Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
Kate Northrup
Hello, Welcome back to plenty. I'm so excited that you are here for episode number two in a seven part series that I'm hosting right now to help you take the next steps and up level your relationship with money. So whether you are at the very beginning of healing your relationship with money or you've been at this for years, what we are talking about today is not common.
Kate Northrup
It is not known. It is not something that I hear other people talking about. In fact, I was just talking to somebody who's been in the personal development world for a decade. She used to work at Tony Robbins. I mean, she has been around behind the scenes of so many of the biggest names in personal development and financial empowerment and business coaching.
Kate Northrup
And she was going through some of the material that I'm going to share with you today. And she was like, Wow, this is really different. Like, this is not common knowledge. And so I'm so excited to reveal to you today how your physio ology, specifically your nervous system, is the mitigator of your ability to have financial well-being. So we're going to dive into how this works.
Kate Northrup
And today, when you walk away from this episode, you're going to be so much better prepared to work with your nervous system to shift your energetic set point for what you're able to receive and what you're able to enjoy financially. What we know from the data is that even women who are making $275 plus a year, which is an extraordinarily high income, even those women, the vast majority of them, still say that they lack financial confidence.
Kate Northrup
Okay. So the misunderstanding out there is that more money solves the problem. What the data shows us, though, is that more money does not solve the problem after people have their basic needs met. So absolutely, if you're not able to pay for shelter, if you're not able to pay for food, if you're struggling for your basic needs to be met, more money is absolutely going to solve that problem.
Kate Northrup
However, once your needs are met and you are moving more towards affluence, meaning you have more than enough, unless you shift your nervous system set point, you will not be able to actually experience and receive what you have and what a waste that is. Right? Why have resources if you're not stewarding them? Well, you're not grateful for them and it still feels like there's not enough.
Kate Northrup
Do you know people? Or are you someone who. No matter how much money they make, the conversation is still and the feeling is still that there's not enough. Well, let me explain to you why that is based on the way our bodies work and the way our bodies are connected to our brains and the way all of that is connected to our emotions and our thoughts and beliefs and our behavior and our reality.
Kate Northrup
So here's the deal. Basically, every process in your body is determined by or mitigated by your nervous system. So our nervous system is a network of nerves that runs through our body and includes our brain and our spinal cord. And there's not one part of our body that is not impacted by our nervous system. Now, people love to say that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and I agree with that.
Kate Northrup
And some people say this phrase that we are basically like a spiritual being walking around in a meat suit. I really don't like that phrase at all. For some it just like kind of grosses me out. And also I don't like it because it devalues the body calling our bodies, which are these incredible networks of technology and physiology that can unlock states of bliss and expansion and connection beyond our wildest imaginings.
00:04:38:00 - 00:05:25:20
Kate Northrup
Like what you have available to you in your incredible physiology is so magnificent. This state of splendor that you can access without any kind of drug or substance or anything external needing to happen is so mind blowing. And once you learn how to access these states, I don't think you would ever call it a meet suit again like it is this divinely orchestrated network of absolutely miraculous, interconnected systems that keeps you alive without you having to do anything about it other than like, get some sleep, make sure you eat and make sure you drink water.
Kate Northrup
But it's keeping you alive without you having to think about it. It's phenomenal. Okay. So yes, we are spiritual beings having a human experience, but the major part of our life, the fact that we are all alive in this lifetime, having this experience, the major factor of it is our body. And so why would we not get to know our body intimately and fully live in our bodies while we have them?
Kate Northrup
What we know for sure is that our bodies have expiration dates. We don't know exactly where we go after this lifetime, where we came from or where we go. Although if you read near-death experiences, accounts of near-death experiences, there are so many commonalities. So I think, like it's we can imagine where we go after this lifetime. But for today, we're talking about the nervous system.
Kate Northrup
So I'm going to bring it back. The nervous system mitigates our ability to receive and experience money, and it actually experience the benefits that money can bring us What we have been misunderstanding is that, number one, we think that more money will solve all our problems and it solves some problems. But we misunderstand and we make money. Our source and we think like, money is going to make me feel ultimately satisfied or peaceful or safe or whatever.
Kate Northrup
No, it won't. If you cannot access a place where you feel safe and whole and so celled and satisfied in your physiology, now adding more money will only amplify what you've already got. Money is simply an amplifier. It just reveals and expands who and what you already are. So we think like, people say, they got all this money and then they turned into this greedy, you know, whatever know people are who they are.
Kate Northrup
And then you add money, it just makes it more so money is like fertilizer. So adding more money doesn't necessarily solve solve the problem of feeling like there's not enough. But what does solve the problem of feeling like there's constantly not enough is working with our nervous system. So our nervous system has these set points, and the set points are determined by the environment in which we were raised.
Kate Northrup
Our past experiences and the experiences of the collective of other people who we relate to and our ancestors. So there are five levels that impact our nervous system, and they are the following. Number one are big traumas. So most people who begin to learn about the nervous system understand that trauma is connected to the nervous system and the ability of our nervous system to regulate us in our daily experience.
