And you are ready. You feel this all-knowing Force of Love has been waiting for You. It now fully accepts and rejoices in your sacred offering. Of yourself. All of you. Without any need to become more deserving. Without any need to improve. You have been worthy to belong to Love all along. – Tosha Silver
On the theme of letting go and surrender, Tosha is my go-to counselor-slash-godmother. She is like a soul aunt (yep, we do have a soul family) that I’d love to pay a visit every now and then for guidance and advice. Or quite more often, she’s the one who pops up in my life on divine timing.
In that sense, she truly is a fairy godmother, as the dictionary defines it: “a female character in some fairy tales who has magical powers and brings unexpected good fortune to the hero or heroine.”
And good fortune was I in while browsing through Amazon’s bookshelf when this book with a shiny design cover came flashing on the recommendation. “Tosha?” I thought. “Yes, darling, it’s me and I have something for you,” I imagined her handing me the book, virtually.
I’ve always asked the Universe that if It’s sending a message, showing a sign, to make it so obvious that I couldn’t miss it. There it was, It’s Not Your Money Kindle edition on sale for $1.99. Hah! If that wasn’t obvious enough.
The book is designed to be an 8-week read, or better put, practice.
Here are my biggest takeaways 3 months after, lessons I will continue to apply hereafter.
The Full Abundance Change Me Prayer
It reliably calls in the transformative power of Love and elevates one’s consciousness—no matter what your current state. It invokes Abundance itself—including gratitude, prosperity, and freedom—yet it serves an even deeper purpose. It teaches your whole Being that you, too, deserve to receive. In many ways, it’s a song of worthiness.
Intention is the foundation for creation. Affirmation strengthens it. Action builds it.
So first off, a prayer to set the intention and we repeat this every morning for 8 weeks to reaffirm. Continue on and on for as long as you like.
I’d suggest you keep a copy handy, make an audio recording if you wish, save it on your smartphone, or print a hardcopy and display it conspicuously.
We are sowing seeds here in the garden of our minds. Seeds of worthiness, mostly. So come harvest time, we’ll then be ready to receive.
Releasing Doership
Releasing doership means that rather than striving and pushing harder, you actually learn to get out of the way. Your instincts start to guide your actions, and you don’t cling to outcomes.
Tosha had a firsthand experience of this. She got stuck on what ideas to write for this book, claiming she is it’s “writer.” It wasn’t until she offered it to the Divine that the book seemingly wrote itself.
And so she invites us to practice this offering, this releasing of doership, of ownership. One way is by replacing my with the. “My job” becomes “the job.” You make the job more about the work and less about you.
True offering takes what can be an unbearable cross and returns it to Love.
Our real job is not the actual work per se, but to allow the work be done through us. Releasing doership doesn’t mean we don’t do anything. It simply means we act as we are divinely guided. Our actions come from knowing that God is the Doer. It’s letting it be done according to Thy will.
You not being the cause also releases your grip on the effect. When you detach yourself from the outcome, you free yourself from frustration and disappointment.
Even success or failure becomes irrelevant because you learn to enjoy the process, which is where true abundance lies.
The Five Divine Steps
At this juncture, you’re preparing for just one thing: to become a vehicle for abundance. As you keep doing the steps, you’ll notice synchronicities increase. You’ll start to be in the right place at the right time to freely give and receive and to help others when you’re guided. All may spontaneously start to happen without much thought. You’ll move into a grace-filled, expansive reality where you remember that you’re an unlimited Being guided by Love and a vehicle for Divine Source. No matter who you are.
As we enter week 2, Tosha lays out these 5 Divine Steps into becoming a vehicle for abundance:
- Say the Full Abundance Change Me Prayer – Again and again, to instill an abundance mindset.
- Start to Clean Your House – In order to receive, you have to make room. So, declutter. Everything is energy, including your household items. Old unused ones may be carrying low vibes, most of which keep you stuck in the past (yup, especially those stuff from your ex). Tosha recommends Marie Kondo’s principle in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, releasing what doesn’t bring you joy. Check our notes on Make Space for additional insights.
- Stop Complaining About Money – Complaining reinforces your belief in scarcity. Use The Sedona Method to help you interrupt these thought patterns and break free from them for good.
- Make a Statement of Gratitude – Each day, just look for one thing to be grateful for. If there’s a habit that will lead you to an abundant life, it’s definitely this one.
- Say “It’s Easy For Me to Receive” – How are you taking in those compliments? When someone offers you a treat? How you feel speaks of how receptive you are. You’ve been very good at giving, you may want to start flexing those receiving muscles, too.
Old Soul Abundance
If you’ve tried and tried to get more money and found this hasn’t worked, I want you to know you’re in no way a “failure.” Instead, you might just be an old soul. If you are, chasing after abundance can be fruitless and exhausting because you were born to align with Love’s will, follow the Tao, and serve something beyond the ego.
Hello, old soul! You’ve heard it straight from Grand Aunt Tosha: “You’re not a failure.” Though I’d bet you’ve somehow known it all along that there’s no such thing as failure, we can always heed some reassurance.
