Sacred Currency: Decolonizing My Relationship with Money

 When I stumbled across Khalil Gibran's words in The Prophet—"You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give"—I felt something crack open.

Not because I disagreed, but because I realized how much I'd been carrying the collective's confusion about what it means to be generous, what it means to be spiritual, and what the hell money is supposed to represent in a liberated life.

I've spent nearly a decade studying money—not just as economics or personal finance, but as cosmology.

As energy. As mirror. And what I've learned has required me to untangle religious conditioning I didn't even know I'd inherited, confront my own patterns of hoarding and fear, and ultimately craft what I now call a sovereign relationship with money: one rooted in Afro-Indigenous and feminist cosmologies of reciprocity, abundance, and energetic stewardship.

This isn't a post about budgeting tips or manifestation formulas.

This is autoethnography—me mapping my own money story as data for collective liberation. Because if we're going to build a world beyond extractive capitalism, we need new stories about what money is and what we're allowed to do with it.

Money as Sacred Technology—Not Moral Failing

Let me start with the question that's been haunting me: Why does money even exist on a spiritually evolving planet?

I've been in enough liberationist spaces to know that many people wish money didn't exist.

They romanticize bartering, mutual aid, gift economies—systems where nothing is commodified and everything flows through relationship.

And I get it. I respect it.

But here's what I've come to understand through my own practice and study:

Money is a technology of energy exchange.

It's not inherently good or evil—it's a tool humans created to solve a specific problem: how to move energy beyond the limitations of proximity, capacity, and subjective valuation.

When we only had bartering, exchanges were beautiful but entangled.

Your pottery for my healing. My time for your grain.

Everything required mutual recognition, direct relationship, and emotional negotiation.

And while that intimacy was sacred, it was also binding. You couldn't scale care.

You couldn't move resources to where they were needed most.

You couldn't honor someone's work without also managing the emotional weight of equivalence.

Money abstracted that intimacy in a way that, when done consciously, actually preserves sovereignty.

It depersonalizes certain exchanges so that both parties can maintain clarity.

I give you money for your service, and neither of us has to negotiate whether my gratitude equals your effort.

The transaction is clean. The relationship can remain intact.

That's not cold, that's sacred stewardship.

Money makes the invisible visible: effort, care, time, skill, and value all given measurable form.

It allows generosity to be structured instead of drained.

The distortion came not from money's creation, but from our collective dissociation from its spiritual purpose.

We started using money as proof of worth instead of evidence of exchange. We made it a god instead of a guide. And that's where the wound lives.

The Religious Inheritance—Why We Demonize Wealth

I never grew up deeply Catholic.

I was baptized, did my catechism, but church wasn't part of my American life.

I've been maybe ten times in over thirty years. And I've never dated anyone religious.

So I thought I'd escaped the money guilt that so many people carry.

But the more I've studied, the more I've realized: you don't have to go to church to inherit the church's conditioning about money.

Western religion—particularly Christianity—turned money into a moral test.

"The love of money is the root of all evil" became "money itself is corrupt."

Poverty was romanticized as purity. Wealth was framed as a threat to your soul.

Meanwhile, the Church itself accumulated vast wealth and positioned itself as the intermediary between the divine and material prosperity.

The message was: give to the institution, not yourself. Sacrifice over abundance. Service over sovereignty. Dependence over autonomy.

For those of us connected to colonized regions and ancestries—the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Philippines—Catholicism didn't just reshape belief, it reshaped value systems. We inherited:

• Martyrdom as holiness—suffering became sacred
• Service as penance—giving everything away was how you earned grace
• Authority over agency—you don't own your worth; it's bestowed by God or the priest

Even if you never set foot in confession, you absorbed the echo: guilt for desiring comfort, shame for saying no, confusion between generosity and depletion.

This is how, over centuries, wealth and power centralized in institutions rather than communities.

And so, in the collective subconscious, to be wealthy and free is to defy the design.

Modern spirituality often replicates these same patterns, just dressed in New Age language:

• "I don't care about money, I just want to serve" = virtue through renunciation
• "If I'm aligned, abundance will just come" = divine reward replaces Church reward
• "Charging high prices is capitalist" = moral purity through poverty

But here's what I know now: True liberation requires conscious relationship with all forms of energy—including financial.

