The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

202 ⎸ Healing Money Trauma with Meenadchi

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 202

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In this eye-opening episode, Serena sits down with Meenadchi, an ancestral healing practitioner, to explore how intergenerational trauma impacts our relationship with money. This isn't your typical business conversation - we're diving deep into the personal stuff that affects how you run your business and serve your clients … and get a little woo!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How trauma from your ancestors (even great-grandparents) lives in your body and affects your money decisions today
  • Why your "difficult" clients might not be responding because of their own money trauma - and how understanding this changes everything
  • The surprising science behind why we existed in our grandmother's bellies and what that means for inherited patterns
  • Practical exercises you can do right now to start healing your relationship with money, including writing a letter TO money

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Meet Meenadchi

Meenadchi (she/her) is an ancestral healing practitioner, TEDx speaker, and communications expert whose work centers social change and embodied transformation. Using the modality of Family Constellation Therapy, Meenadchi supports socially-conscious changemakers and entrepreneurs heal inherited and ancestral money trauma, so that we can be paid well for our work and so that we can pour funds into our communities from a state of overflow instead of self-sacrifice. Meenadchi holds a clinical license in occupational therapy and has historically served communities impacted by gender-based violence, complex trauma, and serious mental illness. She is the author of Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication (2019) and is a faculty member with the Trauma of Money™.

Connect with Meenadchi

Website: http://meenadchi.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meenadchi/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/with.meenadchi/

Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me @ambitiousbookkeeper

For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:

