Silver - Its not your money: how to live fully from divine abundance

ALSO BY

TOSHA SILVER

Change Me Prayers: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Surrender

Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead

Make Me Your Own: Poems to the Divine Beloved

Copyright 2019 by Tosha Silver

Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver. Copyright 2014 Tosha Silver. Reprinted with the permission of Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com Published in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au Published in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

Cover design: Micah Kandros Interior design: Nick C. Welch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private useother than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviewswithout prior written permission of the publisher.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-5473-4

E-book ISBN: 978-1-4019-5474-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

1st edition, February 2019

Printed in the United States of America

To Maha Kali

Ironically

when you let the Divine take the lead

old desires often begin to hatch

and be fulfilled

anyway

(as a gift from Love Herself)

except now

youre not

their slave

Tosha Silver, Unshackled, Make Me Your Own

Dad, I TOLD you. If Gods not included,
I just get bored.

Little girl in line at Kohls

If anyone told me years ago that Id be writing a spiritual book about money, Id never have believed it. But when I look back on my life, it makes total sense. All my other books have centered on the practical ways to surrender and let the Divine lead, and money might be the single stickiest topic for this approach. Many spiritually-minded people will invite the Divine into almost anything, except the moolah.

I grew up the middle child in a middle-class Jewish family where my parents worked incredibly hard for my two brothers and me to feel physically comfortable. Ill be grateful to them forever. Nonetheless, my obsession from a very young age was a single topic: Impending Doom. No matter how seemingly safe we were, I was always sure that in some vague and intractable way, disaster waited right around the next corner.

Perhaps this incessant fear came from being born just a couple of generations from the Holocaust with distant relatives whod perished there. As a kid, Id heard stories about pogroms, concentration camps, and collapsing economies. Perhaps terror was encoded straight into my DNA.

Or maybe it was the legacy of past lives replete with suffering, loss, and travail. All I know is that despite growing up in a quiet ranch-style home with a weeping willow tree I madly loved in the backyard, nonstop anxiety was my steady reality. My constant wait for that indefinable other shoe to drop emerged in some wild and dramatic ways.

When I was six, my mom left the house one rainy afternoon without saying anything, which was rare. Within twenty minutes, I was running down the street, banging on doors and frantically screaming her name, sure shed been kidnapped. When I found her calmly sitting in a neighbors kitchen, drinking coffee and borrowing eggs, I collapsed into her lap in heaving tears of relief. She gave the neighbor a wry look like, Yes, here is my darling, hypersensitive daughter.

When my parents went out for an occasional date, my older brother would look forward to winning Scrabble with Patti, our babysitter. Meanwhile, Id sit with my face flush against the cold bedroom window, staring down the dark street, waiting hour after hour for the lights of their returning Pontiac. When Id finally hear the key in the door, joy would flood my body like sunshine at midnight. Id feel as if tragedy had somehow once again been averted for another evening. But who knew when it might strike next?

So yes, I had a feverish imagination with a sense of nonstop peril, though I learned early to appear as brave and normal as possible. Once I graduated from college, those survival fears immediately swamped me, almost in spite of the job opportunities that came. I began teaching ESL part-time at a community college and eventually had a side business doing bodywork and intuitive counseling.

The terror of not-enough was a constant storm cloud. If a client canceled, I panicked. Though I covered the bills month to month, I kept fretting about what Id do if I couldnt one day. This led to such overwork and exhaustion that by the time I was 30, I was bedridden for 3 years with adrenal failure, something I wrote about in my first two books.

By the 90s, when I was regaining my health, the New Age ideas about manifesting and the Law of Attraction were beginning to boom. Many of my clients were enamored with the notion that any desire could be magnetically attracted through visualizations and positive thoughts. They put up vision boards with pictures of everything they wanted, from Balinese vacations to artists lofts in Manhattan. But I also noticed that many lived in fear that any negative thought might stunt the delivery. Some even blamed themselves ferociously when each and every wish didnt hatch, assuming theyd surely blocked them.

Yet right from the start, this Grand Chase of the Wishes, kind of like a metaphysical Iditarod, left me feeling empty and bemused. Growing up in relative comfort yet beset by constant fear, I had no illusions that fixating on that laundry list of desires could ever bring much peace. Id watched some of my own clients create fame and fortune, then have it all crash. People manifested soul mates, then lost them just as fast. One painful desire only seemed to beget another.

At the same time, I longed to go deeper into my own spiritual studies of yogic philosophy. Id been introduced to yoga in college and I sensed it held many answers, far beyond stress reduction and a better butt. (Not that theres anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say.) I knew there had to be a deeper, more nuanced answer to life than to be born, chase stuff, and die. I longed to find a sense of safety and enoughnessthe sense that despite ups and downs, crashes and cataclysms, one could somehow prosperseparate from lifes inevitable flux.

So I began to study famous ancient texts from India such as the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjalis