Standing on 5th Avenue in NYC last week in front of the Barnes and Noble, I imagined lines around the block of women eager to have me sign my new book about permission for happiness and wealth.
Mid this visioning, a panic attack swooped in, crushing my chest.
The timing of the panic attacks continue to surprise me, but less now that I understand I process memories with high body sensitivity. As an empathic person, I feel everything through my body. I love with my body, write from my body and feel with my body. The pluses are when I am out of my head and in my body, I am free. The minuses are when I am in the memories of my body that trip up parts of my mind not yet at peace, I panic.
In this moment, imagining a great success as an author, I was blocks from where I had worked as a hungry, ambitious scared 21 year old. One pair of duct taped walking shoes, zero bank balance, student loans, and fear over where I would get my next meal. I was working on 5th Avenue as an executive assistant, surrounded by a great opulence that was not congruent to my scarcity state of mind and reality. The struggle was real for one who craved to be an artist, but was living in a city way too expensive their paycheck.
Even though the fifty something me in NYC now was confident with little financial insecurity, the body memories were real. I felt a wave of sadness for that young woman who wore a mask of resilience covering a great fear of how to make it to the other side. All I knew was to work hard and keep going no matter what it took. I thought you had to starve to be successful. I thought you had to suffer to truly live.
Many artists will tell you this is true. The film business fostered this “do it all for nothing.” It’s not the scarcity that drives you. It is the dream.
You can have a dream and be happy and wealthy… what? Really?
Do you want to think the opposite? What’s the point!
When I understood later in life you have to do the inner work to find happiness and then you can be successful and live without suffering, I had a huge breakthrough. All the stars started to align. I saw that the messages I had been given about the correlation of working hard and making money were not true. I thought the scarcity was what drove me to realize my dreams, but the dream was the driver. My college age daughter is still trying to understand why she witnessed me in scarcity for a lot of her young life. I thought to buy a house and start a business I had to be over the top frugal. I taught improper lessons. I would have still saved and bought the house even with spending that little extra. Happiness and goals were driving me, not the saved ten dollars. I am trying to re-teach her now that money is a flow and being stressed all the time about it will burn her out. Why not trust that the best position paying the most with the easiest schedule is coming to her in divine accordance? I wish someone had told me that when I was 22. I would have at least felt the suffering had an end game that was more than just more suffering.
Instead of letting the panic attack get me, I kept walking with my 14 year old on 5th Avenue and admired the outfits in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue. I was conscious that the me who believes I can have lines around the building for my book was fighting the body memories of a young girl who wanted to believe but also simultaneously doubted her own intuitive courage and power.
When I arrived in NY the night before, I was acutely aware that the city welcomed a new me. I was in my skin on the train, on the street, navigating the neighborhood. We found ourselves in a festive Israeli restaurant in the West Village vibrating with song and celebration. We were privy to a mind-bending quartet in Smalls Jazz club where we swooned and closed our eyes to hear the chaotic and melodic instrumentation through our whole bodies. I felt wealth and happiness co-mingling inside, and I wore it like a new coat. NYC was celebrating me, and I was celebrating me, and as we entered the subway at 10:30 PM, a street musician crooned Justin Bieber’s Lonely, and I thought, no I am not anymore. I am not alone. I am with me.
While one part of me wanted to constrict and stop spending money in NYC and be less abundant, the work I was there to do was the opposite. Instead, after buying tickets to the Broadway show Chicago, we grabbed late night eggs in a diner. If we were thirty and tired wandering the Whitney Museum, we bought lattes. When a client suggested we meet for food in a fancy hotel, I leaned into the significance of it being where I once shot a movie. When the food costs at Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate were exorbitant, I still enjoyed the fact that we were sitting at the table when John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale sat in the movie of the same name. I even wandered into an Upper East Side lighting store (I love lighting), and the salesperson treated me like someone who could actually afford a $12,000 Murano glass light. I mean, I was marveling over it so he gave me a tear sheet. And it was on sale for $5k. That’s a steal! (I jest.)
Through all these experiences and beyond in NYC, the young scared girl who was once hungry needed to be acknowledged but she could not run the show. She doesn’t get to live inside me anymore. She is put to rest. We get to be in the benefits and rewards of all the work, and awareness and peace of mind from the past decade but those old voices need to be dimmed. Manifestation is not some lightening bolt, but rather a consistent vigilant thought that all you want and need is coming to you even when you have body memories, flashbacks or fear. That is when you hold on to the new you the tightest and refuse to let go.
I have been living in happiness and wealth for only a couple years but I have no interest in turning back. I learned how to live without money and that was not so fun. Now I get to learn how to be in wealth and happiness and teach about the process in which to do so. I get to help those less fortunate than me and still suffering.
Suffering is easy. Permission to be happy not so much.
Which do you want to master?
The outfit I will wear to my book signing in 2025 at the Barnes and Noble on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Stay tuned!