The Part of Me I’ve Kept Quiet
On loving money, high tea, and fashion, and what that has to do with your spiritual path
I have a confession.
You might find it surprising. So, get ready for an unexpected personal reveal.
I love money. I love high tea. I love fashion.
And for a long time, I kept those things quiet. My friends know this about me. But I’ve never shared it here, with you.
Not because I was ashamed, exactly. But because I was aware of the image. The woman who has been on a deep mystical path since 2004. The space holder. The beholder of spiritual wisdom. And, somewhere along the way, I absorbed the unspoken rule: spiritual people aren’t supposed to love luxury. They’re supposed to be above it.
So, I kept those parts of me in a private drawer.
The investor Anna.
The woman who orders the full high tea with savory sandwiches and scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam and feels genuinely delighted by every single bite.
The former fashion model who still asks herself every morning: what colors and clothes will best support what I want to express today?
This week, in the spirit of Independence Day (in the USA), and what I’ve come to love calling Interdependence Day, I’m pulling open that drawer.
Consider this my independence: showing you the parts of me I’ve been quieter about.
And the interdependence? That’s what comes next.
Through the Lens of Expansive Living
One of the foundational principles of the Expansive Living Method is this: the spiritual and the material are not opposing forces. They are one continuum.
Everything that exists, including money, food, clothing, is an expression of consciousness.
And the quality of consciousness we bring to our material world determines the quality of what we create, what we experience, and what we leave behind.
With that as our lens, let me show you what’s actually in that drawer.
Money and Investing
I invest in companies. Real ones, with unconventional ideas and founders who think differently. I am currently considering investing in a women-owned AI company that is working to bring individual voice back to writing, so that AI becomes a tool that draws out your uniqueness rather than flattening it.
That, to me, is consciousness applied to technology.
And while we’re on the topic of investing, I want to talk about what money actually is to me.
Money is a material resource, yes. We need it to pay rent and buy groceries. And it is also a conscious being on this planet, evolving with us. As we shift our relationship to it, how we think about it, speak about it, relate to it, money responds.
It is a bearer of freedom, of abundance, of generosity, of service, of pleasure. You can have those qualities without money. But money can carry them in a big way.
This is not a popular thing for a spiritual teacher to say. But it is true for me. And I think the split, the idea that spiritual people should be indifferent to money, or suspicious of it, is one of the more damaging splits we carry. Because we all need money.
And when we relate to it with shame or distance, we cut ourselves off from one of the most direct expressions of freedom available to us in material life.
I ran an immersion workshop earlier this year on exactly this: how to shift your relationship to money and wealth. As a spiritual practice, not a financial strategy.
What’s your relationship to money and wealth?
High Tea
I love high tea. I love the feeling of material luxury it affords me. Specifically, I love the savory sandwiches, the small, precise, surprising ones where someone thought to put this with that and it works in a way you didn’t expect.
I love the scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. I love that everything is bite-sized, so you move through a multitude of flavors rather than committing to one big dish with one flavor for an entire meal.
What I love most, though, is what preparing a high tea requires: attention.
Someone had to think about each detail. The size of the sandwich. The color on the plate. The pairing of flavors. That attention, that care, is a form of consciousness expressing itself through the material world.
High tea with my niece in New York City June 2026
When I sit down to a good high tea with a close friend, moving between deep conversation and laughter, I feel something I can only describe as material enjoy-ment, emotional content-ment and spiritual de-light.
This is not indulgence for its own sake. This is the spiritual made material. The care, the creativity, the beauty: these are sacred qualities that someone chose to bring into a very ordinary act of eating.
Are you a high tea person, as well? Or, what is your favorite drink or food ritual that brings you fully present?
Fashion
I was a fashion model in my 20s. A very successful one. And fashion has never really left me, not as vanity, but as presence.
Every morning, I ask myself: what do I want to express today? What colors, what shapes, what quality of movement do I want to feel in my body as I move through this day? And then I choose accordingly.
Clothing, for most of us on this planet, is not optional. We live in cultures where we dress. So, the question isn’t whether to wear clothes. It’s whether we’re going to treat that daily act as an expression of who we are, or just a task to get through before the real day begins.
In a Chanel outfit for a shoot for Japanese Elle in my late 20’s
For me, fashion is a form of self-authorship. It is how I show up in the world before I say a single word. And the spiritual person who dismisses fashion as superficial is, I’d gently suggest, missing an opportunity to bring intention into something they’re already doing anyway.
Do you use clothing as expression? Or has fashion felt like it belongs in a different category from your spiritual life?
The Thread That Connects Them
Money. High tea. Fashion. Three things you might not expect from someone who has spent 22 years on a deep mystical path.
But here is what I want to share: none of these are departures from my spiritual life. They ARE my spiritual life, expressed in material form.
