What the Forest Knows: Attachment Wounds and the Truth About Scarcity | S2 Ep.9

Attachment theory, nervous system safety, and debunking scarcity mindset through the wisdom of the mycelium network and earth-based spirituality

The “abundance is a frequency” line can sound comforting until you are living inside real financial pressure. Today we slow down and tell the truth: nervous system regulation matters, but it does not erase inflation, wage stagnation, housing costs, or the collapse of the safety nets our bodies evolved to expect. I name why some manifestation and money mindset messaging slips into spiritual bypassing, turning a structural crisis into a personal flaw.

From there, I take a clinical turn into attachment theory and somatic therapy. What if a “scarcity mindset” is often an attachment wound wearing money’s clothes? When money becomes the stand-in for safety, shelter, food, and belonging, hyper independence can feel like the only sane strategy. But money is a terrible attachment figure. It cannot co regulate you, it cannot hold you through grief, and it cannot create earned secure attachment, which only happens through repeated relational experience of leaning and being met.

Then we step outside with the trees. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s work on the wood wide web shows how mycelium networks connect trees, move nutrients and information, and support the forest through overflow and interdependence, not scorekeeping. I close with a simple, embodied practice: find a tree, root down, and ask what it knows about scarcity and trusting the network you cannot see. If this lands, subscribe, share with a friend who needs steadiness, and leave a review so more people can find the work.

Transcript

Why This Topic Now

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Priestess Initiations. I'm Casey Dunn, educator, priestess, and professional somatic therapist. In April 2025, I went through a Priestess Initiation of Old and launched the Priestess Initiations podcast six months later. Whatever brought you here today, I invite you to drop into the spiral with me. Let's begin. I'm Casey, and I am feeling super excited about this episode. This episode originally had a slightly different title when I planned it. I was always going to talk about trees this season. I cannot do a Celtic earth-based spirituality season theme without talking about trees. And yeah, and then this past week, couple weeks really, I've been moving through a lot of stuff in my own nervous system, in my own body, as many of us have been. And I realized how much more wanted to be in this episode than I had originally planned. And so I want to tell you why this episode's coming now. Because I don't think it's an accident. We are moving into a Taurus new moon. And on paper, Taurus should feel like the soft one, grounding, embodied, the bull with her feet in the earth. It's Venus's home sign, asking us to slow down and feel what's real. And that quality's here. But underneath it, I'm feeling something heavier. And so Mars is crossing Eris right now. And if you know Eris, she's the truth teller, the goddess of discord, the one who names what everyone in the room agreed not to say. And when she's activated, old survival patterns surface, especially with Mars. Old anger, old ways we organized ourselves around fear rather than truth. It's clarifying rather than comfortable. And this particular new moon is carrying crossroads energy, not manifesting energy, more like, what are you willing to stop pretending you don't already know? So I've been sitting with that question, and it pulled me towards something I've been turning over for weeks in my own nervous system, in my own relationship patterns, in my own particular terror of dependence, of leaning on people. Eris has been nudging me to say it out loud. So that's what got added to this episode. Still about trees, but we're also going to talk about scarcity, about money, about attachment in particular, and about what the forest already knows that we've somehow forgotten. This is not an episode on change your mindset to manifest money. This is season two, and it's our season of Celtic mysticism and earth-based spirituality. And one of the core threads running underneath all of it is this. Abundance

Scarcity Mindset And Spiritual Bypassing

SPEAKER_00 4:07

is a frequency. Change your thoughts, change your bank account. And I want to be precise here because I'm not going to throw the whole thing out. There is something true in it. And that's that when we're in deep scarcity patterning, there is a real paralysis that happens in the nervous system, a kind of shutdown, a dorsal collapse that makes it genuinely harder to be creative, to see opportunity, to receive what's being offered. That's not woo. That's polyvagal theory. And when your nervous system is in survival mode, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. The part of you that generates new ideas, that takes considered risks, that can imagine a different future, that part needs safety to function. So, yes, nervous system regulation and the capacity to build wealth are 100% related. But here's where I have to name what that narrative gets catastrophically, mind-blowingly wrong. It constantly locates the problem inside you as an individual, in your thoughts, in your frequency, in your unhealed money wounds. And in doing so, it performs one of the most sophisticated spiritual bypassing acts of gaslighting available in the wellness industry. It takes a systemic crisis and makes it personal. The system is broken. I need you to hear that not as a disclaimer, but as a clinical and political fact. We are living through real inflation, real wage stagnation, real housing unaffordability, real erosion of collective support structures. The conditions that are making it hard to survive are not a mindset problem. They are structural. And to tell someone who's genuinely financially precarious, who's struggling, that they just need to raise their vibration is not spiritual wisdom. It's spiritual bypassing. So that's the heiress piece, the goddess Heiress. She needed to be sad. She lives in my third house of communication. And so sometimes she's a little pushy. Um, but now I want to go deeper. Now I want to talk about what I'm going through and what I'm learning currently.