Kate Northrup
Trauma is essentially when something happens to us and we do not have the capacity. Thus support the resources, the tools, the skills, the bandwidth to fully process that experience. And so part a part of us gets stuck in that experience emotionally and energetically. So traumas are like these little uncompleted emotional stress loops that live in our body and keep us stuck in time.
Kate Northrup
At the time of that experience happening because we weren't able to fully process it and fully run it through our system and essentially metabolize the experience. So there are big traumas, there are little traumas. Those things can combine and add up over time. And the thing that you need to understand about trauma is that we cannot determine for someone else what was traumatic and what was not.
Kate Northrup
A lot of what impacts our nervous system is what we have the capacity, the resources and the support to metabolize. And so the same exact experience could happen to two different people, and it will impact their nervous system in a different way. It will get stored in their body memory in a different way based on so many different factors of that person.
Kate Northrup
And so we don't want to be looking out at the world and judging what should or shouldn't be traumatic to another human being. That has nothing to do with us. It's none of our business. And we cannot see inside their bodies or feel inside their bodies to know what that experience is like. Right? So there's big traumas. There's little traumas.
Kate Northrup
So those are two of the different ways that our nervous system is impacted. And then we also have collective traumas. So collective traumas are when somebody we identify with. So maybe we're the same race or maybe we're the same gender, or maybe we're the same sexual identity, or maybe we have the same career, or maybe we're the same age, or maybe a combination of those things.
Kate Northrup
So there's somebody either in the media or in our lives who we identify with in a certain way, and we witness them or hear about them going through something traumatic. Our body, our nervous system actually imprints that as though it happened to us. The mirror neurons in our body did not know the difference between something happening to somebody else and something happening to us because our bodies do not believe the lie of separation.
Kate Northrup
Our bodies know the truth, that we are all waves in the same ocean. We are not all separate bodies of water. We are all connected. We are all expressions of one source energy and our interconnectivity. That's our unity consciousness. Our singularity is actually reflected in our biology. My body cannot tell the difference between something that happened to somebody else who I identify with that was scary and something happening to me.
Kate Northrup
So our imagine, if you will, what happens in the bodies of people who are in the same group of something that is happening that everyone is reposting on social media over and over and over again. Take the conflict in Palestine, Israel, Gaza. If you are someone with Palestinian heritage, if you have family there, if you are someone with Israeli heritage, you have family there.
Kate Northrup
Perhaps you've traveled there, spent time in that part of the world, and everyone on the social media feed decides that it is their job to continue to repost the horrors going on that is actually traumatic to people's nervous systems. It's why I don't do that personally. Now that we are, I'm not going to take a whole sidebar about how to participate in social media.
Kate Northrup
Everyone gets to make their own choices. But based on what I know about the nervous system, I know that continuing to re talk about the horrors going on in the world can actually be really, really harmful and traumatizing and make the nervous system set points frozen for people who are collectively feeling connected to those events. So that's just a very practical, real intense example of how collective trauma works.
Kate Northrup
Now, what ends up happening is when we see out there other people who we relate to, who are having the experience that our body also feels is scary and our body doesn't know the difference between whether it happened to them or whether it happened to us, then it actually puts us in a contracted disregulated state and we are less able to engage in the world in a paradigm of safety and well-being.
Kate Northrup
So we may not even be in the same part of the world, but now we are going into shutdown and contraction. It is not helpful. It is not helpful. It doesn't actually collectively improve the health of the planet. So that's collective trauma. And then we have ancestral trauma. I said there were five layers of trauma that affect the body.
Kate Northrup
There's actually four. So just that was an era. So the last one is ancestral. What we know from studies on epigenetics is that the experiences that happened to people who are in our lineage, to our grandmother or to our great grandmother, to our great great grandfather, grandmother, grandfather, etc., etc., etc., those experiences live on in our DNA. Okay?
Kate Northrup
We also know that all of our eggs, if you are if you are somebody with ovaries, all of your eggs already existed when you were four months in utero. So what that means is when your mother was gestated in your grandmother's body, all of her eggs existed when she was at four months gestation. That means the egg that you came from was originated inside your grandmother's body.
Kate Northrup
So when we think about the impact, I know my granny had a really hard time, especially in her early years. She grew up in the Great Depression. Her father was a bootlegger. He left the family and went out and just abandoned them and had this entire other family. She was raised by a single mom who it was just it was, you know, she lost her family's last $0.50 in a snowstorm while she was standing in the bread line.
Kate Northrup
The impact of what happened to my grandmother lives in my body. So even though I have not personally experienced food scarcity or food insecurity in my life, I have not personally experienced being abandoned by our families provider in that way. I haven't personally experienced that kind of intensity and stress and pressure around money. My body has a memory of it because our nervous systems are designed to keep us surviving.
Kate Northrup
They are designed to keep us safe. And so our nervous system is gathering, gathering, gathering all of the information about what is a threat. So our nervous systems, our threat gathering machines. And so they're gathering information from our ancestry. What we know with the study of epigenetics. Epigenetics. One example is that and I learned about this from Milagros Phillips and also Dr. Valerie Rhein.
