The Calling: Follow your spirit- all the way in

S2 09 Embracing Plenty: Surpassing the Limitation of Time, Money, and Life Force Featuring Kate Northrup

• Homaya / Kate Northrup • Season 2 • Episode 9

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Blessings, beautiful people!

I am delighted to welcome the wonderful Kate Northrup to this episode of The Calling. Kate is an author, entrepreneur, and thought leader, known for her books Money: A Love Story and Do Less, as well as her podcast Plenty. She invites us to dissolve the old paradigms of scarcity around time and money, allowing us to tap into the flow of true abundance.

Kate and I explore the deep shifts that come from moving beyond the belief that time and money are limited. We journey through the wisdom of the body, the power of receiving, and the interconnectedness of all things. This conversation is an invitation to live from a place of plenty, where giving and receiving become one and the same.

What You’ll Discover in This Episode:

✨ Why time and money are not limited resources
✨ The deep conditioning around productivity and achievement
✨ How Kate’s own paradigm shift began with pregnancy and motherhood
✨ The power of organising life around the wisdom of the body
✨ Releasing the hyper-independence trap and embracing support
✨ How to truly receive - and why it’s the key to abundance
✨ The interplay of giving, receiving, and the infinite nature of resources

Kate’s insights invite us to question everything we’ve been taught about success, productivity, and self-worth. We explore how aligning with the body’s natural rhythms leads to greater flow, ease, and yes - plenty.

Connect with Kate Northrup:

📖 Read Do Less and Money: A Love Story
🎙 Listen to her podcast Plenty
🌍 Visit her website katenorthrup.com
📲 Follow her on Instagram: @katenorthrup

Thank You for Listening!

If this conversation resonated with you, I would love to hear your reflections. Share your thoughts on social media and tag me! And if you feel called, leave a review—it helps spread the magic of The Calling to more beautiful souls.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, text the show.

Homaya Resource Links:

Homaya: [00:00:00] Blessing, beautiful people. I am delighted for the episode that we have today and for this wonderful magician that is coming into play with us today, Kate Northrup . Welcome. 

Kate Northrup: Thank you. Hi. 

Homaya: Hello again. I'm so happy for this conversation. So Kate, I will introduce you, but I would love you also to introduce yourself because I am sure that there is something that you would say that no one can describe.

So from my perspective. I'd like the listeners to become aware that you are an author of two beautiful books. One is Do Less, which was your first book. And the second one was about a love story, Money, a love story. 

Kate Northrup: Opposite. Money, a love story was my first book. Do Less was my second. 

Homaya: Okay. for reframing and resetting that.

Yes. [00:01:00] And also you have your podcast Plenty that is running already a year by the time that this will come forth this session, then it will be even more than a year. And one of the reasons that I wanted very much to have a conversation with you is exactly because you are tickling the universe with whatever we perceive as a limited resource.

Most of the people are perceiving time and money as a limited resource. And gently, gracefully, you're taking those paradigms and saying, no, I want us to experience it completely different, unlimited. This is my experience when reading and listening and following you for quite a long time. 

Kate Northrup: Thank you for understanding the core thread.

[00:02:00] Many people are like, oh, wow, you wrote a book about money and then you wrote about time. Those are so different. And I'm like, same, I thank you for thank you for. Just really seeing that the, what I do is I help people to dissolve the lie of scarcity in their lived experience and really tap into the flow of true abundance as it relates to their time.

As it relates to money, as it relates to energy and creativity and love and all of it. So it just so happens that two great places to play are time and money because we are so conditioned to believe that there's not enough. Of either one of them. And and, that is the belief in that lie and the alignment with that lie, of course, creates the [00:03:00] circumstance that there's not enough of either one of those collectively and individually, but we can.

The truth of what our bodies know is that there's actually plenty and so tapping into the deeper wisdom of the body allows us to unravel the patterning and access. The truth. 

Homaya: Yeah. 

Kate Northrup: Which is that we live in an infinite universe. 

Homaya: Yeah. And there's also a very strong limited connection of time is money.