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Have you ever wondered if your own money mindset is getting in the way of how you run your business or how you serve your clients? Well, in today's episode, I have Minchi, an ancestral healing practitioner discussing the impact of intergenerational trauma on personal behavior, particularly in relationship to money. In this conversation we explore her background, the significance of family constellation therapy and the importance of understanding trauma to improve relationships with money clients and everyone in your life. So I hope you grab a notebook'cause there's definitely some actionable strategy To take away from here, especially if you are the journaling type and. I hope this is illuminating and somewhat validating for you as it was for me. So without further ado, let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast Today I have a wonderful guest on her name is Nina Minchi. I knew I was gonna stumble over my words with that one, even though I practiced it like 50 times. Um, uh, but yeah, so we met through a mutual, like, I guess a networking group that we're a part of, the rem de lam., Group, which is small but mighty so far. I love all the connections I've made inside of that group. And we ended up on a call, just the two of us, pretty much, and decided to have you on the podcast because I'm trying to focus a lot more on not just, I mean my, my audience is bookkeepers and accountants, but That I want to like, bring to them and make them aware of in life, because all of that contributes to your business. So this is gonna be one of those episodes. We're gonna get more personal and I guess mindset related, I guess is the term that people might relate to more so welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Would you mind introducing yourself to the audience? Thank you for having me. I'm Mina Chi, she her pronouns, and I'm an ancestral healing practitioner, so like the body is my jam and thinking about How trauma is stored in the body and how that shapes our behavior. And then really specifically looking at what is the intergenerational trauma, right? Like what is it that our ancestors have navigated? What is it that they've experienced, and then have sort of accidentally or unintentionally passed down to us so that even though we may not have faced a specific hardship or a specific crisis. Why is it that we're constantly stressed about it? Why is it that we're constantly panicking about it? Why is it that our nervous system is reacting in certain ways to different things in our life? that sometimes isn't actually about things we've navigated, but it's related to what our people have been through and. A lot of that comes back to money. A lot of people have, know, even if, if I just say the word, I would invite listeners to take a moment and notice does your body start to contract or does your body start to expand? start to contract, it probably means there's some gunky stuff in your body in relationship to money, so how do we heal that so we can have a good relationship with money? Yeah, and that's why I was really excited to bring you on the podcast because I mean, we work. My listeners, we all work with money and, this is something that I, I cover. I kind of, I wouldn't say gloss over it, but I don't cover it in super depth inside of my programs. But I do address our money stuff because I think it's really important as bookkeepers and accountants to find a balance between our training and being like, skeptical and having more of that like. Mindset of control over money and all that kind of stuff versus, you know, just being more open and trusting a process and all of that. So I was really excited to bring you on to dive into the money topic and wherever else this may go. Hmm. Yeah. So, can you talk a little bit about your journey and what led you to doing this work? I. Gosh, my journey has been such a hodgepodge. It def I'm like the opposite of a bookkeeper. I like up like super all over the place, artsy this, this and that. You know what I mean? So I have led a very eclectic. Life, I think it feels like the right word to say. Very much not the tried and true path of like, you know, this is what I'm supposed to do, climbing the corporate ladder or whatever. But I am first generation. so my family is from Sri Lanka and so growing up, war back home started three days after I was born. And so conversations about trauma, conversations about family, and just thinking about those things were very everyday I. Commonplace sort of things in the household. So I grew up really thinking about like what is the impact on our body? What is the impact on our behavior? And then after college, I was in the arts for a number of years and then few different things happened, life pivoted, I started working more intentionally in trauma. So I was working in suicide prevention and then. Rape crisis advocacy. and I was good at it. I was just real good at it. I could hold space for a lot of different stuff. And then long story short, through a bunch of different windings and weavings. I wound up encountering this modality called Family Constellation Therapy, and it's a modality to clear intergenerational trauma from the nervous system. And I just loved it. I just loved it. I saw it have like incredible results, p incredible results in a much shorter period of time than conventional talk therapy. And for folks who are. Less familiar with the concept of what intergenerational trauma is. I'm gonna share my very Please. geeky fact. My very favorite geeky fact is that all of us existed in our grandmother's bellies. I. So like my grandmother, my AM ma, or rather my Amma, how, I don't wanna say this. My grandmother got pregnant in like February of 1953. My Amma was born, my mother was born in October 53. So my Amma got pregnant. Would've been in like February-ish, I