Have you ever felt like you’re doing all the “right” things for your money mindset and manifestation, and perhaps seeing some progress, but then finding yourself right back where you started? That was my story for years. I had done subconscious work, energy healing, affirmations, visualizations – you name it, I have done it. I would see shifts, feel hopeful, and then either slide back into the same old patterns or something would happen around me that made me lose faith.
The word “patterns” kept coming up in my awareness. Interestingly, this is my Gate 44 in Human Design, which represents my grounding force (my conscious Earth). What this means is that I can shine my light into this world when I stay grounded in understanding and healing my patterns. When I don’t, I stay stuck in a cycle of repeating those patterns over and over again.
And that’s what finally led me to explore something I had been avoiding: shadow work and emotional work around money. What I discovered in those 30 days didn’t just change my relationship with money, but it transformed my relationship with myself. I also uncovered the biggest root cause of my financial blocks – a huge chunk of it was tied to my sense of personal power and self-worth.
Why I Started Shadow Work (After Everything Else Failed)
For the past few years, I have been delving deeply into subconscious reprogramming and energy work related to money. I have experienced some powerful transformations. This includes moments and even results where abundance felt real, and I was able to manifest money. But knowing what I know now, I have never ever been able to detach from money truly. It has always carried a charge – a desperation – something that I need to have. And likely also the reason why, I would find myself back in the same emotional space: anxious about money, feeling like I wasn’t enough, struggling with the same limiting beliefs, because if there is that attachment to it, then there were lingering emotions there.
It’s not that the money work didn’t help—it did. But it felt like the results felt temporary and needed constant rework, like I was putting a Band-Aid over something much deeper. I had to listen to hypnosis daily or do energy work daily – if I did not, then I could not function in the way I would have liked. And let’s not forget, my triggers never went away. I would have reactions to things and would find myself getting defensive, passive-aggressive, judgmental, etc.
Remember, where there are triggers, there is unaddressed trauma. This goes beyond words, places, and people. Even things such as smells and sounds can create these intense emotional reactions.
I realized that while I had been working on the surface level of my money blocks, I had not been willing to look at the emotional layer underneath. Shadow work felt scary because I had experienced emotional upheaval in the past with this work. It does go deep and gets worse before it gets better. As I am typing this post, I am feeling grief. There is no reason for it, but it is my body purging all of this out. This is what emotional healing looks like. It is raw, but if you take the time and courage to do it, it unravels and reveals you. The masks and personas that you have been carrying – that dissolve. You truly stop caring about what people think of you, and not in an angry way, but in a very neutral way. But it will bring up the most raw parts of you that have the ability to bring out your true potential – the full spectrum.
I could not have imagined in a million years that I would not only stand up for myself, but do it with such composure—keeping my boundaries intact while staying polite and respectful, yet still getting my point across clearly.
The Solar Plexus Connection I Didn’t Expect
When I first learned about human design, I found that I have an Open Solar Plexus Center. For those unfamiliar, the solar plexus center is the emotional center in your Human Design chart. When it’s defined (colored in), you create emotional waves within you, and therefore, your emotional waves are very contained, i.e., other people’s emotions do not affect you as much. When it’s completely open, like mine, you’re designed to be a complete empath and take on others’ emotions and their high and low waves. As you gain wisdom in this center, you become wise about emotions—because you know what it is like to have emotional waves and not to have them. You have access to the full spectrum of human emotions.
As someone who was rewarded for being “practical” and not emotional in my childhood, I grew up thinking emotions were bad and useless. The irony was that I was absorbing everyone else’s emotions, opinions, and energy around money and success. What I did not realize was that I had no outlet for these negative emotions, and either completely bypassed things or slammed a door on the emotions. Or let the emotions come through, but never let them out. When someone expressed fear about the economy, I felt like crying in my body. When people talked about struggle and scarcity, I took it on as my own reality. My solar plexus was like a sponge, soaking up the collective emotions, sadness, anger, and frustration around money instead of being anchored in my own inner knowing.
This discovery helped me understand why my previous money work had felt so unstable. I wasn’t just dealing with my own beliefs—I was carrying the emotional weight of everyone around me. My parents, both of whom had a defined solar plexus center, ended up conditioning my solar plexus center with their emotions around how they viewed money. I did not have emotional sovereignty around money. There was always an emotional charge there.
