Dr. Vanessa Calderón: We've seen what the current power over paradigms look like. They look like domination, extraction, control. But what if the leaders building what comes next learn to embody a different kind of power? Not power over, but power with, a power grounded that's deeply compassionate and generative. Here is the problem though. So many mission-driven women, they want to create change, but still feel deeply uncomfortable with power, with visibility and with money. And there's a reason for that. in this episode, we're talking about why money and power still feel so uncomfortable for women and how we can start to reclaim that. Welcome to The Authentic Path. I'm your host, Dr. Vanessa Calderon, Harvard-trained physician and healer. I integrate science and ancestral wisdom to support you in creating the success you desire in all areas of your life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Hello, sweet friends. Today I am doing something that I have rarely done before. In fact, I've only done it one time before, and that was last week. I am re-releasing an episode. the reason I'm doing that is because I believe this conversation is even more important right now than it has ever been before. We are living through an enormous transition in consciousness. Old systems are being questioned and dismantled, and new ones are being actively built. And everywhere we look, we're being asked to examine our relationship with power. Who has it? How is it being used? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of power do we want shaping what comes next? Because the answer cannot simply be replacing one person at the top of the hierarchy with another while continuing to use the same model of power, power over, power rooted in domination, extraction, fear, and control. What we need now is different. We need a different kind of leader and a different relationship with power. We need to become and learn how to be in right relationship with power. Power that's human-centered, compassionate, grounded, generative, power that allows us to create, protect, to serve, to build, and to make meaningful change without losing ourselves or exploiting other people along the way. And here's where this gets complicated. So many conscious, mission-driven women who are here to help build what comes next. Have also learned consciously or unconsciously that being powerful maybe isn't safe. Maybe it means being out of integrity. And they don't want that type of power. that's a problem because power is also in relation to money. Money gives us choice, autonomy, influence, and the ability to create change. And our relationship with money often becomes a mirror for our relationship with power. That is what the episode today is about. It really dives into the question why so many brilliant, capable women simultaneously desire greater impact and resources, but still feel uncomfortable with money, visibility, with power. And why? more importantly, how do we begin to heal that relationship so we can step into power differently? Because this moment doesn't need more people dominating from the top. It needs conscious people who are willing to reclaim power and steward it differently. As you're listening to this episode, I want you to pay attention to something else. I want you to pay attention as to how this episode is landing with you. And if it is resonating with you, I'd like to invite you to join our next healing circle called Resourced Wealth. Resourced Wealth is a small, intimate, healing-centered approach to money, power, and capacity for mission-driven women. This is not a surface-level money mindset or strategy program. It's a graduate level exploration that's coupled with deep, embodied, integrative healing designed for mission-driven women to help you expand your capacity to hold more wealth, impact, support without burning out. Because the work you're here to do requires resources. It requires time and it requires having the support. And yes, it requires money. And we need more conscious, compassionate women who are not afraid to hold wealth and power and who know how to use both in service of something so much bigger than themselves. Our next healing circle starts Thursday, September 24th. The link to learn more is in the show notes. I'd love to have you there. Okay, let's dive into the episode.

