Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Pursuit of Wealth

The past 12 to 14 months of my life has seen the transit of Saturn into my second house in my astrological chart. Saturn is the planet of limitation, stress and challenge. It is also the planet of transformation, although it is not normally referred to it as such (Pluto is more often known as the planet of transformation.). The reason I say Saturn is the planet of transformation is because transformation is only possible through getting rid of what is not essential, to reveal what is essential. And the role of Saturn does exactly that – through stress and limitation, it reveals to you what is not essential, and reveals to you what is.

Saturn in my second house propelled me onto a quest for wealth, or to be more precise, material wealth, money. Traditionally the second house is believed to represent money and self-value. So you may wonder, why is money and self-value tied to one another? With my moon node also in second house, my transiting Saturn really took me onto a new height with my self development. The moon node indicates some of the most core soul developments and lessons. Topic for another discussion!!

During this Saturn transit, I lost money, including making faulty investment decisions. I was also pushed to understand the value of money and learned not to squander on things that don’t bring me value. I had to let go of negative beliefs around money as well as get clear with myself what I truly value, because before this, the many things I valued didn’t really come from me, many of which I later discovered were expectations placed on me by others or expectations I placed on myself!

All in all, however, this is what I have learned. Money is an outer reality result. It is an energy that allows us to acquire the things or experiences that we want, need or value. Things that can be purchased have what we call a “price”, which means then that everything may have a different ‘value’. So in other words, money is the measure of ‘value’. It does not determine the ‘value’ of an item. Because the ‘value’ of a thing, be it a pair of shoes, or a holiday package is determined by supply, demand and other human factors. The truth is, ‘value’ in the material world is most often than not, totally subjective. Who says a TV should cost ten thousand dollars and one carat of diamond few thousand (USD here..)? It all started with someone’s perception of its value and then demand and supply took it further. Similarly, a person’s self-value can also be subjective. It is subjective to the person valuing that person, namely, yourself. Who says you are valuable or not valuable. You do! And why would someone decide that a person is not valuable? Perhaps we have been told as a child that we don’t do this, we are not good, if we say this, we are not good, if we don’t get good grades and get a good job, we are not good, and on and on… Perhaps our society has many labels on us. If we make this much money, we are again, not good enough. But guess what, you are the true appraisor of your own value. And if you can peel away all of the untruths that I just mentioned above, about how others decided to put a ‘label’ on how valuable you are, you will start to be able to see that you are fully valuable just the way you are. You can start to see that value comes from within. And when you start seeing that you’re already valuable whatever you do, wherever you are in your life, you’ll stop sending out these vibes to the world that you are not good enough, and that, directly affects how much wealth you can create. Think about at work, if you think you’re a valuable employee, you’ll perform better, not because necessarily you are more skilled than the other employees (you can be but that’s not what matters), simply because you feel better about yourself and you really believe you are contributing to the good of your company. Others will get that vibe off you and start to perceive you as good at what you do. You have greater bargaining power and can get a better salary. Same in business. You believe that whatever you sell offers great value to the world and consequentially, you can get a better price for your products or services and be able to manifest more customers. This is the relationship between value and money.

My greatest lesson with my Saturn second house transit is the gift of learning to see that true wealth comes from remembering that my value comes from inside, that I am my own appraisor. It is like saying, that we each have a shining light within ourselves. God is within and once you remember your own greatness from within, noone else can take it away. No situation can take it away. Our self-worth has nothing to do with what others think of us, what we do, nor whether we fail or succeed at something or not, because whatever you think you should be or you can be, you already are. Should you fail at something or experience a setback, it is only teaching you something you do not know. Don’t tie your self-value with anything that is unessential, anything that can change – which, unfortunately, is everything in the material world. You are much greater than that. Outer success comes and goes. You can be on the top one day, next day you can be rock bottom. It is the cycle of nature. As Roger Hamilton (one of the wealth coaches) says, true wealth is when you are happy when you have not a penny in your pocket. This isn’t to say that you should go squander all your cash and just be happy. It is simply to remind you of the prosperity that you can experience right here, right now. And from there, you can go and create the beautiful vehicles of wealth that you want, or you can simply sit back and have a margherita.

I am yet to experience my Saturn return in the third house. Until then, cheers!