Money As An Attachment Stand In

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Because when we name, even name the system as broken, which it is, there's still something happening inside us that's worth looking at. Not because it's our fault, but because it's where we actually have some agency. So I'm still working through this, like I said. And when I look at my own relationship to scarcity, and I mean, really look at it, not from the let me heal my want money wounds angle, but from a clinical attachment lens, what I find is not primarily a money wound at all. It's an attachment wound wearing money's clothes. So I want you to pause for a moment and think about what money has become in this culture. It's not just currency, it's the primary stand-in for our most basic human needs. The ones Maslow put at the bottom of the hierarchy because nothing else works without them. Safety, shelter, food, and belonging. Without money in this system, you cannot reliably access any of those things. Money has become the thing between you and your survival. Between you and your nervous system finally being held. That is not how it should be. Humans did not evolve to need currency to access community, to access food, to access shelter. We evolved in interdependent systems where those things were held collectively. The fact that we now require an individual financial cushion just to feel safe in our bodies, that's a structural wound, not a personal one. And our nervous systems are responding accordingly, and mine is responding accordingly. I am in this with you. And so when we talk about scarcity mindset, we're often actually talking about a nervous system that has learned correctly that it is alone, that there is no net, that if something goes wrong, there is no mycelium network sending nutrients, and I'll get into trees in a minute. But there's just you holding the rope. When we learn early or confirm later, that we cannot reliably depend on others to show up, we develop what's called an insecure attachment pattern. And one of the most common adaptations is this. I will rely only on myself because if I rely on others and they leave, I am more devastated than if I had never leaned on them at all. I know this one personally, even with genuinely supportive people in my life, people who have shown up repeatedly, concretely, there's a part of me that is always quietly calculating the cost of leaning on anyone else. Because if I lean on them and they leave, or maybe they don't leave and they die and leave, I'm back to nothing. And so the safer move, the move my nervous system keeps thinking is safety, is to do it alone. Is what I call my eldest daughter hyper-independent drive. But no, really. But what it is, is it's this feeling that what is actually safe is to be so self-deficient, so so self-sufficient. There we go, that loss cannot hurt me. But that is not independence. That is a wound that has learned to call itself strength. And this is where money enters as the perfect, honestly, like it's a substitute attachment figure. And the idea feels like if I have enough money, I don't need to depend on anyone, right? If I have enough money, I am safe regardless of who stays or goes. Money becomes the replacement for the secure base that attachment theory tells us every nervous system is organized around finding. The problem is that money makes a terrible attachment figure. It cannot co-regulate you. It cannot hold you when your body's in crisis. It does not show up in the way that changes your nervous system's fundamental understanding of whether or not the world is safe. Earned secure attachment, the kind that actually rewires the nervous system, only happens through repeated relational experience. Through learning to lean on someone, to yield, and being caught and having them catch you. Through being seen in vulnerability and still being loved, and someone choosing to stay. Money can buy you time and options, but it can't buy you that. So I was sitting with all of this: this broken system, the attachment wound, the nervous system, logic of scarcity, and I didn't have an answer. I still don't have a complete one.

The Wood Wide Web Of Trees

SPEAKER_00 13:00

But I thought I was sitting with it, I looked out my window at the trees. There's a few trees outside. I don't get to live in a forest yet. One day I will live in a forest. If I'm manifesting something, it is that. Manifesting what safety actually feels like to me is trees. But I was looking at the trees and something shifted. And there's a woman, um, Suzanne Simmard, and she's a forest ecologist, whose work I'll link in the episode description. And she has a book called Finding the Mother Tree, which I am not finished with, but I already cannot recommend enough. And she spent decades documenting what is now called the wood-wide web. The fungal threads that connect trees underground, through which they share carbon, water, nutrients, and information, essentially. It's kind of like a giant computer. And that was partly what I thought this episode was originally going to be about. But what I realized, and what resonated with me from what she found is that the trees are not competing with each other for resources the way we would assume based on our human society, right? The trees are sharing. Mother trees, the oldest, largest trees in the forest, actively send resources through the network to younger, struggling trees, including trees of different species. The network doesn't operate on debt or reciprocity, the way we understand those words. A tree can signal need through the network. And another tree, if it has excess, will send what it can. But it doesn't send what it doesn't have. And there are no grudges, no accounting, no, I sent you carbon in March and you haven't sent it back in April. The trees just live in a state of what we would call in psychology interdependence.