This is an old paradigm, but it's still, it is still very much in the air. 

Kate Northrup: Yes. 

Homaya: Did you experience yourself, yourself moving paradigms? 

Kate Northrup: I did. I was I worked very early, actually very, early. So both of my parents are doctors and they worked a lot. And there was a [00:04:00] feeling in my household that there was never enough time.

There was a feeling, a general energy of constriction around busyness and achievement. And the pressure to get things done and it was not spoken, but the unspoken underpinning of that was that the pressure to get more done was associated with money and with success. And with significance, like it felt really important to get all these things done for this end goal and that if all these things didn't get done, there would be like a really big problem.

And I remember early on, I read like in high school, I read rich dad, poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And I started to learn about leveraged income, and [00:05:00] I started to learn that there were all these ways that there were other people making money that did not require trading hours for dollars. Now, and I was like, wait, that's really cool.

And so I made a decision early on to become a business owner. And an investor so that I could be home with my kids and be present someday with my family and not have this constant pressure of there's not enough time and I have so much to do. There's not enough money and I have to work more to make more.

And so that, yeah, that was like an early day paradigm that I popped out of. But it was the paradigm I was raised in, for sure. 

Homaya: You're speaking a lot about the wisdom that exists within us, the wisdom of the body, as the leader, as the one who [00:06:00] can show the way. How did you yourself manage to put an end to the everlasting to do list?

Kate Northrup: Yeah. Listen. I live in the culture also, so this continues to be an ever evolving practice in my own life, but I have to tell you just I'll just give you a picture right now and then I'll answer the question. My kids, we, so we, traveled for six and a half weeks this summer.

I live in Miami, but I'm from Maine. So we went up north, we saw friends and family. It was beautiful. I worked like a couple hours a week, but mostly I was playing with My kids hanging in with people I love who live far away. So I mostly see them in the summer, just really like enjoying life. And then we got back for the summer, from the summer and my kids started school and I'm [00:07:00] like, I think this is the third week of them being back in full time school.

And I am experiencing a spaciousness and an amount of time I have available for things like going to yoga. And walking and sitting in the sauna and reading books, I'm experiencing a level of time available to me that is literally it's unprecedented. And I'm like, this is so cool. Like the more we expand.

The more space there is to expand, it is never ending. That is literally the definition of infinity. So 5 years ago, I would have said I had unlocked this in some certain way in my own life. And now I'm, like. Wow. 

Homaya: Even more. 

Kate Northrup: Wow. I really am the source of time. Like we are all the source of time and the more there [00:08:00] is, the more there is.

Okay. What happened was I got pregnant with my first daughter and I had, I am, I have always been a high achiever. I was a straight A student. I graduated magna cum laude from school. I was like on the thing. That you're supposed to do work hard in school, get good grades, except I wasn't going to do the get a good job part.

I wanted to work for myself. So I, but I've always I'm conditioned to be achievement oriented and. Even though I understood making money in ways that are not tied explicitly to trading hours for dollars, there's still that deep conditioning of achievement and that the more you do, the more valuable you are, the busier you are, the more valuable you are.

And then I got pregnant with my first daughter. And I was so tired. I was so [00:09:00] tired. I like was sleeping like 14 hours a day. It was insane. And I had all these pregnancy issues and blah, blah, blah. I had never had an experience before where I couldn't overcome a challenge by just being smarter or working harder or trying harder.

There was nothing I could do to just not feel like I needed to lie down all the time. And it blew my mind. And I remember when I was six months pregnant, I was actually giving a talk at Kripalu. And I remember preparing for that talk, which was about all I could do because I was so tired. And I was like, this is wild.

I am doing the most productive thing I've ever done, which is creating an entire human being. And yeah, I'm a not one bit have I had to think about it consciously, [00:10:00] right? Like I didn't need to, there was no amount of my. Intellectual capability or being smart or being capable that was or trying harder that was required that has been required to make this human and.