think. And so then. my Amma was around five months in utero is when the reproductive system comes online, means that the eggs, the cells that became me and my siblings, have been around since June of 1953. Like the cells that shaped my body have been picking up information since June of 1953, which then means that any of the stressors my grandmother was navigating. nervous system was impacted, it would've shaped the way my genes were being encoded in utero. So that's kind of like a, a glimpse of what intergenerational trauma is, and it means that we can get activated, like have quicker stress responses, based on things. And so coming back to Family Constellation Therapy and the work, we're carrying stories inside of our bodies, we're carrying beliefs that we didn't realize that we had inherited, and we're carrying just ways of moving through the world, patterns in our relationships that, again, oftentimes didn't start with us. And if we. Are only looking at our lifetime, we're not gonna get to the root. And if we don't get to the root, then the pattern won't change. So that's, that's the long-ish winded answer of how I got here. I. Yeah. Thank you for explaining that and, and giving all that background. I think it's really important for people to understand. That's epigenetics. If anyone was not familiar with it, they are now. That was a great explanation. I learned about that, probably about a decade ago, because I worked at a biotech company and we, you know, did some stuff around DNA and so I, I learned about that kind of accidentally and in passing, it makes a lot of sense. I have a question about like, when you work with people doing this, family Constellation therapy, that's what you call it. Right? Okay. Do you work on clearing current trauma first or like do you unpack the generational trauma and see if that heals whatever this person has been through in this current lifetime as well? Like how does that work? Yeah, we are always looking at what is the present pattern and then how does that relate to what happened previously. So, so for example, right now I'm, I teach every year I teach a healing money trauma program, and it tends to be small business owners because I feel like, I don't know any small business owner who just has a quote, easy time with pricing their services. People get all kinds of weird. Mm-hmm. talking about money. You know what I mean? And like, something for example that's very, very common amongst the women who come through this program and who work with me is that people are often navigating things like. I don't wanna make too much money because if I make too much money, I'm going to be very visible. And if I'm very visible, something bad is going to happen to me. And people don't necessarily know that off the top right. They just know I Right. be too big. I don't wanna, I don't, they have this energy of like, I don't want too much. Mm-hmm. we start digging, it's the, oh, I had a grandmother who was really successful and then people in her village and in her neighborhood started getting really jealous. And then because she was more successful than her husband, it like destroyed the marriage. And like all of these kind of like ripple effects like, what is it that's actually living in your body that's making it so. But you feel more or less comfortable expressing desire to be seen or to be big. So the answer kind of to the question is, I'm, we're all in this particular form of therapy. We're always looking at what is it that's behind the current pattern of behavior. That's sort of like setting the stage for this behavior because when we clear the root, the pattern can shift. Oh right. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Very interesting. So. Finding the pattern tends to be, is that the hard part? I about it, for me it feels think it's, I think it's hard if you're doing it alone. You know what I mean? Like, when you're alone, like, there's things that your body knows. Like, for example, today I was, I had a client session this morning. and I started asking certain questions, and all of a sudden she remembered something that had happened to her great-grandmother, like when her great-grandmother was 15. Her great-grandmother had experienced this. Pretty scary thing of like semi being kidnapped and then being tricked and going to jail in a country that she was not from. It was a really, really, I was, as I was listening to it, I was like, this is so scary. Yeah. And my client had never connected those dots. like how that fear lived in her and how cause the, with this particular client, what we're working on is, separating fear and intuition so that she can just trust her intuition Um, of like getting confused about what should I do and then doing the thing. Even though your body's like go in this direction, but you're like, I can't tell the difference. yeah. I mean? And so kind of like some of what we found was that. Her great-grandmother had experienced something really horrifying and horrific, then raised everybody else to be really, really afraid of the world, and she hadn't connected some of those dots. So we wound up doing like this really lovely. Release blessing from like within the lineage. And by the end of the session, she felt a lot more connected to her intuition. And also, you know, a little bit less charge around fear. Fear is there for a purpose. It's there to help us, but it's not really, it shouldn't hinder us. Right. so some of those are kind of like the changes that can happen. I think when we're in conversation with someone who's asking questions that help us unpack what we actually already know. Yeah, absolutely. Just triggering even just you explaining this process and this story triggered a story that I remember my mom telling me that happened before I was born, so I'm like, oh wow. Yeah, it does. It's super powerful to just like. