Is it okay to charge money for doing Spiritual work?

QUESTION: I am so much in the heart and to make money you need a mind. I wished to coach and teach EFT, but I have difficult in charging people in need. Spiritual people have these issues about charging others, do you have an insight for this?

ANSWER: The question is not really about money but about the guilt behind asking for money. When I ask for money am I coming from love or fear? First I am going to share an excerpt from my book, What Happens When You Let God:

"As I am bringing this chapter to and end, another thing I would like you to be aware of, is that after twenty years of following and even teaching self-empowering techniques, getting to meet some of these well-known speakers, even working for one of them, I noticed a concurrent theme. Not for all of them, but for most, all that they want is money for the false sense of power they derive from it. Without it, they feel small. Not because they are, but because they believe they are, even when they are in denial of it. As a result, they even make others feel guilty for not having money. And they must, for that is how they can manipulate, or as they say, “persuade” others into investing in whatever it is they have to offer, especially when most believe, as stated earlier, that you, me and everyone out there is their source and supply.

Here is a disturbing email I received before this book was published by someone who simply came across my website. These are her exact words, without any editing;

----- begin email -----
'Dear Nick, I just wanted to say that I am so pleased I found your site. I feel that this law of attraction fever, is two far away from the truth. I listened to (name undisclosed) tele-seminar last night on attracting wealth and it left me cold.
The questions were all from people wanting money. Not enough emphasis is being put on internal peace and strength. It took me a long time to realize this and forty years of searching, but mainly plumbing the depths. I gave up almost everything I had, ran my businesses down to virtually nothing and basically jumped empty handed into a void.
What I found astounded me. Peace, happiness and a totally new way of life. It mended not just my broken spirit, but all my relationships with family and my beautiful child who had become separate from me spiritually. I am now in a position to retain the beauty I have found in my new life, while attracting to me exactly what I need.
I found it interesting from my new perspective, that when you have peace and strength, there is little else you want, and attracting your needs is enjoyable, fun and effortless. You are a wonderful inspiration, and I believe that the world really needs you, now more than ever. With love, Sue. W.'
----- end email -----

Am I saying that there is anything wrong with having money? Absolutely not, as a matter of fact, feel free to have as much as you want and enjoy it! I do enjoy it when I have it. There is no reason to feel guilty about having lots of money. What I am saying is, be careful whom you choose as your god. If you were to be honest with yourself right now, unless money is not an issue for you, that’s where most of your attention probably is. And unless you want God more than anything else, meaning choosing peace above all else, if I can come up with a tool or something that can promise you financial freedom, you are most likely to fall prey to what I have to offer. In her book titled, “Oh My God. It’s ME” Dr. Sheryl Valentine states:

'Our true inheritance is not money or things; it is the remembrance that God is the source of all good. Once we remember this—instead of living in a place of isolation and fear, our lives become filled with purpose and meaning.'

The truth is, not having money is not the problem. The real problem is a two-point never-ending loop. The first problem has to do with the way you feel about not having it, and second, the mistake of believing that the way you feel has to do with not having it. In other words, if I feel bad for not having money, that triggers guilt and fear. Now that I am feeling fearful and guilty, and thinking that not having money is the reason I feel the way I do, that puts me in a very vulnerable position because I have introduced a new god (money) into my life. That forces me to keep my attention out into the world as opposed to where my attention should always be, which is within, in other words, on God. Even many people in the spiritual community don’t want to accept that they have bought into the ego’s way of thinking. That’s why you hear titles such as, “spiritual prosperity” or “the law of spiritual abundance” or some other variation of the same premise."

Now let's look at money from A Course in Miracles' perspective. Everything I see in the world is an effect. The Mind is what project all effects I see in the world. However, I am having an experienced, which, although it is not real, it is still an experience. My experience is that I am a body who lives in a world that is real and that I needs financial resources, shelter, food, and so on. So as we heal our mind from our sense of separation from God, all we need to do, is to establish a very intimate connection with our Spirit within, so that every decision we make is rooted in love and not in fear.

From that space, we begin to feel that we are fully taken care of and provided for. As a result, the resource that we need will show up in the form of money, or something else. Using myself as an example, there are times when I feel appropriate to charge for my time and at other times I feel moved to offer my services freely. The key is to not doing service out of guilt because in that sense I am not serving neither one of us, and here is the reason why.

There is only one of us in the room. If I buy into someone's guilt, all I am doing is reflecting back at them their own fear, which in turn solidifies the fear in me. Why? Because the person I am seeing out there is my own projection. Remember, I am the one projecting everything I see. So really, the one who needs healing, is really me. They are the projections I am putting out there in order to make myself belief that they are the ones who need healing, when in reality they are showing the parts of me that need healing.

A world filled with fear is simply a reflection of the fear that resides within me. A world filled with love, on the other hand is simply reflecting back at me the love that is within me. So the work is never on healing others or the world, it is always on healing the dark spots in my mind that are projecting the world I see. That's why every master in one way or another have said, "Everything is perfect in my world." Because they are not seeing a world through the eyes of the ego, they are seeing a world through the eyes of Spirit, from the love that they are, not from the false sense of most of us believe ourselves to be.

So when it comes to money, the fear is not about charging money, the fears is about thinking that there is not enough to go around and when I charge someone, I think I am taking something away from them. But once again, the REAL issue is that we think that our source comes from the world, when in reality, it comes from Spirit. Once you are grounded on Spirit, then the money shows up from wherever it is at the moment.

Sometimes may show up from people compensating you for services rendered. Sometimes it will be from a business you started, or from a friend or stranger offering you a gift, from a sell of a product, from having money mysteriously showing up in your bank account, from having a gut feeling to play a lottery ticket, who knows. So if you want to teach EFT, just remember that even when the money seems to be coming from your clients, the real "Cause" behind the transaction is God, Spirit, whatever you want to call it. Always, always, ALWAYS, align yourself with Spirit FIRST! And whatever it is you end up doing, you can't go wrong. It's that simple!

Remember to order a copy of Nick's book What Happens When You Let God at: www.TruthAndMiracles.com or www.WhatHappensWhenYouLetGod.com
And to hire Nick to speak at your church, college or corporate event, simply visit: www.NickArandesPomo.com