Vanessa: Hello, sweet friends. Welcome back to the podcast. This is the second episode in a series on money and power, legacy, and really ultimately capacity, increasing our capacity to hold the wealth, the money that we desire, the power that lives within us. So today's episode is called Money is Power. And that's exactly why so many women have a complicated relationship with that. This series was created especially for entrepreneurs, for mission-driven women, for leaders, for coaches, for healers, who women who want to grow their income and impact without betraying themselves along the way, without burning out and being in integrity and in alignment with who they are. So in the first episode, we talked about something that tends to completely change how women understand their relationship with money. The idea that for so many of us, this is not a strategy problem or a budget problem. It's not even a mindset problem. It's what's called a legacy wound. So I dove deep into legacy wounding. We talked about how our nervous system inherits these patterns through family, ancestry, collective history, the generational and ancestral trauma that sometimes gets passed down and inherited. and shapes how we feel and what feels safe, what feels risky, what feels possible when it comes to money, success, power and expansion. And today we're going to zoom into one very specific and very important part of that story, because there's a very good reason that money feels so charged for us. There's a reason it brings up so much fear and guilt and pressure and conflict and self-doubt. There's a reason so many smart, capable women who simultaneously want more, but also feel really uncomfortable with what that more represents. And that's because money has never just been about money. Money tends to be a representation of our relationship with power. Money tends to be about power. So if we were going to go way back historically and think about how money was even created, I want you to just I think many of you know this, but just so that we're all speaking the same language. Money was invented so that we could start exchanging value services for something that was a little bit easier than another service or honestly like a goat or some chickens or a rooster because before you'd exchange a service for another service or a service for a gift. But it became really difficult to start deciding how to bring my cows along to exchange for the service of healing. And so instead they created this, they created something totally made up. That wasn't even paper initially, it was coins initially, coin based. And that was money. And that's what we chose to exchange for services. And so as we went on and evolved, it became coins and then it became paper. And now it's essentially credit. It's like most of it happens online. So when you think about it, the more, the more of that that you have, the more you have the ability to choose. so money has never just been about money or that coin, but it's transitioned to become about power. Again, the power to choose, the power to leave a relationship or a work environment that is not serving you, the power to protect yourself or your loved ones, the power to shape your life in a way that really serves you, and the power to not be dependent on anyone else. So if your relationship with money feels complicated, if it feels conflicted or tense, it might not be because you don't understand abundance or because you just need to think differently. It might be because somewhere in your nervous system, the concept of power still does not feel safe. The concept of power still does not feel safe. And when you look honestly at history, you're going to start to understand why. So in this episode, we're going to talk about how women historically have been excluded from money and power, both legally and structurally, and what that did to our nervous system and our sense of safety, and why the concept of being more visible or being more independent or ambitious still carries this unconscious threat for so many women, and how this shows up today as under earning, as over giving, as feeling guilty or really self capping ourselves when it comes to our income. So before I go on, just want to name something that I think is important when we talk about things that can feel charged about the history. This is not about blaming the past and it's not about re-triggering ourselves. So what we're going to talk about today is really in service of understanding why things are the way they are, because sometimes when we can understand the why, it helps us move forward. So this is about understanding our personal, our ancestral history, our collective history. how that lives in our body and how we can then move forward from that so we don't stay trapped. Because until we understand what our bodies learned about money and power, we're gonna keep trying to solve this problem with strategy. And again, it's not a strategy problem, it's a safety problem. And that doesn't work so well. It's like trying to approach this round hole with a square peg instead of the actual solution, which is understanding and healing these wounds. So I'm gonna start at the beginning. Okay, so one of the most important things to understand, again, I said this in the beginning about our relationship with money is this, that money has never just been about money. Money has always represented something more. It's always represented power. And if you look honestly at history, you're going to start to see something very clearly, that for most of human history, women were systematically excluded from money and power. Now, many of you listening are going to say, yes, I know, I get it, we know that. But stay with me for a second because I want to give you some really clear examples. And you're going to start to see that this wasn't just like hundreds of years ago. This is like very recent in like our mother's history and our grandmother's history. So this is not metaphorical. This is this is now our lived history. This is legal, economical, it's