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. Yeah. You need that second person to like, help draw it out of you. Yeah. Yeah. So, where do I wanna go next with this? I'm like, I have so many questions. Can I share Yes. that has been, yeah. I think that there's, you know, I've worked with some bookkeepers before, and not, I'm kind of like in tandem, because a lot of times I think that something that's sort of. Important for folks to understand. Is that like when your client isn't completing a task, like when your client isn't sending the documents that they need to send or is being like hyper avoidant with your emails? You know what I mean? It's not necessarily because clients don't want to do the work, but if there's trauma preventing them from looking at their numbers. If there's trauma that's preventing them from being willing to be successful, you know what I mean? Then that can shape the way clients are showing up. To your sessions, and similarly, bookkeepers are small business owners and you deserve to be well. I love my bookkeeper. My bookkeeper is gold for me. I am so happy and delighted to pay her every month because, because of the way she keeps my business running. so then also on that side, as a small business owner, just like the reminder that you're allowed to be nourished, you're allowed to be paid well, you're allowed to have clients who celebrate the service that you do and that you don't have to work with for peanuts. Yeah. That's such an important point that you make about, Clients being non-responsive and things like that, I, I see conversations happen so much. It happens within my team. Even the frustration that we get when clients don't send us the documents we need, and it's like they're not doing it at us. Yeah. That doesn't make them a bad client, doesn't make them unworthy of our service. It's like, like you said, you have to have a level of understanding. For one, they are a busy entrepreneur and for two, there might actually be some trauma behind I can give an example of a client who. Month after month, she pays for the service for us to do her bookkeeping. Obviously, she pays the bill, no questions asked. Part of her service package is she gets her reports and a monthly video going over her reports, and for almost a year, she did not open. Those videos because she knew what was in there and so she was avoiding it. And finally I had to step in and be like, there is no judgment here. I just want you to survive, so let's get on a call. Let's go over this together and come up with a game plan. And sometimes that's all clients need. So don't just go willy-nilly firing all the clients that don't get you the stuff they need. They might just need a little compassion. yeah. Yeah. So that's my 2 cents on that, It's a good 2 because I could have fired her because she wasn't like responding. I mean, she's not a client that doesn't get us our information, but it was just like she wasn't utilizing what we were doing for her. And we truly care. We wanna make sure our clients are successful, so I'm gonna do everything in my power to make sure that they're getting the information and. Approaching it in a, in a way that doesn't make them feel judged.'cause that's just, it's gonna make it even worse. Money brings up. I mean, money people judge themselves Mm-hmm. money brings up a lot of shame. Yeah. up a lot of shame stuff. that can be hard to wrestle with. Yeah, yeah. So for anyone listening, don't go fire your clients for not getting you the information. Just have a conversation with them. Dig deeper. There's probably a reason. Yeah. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I also love having people on the podcast who aren't bookkeepers and accountants and sharing how much they love their bookkeepers and value the service because so many, so many of my students and listeners feel like. Nobody values bookkeeping. It's just compliance. And I'm like, there is actual value in being compliant and some people won't value it. That's true. But so many people actually do, and there is plenty of clients out there that are able and willing to pay for the service. One of the things I really teach my clients, so a lot of my clients, I would say it's like 50 50. Like there's the clients who are terrified of making more money and like have some type of hang up about being paid well. And then there's the clients who tend to be a little bit more restrictive with their spending, and are terrified of paying people money. have five foundational principles of money, which I might share in a moment. But, I always encourage people to pay for good services because it puts you in your zone of genius. And one of the foundational principles of money is that it has to be in flow. Money is a lot like blood, that if blood is hoarded, if blood isn't able to move through the body. is gonna emerge. And similarly, if blood is hemorrhaging from the body, it's just spilling out willy-nilly all over the place, illness is gonna emerge, right? Blood needs to just be able to move in healthy circulation wherever it needs to go. And money is the same. If money is hoarded, illness emerges. If money is splurgy, illness emerges. Money needs to move throughout society, wherever it needs to go. And as a small business owner. You have to put money to good use. You can't just like stock pilot and try and like Scrooge McDuck it because it's not gonna work. Pay people to do good work so that you can be in your zone of genius and they can be in their zone of genius. Yeah, there's one area with that that tends to come up and again, could absolutely be like an ancestral thing, but a lot of my business owner clients and even bookkeepers and accountants, because we need to pay for services as well so that we can do our work is the fear and frustration, I guess. I don't know. Other feelings that probably pop up around hiring the right person or having a bad