In fact, “failure at manifesting” might have been the Divine plan all along—the perfect route to make you leap, once and for all, straight into Love’s waiting arms.
Tosha even goes to saying that your ego may have been prevented from manifesting for your greater good. The Universe could be saying “Not yet, not yet.” Not until you’re completely ready for it. Not until you’ve fully grasped the lesson your soul is teaching you.
Imagine if everything went your way. What if, to paraphrase the scripture, you gained the world but lost your soul?
I ponder this myself and keep realizing that the Universe is, in fact, saving me from harm. Truly, it is working in my favor.
It is for all of us. Who knows, it might be preparing us for something better.
Three More for More
Just imagine yourself part of this radiant waterfall of light. Know that financial abundance and prosperity are part of this—they’re not separate. The more you see yourself as a vehicle for giving and receiving, the more everything that wants to come can come, and everything that wants to go can go.
You yourself are a waterfall of abundance, even if you don’t see it in your bank account yet. It doesn’t matter. See it coming in; see it going out. You’re part of that waterfall of light.
That was an excerpt taken from one of the many guided meditations Tosha leads to close out lessons in the book. In addition to the 5 Divine Steps, she adds 3 more tools we can integrate into the practice.
Tool #1: Get a GOD Box – the box will serve as a Divine container for your problems and fears around money. When an issue comes up, write it down on paper and put it inside the box. It’s an act of offering your concerns to the Divine, trusting the right solution will be shown in due time.
Tool #2: Smash Coconuts – LOL, I laughed right away as I read it and imagined myself smashing the heck out of it! But Tosha is serious about this ritual, which is done in India and other parts of the Caribbean. The coconut represents your mind’s attachment to the problem and smashing it symbolizes your freedom from it.
So all those problems, disappointments, frustrations, resentments, anger, or whatever they may be, use the coconut to release those burdens. Smash them away!
Or, if you just can’t simply pull it together, then, by all means, go at it!
Tool #3: Make Demos of Abundance – recall the last part of creation: Intention-Affirmation-ACTION. Here it is: Act as if you’re prosperous. You don’t have to believe it yet, but it’s a make-believe act to reaffirm your intention.
If you intend on becoming prosperous, the Universe will provide opportunities where you can demonstrate being prosperous. When they present themselves, Tosha suggests affirming as you act on them: It’s easy for me to spend God’s money to help.
Tithing is one of her recommendations. It’s to practice sharing 10% of what you have to wherever you feel it’s needed.
Ask yourself the question when a situation calls for it: “What would a millionaire do?”
Act on it.
Release Self-Torture
No individual person, place, or thing is your Source, only God. There’s no need to fret about the one that got away. When God is reinstalled as the storehouse of all, there’s no tragically missed opportunity. Only a move into the present, where what’s meant to be yours will always come.
Reading this part cracked me open like a coconut. It had me bursting into tears (when I thought I already had myself emptied out), reminding me of the many times I blamed myself when my father was hospitalized due to cancer and during the grieving times following his death.
The self-blame came from a year before it, when I lent money to a friend for his father’s hospitalization too, plus her miscellaneous expenses. Then came the crisis our family went through, I had nothing to shell out anymore. I was dead broke when I badly needed it, for my own father’s life was at stake.
The guilt and blame haunted me, but I realized I was doing it to myself. It was self-torture. And it was self-forgiveness that undid it all, maybe still undoing what remains, so I can be free again. That renewal also brought my renewed relationship with money.
So I’m inviting you to dig deeper. Your money issue could be a forgiveness issue, too.
As you forgive yourself, you open once again to the Divine Flow, where any loss can potentially be followed by gain.
Forgiveness is the work. It does healing that pays off huge dividends.
Inner Sankalpa
In the end, you’re the one. You’re the savior. No matter who you are, your own inner little one is waiting for you.
When you look inside, you’ll often see that the one who’s enraged, lonely, or hopeless isn’t even the adult part of you. It’s that abandoned one inside crying for love. How things change when you begin to care for it!
Sankalpa. It’s a Sanskrit word for intention or vow. And that’s what week 5 is all about – Inner Sankalpa – making a vow to love and support the kid in you, the neglected one, the abandoned child, the part of you that needs your utmost care and attention.
This process involves getting to know your inner kid again. How did you view money when you were a child? If you’re like me, you may have grown up resenting money because you saw your parents quarreling constantly over it. What beliefs around money were instilled in you?
In week 4, Tosha guides you through an energetic clearing technique known as “cord cutting,” one that is common when healing abundance issues. She also suggests connecting to your inner dog, or whatever animal you’d like to pet, if you find it hard connecting with your inner kid.
You may also check out The Abandonment Recovery Workbook for the “Big You / Little You” exercise plus other tools to assist you in parenting yourself.
The Three Crown Jewels
You’re finally ready to let something greater than the ego take over. True intimacy with the Divine can begin. This is the road to freedom, but not because all longings vanish. Instead, desires melt into preferences and no longer own you.
Your interest in true offering takes precedence over all else because the soul is hell-bent on freedom. Hell-bent.