Kate Northrup
So if you want to learn more, their books are linked in the show notes. What they did is they took rats in the lab and they piped in the smell of cherry blossoms. So they piped in This perfume of cherry blossoms. And then they zapped. They, they gave these rat pores an electric shock. And that obviously freaked them out.
Kate Northrup
And so it set off this entire physiological response of a fear response and a pain response in their bodies. Now, rats reproduce relatively quickly in terms of from a generational perspective. And so very shortly after that, they were able to have two generations later. So those original rats had babies and then those babies had babies. So now they had the grand babies of the original rats from the laboratory.
Kate Northrup
What they did is they piped in the smell of cherry blossoms, but they did not shock those grand baby rats. But what happened is that the grand baby rats had a full on trauma response to the smell of cherry blossoms. Okay, so they had the stimulus that had caused trauma in their grandparents, but they did not actually have the shock.
Kate Northrup
There was nothing happening for those baby rats that was causing them to have pain. Nothing yet. Their bodies were responding. Their nervous systems were responding with fear as though the smell of cherry blossoms was causing the pain. Is it not? Mind blowing? Think about what might have happened in your ancestry. And listen, this is heavy stuff. I spoke about my grandmother.
Kate Northrup
You know, you may have had people who were enslaved in your in your history. You may have people who have gone through famine. And here's what we know. We will never know the stories of our ancestors that live in our bodies. But what we do know is that our bodies are playing them out. We are acting unconsciously based on generational trauma, and we will never even know the story.
Kate Northrup
And yet we're living out these fear patterns and these constriction patterns in our lived lifetime, in our current reality that were handed down to us because our DNA is wired to keep us safe. Our DNA, our nervous systems are not wired for expansion. They are not their default setting is not to expand because according to our nervous system, that which is unfamiliar registers as unsafe.
Kate Northrup
Our nervous system will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven every time until we learn how to update our nervous system. The thermostat. Now, the good news is I don't need to know every single traumatic story from my grandmother and my great grandmother and my great great grandmother's. I don't need to know. You know, my my maternal grandmother, I talked about her, my paternal grandmother, she struggled with alcoholism from the time she was a teenager until the time she died.
Kate Northrup
She went to like 18 or 25 rehabs. It never worked. So. So who knows? I don't know what happened to her that would cause that level of addiction that had her in a grip. I don't know all the stories that my dad grew up with, with a mother who was struggling so much with alcohol. I know some of them, and they're super disturbing.
Kate Northrup
But what I do know is that those stories live on, live on in my body. And I get to I get to complete the emotional stress loop on behalf of my ancestors. Right. Like my granny and my granny. They didn't have therapy. They didn't know about the nervous system. They didn't have people talking about personal development and generational healing, generational trauma.
Kate Northrup
But I do. And so in this lifetime, in 2024, we get to heal seven generations back and seven generations forward. That is not just a nice, fun thing that feels good to say. It is literally available to us because of the way epigenetics work. We can literally, by closing those emotional stress loops now by completing the the the by re revisiting all of those places that we are stuck in our nervous system by signaling to our nervous system that we are safe over time, it actually changes the DNA patterns that we are passing along and not only the ones we're passing along to our direct offspring.
Kate Northrup
Right? Like my daughters already came out of my body. I'm not going to be literally updating the DNA that is in their bodies physiologically, like by giving birth to them and by forming their bodies. Like that ship has sailed. Right. However, what we know from lineage patterns and collective patterns is that we can not only do we inherit ancestral and collective traumas, we can inherit and pass along ancestral and collective healing, ancestral and collective joy.
Kate Northrup
Because the great news is the physiology of inherited patterns in the nervous system works the same whether we are inheriting healing and joy and expansion, or whether we are inheriting and absorbing from the collective traumas and constriction and contraction. Okay, so good news all around. And so the name of the game is to learn to signal safety. Now that's a whole other body of work.
Kate Northrup
That's a whole other journey. And I think what we'll do is we'll end this episode here and next time next week because we're here in a seven part series. So I'll go into in part three of this series how what are some ways that we can actually signal safety to our bodies so we can update and upgrade our nervous system thermostat around what we are able to receive in terms of well-being in our lives, which of course will ripple the ripple effects of that.
Kate Northrup
Our how much can you receive financially? How much wealth are you able to create? And I of course, I mean financial wealth. Sure. For a one KS Roth IRAs, real estate, you know, money in the bank. Yes, absolutely. And also, how much richness can you feel? Because remember, our nervous system set points are not determined by how much money there is.
Kate Northrup
They are determined by how much we can actually receive the bounty that is already there. So we'll talk about that in the next installment. If you want to make sure that you don't miss it, make sure you are subscribed to the Plenty Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. If you're watching this here, if you enjoyed this episode, if you're getting value out of this, please leave a rating and a review shared on social text.
Kate Northrup
A friend and I can't wait to see you for our next installment, all about how to signal safety in your nervous system, to expand your ability to receive and enjoy your money. I'll see you then.