experience and being like, oh, I should just do it myself. Yeah. I can't find good people. It's like, well, not with that mindset, right. not bad attitude. So, have you experienced anything with your clients when you start digging into the money stuff with that as well? Like lot. A lot. Because as you can imagine, right? Even when we say it right, people who know how to survive, people who know how to make it through self-reliance is a big, big survival strategy, Um. it is not a strategy you can stick with forever. It does not create sustainable peace to have to hold all. I can see your face changing Like, oh. uhhuh and any survival strategy. Most survival strategies are things that someone else in our lineage has experienced before. We're not the first person to experience pain. It's kind of like, um. You wouldn't have such a big reaction to something if it was the first time it kind of happened. Like if you, if you can imagine the first time anything happening, I can't think of like a really good example right now because I'm thinking about, what I'm thinking about is how many times I've been bitten by a mosquito. And so if I even hear this, this the little buzz right of a mosquito, my nervous system goes on fire and I'm terrified. I don't know if it was as strong right? The first time I was bitten by, by a mosquito. And so the same way. If you have a tendency to hyper self-reliance. Chances are other people in your lineage have had to use that survival strategy, which is why you go to it so quickly and so fast. And while it may get you through the most immediate thing you need to get through, it's not going to help you build the life you actually wanna be in because ultimately the life we wanna be in is one that allows space for rest, one that allows space for ease, and one that really allows us to. Be with people who love us in like a loving, we just, we just wanna be with people we care about. Yeah, Yeah. that one really hit home. Okay. I. share anymore. For someone else listening as well. but yeah, that is exactly, I go to self-reliance when things aren't done the way that I want 'em. Or I, you know, a, a big thing for me is, everyone has their values, right? One of my values is people keeping their word and doing what they say they're gonna do. And so the first time someone doesn't, I just, the walls go up. Yeah. Yeah. The walls go up, I then am like, well, can never rely on this person again. So, Yeah. um, definitely a survival, uh, tactic. But it does make sense. Like when I think back to some of the stories I've, you know, I've heard from my parents and grandparents, um, absolutely. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things I love about Constellation work, um, so Constellation work is, is pretty woo. You know what I mean? I think about it as functional woo.'cause we're functionally looking to meet a goal to change behavior, to make life better. Mm-hmm. Um, but one of the underlying principles. Is that there really is a constant source of love available to us, and our work is to remove any limitation or any block to receiving that love. And it's the idea that our family members, um, even if, even if they act like shits. That behavior came from something that they hurt people, hurt people. They experienced their own thing. That made them show up in a way that was less loving towards us. and if we can release some of that trauma, integrate the trauma. That sense of love is more accessible and you don't have to know your family to do this work. I've worked with a lot of people who are either like estranged from their family, because I work in a lot of queer communities, so folks who just don't have, haven't had the fortune of having parents who love them regardless. and then also folks who are adopted. doesn't matter because the work is actually nervous system work about what is your body holding. And if you're here, then we know that you've got ancestors, you've got a Yeah. lineage. You know what I mean? And the ability to make that kind of peace, is really, really powerful. Peace is powerful and I think that again, like the essence of constellation work. is allowing ourselves to believe that somewhere something makes sense and I don't have to hold more baggage than is actually mine to hold. Yeah. Wow. I am just thinking through so much stuff that like when you, like as you're talking, I'm like, yeah, I have, you know, I have an older daughter who has some stuff she's carrying around that I'm like, that's probably from my mom Hmm. having known certain things that my mother went through and it's like, this is not fun. I wish I would've known about this and healed it before. Before she was born. Hmm. Oh man. But we're here now, so Yeah. she's lucky to have you. thank you. So, where do like people go, I guess to, Like to start this work, what would you say like, is the best first step? Like especially back to my question before, if they know they have dealt with their own trauma in this lifetime, do you suggest they work through that first or does it matter what order it goes in? If they know they, they're probably holding onto other stuff too. What would you suggest there? Yeah, I have two things I, two or three things I like to tell, encourage people to do. So one, if you know your family tree, draw that out really quick. Do a quick kind of like map of your family tree. Then identify the issues. You tend to sort of like recurrent face, right? So if it's, if it's your relationship with money, do you go through cycles of feast and famine? Do you self-sabotage? Like what are the patterns? That happen for you? Or if it's in like romantic relationships, what are the patterns that happen very consistently in those dynamics? Right? So of like make a note of like on, on like a side piece of paper, right? Write down what your patterns are. and then I say give each pattern a shape, right? So like a