When I invest with consciousness, I am bringing spiritual intention into the flow of resources in the world.
When I sit at a high tea table and feel genuine delight at the creativity on the plate, I am having a direct, unmediated experience of beauty, which is, by my own definition, a spiritual experience.
When I choose my clothing with intention each morning, I am beginning my day as an act of self-expression, not an afterthought.
The Expansive Living principle is this: the spiritual and the material are one continuum. Not two worlds we shuttle between, apologizing for one when we’re in the other. One world, fully inhabited. That is what interdependence actually means.
For the Space Holders Among You
If you work with people, as a coach, therapist, healer, guide, or any kind of space holder, this matters beyond your personal life.
The split between spiritual and material is not just a philosophical inconvenience. It is a wound that shows up in the people you hold. It shows up as a crisis of meaning. As depression. As overconsumption. As a persistent sense that something is missing, even when life looks fine from the outside.
And here is what I want you to see: every one of those wounds has a material expression. And every material expression holds a hidden spiritual need waiting to be named.
Take the accountant who feels their work has no meaning. They sit with spreadsheets all day and feel nothing but emptiness. They come to you in a crisis of purpose. And what they don’t yet know is that what they do for their clients every day, creating order, providing a sense of safety, making intentional and responsible growth possible, these are the very qualities people travel to retreats to find. Peacefulness. Order. Calm and ease. The conditions for something to grow well. Those qualities live inside accounting. They were there all along. When you help that accountant make that connection, they don’t just feel better. They show up differently at work. They serve their clients differently. Their spreadsheet becomes a spiritual practice.
Or take the person who is depressed and living in a home that depletes them. Clutter everywhere. Furniture they don’t connect to. Objects collected over time that carry no feeling. They come to you exhausted, and part of what is exhausting them is their physical environment, a place they park themselves rather than a place that holds them.
Now imagine helping them ask: what does this chair actually give me when I sit in it? Does it offer comfort? Does it hold my body in a way that lets me exhale? What about that painting on the wall, the one from a magazine or from your great aunt? Does it inspire you? Does it make you feel connected to someone you loved? And that plant by the window, and the way the afternoon light falls across the room, and the color of that pillow. What do those things do in your body?
When someone begins to ask those questions, their home starts to shift. Not because they bought anything new. Because consciousness entered the room. And what was depressing can become a place of comfort, creativity, connection to ancestors, a sense of being genuinely held. That is a material environment becoming a spiritual one. And you, as a space holder, can open that door.
Group created altar for my workshop “Live a Spiritually Guided Life”
at Schumacher College, Devon UK, 2011
Or take the person carrying high credit card debt from overconsumption. They keep buying things, another pair of shoes, another thing they don’t need, and they don’t know why they can’t stop. They come to you ashamed. But there is always a why. Maybe that second pair of shoes was bought right after a promotion. And what they were actually buying in that moment was a feeling. Pride. A sense of their own power. Playfulness. Sensuality. Excellence.
They were reaching for something real, something they deserved to feel, but they didn’t know how to name it or hold it consciously. So they needed another pair. And another.
When you help someone see what they are actually reaching for in the buying, something shifts. Those shoes become imbued with that quality. They become enough. Because the real need is finally being met with awareness. The loop of more slows down. Not because they denied themselves, but because they finally received what they were looking for in a pair of new shoes.
These are not edge cases. They are the everyday costs of a split that most people don’t even know they are carrying.
And the opportunity for you as a space holder is this: as you begin to do your own work of integrating the spiritual and the material, you can see this split in your clients immediately. You know what it looks like. You know what it costs them. And you know how to help them find the thread that connects what they do, what they own, what they wear, what they spend, back to what they most deeply are.
That is the healing. Personal and collective. The split between spirit and matter is old, and it is costing us dearly. Healing it, in ourselves and in the people we hold, is part of how consciousness evolves.
Try This
I invite you to bring these three questions into your own life:
Money: What is your honest, unguarded relationship with money right now?
Not what you think it should be, what it actually is.
Do you feel free with it?
Contracted?
Ashamed?
Curious?
Just notice.
High tea (or your version of it): Where in your life do you allow yourself material delight, the kind that requires someone’s attention and care, including your own?
And where do you hold back, as if material enjoyment lacks any emotional fulfillment or spiritual inspiration?
Fashion (or how you show up): How do you relate to getting dressed each morning? Is it an act of intention, a task to get through, or something you’ve decided doesn’t belong in the same category as your spiritual life?
You don’t have to overhaul anything. Just bring a little more consciousness to what you’re already doing.
I’d love to hear from you.
Are you also a lover of money, high tea, or fashion?
Does one of these feel charged for you?
Comment and tell me. These conversations are some of my favorites.
I send your way blessings of delight-filled freedom.
With love,
Anna