It shifted everything for me. I was like, my body is just doing this and I actually don't even have any physical energy. It's just doing it. And so then when she was born, I had a really rocky birth, a very difficult first year of of. motherhood. And, she was sick. It was a whole thing. And when she was 13 months old, I got my period back.

And all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I was completely fascinated and obsessed with tracking my cycle. I had literally never paid [00:11:00] any attention to it in my entire life. And all of a sudden it came back and it signaled this return to myself. Like it was this feeling of, Oh, my body now has enough energy to bring this back.

And that felt like such a huge accomplishment or not even an accomplishment milestone. And I started tracking my cycle. I started a simple journaling practice that really became something much bigger. And what I noticed is that my anxiety went away and my insomnia went away and I started organizing my life.

And my work around what was going on with my body every week, as opposed to trying to subdue my body into fitting my work schedule and my life schedule. I organized my life and work schedule around what my body needed. And that year we had our first million dollar year [00:12:00] while I was. Nursing, raising this sick baby, but I reorganized the whole way I was approaching time and started approaching time body first.

And it just opened up so much abundance and healing and money and time abundance. So that was the first major unlock for me around changing my paradigm. 

Homaya: This is super powerful and I want to highlight from it just to complete this part of the conversation and run with you to the other things that you're offering here is that what I'm getting is that you harness, we can say the intensity of the mind instead of serving a long to do list that reactivate itself every day to serve the body and to serve the listening 

Kate Northrup: Yes.

Thank you for saying it that way. Yes. [00:13:00] 

Homaya: So beautiful. So beautiful. So if we go deeper with you, if we dive deeper into your experience, both as a mother, as a woman, and I would add. as a family leader, right? Because everything was around you as the creator. I know that you're working with your partner and with your husband and the father of your children, which is such a beautiful experience.

Me, myself, I'm with my Husband, he's everything like he's the father. He's the husband. He's the boyfriend. He's the partner. He's the singer, the massage, everything is his job. 

Kate Northrup: So sweet. I love that 

Homaya: one person do it all. Yeah. But as that person go even more into your body and even more into the feminine body. into the cycle. How, was that shift? [00:14:00] What you felt that is dropping away from you in order to serve that inherent wisdom that you have in your DNA, that you have in your, connection to, to, to the moon, to, to life. 

Kate Northrup: I think one of the major things that was dropping away and that it took me. Years to really get this, was this hyper individuality, this sense that I was more valuable, the more I did by myself and that accepting help or asking for help was a sign of weakness.

I have my, my granny, my, the matriarch on my maternal side she has passed now, but she was the oldest woman to ever, the oldest woman in North America to ever make it to Mount Everest base camp. And she did that at the age of 84. [00:15:00] And her life motto was, don't ask for a lighter pack, ask for a stronger back, which is beautiful in certain ways but I, come from a line of women specifically whose value lies in their strength and capability physically and, emotionally as well.

And this, hyper individuality, I got the stories of my mother, like not calling out for help when she was in extraordinarily difficult physical circumstances or my dad my dad had a bike fall from the ceiling of the garage and it hit his nose and his nose was broken. It's gushing blood.

And instead of going next door to ask a neighbor for help, he drove [00:16:00] himself to the hospital. Anyway, so I just, my wiring has really been we do things ourselves, we don't inconvenience others for our needs. In fact, it's better if we don't have needs at all, and it's better to be the person who is taking care of everyone else.

And if we are needing care, we have failed, or if we are needing help, we have failed. And that really got me into trouble with the birth of both of my daughters. And I feel so sad for the version of me that didn't think that I deserved support, that I had this ridiculous story that I couldn't afford.

Support the result blah, blah, blah, but the part in me that used to think there was something wrong with having a village has [00:17:00] really been dissolving over the years. And I see it in women so much, this hyper independence. this, I don't need anyone. I don't need a man. The Gloria Steinem quote, what is it about something of fish and a bicycle?

