The Soul Doesn't Want More Money

One of the most popular teachings of the online pseudo-spiritual life coach is Law of Attraction (LOA). This philosophy has been rehashed many times in our culture since the early 20th century. In a nutshell, it’s the idea that through focusing your thoughts solely on your deepest desires, you can manifest them.

Most folks who’ve made a career out of teaching LOA have focused on manifesting money. The practical way that they “manifest” this money is by convincing people that they have a magical power to manifest their desires, and that you can access that same magic if you give them lots of your money. My guess is that these coaches actually believe in what they are selling. But most folks who buy LOA trainings or follow LOA coaching don’t succeed in becoming rich. I am sure many would assume that this is because LOA is pseudoscientific hogwash.

But the premise of LOA contains truth: the content of your thoughts does have a direct impact on your behaviors and actions, ultimately impacting your material reality. This should be a relatively non-controversial statement, but the dominant materialist worldview of our social institutions often directly denies this ( see: Tao Lin’s brilliant piece about this). This is how something intuitively obvious becomes a multi-million dollar bestselling book called The Secret.

Now just because our thoughts can impact our reality, does not mean that they are the only thing that does. That idea leads to the extremist view of many LOA practitioners, that each of us is personally responsible for everything that happens to us based on our thoughts alone. This solipsism jives quite nicely with the dominant cultural and social structures that are built on the illusion of the singular individual, taking on the world through sheer willpower.

The alternative is understanding yourself as an ever-unfolding relational ecosystem. You are made up of you and every person, place, or thing around you and within you. We aren’t just living in a world of our own thoughts and feelings and desires. We are living inside the desires, thoughts, and dreams of everyone else around us, in a co-created reality. So no, we are not solely responsible for everything that happens or doesn’t happen to us, it is never that simple.

But even though extreme individualism and greed pervades the LOA coaching ecosystem, and your experiences are impacted by the desires and actions of everything else around you, I still find myself wanting to say…the Law of Attraction can and does work. When we put our singular focus on what we deeply desire, we have the power to manifest that desire—not absolute power, but tremendous power nonetheless. The creative force of a human being is stunning–we quite literally have the capacity to imagine something in our minds and then take the actions necessary to see it manifest in the material world. Tell me another animal, plant, or fungi that can match us in this ability. It is our human magic, it is our birthright. It is the power we have to live our dreams.

So no, it is not delusional to believe that you can manifest the true desires of your soul with sincere intention and focus. So why do so many who buy into LOA fail to become rich? Because their souls don’t actually want money. Even if they consciously desire money very deeply, there are unconscious yearnings beyond the material realm that get in the way. LOA coaches will tell you these are your negative beliefs blocking you from your wealth. I would argue that this is your soul knowing that money is not going to quench your deep inner thirst. In this sense, my guess is that most successful LOA practitioners or coaches are actually unusually shallow, deeply disassociated people.

So how about we reclaim LOA? How about we wrest it from the hands of the most greedy and materialistic among us and remember collectively that yes, our thoughts, our desires, our attention and our focus are enormous sources of individual and collective power. What we think matters, what we desire matters, what we put our energy towards—matters. It might very well be the most consistent and vast source of our individual and collective power.

We are all so fully entrenched in the imposed desires of the materialist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, capitalist and colonialist worldview, we can not just assume we know what our deepest desires are. Influencing and manipulating our desires is precisely what these systems live off of, and no one is immune. Most of us, because of this constant manipulation through public education, socialization and advertising, determine that we simply want “money” believing that having money will set us free to pursue any other desire we might have. Simultaneously, we are surrounded by conditioning that tells us that our deep inner callings are not significant, not real, not realistic, not important. This leaves us in an internal a whirling eddy of conflicting and rejected desires, constantly damming ourselves for not achieving what we thought we wanted, or drowning for years in scarcity and lack without ever really asking ourselves, what does our soul deeply yearn for?

One way to imagine the soul is the soul is the part of us that is in deepest relationship with the collective unconscious of all that is around us. Our soul is who we would embody if we acknowledged our relationship to all, and if we devoted ourselves to witnessing and loving the unfolding of that potential. Our soul is the thing that dreams, the seat of our most true and real internal desires. When we are driven by the desires that come from the inside, we feel full.

