This photo was taken from the This is your time music video shoot done end of 2015. The etherial being pictured here is my cousin sister Ade who I share a birthday with. This was the first campaign video I ever directed. To date its the most money a client has ever paid us for a project. I had such an incredible time because I got to flex my creative muscles like never before. I have fond memories of this project. Yesterday reminiscing on it I realized that I still have fears attached to money.
I'm redoing the Unlimited Abundance course because I still felt blocked and stuck. Yesterday we did Clearing Lack of Self Worth and my mind got blown out of the water! But let me start with where I've been hiding for the last month.
I've been mad at my blog. I know thats strange but I haven't posted because I'm mad. I'm mad at everything and I had to ask myself way? When I dug a little deeper I realized I was suffering from fatigue, specifically business fatigue. For months we had experience blocks on money owed to us. We literally had four projects done and delivered but payment was stuck. As a result we were getting calls everyday from our suppliers demanding payment. So everyday was a wave of resistance. But being the aware beings we are at Brainbow we had to sit down and find out how we manifested this situation.
We realized that after moving into the new office which is owned by a successful production company, we relaxed on actually doing business. By relax I mean; that feeling you get after a long hike and you collapse onto the bed. That's how we felt in the new office. A year ago we decided to move from being a production company to being a brand communication agency. We realized that we are robbing ourselves and our clients when we showed up as just a production company. They missed out on creating an incredible campaign that holistically and strategically met their communication needs. But this year we've been doing productions not campaigns. So we didn't realize how exhausted we where, fighting to create a new us, that we collapsed into another business's arms. Also we where still "fighting" with the DAC for the W.O.M.A.N VR story experience approved a year ago. A project that is to launch Brainbow Conscious Creatives and showcase what value we have to offer.
Somewhere I still held on to the belief that suffering through, working hard, hating what you do will produce results. Our love tanks at Brainbow where running on empty. We remembered this amazing video where Iyanla says, be selfull. Fill up your cup first and give others the overflow. We realized we where making our clients and people in our lives thieves because we weren't loving and taking care of ourselves, thus giving what we didn't have. We where stealing from ourselves and making others thieves. So we decided to make a list of experiences that fill up our cups.
One of these activities was to give myself a birthday gift for the first time ever (hides face). That gift would be a song. In 2004 me and my cousin sisters where in a girl group called Pearl. Bongani Fassie was our producer and De Les featured in our songs, it was really cute. The members are all August Babies, Ade (our Beyonce) 2 August, Me 2 August as well (meticulous creepy planning on our parents part), Nasipi 13 August and Evile 28 August. In 2005 on my 21st birthday we decided to throw a joint August babies party at Club Vogue (age being revealed hard!) and Pearl performed. We where surprised that people knew our songs, and it was indescribable to see words you wrote come to life.
I wanted to gift myself and my sisters (and all ladies for women's month) with a reminder to fill our cups; a metaphor for our lives with things that make us happy, to risk looking like a fool and doing something crazy like dropping a single even though we're not musicians (except for Ade). So 13 years since we were Pearl we went back to the studio to recreate that experience. To say love your life where it is and celebrate how far you've come even if it doesn't seem like far. And as scary as it was we did it! We created Fill up my cup! Us, a couple of 30-something year old mothers made a song appreciating our journey.
When we shared the song with our family they didn't get it and the temptation of perfectionism was strong. We almost didn't share it with the world wanting to go back to studio to get it perfect and completely missing releasing in August. But I remembered that this was a love gift to me and if I felt loved by the song that was enough. I wasn't trying to be the new kid on the block I was trying to remind women to self-nourish. Yesterday the song played radio for the first time, on Kofif FM!
So back to yesterdays brain bending abundance block clearing session. So a lot of the clearings where about, if you ever felt undeserving, or felt you had to suffer for abundance, or had to earn of fight for love uncreate, delete and de-story all that. Christie gets to a particular clearing where she says "If your parents fought about money or you watched people fight because of money uncreate....' I immediately remembered a conversation my mother had with my older brother many years ago. Another black owned firm was in the papers fighting over money. My mom lamented at how black owned business always fail when big amounts of money are put on the table. She told my brother to make sure not to fight with his business partners because it makes ALL black owned businesses seem incompetent. In that moment I bought and sold myself the idea that black people (me) can't handle large amounts of money. So when I started my own business this pattern persisted and without knowing it I was keeping my business small. In fact when we got our first R40 000 I remembered being so scared and watching to see who would change. I was relieved that all of us where scared of touching the money. So I sold myself another idea: small amounts are good to keep the business together. As a result of this belief manifesting money has been a struggle in our business for years. When we got the This is your time campaign, the most a client has ever paid for a project I went into a panic. I grossly over paid the crew and it didn't even occur to me to buy equipment or to re-invest into the business. I just got rid of that money as fast as I could before it could change us into money hungry monsters. Can you see how with this cross purpose; I want to build a successful business but I'm too scared of big amounts of money will for sure keep me stuck! I feel like I finally opened the right door after trying thousands. I can finally see fear for what it is and clear it out of my life.
I was so scared to put up this video and I immediately cleared the cross purpose of wanting abundance but not wanting anyone to know about it. The reason for that fear is because we are taught that people with money are bad and somewhere I think people won't like me if I'm rich! IMAGINE! I can't get poor enough to help people get wealthy. I need to be a beacon of hope that against all odds (stats SA released that 55% of SA lives in poverty and black women are the hardest hit) I can, WE can create abundance, wealth and prosperity NOW! So take a look at me making it rain and teaching my daughter to embrace abundance. I'm excited for the incredible abundance of money, love, creativity and fun that my life IS made of. Look at your life and focus on the bless ups not the mess ups, you'll be surprised at how abundant you already are.
