Gift Payment Choice
You are free to choose an amount that feels good, right, and fair to you, that reflects your financial means and your desire to support me in continuing this work. The going rate for a coaching session is ordinarily a few hundred dollars (and you can find them for less and for much more). But maybe what is right for you is more. Or less. Perhaps much less. At any amount of none, I’m fully and equally committed to helping you the best I can. There is sincerely no judgment on my side :)
A Note from Me on Gift Payment
We live in a society where money is a powerful director of human attention. Our attention and decisions often go towards what money holds as valuable, rather than what we believe is important in the world. Every time we choose market price to pay for something, we invisibly digest the economy’s value system and rhetoric, and it slowly overtakes our own personal values and beliefs. We’ve reached the limit of the good the modern economy can offer society, and it clearly doesn’t seem to be serving us anymore. If we hope to create a more beautiful world in alignment with our values, I believe we need to inspire individuals to deeply question our relationship with money, weaken its hold, and reclaim our lives and imagination.
This is why I offer gift payment for my coaching services.
For you, it is an opportunity and invitation to ask the hard question “what are my values, and how do I choose to use money in service of them?” The question might spawn more questions than you have time to answer now, and there’s no “right” answer to any of them. It’s a necessary step in the journey to reclaim your life and our shared reality for ourselves.
For me, it is part of my practice of releasing control to open the opportunity to feel more deeply supported by the universe. It is the decision to support those people whose values I want to see in the world (many of whose work is not valued by the economy), rather than letting money choose for me. My decision to not require payment is not because I question my market value - I have been paid market rates for my time. This is my own experiment in the never-ending journey I choose of aligning my life to my values.
There is seriously no judgment, whatever you decide. Perhaps you choose to give a “small” amount initially, but later experience blossoming of the value of our work together and have greater financial capacity, and choose to give more. Or perhaps soon after giving, come across financial hardship and need to decrease the amount of your gift.
If you want to support me in giving this work to others and have the financial means, money will help me continue my current life experiment. If I find the work feels deeply meaningful and enough money isn’t flowing to sustain my current life configuration, I’ll see it as a joyful invitation into a deeper questioning of the outdated blueprints we’ve inherited on how to live life. Whichever way it goes, I welcome the journey with open arms.
In closing
None of this is to say that money is inherently evil, or others are less virtuous for deciding to charge for their services. Certainly this decision would feel unthinkable for me without the privileges and unearned gifts of my life. This is purely a personal experiment seeking to explore the question “what narratives of my relationship with money best serve the creation of a more beautiful world?” I do hope it inspires you into a deeper questioning, and perhaps the blossoming of your own unique experiments.
Sincerely,
Trip
*The messaging found above regarding gift payment and the inspiration to experiment with it come directly from the work of Charles Eisenstein.