Anyway, I can't remember what exactly she said. It was like a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle. And I'm not saying, listen, we have all sorts of sexual identity and all of that stuff. I'm not saying we all need men, but we all need each other. We all need each other. And actually leaning on one another makes us all stronger collectively, but married to the lie of.

Scarcity is the lie of separation is the idea that somehow like me over here doing my thing is completely separate from you over there doing your thing. And, in fact, we are all, of course, just waves in the same ocean. [00:18:00] And so the more I lean into support, the more supportive I become because the more replete my resources become the more a friend leans on me.

We can open up those floodgates of energy between the two of us, not in an unhealthy, unmeshed way, but in a way of there's actually more resources when all of us are willing to receive. 

Homaya: Can we go a little bit deeper 

in receivership? 

Kate Northrup: Sure. 

Homaya: I have a full body shiver because I feel that the essence is, okay, so we are changing the paradigm and so on, but what is standing, there when I'm listening to you is really increasing your presence as a receiver.

Kate Northrup: As a receiver. So what's really important in this. It's really like this blew my mind. So [00:19:00] I love science. I'm a huge science nerd, specifically biology and a little bit quantum physics. So one of the things that's really cool about the brain is that the same part of the brain lights up whether we are giving or receiving.

What does that tell us? That tells us that our body knows the truth. There is no separation. You are me. I am you. When I'm giving, it's the same thing as when you're receiving. When I'm receiving, it's the same thing as when you're giving. It's good for everyone. The other thing that is so cool that helped me to get out of my own bullshit stories about Oh, if I receive, there's less for other people.

That's the, that's what gets most of us stuck is I can't receive because then someone else will suffer. My well being automatically causes someone else's suffering. That's, that is the epitome of the zero sum model. There's not enough being to go around, so [00:20:00] I can't take Dextra. And especially for women who've been conditioned to be of service and to be givers only, this gets tricky.

But here's what's so cool. Our bodies are made of electricity. One of the main ingredients for our bodies, we can actually create energy, ATP, only through light. We actually do not need to eat in order to, for our cells to make energy. Our nervous systems are the super highway of communication between the brain, the body, all of our organ systems.

Our nervous systems are really like the engine running the whole thing. And they are a series of neurons that run all through our entire bodies, brain body, brain, that the communication is electricity. What is electricity? Light. So actually, our entire bodies are just conductors for [00:21:00] light. We are just out here, we are fully actually energy receivers.

Our bodies are just energy receivers. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of our bodies are made up of water. And water is the, is one of the most effective conductors we have for electricity, right? That's why you want to get out of the pool when there's a lightning storm. But here's the thing that's so cool.

Being a receiver, the most effective way of being a receiver. Is actually being a conduit, meaning when you are a conduit, you have energy coming in and you are passing it through you so that energy goes out. You're not here to take the energy and then hold it. We are here to take the energy and open ourselves as wide as possible to let it come through.

Very similar. to [00:22:00] giving birth, right? The baby doesn't just come in through conception and then hang out in the uterus forever. It's like the vagina is designed, the cervix is designed, even if you have a baby through C section, which I had one through C section, one vaginally same, there was an opening.

It came out, right? And I had to open wider. To not only grow that baby, but then let her out to then go on and have her own life and bless the world. And so that's what receivership is, opening ourselves as wide as possible to let as much come through us, not to stay. But to bless ourselves, our lives, our communities, and to pass through us because when we've allowed it's like if you have a plant and you water your little potted plant, when you over water it, it starts to leak.

That's a good [00:23:00] thing because it's had more than enough. And so it goes on into the next, right? It just goes. So that's what we're talking about here is to allow yourself to have the resources of time, support, love money, circulate in your being, in your life. And then allow yourself to be a conduit so you can receive as much as possible in order for those resources, honestly, to be amplified through you 

and 

moving through to the next person because there is no separation.

