I shared recently that I am re-evaluating much of my life after leaving a magical cult.
It has been tough to discover all of the ways the cult programming has influenced my life, from unethical marketing practices I have made the mistake of using, to becoming reliant on somebody else telling me what to do.
One of things I have learned is that hoarding power never ends well, not for the community or for the hoarder.
Hoarding of any kind speaks to a misunderstanding of the world, a deep fear that there will never be 'enough'. There is a common, fundamental misunderstanding of human nature (and one I have fallen prey to many times) that causes hoarding of all kinds: food, money, power, attention, etc.
It's the belief that all humans are fundamentally selfish.
For as long as you believe that, you will believe in scarcity. And if you believe that something is scarce, you will store it (that is a normal human response). What we call hoarding behaviour is an overzealous response to a false scarcity. And if you believe that humans are always selfish, then there is all kinds of scarcity around and you cannot trust anyone to share with you.
I think this is at the root of trouble with receiving, whether that is literally receiving gifts or aid from people we know, or receiving results from spells from the Universe.
If I believe that money is scarce, I'm going to be really uncomfortable when someone buys me a drink. I might even refuse. Who am I to take someone else's money? I might feel uncomfortable about taking work from other readers or astrologers who could possibly need it more than me, because I believe there is a scarcity of clients. I might overextend myself and make promises I can't possibly keep, because if money is scarce, no-one would give theirs away to me just because they like me and have benefitted from my website.
But human beings aren't fundamentally selfish. Self-serving, self-centered, perhaps. Prone to selfish behaviour, sure. But throughout recorded history, people help people. People help animals. People make art and mourn their dead and smile and do a thousand other things just because.
Money (or anything else) isn't scarce. It's just being hoarded by people who believe that it is. And me having an internal meltdown over being bought two drinks in one afternoon didn't affect the stock market or the billionaire's fortunes a single bit. But it made the people who bought me them happy, just like it makes me happy to buy gifts for people whose company I enjoy. I didn't have to be dying of thirst on the pavement for it to happen, either.
When you creep around behind the scenes trying every trick in the book to nudge people into doing what you want, you believe that you are scarce, that other people are scarce, that good nature is scarce, or whatever it is you're trying to wrangle out of people is scarce. It's a self-defeating circle, and the really sad thing is that it infects everyone around you.
This was first sent out as an email to my list, you can join it for free here: www.siobhanjohnson.com/about