What happens to our senses when we touch all things with the mind that each one is veiled with a price tag? What we owe, what we are owed, what has been taken from us, how we take. When the wilderness of our hearts are mined to prop up our own or some one else’s advertising?
If you have even a small interest in self growth, spirituality, magic, or “manifestation”—which seems to be a category all on its own, you have probably scrolled past a lot of content talking about how “money is energy” and “money is neutral.” The simplicity is a nice meditation to release the weight for a moment of what is also true about money, that it is the energy humans have projected their fear, power, and dominance onto/through since forever. In the beauty of money’s simplicity, I question the ways we have underdeveloped our own ability to understand what is uniquely of value to each of us.
Capitalism is in itself a form of hypnotization. A gentle sway and tick piercing the subconscious with its belief that it is possible to equate every experience and thing to money. But we cannot just equate the value of every thing to money, or to the amount of money we believe we need in order to access full presence of body and mind to an experience. Playing with the nuances of these energetics without learning to detach from a capitalist view of value will not personally and collectively heal our relationship to money.
Collective projections upon money still flow through intentionally broken systems to keep people in survival mode. Advising that we all just start charging more because we are “worth it” follows the idea that all things can and should be measured by money. It’s not wrong. It is a completely understandable approach within our context. I just seriously question at this point, what is the long game here? Where does it leave us to keep going down this path? How do we truly reframe how we as a collective engage with money and value in the long term?
Money complicates value by declaring to us the worth of things before we have even decided this for ourselves. We are basically born learning how to do this and it creates a distorted filter that keeps us from connecting with what holds the most energetic worth for us individually—and yes it is different for each of us. Not understanding what we value makes it impossible to metabolize life. The disconnect like a chasm of longing between ourselves and the feeling of gratitude.
At its worst, money has made people believe they are allowed access to anyone/thing they want. At its best, it allows us to obtain what we need and desire with an ease that is not possible without it. Both are true and beneath them is our collective responsibility to understanding value.
We must be able to untangle what we value from money, to look at them each on their own and decide how to restructure our lives accordingly. Pull all the interlocking roots apart enough to remember what actually sustains, what makes us feel alive, what is holding that level of value to us and how we might allow ourselves more of it. Money should be meeting us in that place of aliveness, not creating it or telling us what it is.
I don’t think money or flow of money in a person’s life has much to do with with where they are at spiritually. I actually think that over fixation on this is just another way we get stuck in the structural veil of capitalism where we think everything can and should be measured by money, including our connection to the divine. Our relationship to money is just like every other relationship in our life. The way we feel about all these relationships—with a partner, family, self, friends, our pets, our home, the land we live on, our job, our wider communities, our finances—and how we are responding to the emotional states they provoke, what they are mirroring about us, are just the mechanisms of how we grow and create. It also helps us understand our values better. So yeah, our feelings and response to where we are at financially could say something of how we are doing spiritually, but this is just as true as our relationship with our body for example. All of these are ways to interface with the divine if we want that. They are like the structural overlays of this experience, not a measuring stick of spiritual expansion which is fully available to us in every moment.
I hope teasing this out simplifies things in a way. Perhaps my own value regarding spiritual growth has always been about connection above all else which is why I view things in this way. Someone who values learning and mastering how they are truly a creator in this world may find playing with flow of money more of a path to their own growth. There isn’t a hierarchy here or right way to do things. I do though feel it is important to speak the many truths about money and how colonization, patriarchy, white supremacy, genocide, and mass extinction are part of the story of money and how we engage with it on a daily basis. For me, it just further points to our responsibility in detangling money from what we value. These have been collective values that we allowed money to powerfully enact and that reverberate generationally into each of our lives. How money flows currently is influenced greatly by this and it is a disservice to us all to try and pretend or ignore this. If we truly collectively value our wellbeing and the health of our planet then money will flow to these places and support this. In fact, it already does flow in service to these things, running alongside the older deeper riverbeds of past shadows. Taking it down to the size of our one life, we can do our best to focus on what we personally value and attempt to be present each day with this, deepening the younger collective grooves.
This year is so astrologically significant, Pluto and Saturn both moving signs have signaled the birth of a new generation. With Uranus traversing the sign of Taurus since 2018, the greater upheaval and instability we have seen around basic needs continues to drive home this question of what we collectively value. Pluto moving into Aquarius takes an excavator to the greater web of our communities, further exposing where our advancements and extraction have displayed our shared values for better or worse. It turns our gaze toward the collective debts we carry and how they keep us from existing efficiently in service of our bodies and the body of the earth.
Uranus has been conjunct my natal venus for a few years now and is just reaching the final edge of this transit. The experience has shattered and awakened my heart along with delivering me into a more embodied place around what reciprocity and value actually means to me. My love of cycles, patterns, and deep time pulled me even closer into study of and living astrology, deeper into divine surrender, consumed by a raw brokenness so intense it turned into holy reception and landed me with the ability to see the beautiful structure where I could feel myself and everything else inherently woven in.
