Fundraiser workshop hopes to illuminate the hidden beliefs surrounding the green stuff
It’s a small five-letter word but boy, does it pack a wallop: Money. It’s also the theme of an upcoming workshop open to the public at Inner Light Ministries, which hopes to reveal to its participants some of their hidden beliefs and/or shadow elements surrounding money and abundance.
At the helm of the workshop is its facilitator Ben Saltzman, a longtime local whose work in coach training and enneagram work has been revered. Saltzman spearheaded Inner Light’s successful “Money Mystics” program, a weekly series that runs for several months at a time. All the funds for the upcoming fundraiser will be donated to Inner Light.
“We’re trying to get people engaged around the process of making more money,” Saltzman says, “and getting into the spiritual principle of ‘giving’ as part of ‘divine circulation’—how do we circulate money, how do we allow it to come in?”
It’s a juicy topic and if the last four years have shown us anything, it’s that the country’s leaders continue to fret over varying ideas of abundance, budget and other economic affairs. But what seems to stand out most here is the depth in the work.
Saltzman is quick to point out that while many may grasp the idea of affirmations, or, even, getting into alignment with the inner experience of abundance and clearing out limiting beliefs, thereby creating a pathway to attract more abundance into one’s life, sometimes more inner work is required.
“The problem is that there is a shadow element; there are hidden belief structures going on underneath the surface that push money away, and it doesn’t matter how many affirmations you do, or how many prayers you do, or how much visualization you do,” he adds. “If you have these underlying blocks—the belief that you’re unworthy, or stuff that comes from your parents’ relationship, for instance—whatever—those things are down there; repressed, and we tend to judge them. We call it shadow and they keep money away from you. It keeps you from receiving the money that naturally wants to come into your life.”
Shadow work is an interesting concept and what Saltzman helps facilitate is assisting individuals look for disowned parts and beliefs within themselves, which are often acted out. How this process unfolds is interesting to note because as individuals begin shedding light on their shadow elements, a variety of actions can take place—everything from dialoguing with the shadow element to acting certain things out.
Think of it as a quasi-spiritual playground where your inner beliefs get a chance to frolic in the light of day.
The idea, Saltzman says, is to accept the shadow elements, and “love them up, and bring them back on board.”
“Some of the classic shadow parts are not feeling worthy to receive—and every time we judge and push it away, it grows and festers and comes out sideways and sabotages us,” he adds. “So, the shadow tends to sabotage us right when we are at the edge of financial success and that’s hard to deal with, especially if we don’t know it’s there.
In a sense, this discovery process gives an individual’s shadow full permission to “get its thing on.”
“We crank it up, maybe go a little overboard with expressing it so that we can have some fun with it so that it’s not so scary any more,” he adds.
When asked why he feels money matters, in general, is such a sensitive subject, Saltzman notes that for many people, it was a taboo subject during their youth.
“People weren’t allowed to talk about it,” he says. “At the dinner table, if I mentioned money and how much we had, I would get a disparaging look. I think for many of us, that sort of thing got woven into our psyche and we didn’t talk about it—as if it’s bad or wrong. It’s what we infer. It goes underground. And it becomes the most charged subject around. More marriages break up on issues around money than anything else.
“But on a societal level, people are starting to notice the 500-pound pink gorilla in the room that is Money Disparity.”
Addressing all this is important in the workshop, but another aspect of the event—and with “Money Mystics,” in general—is that not only is it designed to help people learn how to generate more money in their own lives, but also to learn how to generate more money as a participant in the “redistribution of wealth on a global scale.”
You’ll be doing the inner work so you can be part of something bigger,” Saltzman points out. “As in … ‘how can we redistribute money so that it is equitable so that this 99 percent/1 percent thing isn’t happening anymore.”
“Money Manifestation and Your Shadow” runs 7-10 p.m. Monday, July 16 at Inner Light Ministries, 5630 Soquel Drive, Soquel, 465-9090. Visit innerlightministries.com. Cost is by donation. Participants may also sign up for the “Money Mystics” program. Learn more about Ben Saltzman at touchedandtransformed.com.