When Life Became My Mirror
The interesting thing about this emotional work and shadow work is that when you are ready and start healing, you start being shown more things to heal. As I began this deeper work, life started showing me exactly what I needed to see and throwing those people and circumstances my way. Over the past three years, I have encountered two different managers who exhibited different types of controlling behaviors. In my last job, I also had a bad workplace environment, which I healed and came into this job. With this job, that aspect had healed, but now I had a boss who was trying to control how I showed up and behaved.
At first, I thought this was just bad luck. But as I dove into shadow work, I started to see the pattern. The universe wasn’t punishing me—it was showing me something about myself that I wasn’t ready to see. I slowly started to let my emotions flow and work through my past traumas, and noticed an interesting aftereffect soon after. I noticed that I did not feel the need to have a “mask” anymore. I found it easy to be myself. I also noticed that other people’s emotions stopped affecting me as much, and I found it easier to get angry on my own behalf. For example, before I would worry about not making the other person angry or rocking the boat because I was worried about the intensity of their emotional reaction, and how that ended up affecting me and scaring me. This was not the case anymore. If you have an undefined or open solar plexus center in human design, you will relate to this.
The Performance Review That Changed Everything
The most recent incident happened during my year-end performance review. I had been putting in overtime, going above and beyond in a completely new role despite having a very small raise. Deep down, I knew that when something requires this much struggle, it’s usually not aligned for me. As a 6/2 profile in human design, things that have been right for me in life have felt natural, easy—areas where others wonder, “How does she do that?”
The review started with acknowledgment of my great work, but quickly turned into a critical session focused entirely on “visibility.” My manager tallied up the times I had attended leadership meetings online instead of in person. He criticized me for doing a presentation virtually when my son had a 106-degree fever the night before. This was despite our company’s stated values around flexibility, but my manager personally didn’t value it.
Here’s what was different this time: I didn’t let his words touch me. I recognized that his criticism wasn’t about me – it was his projection. I calmly communicated that this wasn’t the right fit for me, that I needed a role that valued my skills, offered flexibility, and provided the compensation I was seeking.
I left that meeting with a calm decision that I was ready to leave the role. But more importantly, I started asking myself: Why had this happened again?
Taking Back My Projections through shadow work and money vows
This was the second time in three years that the universe had placed someone in my path who tried to micromanage and control me. I knew this wasn’t random, so I started tapping (EFT) to get to the core of it.
The shadow work process I used involved taking back all my judgments and projections. Every time I found myself judging my manager or feeling victimized by the situation, I asked myself: “Where is this quality in me? Where do I do this to myself or others?”
Shadow work helps us understand that we are all one. What one person is capable of, the other person is as well. But we have repressed those parts within us because of conditioning. Shadow work is the journey of finding that unforgivable part that you judge in others within yourself and finding the good in that, so you can accept and integrate that polarity within you.
As I went deeper, I realized there was gold in these shadow aspects. The manipulative tendencies that I was judging in these people were also within myself. But there was something to be said about it – it highlights the intelligence and strategic thinking behind it. The absence of empathy also showcases non-interference with outside factors when you are focused on a goal. The key was learning to own these qualities consciously instead of projecting them onto others.
It was uncomfortable work. I had to look at how I tried to control outcomes, how I judged others for their choices, how I gave my power away, and then resented people for taking it.
I also discovered that many of my money beliefs were actually vows I had made to keep myself safe:
- “If I stay small, I won’t be a target.”
- “If I don’t ask for too much, I won’t be disappointed.”
- “If I prove my worth through struggle, I’ll eventually be rewarded.”
These vows had been protecting me, but they were also keeping me trapped in patterns of powerlessness. The shadow work helped me see that what I was judging in others—their need for control, their insecurity, their manipulation—were all qualities I possessed but had disowned.
The EFT Breakthrough That Changed Everything
The most powerful part of this process was using emotional EFT to get into the depths of my emotions. I had never been someone who embraced emotions—I was always rewarded for being practical, logical, and solution-oriented. But this work required me to feel everything I had been avoiding.
I started tapping without a script, just voicing whatever emotions came up around money and power. The anger, the hurt, the rage, the grief—I let it all come out. What surprised me was how this emotional expression would take me to deeper and deeper layers, like I was literally purging myself of emotional murkiness that had been buried for years.
