I'm $15k in Debt and it's Okay
On the medicine of debt
I’m ~$15,000 USD in debt and it’s okay.
A lot of that is credit card debt, and it’s okay.
I love you, debt medicine.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Truly, I mean that.
Dear debt…
I get the feeling you won’t be around much longer, and I actually feel a weird premature nostalgia about our time together.
You triggered me so much.
You felt like such a goddamn burden.
You felt like a stain on my soul and identity that I needed to scrub off as rapidly as possible.
But you wouldn’t go away so easily…
You brought up so much fear and attachment and insecurity and money-entangled identity that I didn’t know I was still holding onto.
If it wasn’t for you, all this stuff would not have had an occasion to come to the surface.
To be seen, to be felt, to be released, to be held in the fires of loving presence and transfigured.
Money-related wounding and baggage seems like one of the mega-massive karmic knots we are presently unraveling as a collective.
Debt, you gave me an opportunity to unwind so many of my knots around money.
And to root myself, my identity, and my worth more profoundly in the Eternal Loving Presence-Completion of Now.
You helped me to actually embody my own teachings about Wealth — e.g. that True Wealth is simply the Now, just as it is, and has nothing to do with numbers on a screen.
I won’t claim to be completely clear of residual money karma. It’s a sticky one.
And that’s part of why I’m actually on some level bizarrely grieving my sense that I will soon pay off all my debt.
I really never thought I’d say this, but part of me is actually wanting to stew longer in the BBQ crockpot of debt medicine.
It’s a potent initiation for burning away arrogance and inflated-ness and grounding into earthly humility.
And I feel like it has more to teach me. Perhaps I should be careful what I wish for.
But, I’ve come a long ways through nearly a year of intense financial struggle.
It was exactly the initiation I needed.
I’m far clearer of gunk around money than I was before.
Today I felt like I could sense my own soul winking at me, knowing it had perfectly orchestrated said initiation.
The Bufo spirit also seemed to tell me in the jungle this month that it had a significant hand in turning my financial tables upside down, so as to give me a hefty dose of humble-pie-flavored debt-medicine.
It does feel, though, like it’s nearly time for my financial fortune to turn back around.
No firm assumptions, no “counting chickens before they hatch,” we’ll see man, yet that’s the sense that I’m getting.
For one, I might actually relinquish some deeply-ingrained, weirdly-culturally-inherited, American-individualist-self-reliance-type pride and ask a couple dear people for financial help. (Might share more on that later, depending what happens.)
That’s not really the main reason I’m sensing a turning of the tides, though. It’s more so this:
I feel more like myself than ever, more aligned than ever, and I feel ready to initiate some leaders.
And the initiation(s) will entail a significant financial investment, to filter out the non-serious and to give those who work with me a keen sense of having real ‘skin in the game.’
That is the message I am receiving.
I also know that there are next stages of various visions wanting to be built and to manifest, for the upliftment of all…
And I know that greater cash flow will assist in allowing certain doors to open (more rapidly).
So I sense myself being invited back into the responsibility of actually earning, receiving, and saving decent amounts of money.
And it feels completely different this time around.
I feel the gravity and sacred responsibility of it.
The holy duty to be a grounded, integrous steward / channel / container for building and distributing financial wealth—for the good of my family, the Earth, and the whole.
I feel a call to gradually unplug more and more from the big-bank-matrix and the legacy financial system—to increasingly become my own bank and store most of my assets in/as cryptocurrency (likely including a sizable portion in stable-coins [employing yield-farming or other interest-generating mechanisms] or other conservative crypto investments / projects / mechanisms; I’ll continue to invest substantially in BTC and ETH as well; like most crypto-enthusiasts I’ve definitely gotten burned by taking too much risk in the crypto space). I sense deeply the importance of “decentralizing all the things” and reclaiming our sovereignty from enormous bank/government/corporate institutions that have repeatedly proven they do not deserve our trust and investment.
Anyway, that’s kind of a whole other tangent.
The point I was making was that wealth-building now feels less like a “let’s stack these dead presidents son!!”-type affair and more like a sober, grounded adult activity that comes with its own set of tradeoffs—pros and cons. Especially now that I am far more aware of the initiatory, money-karma-dissolving upside of financial struggle. I recall John DeMartini having some great things to say about the tradeoffs of poverty VS wealth in his fantastic, provocatively-titled book, How to Make One Hell of a Profit and Still Get to Heaven.
So yeah, there’s actually an unexpected and odd grief around the prospect of completely rerouting my financial trajectory in 2023 and beyond.
I guess some people would feel that’s a ridiculously ‘privileged’ thing to express, but it’s simply my heart’s truth in this moment.
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
— Freud
There’s that sorta-hauntingly-poetically gorgeous Freud quote again.
Ahem…
So, yep, I think that’s about it.
Thank you, debt.
I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some parts of me that still feel eager to be rid of you and excited to have more cash again.
But those parts feel a lot quieter now.
And unexpectedly, there are now parts that feel appreciative of the humbling, grounding medicine you dispense.
I’ll do my best to savor your medicine while it’s still present with me.
࿊ “In every curse there is a blessing, in each blessing a curse.” ࿊
Thank you, God, for the exquisitely equilibrated poetry of this miraculous life.
I trust You, with all my heart.
More and more every day.
Love,
Jordan
P.S. Yes, I’m out of the jungle now! More soon about the powerful, enchanted 18 days we spent in there.
JB loves God and life and his family and friends. Currently he is inactive most everywhere apart from Substack and his personal broadcast channel on Telegram.
Amazing. I just loved it.