Homaya: That's it. Harmoniously and perfect with the essence of the soul and the creation of body and soul as one. As the creation of the soul and the creation of humanity as an extension of the divine consciousness is to amplify the divine consciousness to be as similar as possible [00:24:00] to the divine consciousness, which means opening up to all the plenty that exist, all the possibilities, all the options beyond good and bad and really to allow that to pass through us. One of the things that I love to say to my students is that the only thing that you will take from this life is whatever you give. Whatever you gave to someone, a teaching that you moved forward through you, a donation, whatever act you gave, this will be the only thing that you will take out of this. life because it passed through you. And I love that in this conversation, this highlighting that giving is the highest form of receiving. 

Kate Northrup: Yeah. But only 

if you are replete with resources. So Barbara Hewson, who's [00:25:00] a dear friend and one of my money mentors, she wrote Rewire for Wealth and Sacred Success, many other wonderful books. She says there are four rules to creating wealth and they are spend less, save more, invest wisely, and give generously in that order.

Because if you do it out of order, anything other than that is going to be an act of self sabotage. And as women, we very frequently give generously first before we have taken care of our own needs. Now, listen, I've had babies, I've got my little girls, right? Like they still depend on me to stay alive in some ways, even though they're six and almost nine now.

So there's some level, like sometimes you just have to put somebody else's needs first. However. However, we have, [00:26:00] the pendulum has swung way too far in terms of giving, giving when we are empty. And I think about that in terms of being a conduit for what it means to be a woman and teaching my kids just through modeling.

I want them to. Take care of themselves. I want them to feel the joy of strong energy reserves. I don't want them to go through early days of motherhood the way I did. It was awful. My mother's trying to convince me to have another kid. And I'm like, mom, I can't go back. I can't do it again. Like it was so hard.

And that's because I wasn't feeling, I wasn't feeling, I wasn't feeling, I thought there was somehow fundamentally something. Morally superior about being empty. Yeah. 

Homaya: The baritone. 

Kate Northrup: Yeah. But that being said, and I don't know the answer to this [00:27:00] one, but it's something I think about. I wonder, is there a way that we could approach our giving?

So that it actually is filling us up at the same time. And I think if we could tap into the level at which there is no separation, the level at which our brain, our bodies already know there is no separation. I believe that the act of giving can fill us up just as much if we're doing it in the paradigm of total infinite abundance. and total unity consciousness. 

Homaya: Yeah. This is powerful that the giving itself fulfills and come from a place of fulfillment. 

Kate Northrup: In the part that like, so our bodies have mirror neurons our, nervous system has mirror neurons and the mirror neurons, don't. [00:28:00] Make any separation between two people, right?

So if I'm talking to my girlfriend and she's crying in a, in about a moving story or I will probably cry. Like I always will be that person. And so that's an example of mirror neurons. When my kid comes to me and she's got like this bloody scrape on her knee, I literally actually feel pain in my body.

Like I get a, that's mirror neurons. And they're so cool and they're so cool. And I think that we could activate our mirror neurons to really affirm that when we are giving, it is happening in, us as well. Like it is happening in all of us. And I think about this with one of my girlfriends just had a really big win in her business.

And and another girlfriend, there's like a trio of us. We're really close and we text. A lot, kind of one [00:29:00] friend said, a win for you is a win for all of us. And I just felt it so strongly in my body that like her upliftment is collective. 

It really is. And so when we can give from that place. as opposed to the illusion that it's depleting us, but really knowing that giving from that place fills us up.

I think that's possible. 

Homaya: I feel that when you use the word plenty, that is really putting us in. anchoring in that state that is all here. So when you're asking this question and you say how, can we really be there? It's really depend where are we anchored in the state of consciousness that we have.

If we are anchored firmly in even lack exist in abundance, because you, cannot even think about something that is missing. If you wouldn't [00:30:00] understand, recognize that abundance is the source of everything. The lack comes because it's not coming in an empty stomach. There's a stomach. In it, it is empty.

So whatever lack it is, there's already plenty before it. And I feel that as more we are anchoring ourselves in existence, that whatever we will think of or whatever we will experience, it will be on the base of something is already existing. We already manifested ourself. to even think of for the first place, even think of something that is lacking.

