Day 23: The Shame That Hides Inside Ambition

30 Days Of More

🌀 This post is part of 30 Days of More — a somatic money challenge designed to expand your capacity to hold and receive more money with less resistance. Each day includes a practice to help you turn your big feelings into fuel for big money. Free subscribers receive the daily posts and weekly money challenges, and paid subscribers get access to the somatic practices and integration journal prompts. If you’re ready to go deeper, upgrade here.

When was the last time you wanted something so badly it scared you a little?

Maybe it was a number that flashed through your mind during a journaling session and you immediately scratched it out because who am I to want that. Or a vision that dropped in during a walk: the bigger house, the team of five, the year off, the whole new offer suite. And your next thought was that’s a lot, isn’t it.

Or maybe it was something less obvious than that, like a tug toward more, and the reflex to apologize for it before you’d even said it out loud.

There’s nothing wrong with that. We have been so beautifully conditioned to feel that way.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing in myself and in the women I work with — the moment we start to actually claim a bigger more, an audacious dream, a number that means something, a vision that’s actually ours and not just the next reasonable step from where we are — this whole other layer rises up. Greed. Privilege. Selfishness. The feeling of wanting too much. The story that says I should be happy with what I have, I should be grateful, who do I think I am to want this when so many people don’t have what I already have.

And so we shrink the want.

We talk ourselves down from the number, we edit the vision, we tell ourselves we’re being humble — but we’re really being scared. And the moment we suppress the want, we also suppress the part of us that knows exactly why we want it.

Because contentment and longing can coexist. You can be deeply, deeply grateful for what you have and still want more, and the wanting more is not a betrayal of the gratitude. It’s actually what the gratitude is making room for.

Wanting more is the sign that you have more to give.

Sit with that one for a second. The desire itself is the evidence of your capacity. It is the body — not the mind, not the strategy, not the spreadsheet — telling you that you have more medicine to offer, more impact to have, more generosity to extend. And when you suppress the wanting, you suppress that capacity right alongside it.

Greed and Generosity live on the same emotional spectrum in the body. Overwhelm and Overflow, we already know that one. This week we’re learning the next layer of it. If you cap the greed, you cap the generosity. If you make yourself smaller in the wanting, you become smaller in the giving too.

This is the week where we stop doing that.

🌀 This post is part of 30 Days of More — a somatic money challenge designed to expand your capacity to hold and receive more money with less resistance. Each day includes a practice to help you turn your big feelings into fuel for big money. Free subscribers receive the daily posts and weekly money challenges, and paid subscribers get access to the somatic practices and integration journal prompts. If you’re ready to go deeper, upgrade here.