Bank Balance as Mood Ring

I've come to realize that my bank balance mosttimes serves as my Mood Ring ... or really my Mood Generator.  

When I made the decision 12+ years ago to leave my "secure",  "stable", "high-paying" (oh, I laugh at that one) job as a software developer and become a full-time massage therapist and therapy instructor, I also entered a world in which my income was far from dependable.  My parents, tenured faculty members at a university, used to repeat this fact endlessly, as did my "wise" and smug co-workers.  "Why the hell would you want to leave a perfectly good job, salary, security, a reasonably "sure thing" to do that?"

Yet, consider:  none of the companies I worked for in the past as a software guy even exist now, or they are so changed as to be unrecognizable:

• the department I worked in at Duke for seven years was subsumed into another department, completely changing form, mission, directors and staff 
• the first engineering company I worked for is completely out of business now
• the engineering company I first worked for in AL no longer does software at all 
• the second AL company I worked for, a local-done-good, home-grown software company for library automation (which was the best place I ever, ever worked, btw) saw its owners sell out and take all the cash, leaving the company to be merged with two of its competitors.  They've now moved to a different state, leaving its original employee base and the ones who actually *built* the company high and dry, laid off with few prospects.   In a military/space town, library automation experience doesn't get you very far.

In retrospect, there wasn't stability or security to be had in my former profession, either, despite what anybody thought.

Yet, knowing that had I stayed with my last employer I would now be unemployed and a little desperate, I still get discouraged and depressed when funds are low, as they are today.  This is an old wound that I have not yet been able to heal, that of yoking my mood to my fortune.  As a shamanic-y guy, I know that this life is a dream, and its a dream of my own making.  Yet this particular part of my dream seems oh-so-real to me, the veil is thicker here, and I have a difficult time seeing through it.  I suspect that there is ancestral energy, possibly curse energy here that I must deal with in order to make my way through this.  Both sets of grandparents raised large families in the midst of the Great Depression.  Perhaps the family energies of those hard times are what lingers still.

Money and self-esteem are tied together in me, and I would love to untangle that knot and sever that binding connection that weighs on me so heavily. 


Intellectually I know that these two things are not actually connected by anything other than my mind, yet in true magical fashion my mind creates this very solid external reality from my thoughts. 


Historically, money has always, always been there when I've needed it, which I have continually marvelled over.  The prospect that it might not be there at some future point is what is so wearing, month after month.   And it is a cycle - I see it happen time and time again, not being able to remove myself from this draining equation.   I suspect that this will be a layered healing that will come in stages.  Like the bolder that is caught in soil in the garden, a lot of preliminary work has to be done around the edges so that it can be dislodged with that final, easy tug.  One clue to the layered nature of this problem is that my mood also appears to be linked to storms - I get sad, sometimes really really sad, right before certain kinds of rain storms.  Maybe these things are linked?  Maybe not.


I just hope I can keep paying my mortgage while I figure it all out ...