If you think of something that might be depleted, it's already here. I feel that the more we're anchoring there, then the state of consciousness that I'm giving from my plentitude will be more natural for us as human. [00:31:00] 

Kate Northrup: Yes. And when we're giving from that plentitude, really, we are, it's not us. That's when we are in full receivership.

I get a million ideas. Like I have 300 million ideas every single day. I will never run out. And so if I share an idea and let's say I have an idea for a girlfriend or something and I share that idea and then she goes and runs with it and creates this creates a bunch of revenue or whatever, with it, that's, I don't even see it as that was mine.

It isn't. I'm a receiver, so I'm plugged into source. There is no limit there. So anything that comes through me wasn't mine to begin with. Just like my kids aren't mine. Like they, I don't know where they they came from [00:32:00] somewhere else. They just came through me. So when we can be in that place, then we are truly giving from our plentitude because we know that source is running through us.

And so we are giving from infinite supply. 

Homaya: Yeah. Yeah. And that whatever is created is not taking away from us. As this friend is taking an idea, she's not taking an idea. She's harnessing an idea until a certain level where someone else might continue from there and that other person might be connected to you, might be someone else, or might be you yourself.

Kate Northrup: It totally it's the same thing for anybody who, takes plants and and takes cuttings or if you make your own kombucha and you have the mother of the kombucha and then, and it gets so big, you have to give it away. And then the more you give it away, it gets bigger. It's the same thing.

Like the mother of the [00:33:00] kombucha, the jade plant that you're giving cuttings so your friends can plant their own the oak tree with the acorns, like you growing an oak tree out of the acorn that the oak tree originally dropped does not deplete the oak tree. It just creates more oaks. It just creates more oxygen.

It just creates more shade. It just enhances the mycelial network. It's really just good for the whole. More is literally more. 

Homaya: Okay. I'm going to ask you one last question. Might be super triggering, but I really enjoy flying with you in this conversation. Okay. So death, there is, I would even say a brainwash.

I feel that the scarcity is so brainwashed into our system because death become an enigma and it is becoming something that is [00:34:00] separated from society. We don't see an end. We don't see death. We don't see the final gratitude. Spectacular. It doesn't feel like that. Did you tap to that as well in your journey into Plantitude?

Kate Northrup: Yeah my, okay everybody's belief system is different, but from my own core, I don't believe that death is an ending. I See it as a beginning or actually really just a return to source. Every single near death experience, report I have heard about, read about, everyone says pretty much the same thing, which is that there is light and an unbelievable sense of love.

And so to me it's of course, will I grieve when my parents go? Will, did I grieve when my granny went? [00:35:00] Yes, To, not be able to be with them in this body, with them in that body, in this time and space. Yes. And. To me, it's like such an exciting thing to go back or find out. I really see death and birth and life as a cycle.

Not as a line. So I, see that like death and birth are right next to each other. And then the rest of the circle is just this minute we're here on the planet. Lord even knows what we're doing. 

Anyway just at my friend, Megan Watterson says, the body is the soul's chance to be here.

So I think we're just like living in this body and be like, oh, cool. That's what that does. And being able to feel sensation and pleasure and all of that. I think that's what we're here to do is learn to live in a body but with death where you leave your body I [00:36:00] just think we go back to source and I don't see that as a limitation, I see it as a return to the infinite. 

Homaya: Yeah, it takes me to, I echo with you completely, and I feel that this is so important that integrates also when someone wants to really anchor in this experience of abundance, to really anchor in beyond even the body, right?

Because when you were saying, when my parents would live, I don't feel that only their body would live. Like inside of me, I would never lose them. I would never lose their sight. I would never lose their vision. I would never lose their words, their whatever they gave, the challenges, the gifts, whatever, they eternally exist inside of me.

And that is a continuation. Yeah. Thank you for such a beautiful conversation. 

Kate Northrup: Thank you [00:37:00] so much. This was wonderful. 

Homaya: Welcome. So people will be able to keep on listening and reading your books. We will have all the details in the show notes. Thank you for your presence. Thanks.