Marketing and advertising train us to merely desire consumption. In the consumer experience, our true desires, our soul’s desires are completely eclipsed by consuming not because we actually want more things, but because we have been sold the idea that we have a problem that money can solve. Simultaneously, our capitalist economic system creates the conditions of poverty and scarcity. In this way, the dominant social order offers both a carrot and a stick—dangling money as the freedom to fulfill any desire we could have, while threatening us with homelessness and hunger if we do not get in line and work for the right to exist. This is how even folks with detailed and astute critiques of capitalism and a strong conscious desire to detach from it still find themselves falling in line with the rhetoric they are fed about what they need from the system to feel safe. Ultimately corporations capitalize on all of our fundamental insecurities, “I am not beautiful.” “I am not lovable.” “I am not normal.” “I am not ok.” “I am not safe.” “I can not survive." in order to profit off of our labor.

But the soul doesn’t want money, and our bodies don’t actually need it to survive. We all know that the best things in life are priceless, and that we can not purchase authentic love or inner peace. Our souls have real desires. We sometimes have trouble believing the soul’s desires are real because we have collapsed material reality with reality itself. What is material is what is real, and our souls are by definition immaterial, and thus in the “illusory” realm. But even though we follow along with this philosophy within the cultural status quo, our bodies betray us with their deep and mysterious longings.

Our souls don’t just want more and more and more. They want a very particular thing. The work of piecing together what we truly want isn’t easy; it is the journey of a lifetime. Sometimes we believe we are following a soul desire, but truly we are believing a story that if we had that thing (a certain kind of relationship, job achievement, physical appearance, etc..) then we would be lovable, seen, and accepted for who we truly are.

At the root of so much unmet need is the desire for love. What’s true is we already have love, it is life itself. Your heartbeat is the evidence, and it is priceless.

We know we are starting to follow along with the tune of the souls when we are starting to feel filled up, satisfied, met. The soul is the thing that dreams. This is why I encourage folks to take a look at their dreams, because they will provide you with clear guidance as to what you yearn for–-what feels deeply real and true in the body. Your dreams and attuning to your somatic experiences will guide you towards the processing and strengthening you need to courageously keep moving towards what feels most real and rings most true for you. Dreams will also highlight thought/behavioral patterns of reaction and triggers that may be getting in the way of going towards what your soul wants.

As more and more people go through spiritual awakening or start to follow their soul’s calling, they are pointing to a real experience of detaching from their strictly material desires and focusing instead on the deeper inner longings that have been pushed down for being unrealistic or delusional.

If you are looking around at the world today and feeling like you are living in someone else’s dream, a dream that you experience as a nightmare, welcome, welcome, you are waking up to the capacity within yourself to dream a new dream. What you have been told to want and what actually feels satisfying to you are two very different things, and you are awakening to the dissonance. And you are a human being–the most creative, powerful creature within this extremely precarious web of life to which we are all inextricably linked. What you name as your desire, and the energy and focus you place on it, can and will alter the material world around you.

Do not settle for the prescribed desires of those feeble minded around you who are willing to exploit and dominate others to enrich themselves or soothe their egoic insecurities. Do not succumb to the dominant materialist paradigm that has trained you to believe your thoughts and your emotions and your longings are not realistic or significant. And if you have been deemed a failure in this nightmare of a social order we have found ourselves in, have faith! There is a soul in you that is shining and true, and it has real desires, true desires, that are based in love and the possibility for things to be other than what they are. It is because your soul shines strong that you have not been able to make it in a cultural paradigm so upside down in its values and rewards.

We can manifest what the soul dreams of, what the collective soul of all life is yearning for, we can dig deep and focus on that yearning beyond all rationality or material evidence. If TikTok girlies can be delusional about their ability to manifest the latest 5K handbag, we can be delusional about creating dynamic communities of care that can meet our needs and allow us time for rest, pleasure, and creative freedom. If we do this with collective consciousness, acknowledging that our true desires stem from the collective link that ties us to all other souls in this web of life, we can turn the tide, and we can make what was previously unimaginable—real.