structural. So for centuries and many parts of the world, women couldn't own property. They couldn't inherit wealth. They couldn't open bank accounts. They couldn't sign their own contracts. They couldn't even keep their own wages. They could work. They could go out and make money, but that money couldn't be theirs. They had to give it to a man. They couldn't start businesses in their own names. We all know that they couldn't vote and they couldn't leave marriages safely. And if they had kids, they couldn't take care of their kids safely because housing, they needed food to take care of their kids. And if they couldn't work and they didn't have money, how could they leave their marriage? They couldn't even do that. And I know we have people listening to this podcast from all over the world, but I'm going to give you some examples that are from right here in the United States. So until the mid to late about 1800s or so, there was a law that was called coverture. this was this what this law did is a married woman's legal identity was literally absorbed into her husband's. So you might hear people that still call themselves oh, I'm Miss. Bob Brown or whatever. So your name is literally your husband's name or Mrs. Doctor so-and-so, you know, if you married a doctor, for example. So your name was never your own name. Your entire legal identity was absorbed into your husband's. you couldn't definitely not own property or control your own money in your own name. So women didn't have the legal right to open bank accounts in this country without a male co-signer until the 1970s. Women were routinely denied credit cards. They were denied loans, mortgages. If they started a business, like if they wanted to open a small business, they would be denied a business loan unless they had a husband or a father co-sign with them until 1974. And it wasn't even until 1974 that they passed a law that made it illegal to discriminate against women in lending based on sex or marital status until 1974. Many of you who are listening to this, this is your lived experience. This is your mother's lived experience, your grandmother's lived experience. So this is not ancient history. This is now. This is why I had this incredibly smart, hardworking mom who was amazing with numbers. but didn't feel like she was good at money. How could she feel like she was good at money? She was never allowed to own money, to hold money, to have money that was her own. So for many of us, our nervous systems were shaped by a world where having money as a woman was literally dangerous or it was illegal, it was forbidden, or it was punished. It was socially punished. So I want to look at what this does to us psychologically and biologically. And before I do that, just I want to just pause here for second, because yes, a lot has changed since the 1970s. But if you think about how long it takes to actually bring something into the collective consciousness, there has to be a law that passes and then there's so much disgruntled people, a lot of people that don't actually buy into it, that they want to keep things exactly the way they are. And so it stays like that for many years because it lives in the consciousness of those people, people who never thought it was right for women to hold money to begin with. And then that has to shift with generations. And then you finally get a new generation of people coming up being like, of course women should have money and men agreeing that women should have money. And now you have to have women start to believe that it's safe for them to hold that money. And so even though this happened in the 70s, that these laws started to change, the reason why we're still feeling this so deeply is because we are now feeling the shift of that conscious tide. So we are now experiencing this huge shift of consciousness where women are now finally feeling the ownership, the safety. And not 100%, which is why so many of us still feel so fraught and so hypervigilant when it comes to money. But the tides are shifting. I want you to now think about what that history does psychologically and biologically. So if for generations, you're a woman and your safety, like you literally, your housing, your food, your ability to access healthcare, your safety depends on men, your survival dependent on being married, your housing dependent on being chosen by someone, your food dependent on you not. Don't be too mad, don't be too angry, don't get them upset. Your status depending on not being too much, then think about what that does to your nervous system. Think about what that did to our bodies. Our bodies learned very clear rules about being careful. Don't threaten power. Don't outshine a man. Don't be too independent or too outspoken. Don't be too visible. Don't want too much. And definitely, you better be grateful for what you have. because historically any women who were too outspoken, too independent, too wealthy, too influential, too sexually autonomous, just God forbid they own their own body, anything that would consider a woman as being too powerful, that was often shamed or harmed or institutionalized or sadly even killed. And I'm not even, this is not hyperbole, I'm not exaggerating here. If you think about The witch hunts that happened in Europe and the Americas, North America, Central America, Latin America, South America, and this was roughly around 1400 to 1700, hundreds of thousands of women were persecuted and killed. Many of these women were healers and midwives, okay? But there is significant historical scholarship showing that even women who had autonomy, who had resources, who had influence, were disproportionately targeted. So this was women that were like widows and owned land, women who were independent or women who lived outside the control of men. These women were also targeted, disproportionately targeted. So your nervous system didn't just learn that power is dangerous. It learned that power in a woman's body is dangerous. And I want to add one more layer here because from a nervous system perspective, As