Asking Without the Stack: Money Shame and Charging for Spiritual Work | Salt & Sovereignty Ep. 26

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I spent the better part of an hour in front of an empty box, unable to type a price. It wasn't my principles that stopped me. It was a much older sentence about the kind of person I am with money.

In this episode I look at what I found when I went back to the thing I'd been building: layer after layer of extra promises, piled on so that nobody could say I was asking for too much. I've started calling it the stack. It's the favor returned in advance, the apology before the question, the explanation nobody asked for. It's everything we pile on top of a request so we never have to make it plainly. Along the way: money shame that got passed down without anyone meaning it to, the quiet rule that says being paid for spiritual work makes it less real, and why a lifetime of yeses we worked for leaves us with no clean evidence about our own worth.

Chapters

0:00 If every yes came after you'd stacked something

0:29 Beliefs that sound like principles

1:39 An hour in front of an empty box

3:47 An old sentence about money

6:43 The scaffolding I built instead

9:20 The stack

12:08 Not one clean data point

13:07 When "free" is also a hiding place