When I was done with these sessions, I felt a deep relief that I had never experienced before. The charge around these beliefs was completely gone—not just temporarily managed, but actually cleared. This was different from hypnosis or journaling, where I had to keep repeating the work. With this emotional processing, it felt like the pathway to healing was permanent.
Some sticky beliefs did come back, but never with the same intensity. It was like creating a new neural pathway that made it easier to process and release emotional charge around money.
The Power Pattern I Finally Saw
Through this work, I uncovered the deepest pattern of all: I had always believed that power was something that was passed on to me, not something I created myself.
I realized I had been operating from childhood programming that taught me women needed men to be successful, that we needed permission before we did anything important. I thought that if I attached myself to someone in authority and made them see my amazing work, they would pass their power to me. I was waiting for salvation from external sources – for someone to promote me, validate me, give me the recognition I craved.
This belief made me a magnet for narcissistic managers. They could sense my skill and talent, but they could also sense my power leaks. They saw how little confidence I had in myself despite being highly capable. It was like a beacon for people who wanted to use me as their workhorse, dangling carrots to get more and more out of me because they sensed I didn’t believe I had other options.
My manager treated me the way he did because I had open boundaries. I let him violate those boundaries time and again. I minimized myself to accommodate him. I gave him permission to treat me that way through my own lack of self-advocacy.
The Money Beliefs That Were Really About Me
One of the most profound realizations was that many of my money beliefs weren’t actually about money at all—they were beliefs about my own sense of worth and lovability.
When I believed “money never chooses me,” what I was really saying was “I never choose me.” When I felt like abundance was available to everyone else but not me, I was expressing a deep wound around not feeling worthy of good things.
This helped me understand why the traditional money mindset had only gone so far. I was not just dealing with beliefs about money—I was dealing with core identity wounds that money was simply reflecting back to me.
What Changed After the Shadow Integration
The shifts that followed this shadow work were remarkable. The first week, I manifested a massive amount of money from unexpected sources. The second week, when I encountered my manager’s controlling behavior after this process, I stayed calm in the middle of the storm. I had agency over my solar plexus reactions instead of being at the mercy of other people’s emotions and projections.
In previous situations like this, I would have been triggered, angry, and upset. The interaction would have amplified and created more drama. Instead, I was able to stand my ground, communicate my boundaries clearly and non judgmentally, and make decisions from a place of self-worth rather than fear.
I told my manager that the role wasn’t working for me anymore, that I would be looking for a new position because I needed flexibility. It did not make sense for me to stay in a culture that was not the right fit for me and rewarded effort over outcome. I knew my worth in that moment – I knew that any company would be lucky to have me, and I genuinely did not need his validation to confirm that. In that moment and thereafter, I felt free.
The Shadow Work Difference
What made this shadow work different from all the other modalities is that instead of managing my money blocks, I had actually transformed them. The emotional charge was gone, not just suppressed or temporarily shifted.
I realized that my financial struggles had never really been about money—they were about power, worth, and my willingness to claim my place in the world. The shadow work helped me reclaim parts of myself I had disowned and integrate them consciously.
Now, instead of waiting for power to be given to me, I understand that power is mine to create. I don’t need permission to shine, to charge what I am worth, or to take up space. My light is mine to claim, and I’m finally ready to let it shine so bright it transforms everything around me.
The next day, I applied for jobs above my current rank. I did not feel like a glass ceiling – even as I type this post, there is no charge about it. There is just an emotional clarity, calm, and neutrality about it. Just yesterday, I heard back from one of the hiring managers who said she already had a candidate for this role, but if she had more spots, then she would have seriously considered me. She said that she was very impressed by my work and resume. It gave me confidence that I had made the right decision by starting to apply for positions beyond my rank. It was not overconfidence – I had just been undervaluing myself in the past. Now that I have decided to seize the power, the right people have noticed it.
The journey isn’t over, but for the first time, I feel like I’m walking a path of true healing rather than just managing symptoms. And that has made all the difference.s. And that has made all the difference.
Have you ever noticed how your deepest money blocks might actually be mirroring back how you see your own worth? What patterns keep showing up in your life that might be asking you to reclaim your power?