we know, as I mentioned right now, money equals survival. We need money to have a roof over our head. We need money to pay our bills. We need money to have food. We need money for health care, access to health care. money equals survival. But if power and visibility and autonomy historically increased our risk of violence, of exile, loss of protection, or even death, then we would be terrified to hold that level of power or that money inside of us. because your body then is learning that safety lives in being small and being agreeable and not being threatening and not being too much, not being too visible, not needing anything. So even if today your conscious mind is telling you, I want more or I am capable or I'm allowed to have more or it's my time or I'm ready. Even if your mind consciously is telling you that your body might still be carrying wounds that makes it really difficult for you to be visible. That may tell you that if you have more, it will make you visible and visible means you're going to be vulnerable and being vulnerable is dangerous. It's not safe. there tends to be this dis-congruence and I see this all of the time with the women leaders that I coach, the women entrepreneurs that I coach, where they definitely want more. And again, many of the women that I'm working with, don't want more because they want to buy all these fancy things. They want more because they want to make the world a better place. They want to have a bigger impact in the world. But there's this dis-congruence in their bodies and in their actions. They might say they want more, but their bodies yet don't feel safe. So they are not taking the actions that's going to help them create more. They say they want more. They do one or two things that, they know that they're not doing what they need to be doing or they're not doing enough. but they're only doing what feels safe. And that sadly is not creating the results that they want. Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about research on a concept called the backlash effect, because a lot of the examples I gave you were about the 70s or before, but we have research from now, from the early 2000s that confirms that some of these patterns may still exist in a lot of settings. There are multiple studies in social psychology that show that women who display ambition, authority, or power are more likely to be judged more harshly. They're more likely to be seen as cold, difficult, unlikable. They're liked less by their colleagues. They're called the B-word. And this is often referred to as the backlash effect in leadership and in organizational psychology. And I want to name that because... Yes, that is true, but I don't want that to shine like for you to shy away from what it is that you want to create in this world because of that. Because the solution to that is not to play small. The solution to that is to surround yourself by a community that supports you, that sees you, that wants to lift you up, that reflects back your greatness, that it's safe for you to be your biggest, your best self, your most powerful self. That is the solution because the more that you can surround yourself with that, the more your nervous system starts to co-regulate and realize, it's safe. It's safe for me to hold my power, to be in my power. It's safe for me to want more, to create more, to be more visible. everything I just mentioned today, if any of that resonated with you, I want you to know it's not irrational. It's your nervous system doing what's called pattern recognition. Now, if you add on top of that, if you so I talked specifically about gender, I talked specifically about women, but I want you to just consider how complex this can be because the history of complex trauma means that now you have gender, but you add on to that colonization, you add on to that slavery, racism, forced labor, land theft. forced sex working and systemic economic exclusion for women, for women of color, for indigenous women, for immigrant women, the concept of money and power, that relationship becomes even more charged. And in many communities, wealth was taken away, land was stolen, labor was exploited, families were separated, and survival required hypervigilance, it required overworking, and it required understanding systems. the women that were most like intuitive and understanding knew that to survive, you played small, you people pleased, you didn't set boundaries, you always did what was asked of you, you were always the nicest, the kindest, you did all of those things. you don't just inherit your brown eyes or your black hair, you inherit gendered survival patterns. You might also inherit colonizer survival patterns, immigrant survival patterns, poverty, racial survival patterns. and how this shows up today. So today, this shows up as women who unconsciously cap their income. So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs who keep saying, no matter what I do, no matter how many more launches I have, how many more strategies I have, how I ship my offer, how I do all these things, I keep making the same amount of money. that is subconscious. You are subconsciously capping your income to stay safe. Women who feel guilty charging more. Their services are incredible. They're getting great results and they're woefully undercharging, but they feel guilty charging more. Women who are deeply uncomfortable being seen, being visible. I work with a woman who is just, gosh, she's a brilliant writer and she has this beautiful blog, but she's so afraid to publish a new blog. Every time she publishes a new blog, she has to go and take a hot bath because she feels so dysregulated. Because every time she publishes a blog, it's her being seen again, and it feels really deeply dysregulating for her. This shows up as women who over give, always giving, always being in service, but under receive, are not safe being nurtured, being taken care of, receiving support. Women who associate being good with excessive self sacrifice, and women who associate ambition or