Embodied Interdependence And Earth Wisdom

SPEAKER_00 15:28

And interdependence is a word we use a lot in therapeutic circles. It is held up as the goal, the healthy middle between the amesh to dependence that terrifies one part of us, right? That I was just talking about, and the defended isolation that terrifies another. But I gotta be honest about something. I am not sure that most of us actually know what interdependence feels like in our bodies. We know it intellectually, we can diagram the attachment spectrum, but the embodied felt sense of it, of being both rooted in yourself and genuinely nourished by others simultaneously, without that being a threat, without receiving being a threat. I think that's rarer than we admit. The trees don't have that problem. They're not sitting around philosophizing about interdependence, they're not healing their attachment wounds before they can access the network. They just are the network. Interdependence isn't an intellectual goal they're working toward. It is their biological operating system. And so my question is: why can't it be our operating system? How do we shift our bodies? How do we find embodied interdependence as a way to operate from? And that, in my opinion, is a prerequisite to any love and light spirituality, shift your mindset to raise your abundance frequency vibrations out there. Because that is not going to work on our current operating system. But could it work on an interdependent one? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know how many people know. But this idea of interdependence is exactly what Earth-based and Celtic spiritual traditions have always known. They've always taught that the land is not separate from us, that we are part of the web. Not managing it, not studying it from the outside, but genuinely embedded in it. And when we lose that felt connection, we don't just lose something spiritual. We lose our nervous system's most ancient reference point for safety. The one that existed long before money, long before individualism, long before any of the systems that are currently failing us. The mycelium map is showing us something like this. Something like that safety doesn't come from accumulating enough resources to never need anyone. That safety is the network itself. Safety is the knowing that the network exists, that there are roots running beneath you, that if you send a signal of need, something may come. That you are not doing this alone, even when you feel alone. That's not the same as naive trust. The trees don't guarantee each other anything, right? A tree in drought cannot give what it doesn't have. Um, thinking back to the Queen of Pentacles archetype episode, right? She gives from overflow. The trees give from overflow. They can't give what they don't have. We try, we try to give what we don't have all the time, and then we end up in a state of depletion. But if the trees are an overflow, they share the overflow. The network doesn't promise abundance, it promises connection, presence. For the trees, it's the biological fact of not being severed. And maybe, maybe that's what our nervous systems are actually hungry for underneath the scarcity panic. Not more money, though we do need enough to survive. Not more self-sufficiency, though it has its place. But the felt sense that we are part of a network, that we are not the only route, that leaning on someone else is not the same as falling over. I don't have a tidy answer to bring you today. Um I started that episode with this, and I mean it. But what I do have is a practice, and it's a simple one. And

A Simple Tree Grounding Practice

SPEAKER_00 20:29

I want to invite you to actually do it, not just think about doing it. Go find a tree. It doesn't have to be a forest. A park tree works, a tree in your backyard, the one on your street you've walked past a hundred times while walking your dog without stopping. Find one tree that pulls you a little. You'll know which one. You probably already have the tree in your mind, honestly. Go put your hands on the tree. Put your hands on the bark of the trunk, feel the realness of it, and put your feet on the ground. Feel the ground under your feet, the way the truth's reels, roots feel it. Not as your surface you're standing on, but as something you're connected into, something you're rooted into. Root down into your feet. Feel the ways that you and this tree are one. Breathe. Slow down. And as you breathe, see if you can feel yourself rooting. Not metaphorically, actually, like imagining your energy, your attention, your root system, your nervous system dropping down. It's this downward energy. That's the feminine, by the way. This downward energy. Down through the soles of your feet. Into the earth, the way roots grow. You don't have to visualize it perfectly. Just let the intention move downward rather than up, right? And then stay there when your mind pulls you away, and it will, just come back to your hands on the bark, your feet on the ground, your breath moving slowly. And when you feel something shift, maybe it's a settling, a softening, even just a slight drop in your shoulders, that's the connection. That is your nervous system finding its most ancient reference point for safety. The invitation is to stay with it. And then from that place, make the ask. Not a demand, not a manifestation script, just a genuine question held in your body, offered to the tree and the network beneath it. Ask the trees, what do you know about this? About scarcity? About trusting the network when you can't see the roots. About sending what you have excess of without guarantee of return. Then be quiet for a moment. Don't try to figure out the answer. Just stay rooted and listen. Not with your ears, but with your body. Notice what arises. Maybe it's a feeling, an image, a loosening somewhere. Maybe nothing at all this time. And that's okay too. The practice is the showing up. That's your homework this week. And under this Taurus New Moon, which is on Saturday, by the way. Um, under Eris and her truth telling, under the crossroads energy, asking you what you're willing to stop pretending you don't already know. Go put your hands on the tree and ask what it knows. Your body knows. The mycelium knows. And sometimes wisdom doesn't come through the mind first, it comes through the roots. Subscribe

Homework Subscribe And Safety Note

SPEAKER_00 24:28

to the podcast so you don't miss an episode. Trust the spiral. This podcast offers spiritual and psychological education and priestess wisdom. This is not therapy, counseling, or mental health treatment. If you need mental health support, please contact a licensed provider and in a mental health emergency in the U.S., call 988.