The Loop That Keeps You Broke and Fried

Blog 16: Part of The Space Between Survival and Joy - a post about the real cost of spiritual money work, and the moment I stopped paying for abundance with my nervous system.

Before the Breakdown

I never intended to live inside this loop.

Somewhere between all the flat business attempts and the bills soaring with astronomical credit card rates, I was too shell-shocked to look for practical solutions. Budgets and spreadsheets made me feel like I couldn't breathe. Traditional financial advice felt like it was written for someone else - someone with stability, someone with linearity. Someone whose body didn't go cold every time they checked their bank account.

So I fell back on what had always gotten me through - intensive multi-dimensional energy healing. It promised a way through – not around – the money blocks. I sank into it, desperate for the pattern to break.

It didn't start as spiritual bypassing. It felt like the opposite – finally facing what was really happening. Finally looking at what lived underneath the numbers, facing the shadows of my money-story.

The excavation turned into obsession.

I tracked each bill to a past life event. Each unexpected expense became evidence of a ancestral contract I hadn't cleared yet. That $1100 water heater? Clearly emotional suppresion. Water is emotion, right - had to be it.

Days spent in deep meditation. Nights tracking through guided healings. Hours on Zoom calls where I nodded along, feeling something shift – feeling it, I swear – only to open my email to another unexpected bill.

The money wouldn't move.

And nobody – not one person – asked the question that mattered: What if it's not supposed to move right now?

My nervous system was already fried. Not just tired. Scorched. Struggling for breath just walking out the driveway, cortisol spikes walking into T.J. Maxx that felt like a panic attack, the pressure on my chest, heart palpitations were a daily thing.

I kept pushing. Not because it worked. Because I had no idea what else to do. The shame of stopping felt worse than the exhaustion of continuing.

When Healing Becomes the Drain

Spirituality gave me new ways to blame myself. More evolved ways. Now it wasn't that I was bad with money – it was that my vibration wasn't high enough. My containers weren't safe enough. My worthiness not embodied enough.

The money still didn't move. But by god, I was working so hard on myself.

Each morning I'd wake up with that familiar weight on my chest. That specific pressure behind my eyes, pain in my head. That taste in my mouth that said: today's going to be exactly like yesterday. I’d shuffle my way to the kitchen, drink my lemon water and then religiously listen to my audio recordings to unwind and heal subconscious money blocks. It was a ritual I couldn’t opt out of.

I told myself this was devotion. Commitment to my evolution. The price of freedom.

What it really was? Slow collapse.

Something had to break.

Not the patterns, nor the blocks. My cooperation with the entire framework.

Where did we learn that destroying our nervous systems was the path to prosperity? That we had to earn our way into receiving? That if we just cleared enough, healed enough, aligned enough – then finally we'd deserve the resources we needed?

The money I have spent on coaching and on healing work left me more depleted than when I started. Insane amounts of money working with people that knew less than I did or promised the moon and delivered air - a huge contributor to being in the financial struggle to begin with. What I needed wasn't more clearing.

I needed to stop.

To let my system come back online after years of spiritual override. To feel my way back from the brink of collapse I'd been living on for so long that exhaustion felt normal.

The Moment I Stopped Cooperating

The real shift wasn't a breakthrough. It was the moment I gave up the search for the root cause. The morning I woke up and didn't immediately try to decode the meaning of my financial state. The day I stopped treating my struggle as a spiritual assignment.

The body knows. Not just when something's wrong - when something's fundamentally misaligned with how you're approaching healing itself. When the medicine has become the poison and the clearing has become the drain.

My body had been trying to tell me all along: You're burning through your capacity to receive by constantly trying to prove you deserve it.

I didn't know what would happen next. I didn't have a neat story of miraculous abundance that followed this realization at the time. The struggle was still there. The pressure didn’t magically dissolve.

But my cooperation with a system that demanded my nervous system as payment….that's what went.

I was done killing myself to become worthy of enough.

After the grip breaks

The Proof I Didn’t Expect

It didn’t shift overnight. But a few weeks later…things got exciting, in the best possible way.

Stuff started moving. And it was real. Like the system finally saying, yes.

A $1300 check landed from a consignment shop I hadn’t thought about in months. Two big vintage pieces sold…for full price. Then a man I hadn’t spoken to in weeks showed up with a dozen roses. On my doorstep.
I stood there holding them like, what the actual fuck.
I was in awe.

One bill would jump. Then a different one would shrink. It was like something behind the curtain was evening it out.

I knew exactly what was happening, though. I didn’t clear some final block. I didn’t suddenly become “aligned.” I stopped cooperating with a system that demanded collapse as proof of worthiness.

And now….my body knows it too.

I can sleep. I don’t wake up with a searing headache in the morning. My neck isn’t stiff. My energy is back. My heart’s not racing. I’m not walking around waiting for the next hit. The static is gone. I don’t feel like I’m bracing against life anymore.

This is what it looks like when the nervous system says: no more.

Love,
Sherry

This was the stop. But not the end.
Next week, I’ll share more about what happens when survival isn’t driving the story anymore, when the loop has ended, but your body still doesn’t know you’re safe.

If you want to revisit where the healing performance began to crack/spiritual exhaustion, read: Are You Healing or Trying to Earn Your Ascension?

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About the Author:
Sherry writes from the space between dimensions - where presence meets paradox, and mastery gives way to meaning. With a background in metaphysical work and energetic healing that spans decades, her voice carries the imprint of lived wisdom - as an invitation versus a doctrine.

Her blog, It Exists (For Now), moves fluidly across themes of transformation, embodiment, remembrance, identity, purpose, and the quiet revelations of everyday life. This is not the kind of writing to teach you, fix you, or convert you. It’s a space to feel, question, soften, and come home to what’s already here.

Whether she’s naming what’s unraveling beneath the surface or tracing the shimmer of wonder returning, her words are less about offering answers and more about walking with you through the liminal. The words hold a frequency that are felt long after they are read.