When I left my corporate job and my consistent income stopped, I had to face my finances in a way I never had before.

Everything had been on autopay.

I didn't want to look at where my money was going because it scared me.

But when the calls started coming, when cards got declined, when I had to confront what I actually owed—I realized I'd been treating money like a shameful secret.

That's when everything shifted.

I started performing what I now understand as rituals of reclamation.

I looked at my money. I tracked it. I honored where it came from and where it went.

I stopped avoiding it and started meeting it as a companion, a mirror, a messenger.

That's sovereignty—the antithesis of religious dependency.

Reciprocity Beyond Guilt—My Actual Money Values

Now here's where it gets uncomfortable, because this is where I diverge from what a lot of spiritual and liberationist spaces expect.

I like having money. I like spending money.

I like being able to come up with an idea and execute it without asking permission or waiting for consensus.

My version of reciprocity isn't necessarily handing cash to individuals, and I've had to make peace with that.

But let me be clear: I'm not talking about billionaire-level hoarding. I'm not defending people who accumulate wealth far beyond what they could ever use while others suffer.

I'm talking about someone making six or seven figures—someone who can cover their needs, enjoy some wants, and build security without constantly justifying their desire for more.

Because here's what I've noticed: we don't shame people for wanting abundant health, for caring deeply about their vitality and investing in it.

We celebrate that as self-care, as honoring the body temple.

But somehow, when it comes to money, wanting more—even when you're not hoarding it, even when you're circulating it—becomes morally suspect.

There's a balance here between hoarding and having.

Between extractive accumulation and sustainable wealth.

Between needing to perform worthiness to justify your resources and simply asking: What do I want to keep existing that serves the collective? And then sending money there.

My reciprocity looks like this:

• I invest in experiences and institutions I want to keep existing. I buy tickets to the ballet because I want the ballet to survive. I support the symphony, local artists, cultural spaces. I take my mom on trips and pay for experiences when she visits. I give through presence, through circulation, through showing up for what matters.
• I don't enjoy lending money. I've never heard great stories about friends or family lending money and it turning out well. I don't let people borrow from my credit. I don't chase people for money they promised to return. So I just don't do it. I only give what I can gift.
• I also don't like buying gifts unless I know someone deeply—and I definitely don't do the obligatory souvenir thing when I travel. I used to buy shot glasses for people. Then I realized: how many shot glasses does anyone actually need? I don't want to contribute to consumerism just to signal "I thought of you."
• I do enjoy treating people. "This one's on me." That generosity feels aligned. For a long time, I felt stingy. I felt like I wasn't "spiritual enough" because I wasn't dreaming of wealth so I could redistribute it. But here's what I've come to understand:
• I care for my money more than most people do—and that's not greed, that's stewardship. I've been a saver since I was a child. I don't give my money to people who don't care for theirs. And I don't believe you have to envision giving wealth away in order to deserve accumulating it.

There is nothing wrong with having, keeping, growing, and investing money in the communities and experiences you're trying to sustain. That is reciprocity. That is circulation. That is honoring the energy.

Afro-Indigenous cosmologies teach us that wealth is cyclical, that reciprocity doesn't mean self-erasure. It means tending to flow. And flow requires containers—including the container of your own financial security.

Reflection Questions for You

As you sit with your own relationship to money, I invite you to ask yourself:

• What religious or cultural conditioning about money am I still carrying—even if I was never explicitly taught it?

• Where in my life have I confused generosity with depletion, or accessibility with undervaluing my work?

• What does reciprocity actually look like for me—beyond what I've been told it "should" look like?

• If I treated money as sacred energy rather than moral evidence, how would my relationship with it shift?

• What would it mean to decide my own worth first, rather than waiting for external validation?

Money is not the enemy of liberation; dissociation from money is.

When we reclaim our relationship with financial energy as conscious, sacred, and sovereign, we stop replicating the very systems we're trying to dismantle.

This is the work. Not to transcend money, but to transform our relationship with it—from fear to stewardship, from guilt to grace, from scarcity to sacred currency.