The Poverty Within
“How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?”
How you gonna win, when you ain't right within? How you gonna win in your relationships? How you gonna win with your money, your career, your business? How you gonna win, when you ain't right within?
But first, we have to ask ourselves: What does it even mean to win?
Society has told us what winning looks like. It's given us values, metrics, benchmarks. But what is true winning? What is true success? What is that grounded in? Who shaped those definitions? Who and what do they serve?
But before we get to true wealth, we need to name the ways we are broke. Not broke in our bank accounts, though that's real too. I'm talking about spiritual poverty. The kind that fragments us. The kind that makes us feel broken even when everything looks polished and put together from the outside. Maybe you're reading this thinking, "I'm not broke. I have money. I worked hard for what I have." And maybe you did. But ask yourself: When was the last time you felt at peace? When was the last time you felt truly connected? When did you last feel like enough?
This spiritual poverty has many roots. Sometimes it comes from childhood—parents who couldn't model what they never received. Sometimes it's ancestral—inherited trauma living in our bodies, patterns passed down through bloodlines. Sometimes it shows up in relationships that mirror systems of domination. Often from those systems themselves—white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy that sever us from our roots, traditions, land. Personal pain and systemic harm are inseparable.
We all carry this poverty, whether we're conscious of it or not. This is because we've all inherited a racialized caste system that we first learn to unconsciously cast upon ourselves before we then cast it upon each other. Here's what I see: We've inherited contradictory responses to poverty and wealth. This keeps us disconnected from ourselves, each other, and our source—which makes us vulnerable to aspiring to the values of the hierarchical society that tell us how and what it means to win.
Look at how this plays out.
Some of us keep reaching for wealth that can never satisfy. Grasping at power built on the backs of others. Clinging to old money stained with stolen land and dehumanization. This kind of "winning" is built on hatred, violence, bigotry, and greed. There's a paranoia that comes with it. A fragility. An insecurity that no amount of wealth can soothe. As Toni Morrison said, there are "bereft" souls seated in that kind of wealth. They have everything and nothing at once. They don't know authentic connection. They're delusional about their own fragility. They're terrified of losing what they have because deep down, they know it was never really theirs.
Then there are many of us who are made to feel inferior due to the material scarcity we experience living in cycles of oppression. We see the ugly and inhumane side of winning and we don't want any parts. Some of us decide money itself is bad—shameful, to be denied. So we rail against the system so hard that we unconsciously cut ourselves off from opportunities to build power that could be shared, circular, communal.
Others of us chase the very wealth that oppressed us. We adopt the values of those who caused harm. We inherit someone else's standards instead of honoring our own truth. We make money and power king and God when they were only ever meant to be tools.
All paths lead to the same place.
We find ourselves ritually broke. Because money isn't the root of all evil…the love of money is. The worship of it. The hoarding of it. The willingness to dehumanize others to get it. So let's talk about what keeps us there.
What Keeps Us Broke
What ultimately keeps us broke is this: we have forgotten who we are.
We're disconnected from our roots, our ancestry, our history. We carry ancestral wounds in our nervous systems, trauma responses we didn't create but inherited. We've been severed from our traditions, our ways of community, our relationship to the land—the practices that once kept us whole and connected. This disconnection didn't happen by accident. It serves power. Systems of domination—white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy profit from our forgetting, from our shame, from our isolation. When we don't know who we are, we're easier to control, easier to exploit, easier to keep broke. And without knowing where we come from, we can't know where we're going. We can't define winning on our own terms because we've lost the map our ancestors left us.
This spiritual poverty shows up in patterns:
We feel separated from one another, thinking we're inferior or superior instead of recognizing our interconnection. We carry shame and can't face what broke us or our relationship to power and privilege. We live in denial, in the delusions of white supremacy, patriarchy, all the systems that profit from our fragmentation. We lack self-awareness, self-regulation, and the ability to sit in discomfort. We're afraid of our shadows. We're trapped in binary thinking—us versus them, rich versus poor, worthy versus unworthy. We're addicted to comparison, competition, comfort. We've lost our ability to care about what doesn't directly affect us.
