If your relationship with wealth has always felt like something you were on the outside of, this conversation might change the way you look at money entirely.

A story that started before I even knew it did

Money has always been complicated for me – and it started young.

My grandfather was passionate about the market. He did really well. He bought Apple stock when it was practically nothing and cursed himself later for selling too soon. And one day he gave me money and said, I’ll only give this to you if you play in the market. So I did. I was really little. I bought JP Morgan stock, made a couple hundred bucks, and thought it was the most exciting thing in the world.

But then I watched my father lose everything in the housing crisis. I saw what it did to him. He pulled his money out fast and had a massive reaction. And that moment created a sense of instability in my field that never fully left. It planted a story that the market was dangerous, that money could disappear overnight, and that maybe the safest thing to do was stay far away from it.

I carried that story for a long time without realizing it was running in the background of every financial decision I made – or didn’t make.

The conditioning runs deeper than we think

This week’s episode of The World Needs Your Medicine cracked something open for me.

Erin West joined me for one of the most grounding and eye-opening conversations I’ve had about women and money – and it went so much deeper than financial strategy. Erin is a Princeton graduate, former intellectual property lawyer, and single mom who walked away from a high-achieving career that left her numb and redesigned her entire life. She now slow travels the world with her two kids, trades in the financial markets a few hours a week, and runs Humans Who Trade – a global community where she teaches women to engage with the markets through the body, the nervous system, and the subconscious.

What Erin brought into this conversation is something I’ve never heard anyone frame this way.

She talked about how girls are socialized from a very young age to save money and spend it on staying beautiful – because beauty is our currency, our ticket, the thing that’s supposed to keep us safe. Meanwhile, boys are taught to expand, to invest, to build. Her own son is 12 years old and already has a plan for living on passive income by 40. When she asked me what I was thinking about at 12… I was thinking about boys, cute outfits, and concerts I wasn’t allowed to go to.

That contrast says everything.

When your body holds the money story

One of the things that struck me most was how Erin teaches trading – not through the news, not through spreadsheets, not through the cutthroat energy we’ve been shown our whole lives. She teaches through the body.

She described the market as a field of collective nervous systems. And once you learn to tune into that field, you can feel it – the same way you’d feel into the energy of a room, or a relationship, or a wave.

She shared that the most profitable traders on the London Stock Exchange weren’t the ones with the best data – they were the ones with the most precise interoception. They could feel what was happening in their bodies and they acted on it the fastest.

And when she said that, something clicked for me. So much of what we’re taught about money is about externalizing authority. Read one more book. Follow one more expert. Find the right indicator. But what Erin is saying is that the knowing is already in the body – and that women are often naturally attuned to it. We’ve just never been told that this intelligence is valid in the world of money.

The $13 million moment that changed everything

Erin shared a story that I found so powerful.

She was in the zone. Trading beautifully, consistently, dancing in her kitchen in a T-shirt and spending two hours a morning. She checked her numbers one Friday and the projection said she was on track to make $13 million that year.

By Monday, she had a six-figure loss. She went into freeze, removed her safety order, and sat there the entire trading day watching it go against her. And at the end of the day… she felt relief.

That moment was the one that showed her – trading is all about the nervous system. It’s all about the subconscious. Because what had happened wasn’t a bad trade. It was her identity catching up to her. She didn’t yet believe she was the kind of person who makes $13 million trading two hours a day. So her system brought her back down to where it felt safe.

When she told that story, I felt it in my whole body. Because I’ve lived that pattern too – in different ways, in different seasons. That moment when you start to expand beyond what your nervous system recognizes as “you,” and something inside pulls you back. Not because you failed, but because your body doesn’t have a reference point for that level of receiving yet.

Why receiving is harder than losing

This is the thread that went the deepest for me.

Erin said something that I keep coming back to… people tend to have a harder time receiving and making money with ease than they do with losing. Because loss is familiar. A lot of us have done hard things. We have a high capacity for struggle. But receiving without efforting? That challenges everything we’ve been taught about our worth.

She talked about how, in her breath work sessions, one of the prompts that creates the biggest somatic reaction in the room is simply this: I am worthy of receiving just because I am.

And I felt the weight of that. Because so many of us have tied our value to what we give, what we produce, how hard we work. The idea that we could receive – really receive – without earning it first… that’s where the deepest work lives.

The system was never built for us to have this

There was a moment in our conversation where I asked Erin why, if the research supports that interoception and body-based intelligence leads to better financial outcomes, it’s not being taught that way. And her answer was clear.

The patriarchy requires women to donate their free labor to uphold it. Women still earn less, still do twice the unpaid household labor, still carry almost all of the invisible load. If women had more money, we’d have more freedom. And why would a system that depends on our unpaid labor want us to be free?

That landed hard. Not as a conspiracy, but as a pattern that’s been running for thousands of years. Erin traced it all the way back to the dawn of patriarchal systems around 6,000 years ago – when actual food scarcity required a shift from collaborative, matriarchal living to competitive, domination-based systems. And that survival-level conditioning has been passed down ever since, generation to generation, epigenetically, because it was tied to staying alive.

But she also said something that filled me with hope… she believes we are in the midst of coming back. That we are literally in the process of unwinding 6,000 years of scarcity conditioning. And there are pathways right in front of us – trading being one of them – that are showing us another way.

$54 trillion is coming

Near the end of our conversation, Erin shared something potent…

In the next 15 to 25 years, $125 trillion in wealth is being transferred as baby boomers pass on. Of that, $54 trillion is projected to go to surviving spouses – 95% of whom are women. On top of that, another $37 trillion is projected to go to younger women in that same period.

This is the largest wealth transfer in recorded history. And the bulk of it is going to women.

When I heard that, I felt this rising in my chest. Because it means that the women alive right now – us – have an unprecedented opportunity to bring our way of being into these systems. Our creativity, our nurturing, our capacity to amplify and multiply. What happens when that energy enters the financial markets, the economy, the structures that have been shaped almost entirely by masculine energy for thousands of years?

Erin said it best… isn’t that the change we’ve all been waiting for?

Coming home to your own relationship with money

This conversation shifted something in me that I didn’t expect.

I came into it knowing that I had gaps in my financial awareness. But I left it understanding that those gaps aren’t personal failings – they’re the result of a very old, very deliberate conditioning that has kept women separated from their own financial power.

And I also left with a new feeling in my body… that money doesn’t have to feel like a grind, or a chase, or something I hand to someone else to manage. It can be a current I learn to feel. A relationship I come home to. A place where my body’s intelligence is not just welcome, but essential.

If you’ve been feeling disconnected from money, afraid of it, bored by it, or like it’s just not your thing… I hope this episode gives you permission to reconsider. Not from a place of pressure or productivity, but from a place of remembering that your body already knows more than you’ve been taught to trust.

This episode airs on March 3rd, and you won’t want to miss it.

xoxo, Lauren