triangle for this, a star, a heart, whatever. Then start working backwards in what you know of your family history. And if you know that that pattern existed with like your mom, then put like a little heart, right? And if X pattern existed with your dad, put a little triangle next to your dad and then keep working backwards within the family tree. And that can be like surprisingly illuminating because a suddenly you see, you're like, whoa, there's like five people before me who have this triangle. You know what I mean? And it like, but one of the things that it can do is it takes a little bit of the pressure off because sometimes we can feel like it's just me. It's my fault. Why can't I fix it? What's wrong with me? You know what I mean? But when we can look and actually see that there's like. Five generations before us who have been holding this particular dynamic. And yes, we do wanna shift it. We do wanna change it. It's not your fault. You know what I mean? Like these were the cards that you were given. think that can be really, really helpful. then if you're not in super strong relationship with your family, or if you don't have access to that information, start thinking about who you do identify as your lineage. And I have like a very expansive. Definition of that. So I will encourage clients to think about nature as an ancestor, right? To think about trees, to think about poetry even, and like, you know, people that, that you have loved in that way, like musicians and artists that you've loved. And put yourself at the center of a piece of paper and kind of like, again, sketch out. That lineage that you, you know what I mean? then to think about like, what do all of these members of my lineage wish for me? And to like draw that in. What are their wishes? What do you believe that they want to have flowing towards you? then just notice how that feels in your body to be in that kind of connection with ancestry. So those are two things. And I'm gonna give one more. if you wanna start unpacking your relationship with money, just write a letter to money, see what you, see, what you wind up saying to money. And then a few days later, like if you write a letter on a Monday, then on a Thursday have money, write a letter back, and see what happens. And that can just be the kind of beginning of the unearthing information that has been sitting in your body for a while. Oh, I love that. I'm gonna have to come back and listen to this and take some notes, um, and start doing more of the work. okay. One last question that I like to ask, business owners who aren't bookkeepers that come onto the podcast is. G give our listeners a little bit of maybe tactical advice. I don't know what it ends up being, but just some insight as to, since you said you have a bookkeeper and you really value them, what's one thing that they do that you are like, this is why I work with them. Or if there's something your bookkeeper could be doing that you wish they were doing, that would change things and make things for the better. can you share that? She talks in regular language. I understand what the hell she's saying. Yes. You know, and I think this happens in every field, right? Like even me when I'm talking about ancestral trauma, I have to be really, really careful because I'm so in my world Yeah. I just right. And that I don't know that I don't always explain it so well to people who aren't in this world. the things that I love about my bookkeeper, one, I can tell she really cares about me. Like she really likes me. I had to go through a few different bookkeepers to find her. She was not my first person, Yeah. bookkeeper I ever had. Just didn't give me accurate information. It was just wrong about certain things and I was like, I gotta go. And then I think I worked with someone who just dropped a lot of balls and I didn't like that. I'm very precise with my thing, so I want someone who's on top of it. The next person I went to, I just really felt like a cog in their wheel of business, like they didn't actually care about me and my business. then I was really, really fortunate to find Starla. Her name is Starla Beacham of Grasshopper Accounting, and I just love, she's so nice to me. She explains everything really clearly. And sometimes balls get dropped because we're human, but we have enough of a relationship that it never feels personal. It just feels like we're having human moments with each other. Yeah, that's so important. And that's one of the things that when bookkeepers ask me like, what if AI takes our jobs and you know, how do I stand out? And it's like literally you just have to care about your clients, just have to treat them like people. And, just show that you care. You don't even have, I mean, it's very important to also be accurate. I'm not gonna discount that whatsoever, but like if that's the base, that's the bare minimum. Be accurate in what you do. And then it's like, then really all you have to do is care. Yeah, it's true. So thank you for confirming that. Yeah. Thank you for modeling that. You're, I've, I mean, there's a very similar energy between my bookkeeper and the way you show up, so Yeah, her name sounds familiar, so she may be in my community, but I'll have to go, I'll have to figure out a look. Um, So if someone listening is feeling a spark of, resonating or whatever with this conversation where can they find you to learn more to work with you? See what you have going on. it's so easy. It's my name, minchi.com. That's gonna be the best place to find me. You Awesome. find me on LinkedIn and Instagram, and my website will lead you to all those places. But it's minchi.com. Wonderful, and we will link that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm so glad this worked out. I'm so glad we've met and I can't wait for more collaborations. Cool. one.

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