We police, punish, and control instead of connecting. We're driven by unchecked envy, selfishness, and the impulse to power over others. This is what keeps us broke—no matter how much money we have. It's not about your bank account. It's about your spirit. Your ability to sit in truth. Your spirit of generosity. It's about being connected to your ancestry. It's about being connected to something greater than yourself.
The Personal Work of Healing
We can name these systems. We can understand how poverty consciousness functions. But understanding isn't healing. Healing happens when you look at the shame you carry and ask: Where did this come from? Is it mine, or did I inherit it?
It happens when you notice the unworthiness that drives you and choose to release it instead of prove it wrong. It happens when you recognize the scarcity patterns—the overworking, the people-pleasing, the perfectionism—and understand they're survival strategies you learned, not truths about who you are. This is the work of self-reclamation: not fixing what's broken, but healing what was wounded. Not becoming someone new, but returning to who you've always been beneath the conditioning.
And this work isn't meant to be done alone. Our poverty consciousness teaches us isolation; prosperity consciousness remembers that healing happens in community, in relationship, in the sacred space of witnessing and being witnessed.
What Does It Mean to Win?
What are the true luxuries of life?
Peace. Connection. Joy that isn't earned but simply experienced. Pleasure without shame. Time that's yours. Belonging, the knowing that you're enough, exactly as you are.
First, the ability to define winning on your own terms—that's power, this is luxury. So I want you to consider: How did your ancestors before the pain, before the fracture how did they define abundance and success? What was winning to them? What about your values and what do they say about what it means to live well?
This is where prosperity consciousness comes in.
It's the practice of transforming poverty consciousness—the internalized scarcity, the inherited shame, the fragmentation into wholeness. Into connection. Into the embodied knowing that you belong and are already enough. It's interrogating your value systems: What am I rooted in and why? How do I see myself in relationship to others? Do I honor our shared humanity, or do I only look out for myself? What are the true luxuries of life? What if we started to slow down, to look around into nature, to see how there is enough for all of us?
This might mean recognizing that the 60-hour work weeks you're proud of are actually your grandmother's survival strategy—ancestral trauma living through you. She had to work that hard to survive. But you? You're choosing it to prove you're worthy. That's poverty consciousness. Prosperity consciousness is choosing rest without guilt and trusting you're still enough.
It might look like noticing that you won't ask for help because you learned early that needing people makes you weak. That's inherited poverty. Prosperity consciousness is building interdependent relationships where care flows both ways. It could be understanding that your perfectionism isn't about excellence—it's about terror. Terror rooted in systems that told your ancestors they had to be twice as good to be considered half as worthy. Prosperity consciousness is releasing the need to be perfect and claiming your right to be human. Prosperity consciousness is recognizing that we already have everything we need to be whole not that we have all the resources we deserve, but that our worth, our belonging, our humanity isn't something we have to acquire. It's already ours.
And yes—material poverty is real. Bills are real. Hunger is real. I'm not spiritualizing away actual need. But even as we fight for material justice, we can refuse to internalize the poverty consciousness that says our worth is in our productivity, our bank accounts, our proximity to power. We can decide on what makes us wealthy and what it means to win.
This is the work. Not escaping poverty, but transforming it from the inside out. Not chasing wealth, but remembering what true prosperity actually is. That's what it means to move from poverty consciousness to prosperity consciousness. That's the revolution.
Before we can truly be wealthy, we have to be honest about the ways we are broke. Name them. Face them. And begin the work of healing the poverty within.
This is the work I do with people in prosperity coaching sessions—helping you name what keeps you broke, face the patterns you've inherited, and build a new relationship with wealth from the inside out. If you're ready to begin, book a session. Subscribe to the newsletter for more tools on the journey from poverty consciousness to prosperity consciousness.