leadership with danger. Ambition and leadership with the B word or all of those things that, you know, internalized misogyny, essentially. Women who feel safer being needed than being powerful. I'm going to say that one again because I work with so many women who just do so much good in the world, are in deep service to this world to make the world a better place. And they feel safer wanting to be helpful, being in service or being needed way more than being powerful. man. And again, from personal experience, this was my story too. I had to do my own work of calling all that back for me. And it was work that we had to do, that I got to do. And this is important because again, these aren't personal failures or flaws. This is just historical survival adaptation. Okay, so here's the core reframe for all of you. When you say your relationship with money is fraught, I want you to think about it as being your relationship to power. Your relationship with money is actually just a mirror for your relationship with power. So your nervous system is still trying to answer the question, is it safe for me to be resourced? Is it safe for me to be visible? Is it safe for me to be powerful? And for so many women, that answer has been shaped by hundreds, sometimes thousands of years of conditioning and lived history. This is why healing your relationship with money is not just work with money. It's actually work in our nervous system. It's identity work. It's historical repair work. It's doing the healing work that our ancestors, that our mothers, our grandmothers didn't get to do. They didn't have the luxury to do. But we know in many indigenous teachings that time is not linear. Time, in fact, is circular. So when we do our own healing, we affect the generations that come after us, but we also affect the generations that come before us. So when we do that work for ourselves, we get to do the work for our ancestors that didn't have the luxury to do the work for themselves. And that is powerful. This work is not just about money. It's about reclaiming your safety and reclaiming your safety to hold your power, to embody your inherent power. What I call divine, your divine power. This is not power over. Like we see all the time with this sort of hierarchical power over, I have to be better than you, stronger than you. No, this is being in right relationship with power. This is about power with integrity. Power that nourishes us, power that's grounded. So I just want to close this by just reminding you, most of us, when we have that hypervigilance when it comes to money, it's actually not about money. What we're actually afraid of is what money has meant for women in history and what it would mean for us to hold our power. So if this episode resonated with you and you're feeling sort of that like, wow, that like deeply, yes, in your body, that sense of, this explains so much about my relationship with money and power and visibility. man, I want you to know I see you. This was my story. And this is exactly the work we're doing inside of my program. It's a community. It's so much more than a program. It's this beautiful, deep healing community that is not about hustling harder or working harder to create more money or forcing yourself into some version of success that doesn't actually fit you. This is a space where we're learning a new paradigm of power. Not power over, not domination, not burnout, but clean. embodied, grounded, divine power. That's generative power. That's life-giving power, where we get to heal our relationship with both power and also money at the level of our nervous system, of our identity, and historically, where we get to untangle all the old stories that we learned, that were taught to us about not being safe, to be visible, to be resource, to be independent, and building this beautiful, deep inner capacity to hold more success. to have a deeper impact, a bigger impact, and to have more support without self abandonment, without abandoning ourselves or burning out along the way. This is for women leaders and entrepreneurs who are here to serve, women who really care deeply about making this world a better place, who are brilliant, who are smart, who are capable, and who are done playing small, who are done shrinking and over giving just to stay safe. This is for women who are ready to be held in community. for women who are ready for their greatness to be reflected back to them, to build, to receive from a place of integrity, of wholeness, of deep self-trust. if this series is speaking to you, I really want you to trust that. I really want you to take this thing home with you, which is you were never meant to choose between being a good woman and being a powerful woman. You were meant to have both. All right, sweet friends, I will see you next week.

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And if it landed with you, if it deeply resonated with you, want to invite you one more time to check out our next healing circle. It's called Resourced Wealth. Resourced Wealth is a small, intimate, healing-centered approach to money, power, and capacity for mission-driven women. This is not a surface level money mindset or strategy program. It's a graduate level exploration coupled with deep embodied integrative healing designed for mission-driven women to help you expand your capacity to hold more wealth, have a bigger impact, and do that without burning out. And we know it's incredibly effective. You can learn about the experience of other students who have come through the healing circle already on our website. The link to join and to learn more is in the show notes. Because listen, friends, the work you're here to do, it's gonna require resources. It requires time, it requires support. And yes, it requires money. And we need more conscious, compassionate women who are not afraid to hold both wealth and power and who know how to use that in service of something bigger than themselves. Our next healing circle starts Thursday, September twenty fourth. I would love to have you there.