You Can Have Money and Still Live in Poverty—And Most People Do
Here's a thought that might mess with you a little.
What if poverty isn't the default? What if the struggle, the scarcity, the low-grade financial anxiety that most people walk around with — what if that's not just how life is, but actually a distortion?
Joseph Murphy taught that wealth is the natural state of being — the same way health is. Your body doesn't have to be convinced to be healthy. Health is the default. Sickness is the disruption. Nobody wakes up and thinks, well, I guess I have to earn the right to have a functioning immune system today.
And yet that's exactly how most of us relate to money.
We treat financial struggle like it's virtuous. Like barely getting by means we're somehow more grounded, more spiritual, more real than the people who aren't sweating their electric bill. Meanwhile, the stress of not-enough is running quietly in the background, shaping every decision we make.
Murphy's point — and I think he was onto something — is that poverty is the disruption. Not the norm. We've just been living inside it so long that we stopped questioning it.
Poverty Isn't About Money
I work in healing and transformation, and one thing I've noticed is that the people most committed to abundance consciousness are sometimes the most tangled up around actual money. And I say that with full self-awareness, because I've been there too.
Here's the thing: poverty isn't a bank balance. It's a state of mind.
You can have money and still feel like it’s leaking out of some invisible hole.
You can get a raise and somehow still feel broke two weeks later. You can be doing objectively fine and still lie awake at 2am running worst-case financial scenarios. That's not a money problem. That's a poverty mindset, and it will follow you around regardless of what your account says.
Poverty is what you believe is available to you. And that belief? Most of us didn't even choose it.
The Beliefs You Didn't Choose (But Still Carry)
We inherited our money beliefs. Most of them arrived before we were old enough to question them — picked up from parents, teachers, religion, culture. The usual suspects:
Money is the root of all evil.
Rich people are corrupt.
There's not enough to go around.
If I have more, someone else has less.
These ideas are so common they feel like facts. But they're not facts. They're inherited programming, and they are quietly running your financial life whether you realize it or not.
They shape what you charge, what you accept, what you allow, and what you unconsciously push away before it ever reaches you.
Worth sitting with that for a minute.
The Flinch Point
Okay. Here's where I'm going to say the thing that makes people uncomfortable.
Money is spiritual.
Not adjacent to spirituality. Not something you tolerate despite being spiritual. Not a necessary evil you make peace with. Spiritual. Full stop.
I know. Some of you just flinched. That flinch is worth paying attention to, because it's not wisdom — it's conditioning.
For generations we've absorbed the idea that money is dirty. That wanting it makes you shallow. That truly spiritual people shouldn't concern themselves with it. And I get where that comes from — there's real history behind it. But here's my question: if you believe that God, Source, the Universe — whatever language works for you — is the origin of all abundance, then how exactly does money get excluded from that?
Florence Scovel Shinn talked about divine inheritance — the idea that abundance isn't something you earn, it's something you claim. Wallace D. Wattles wrote about a limitless supply available to anyone willing to align with it. Charles Fillmore built an entire theology around the idea that prosperity is a spiritual principle, not a contradiction of one.
These weren't people telling you to be greedy. They were telling you to stop treating lack as if it were holy.
Money Is a Mirror
Money has this inconvenient habit of reflecting things back at you.
It shows you how you see yourself. What you believe you're worth. How comfortable you are with receiving. And that last one is where a lot of healers and coaches and transformation workers get completely stuck — not because they don't do good work, but because they have a receiving problem dressed up as a pricing problem.
The work is good. The results are real. But somewhere underneath it all is a belief that says I don't quite deserve to be paid for this. And the pricing reflects it.
The Lie That Keeps You Small
If you do healing work, coaching, or anything in the transformation space, you know this voice:
"I shouldn't charge for this." "It should be free." "People can't afford it."
It sounds like generosity. It really does. But it isn't.
You're not charging people — you're asking them to invest in their own transformation. And here's something I've watched play out over and over: people don't commit to what they don't invest in. Free rarely transforms. Not because the information isn't good, but because the skin-in-the-game piece is missing.
When someone pays for something, they show up differently. They do the work. They take it seriously. Your pricing isn't just about your income — it's part of the container.
Undercharging Is Not Humility
Let's be honest with each other here.
When you chronically undercharge, it's not because you're so generous and selfless. It's usually because some part of you is uncertain. I don't know if I'm worth this. I don't know if it's enough. Who am I to charge for this?
That's not service. That's a poverty mindset running your business, and it tends to get all tangled up with identity in a way that makes it hard to see clearly.
You want to help people — absolutely. But you're also afraid to receive. You believe in abundance for everyone except, apparently, yourself.
You Cannot Serve From Lack
This one is practical as much as it is spiritual.
If you're operating at your financial limit — stressed, depleted, resentful, wondering how you're going to make next month work — you are capped. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and no amount of devotion to your work changes that.
Wealth expands your capacity to serve. The more you allow yourself to receive, the more you genuinely have to give. That's not a justification for greed — it's just how energy works.
Money Doesn't Create Poverty — Mindset Does
People love to point at money as the problem. But money doesn't create outcomes — it amplifies them.
We've all seen it: someone comes into a significant amount of money and within a few years it's gone. Sometimes faster than that. It's not because money is bad or because they were bad people. It's because a poverty mindset will recreate poverty regardless of how much money passes through your hands. The internal pattern overrides the external circumstance every time.
This is why mindset work isn't fluff. It's infrastructure.
The Biggest Misunderstanding
The scarcity model says wealth is a fixed pie — if you have more, someone has less. It's a zero-sum story, and it's deeply embedded in how most people think about money without even realizing it.
But that's not how wealth actually works. Wealth is created. It's aligned with. It flows. A rising tide genuinely does lift boats — not as a platitude, but as a description of how abundance actually moves in the world.
You are not taking from anyone by receiving more. You are participating in expansion. Those are very different things.
Redefining Wealth
Wealth is not greed. I want to be clear about that.
Wealth is capacity. It's the ability to create more, give more, support more, experience more. If you love people — and I'm guessing you do, or you wouldn't be in this work — then you actually want wealth. For yourself and for them.
Overflow is generous. Scarcity is not.
The Shift
You're not trying to become wealthy as if it's some foreign state you have to fight your way into. You're returning to what's natural.
Question the beliefs you inherited. Stop honoring poverty as if it's a spiritual virtue. Start noticing where you're unconsciously rejecting money — in your pricing, in your receiving, in the stories you tell yourself about what you deserve.
Poverty is not humility. It's limitation.
And the moment you stop pushing money away — the moment you let it be part of your spiritual life instead of a contradiction of it — something shifts. Not just in your bank account, but in how freely you can actually do the work you came here to do.
If you're ready to go deeper on the money-mindset piece — and understand why these patterns run so deep — you'll want to watch our free masterclass that walks you through the 4-step method to break toxic cycles at the root and become the coach you're meant to be.
