A client thanks you and pays the price you agreed. Your salary goes up, or a project you spent months on finally brings money in. Have you ever felt weird when the money arrived, or uncomfortable, or even afraid? What comes with it is usually mixed. You are glad, and anxious about what to spend it on, and afraid it is not enough against the expenses you already have. Underneath all of that sits the feeling that something bad might happen to balance it out.
When it is time to ask to be paid, you feel uneasy. You catch yourself justifying what you earned. When someone compliments your work, you find it hard to accept. For energy practitioners, how much to charge for a session is a question of its own.
Where the guilt about money starts
Before you ever earned money of your own, you heard that a good person doesn't care about money, that spirituality and money don't mix, that having little makes you more worthy. In many families those same messages arrive as loyalty. You can't have more than your parents had, and you help everyone before you look after yourself. Some religious teaching adds to those messages, presenting wealth as sinful and having little as virtuous.
Nobody agreed to any of this out loud, and it works like an agreement anyway. If I prosper, the people I love will feel abandoned. I have to give more than I receive. Being paid well means someone who needs it more goes without. Guilt is what a person feels on breaking an agreement, so every payment can feel like proof that you broke one.
Some of the guilt may come from even before this life. Because the spirit keeps everything lived in other incarnations, that guilt can arrive with no cause you can point to.
What being paid actually is
Work gives value to the person who receives it, in their life or their business. You spent energy to make that happen, and money is value in physical form. When someone pays you, they complete the exchange, and after that nobody owes anybody.
Help given in the hope of getting something back puts the other person in the helper's debt, and the helper waits to be repaid. One of them holds the debt and the other holds the bill, and in energy terms that pair is the opposite of money.
What changes when money and being good stop being opposites
Money amplifies what a person already is. Where there is money, a good person can do more good. Someone with no resources can still offer compassion, and someone with resources can offer that and real solutions.
Once they are no longer opposites, a payment is the other half of an exchange, including what someone charges for a session or a service. Receiving it stops setting off guilt, and you stop feeling uneasy asking to be paid.
If you are curious about your own subconscious agreements with money, Seven Weeks with Your Money is a book about those agreements and how they affect your relationship with money. Close to I have to help everyone first is another pattern: taking on other people's emotional weight, which is what You Can't Heal What You're Carrying for Someone Else looks at. And What's Blocking Your Natural Flow? can give you a first sense of what may be in the way for you: it's free, it takes two minutes and you get your result right away.