This has been a “no going back” type experience and as soon as Pluto moved signs I knew it was never going to be possible to use a capitalist frame of reference to understand what I’m doing in this life. I guess I’ve known this to be true for most of my life if I’m being honest, maybe you have too? As such, I still swim in these waters as we all do so I am doing my best to create a structure for my life that feels and functions as beautifully as the one I know so well in the stars and sacred geometry that replicates its song in everything.
If you are still with me, hi, thank you for being here. This writing is about to shift into the personal/“business” but in a dialogue with the above. All of these reflections upon value and money have brought me to the following changes regarding my current offerings to this world…
From now on all natal chart + transits sessions will be pay what you can. To more adequately honor what I recognize as the value of what I offer, I have a form for folks to fill out so I can discern if my embodied knowledge and framework is aligned with your needs. I feel really strongly that money is not the gateway to me sharing this knowledge. Coming to this decision has truly been a wild experience of learning to separate money from value and making it somehow work for me within the confines of our reality. I just couldn’t buy into the way money is so often talked about like some sort of “boundary” to protect what you offer. This truly means nothing in a world with such diverse experiences of access to money. For some people $50 is quite a sacrifice. For others, $1,500 for an experience that supports their soul is nothing. I just don’t find it adequate or the right substance to determine the worth of what I’m sharing. Money is a way to reciprocate for a session alongside your full presence but I leave that up to each person to decide what is accessible and right to them at this time. Reciprocity around what I offer through these sessions is primarily linked to the way they are of genuine service to someone’s soul which in turn serves my own. This is in no way something I believe anyone else offering spiritual services should follow or believe is the “best” way. This is just how I personally feel about what I’m doing in this very specific part of my life at this time. Giving readings was never something I imagined doing but has really felt like a calling in a way and something I desire to share with others on a very small scale. It is not something I ever wish to over extend or water down in order to “make a living.”
Part of this restructuring around what I value is recognizing where I do feel good asking for money to flow. I have created this Substack and encourage those who resonate and appreciate my writing and creating to give me a follow, consider being a paid subscriber, share my content, lift me up! Recognizing my value via exchange of money for my writing, creative expressions, emotional transmutations, visioning, and all the beauty I create and share in this Mercurial way is really where it’s at for me right now. I realized that I often cut my writing down for Instagram because of the word limit and how silly that is when I can have my own platform here and share whatever I want. I am constantly writing and it is something that I almost take for granted as I have always used it as a channel because verbally expressing my authentic truth publicly has always been difficult for me. So, I’m curious to see what happens when I make space for writing on purpose.
If you want to financially support the way I am restructuring my offerings beyond being a paid subscriber, please feel free to pay it forward at any point. I’m not doing any of this because I am independently wealthy lol. My journey with money landed me in massive school debt, feeling like a failure, burned out, unable to recognize what I am actually here to bring the collective, and feeling resentful. Understanding what I value has really supported my overall wellbeing regarding these feelings/experiences and also, I’m still living them. I am seriously blessed to have secure housing at this time and I have been riding precariously through financial uncertainty for a while after quitting my old job, committing to not working in service industry anymore, and truly giving myself the space to fall apart and understand what is happening here even if it meant going farther into debt for now. All support just goes towards keeping my bills paid so I can keep creating, dreaming, and giving in the ways I most desire to.
One way I personally vision a future in regards to value and money includes some sort of structure akin to universal income. I also genuinely find joy and value in creating opportunities for myself and others to get closer to the tools, people and experiences that support whatever our souls came here uniquely valuing and aching to contribute. I feel like shifting the structure of my work so that it better reflects this vision back to me is just the right call.
I generally encourage everyone to financially invest in any amount in the things and people that bring value to our lives to whatever extent we are able. Stretching ourselves to understand the value here beyond any exchange of money can help us get in touch with gratitude. I personally say prayers for people I follow and find value from on social media fairly often. It is a way for me to direct loving energy and gratitude when money is not a currency I can offer. We truly reciprocate in infinite ways.
Years ago I met my future self for the first time in a vision and they told me, “There is no such thing as being worthy or unworthy, there is only the truth of belonging.” It took a long time to grow into knowing this as truth but it really is. You belong here. You and your contributions to the collective cannot be measured by money.
Thank you for your presence here. With love,
Evan
Hey Substack— if this is your first time ever encountering me, hello!! I’m Evan, I’ve been writing, creating, and sharing astrology, spirituality, art, and emotional transmutations on Instagram @evandevovere for about a year and a half now. If you’re curious to know more about me you can check out the bio on my website. I do hope you subscribe and stick around for whatever is to come. We can both be surprised together.
co-creative astrology 