Coming in at week 6 are what Tosha refers to as “The Crown Jewels” that comprise true offering: Aparigraha, Vairagya, and Ishvara Pranidhana. The Sanskrit term is not as important as the essence they point to. They are not to be memorized but to be embodied.
But first, let’s touch briefly on the 3 stages of development as we move toward the ultimate prize for the soul – its freedom.
Stage 1: The ego is fully in the driver’s seat. It’s learning its sense of self, and with that comes its desires. This is part of human nature, so there’s nothing wrong with it.
Stage 2: From the exhaustion of not having the desires of your ego, you learn about surrender and how to let the Divine take the lead. However, it’s still primarily intellectual. The ego has just become “spiritual” so here is where it gets tricky. The offering could have a hidden agenda: “I surrender my finances to you Divine… (okay, so when’s the money coming?)” Hah!
Stage 3: You’re no longer identified with your ego, which also detaches you from the outcome. You are aligning with your soul’s desires, which is what you’ve truly wanted all your life.
At this stage, you wear The Crown Jewels. You embody them.
Aparigraha (Non-Grasping): You “let everything that needs to go, go; and everything that needs to come, come.”
Vairagya (Detachment): The word means “without color,” as in seeing clearly through the tint of your desires. It’s not that you no longer have desires. You still do, but you’re not a slave to them anymore.
Ishvara Pranidhana (Surrender): You let yourself be used by the Divine. You don’t manifest Abundance, but rather it’s Abundance that manifests through you.
The Divine Decoy
In this process of learning to let the Divine lead, you really are tested. Often. Sometimes in ways that even try your sanity. Not in a punishing way, but as if Love says, “Is this spiritual understanding real and not just a nice idea?”
So, if one of these decoys comes your way, don’t think the story is over. You just go back to Divine Order and say the perfect “whatever” is already picked and you’ll be guided to it in the right time and way. In the world of Divine Source, you cannot miss what’s Yours.
Just to be clear, by “tested,” it’s not pertaining to your worthiness to receive. You are deserving of Abundance, of all your desires.
What Tosha refers to is similar to testing the strength of a bridge. She’s saying that God wants to make sure of your solidity before allowing Abundance to pass through.
Your dreams are ready for you. Trust the timing of their coming. Use that time for preparation, for making yourself ready.
Again, Tosha suggests incorporating prayers in the unfoldment of the Divine order in your life – to pray for courage, acceptance, confidence, and ease. In the book, you’ll find a series of short prayers complemented by guided meditations.
You see, much of it is inner work. Continue strengthening your spiritual muscles with practices and habits that suit you. Before long, you’ll find yourself in synchroni-city – a ‘state’ wherein even the smallest, most ordinary event in your everyday life seems to be happening at the right time, at the right place.
Everything is lining up for you. You just have to align with it, too.
In this way of Being, decisions make themselves when the time is right. When in doubt, sometimes the best thing you can do is be exactly where you are, even if you’re completely confused. Sometimes you’re being protected from what you don’t yet need. The situation is cooking. If you’re hitting obstacle after obstacle, simply let it all cook more. What seems like a huge hassle now could be easy as pie later.
Later, it will be delicious.
Because. It. Will. Be. Ready.
The Road to Abundance
This entire journey has been about getting lighter. Lightening the emotional burden you carry from the past. Lightening the clutter from your house. Lightening your private personal collection of resentments and vendettas. In fact, you’re releasing anything that’s blocked the Flow.
Watch for the signs along the road. Those small things we’re talking about? They’re also a reminder that the Universe is working for you. It wants you to know and experience what it feels like to be on the Abundance road. It’s telling you to keep going.
There may also be roadblocks, signposts telling “Ooops, not this way,” or “Old baggage coming up,” which you need to let go of because you can’t take them anymore to where you’re headed.
Lisa Nichols, author of Abundance NOW and another fairy godmomma, says we’re moving into a new “ZIP code” that requires a new ID – a new identity, one without attachments, no longer identified with the ego but with the Divine. Your new life requires a new you.
In the context of Law of Attraction, speaking from a vibrational standpoint, you are elevating to a higher vibration – you are getting “Light-er.” And you can actually sense this in your body, that feeling of lightness.
What’s happening is you’re becoming a vibrational match to your desires. It’s not hard work, after all. It’s light work. That’s what makes you a Lightworker, ooooh!
You lead yourself to this path and you discover the way. Even more, you become the way, a Wayshower. In so being, you lead others, too. You become an abundant road yourself, bridging them to theirs.
Off you go, my friend. Sending you lots of love and awesomeness along the way.
Until we meet again. Carry on!
It’s Not Your Money: How to Live Fully from Divine Abundance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOSHA SILVER graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature, but along the way fell madly in love with yogic philosophy. For the past 30 years, she’s taught people around the world ways to align with Inner Love.
She lives near San Francisco, where she runs an online school called Living Outrageous Openness, which offers ongoing support to those who follow these beautiful, ancient practices.
Find out more at ToshaSilver.com
Other Books by Tosha Silver
Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead
