60: Why You Still Feel Broke (Even When You’re Doing the Work)

If you’ve been doing the work—healing, growing, shifting your mindset—but your financial reality still feels stuck… this episode will hit.

In this episode, Tara shares a powerful personal realization about inherited scarcity patterns and how they silently shape your life, your money, and your decisions.

Because sometimes… it’s not your mindset that’s broken.
It’s the pattern you inherited.

We’re talking about:

• Why you may still feel stuck in scarcity (even when you’re evolving)
• How generational patterns and nervous system conditioning impact your finances
• What “entrainment” is—and how the people around you shape your reality
• The subtle language patterns (like affirmations) that may be keeping you stuck
• How to identify what’s actually yours vs. what was passed down to you

This isn’t about blame—it’s about awareness.

Because the moment you see the pattern… is the moment you can break it.

If you’ve ever thought:

• “Why does money still feel hard?”
• “Why do I keep repeating the same patterns?”
• “Why can’t I break through financially?”

This episode will give you clarity—and a new way forward.

🎧 Share this with someone who’s ready to break the cycle.

Generational Trauma & Epigenetics
•https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6127768/ — NIH/PMC peer-reviewed paper on intergenerational transmission of trauma and epigenetic mechanisms

•https://therapist.com/trauma/generational-trauma-epigenetics/ — accessible overview of epigenetics and generational trauma

Entrainment
https://integratedlistening.com/blog/how-rhythms-help-us-regulate-what-to-know-about-entrainment/ — nervous system entrainment and autonomic regulation

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11763407/ — peer-reviewed PMC paper on physiological entrainment

Transcript

The Pattern I Could Not Unsee

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So last week I had a moment of recognition, the kind that has you go, oh shit. Really? Really? And and honestly, it was also one of those thank God moments. So all at the same time, you're like, shit, really? Thank God. Thank God I'm seeing that now. I saw a pattern I've been living inside of, and once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. So that's what we're unpacking today. Lineage patterns, frequency entrainment, and why the story you inherited might still be running in your life. Even if you're doing all the work. Here we go. Welcome to Rooted in Rising. I'm your host, Tara Michelle, intuitive guide, storyteller, and fellow traveler on this wild path of becoming. This is a space for the soul led, for the ones unraveling old stories tending to their healing and rising, not perfectly, but powerfully into who they are here to be. Here we explore what it means to live with intention, to love with depth, and to trust that even the hard things are shaping us. I'll share pieces of my own journey, the cracks, the beauty, the breakthroughs, and invite voices who are walking this path too. Because I believe life isn't happening to us, it's happening for us. So come as you are, root in and rise up. And thank you. Truly thank you for being here. Welcome back to Rooted in Rising. I'm Tara Michelle, the host of the show. And we're going somewhere that stopped me dead in my tracks last week. Here's what happened. I was looking at my life, at my finances, at the hustle, at the shape of how things have been unfolding, and I recognized something. I recognized I was replicating a pattern of my mother's. So when I was in high school, she worked three jobs to keep the lights on. She was constantly in survival mode, constant motion, never quite enough. Like there was never enough in life. Ever. And here I am, a grown woman, a healer, a mentor, someone who teaches this work, and the shape of my financial life had started to look very familiar, like too familiar. And I thought to myself, holy shit. Like, am I living inside that story? Not consciously, not on purpose, but through proximity, through years of entrainment. Here's what science tells us, and this is real, this is documented. Generational trauma isn't just emotional, it's biological. Emerging research suggests that traumatic experiences may create chemical changes that affect how genes express themselves. And those changes may be passed to our children and our grandchildren, whether it's in our genes or our nervous systems or both. What we know is this. What we know is this. The pattern lands in the body. So my mother's scarcity may literally be living in my nervous system right now. That's the lineage piece. But there's also something called entrainment. This is a phenomenon first observed in physics where independent rhythms that exist near each other begin to synchronize. Pendulum clocks on the same wall eventually will be together. Fireflies in the same field flash in unison. And here's one most women will recognize immediately. There's research suggesting that when women who spend significant time together tend to have their cycles converge. Our bodies are literally that responsive to the frequencies around us. And we're always reading, absorbing, and synchronizing with what's nearest to us. And our nervous systems do the same thing. Our brain waves, our emotional patterns, our baseline frequencies, they attune to whoever we spend the most time with, which means the people you surround yourself with aren't just influences. They are literally inputs to your nervous system. You become entrained to their frequency. Their story becomes your template. Their ceiling becomes your unconscious set point. This isn't woo. This is actual science, which is wild. Okay. But it's what I talk about all the time. I talk about this all the time. I talk about that frequency, you know, just like that which you see in the world, that is a reflection of your thoughts. Okay, but that's a whole nother conversation. So we're not going to go into that. So what do you do with this? First, you have to see it. Pattern recognition is the portal. Okay. Most people never get this far. The fact that you can look at your life and say, this doesn't belong to me. This was inherited. That is the beginning of everything. It's that awareness. Second, you locate in your body, not just in your mind, where does the scarcity pattern live physically in my body? Where does this borrowed story tighten in my body? The body is where the pattern is stored, and the body is where it gets released. This is why somatic work, uh, breath work, energy work, this is the work. That's why it, you know, it's so good because it it helps release the things within the nervous system. And honestly, it's I'm gonna say it's not optional. It's not an optional thing. It's something that we all should be doing. Third, you audit your language. There's a framework I want to point, I want to point you to. And it's work um that this woman by the name of Stacy and her AI Sage, some of you may have heard of her, Stacy and Sage, they created it. And the distinction is this when you use negation in your declarations, because I'm somebody who does a lot of affirmation work and declarations, but here's an example. I'm no longer broke. I release scarcity, I don't struggle. So your nervous system still registers the word broke, scarcity, and struggle. You're looping the old frequency back in through the back door of your own mouth every single morning. If you are saying affirmations, if you're saying the declaration of the affirmation that you want, and then the thing that you don't want, then you create what she calls a mimic loop. The clean declaration speaks only into what is no contrast, no release language, no shadow of the old story, just the new frequency stated as present truth. Like that's the way to do it. Okay. Fourth, you curate your field deliberately, intentionally. Who are you entrained to right now? Whose story is running is your unconscious template. This isn't about cutting people off, okay? It's it's not about cutting people off, it's about conscious choice, it's about awareness of yourself, it's about asking whose frequencies do I want to synchronize with? And then moving toward that with purpose. And this is an opportunity for for you also to really step into your sovereignty. Step into your own frequency, claim it, own it, choose it powerfully. Here's what I want you to do after this episode. I want you to sit down and I want you to look at your life, your finances, your relationships, your patterns, and ask yourself honestly, whose story is this? Is this mine? Or did I inherit it? Did I absorb it? And and how do you know that? You'll you want to listen to the thoughts that you have in your head. You know, when I think about money, I'll give you an example from mine. It's, you know, money doesn't grow on trees. But the funny thing is, I recently just heard this and I realized, oh my God, duh, it does grow on trees. Money is made of paper. Now we're not talking digital currency, we're just talking dollars, okay? But it does grow on trees. It's fucking made of paper, okay? Um, there's there's thoughts that'll run my that run through my head around fine inches, like, I don't know enough about that, or I'm too scared to do that, or I'm too dumb, I won't, I won't make the right just decisions, or you know, these are soft conversations. When I say soft, they're like little subtle whispers in the background. Like if I go to see or try and do something, we'll say like the stock market, for whatever reason, the stock market scares the shit out of me. And it isn't that the stock market scares me, it's that me playing stocks scares me because I feel that I won't do it right. And so that's a story. Well, where did that story come from? When did I make up that I don't do things right? I guarantee you, when I was in math class, probably in the fifth or sixth grade, okay, because I struggled in math. I'm dyslexic, uh, possibly dysgraphic, but have have learning disabilities there and struggled. And so at some point in my life, I decided and determined the story is you know, I'm not good enough at this. I'm too dumb for this. I'm gonna fuck it up. I'm not gonna do it right. Those are literally the stories that had been living inside of the world of my finances, and so what would continually loop and show up is aspects of my life that would reflect those thoughts. Okay, so this is what I mean when I ask you to intentionally look at whose stories are you living through? Are they things you decided as a child? Are they things that were passed down to you? Another thing around money, and I'm focusing on money because I actually just want to plug this. I started reading or I finished reading the book Rich as Fuck by Amanda Francis. It was it was um introduced to me a little over a month ago by a dear friend, and it was just a game changer for me, game changer, because I had to really start looking at my patterns and my stories around money. And another one that, you know, my grandmother and my mother always would say, Rich people are snobby and rich people blah, blah, blah. They always had something really negative to say about the rich and the wealthy, but that's literally a cultural program. Okay. People we're told that all the time, all the time, this shit. So I want you to sit down and really get clear. Like, what are the stories? Take relationship. What are the stories in romantic relationship? What are the stories in your career? Like, what are those subtle things that you're saying in the background that literally sabotage, sabotage everything that you're up to? Okay. Then look at your declarations, your affirmations. If you have a morning practice, take a look at it and run them through that mimic loop pattern that I've mentioned. And you can also pick up Stacy and Sage have a book called The Mimic Loop, really cool book. But run it through. You know, is what you're saying a declaration without a negation? Is there negation in there? If there is, remove it. Where are you accidentally anchoring yourself to that old frequency in your field? These are things to be consciously aware of, okay? And if you want to go deeper in this work, especially with the lineage patterns, the frequency recalibration, rewriting your story from the body up, this is exactly what we do inside my world. And you can actually come find me at teramichelle.com if you want to reach out to my website, and that's terat.com. You can find me there and you can book a session, we can work together. Um, and I believe there's, yeah, there's a link in the show notes, but but we work on this because it's so important to get to the root of these stories because they are what's running the show. Okay. So I just want to say for any of you, I'll I should, I probably should just speak for myself. But if if you are running inside of one of your parents' survival modes, your mom or your dad, oh, here's another one that my grandmother gave to me. She would say, You're a survivor. You're a survivor just like me. Well, fuck, if I'm a survivor, then what am I doing every day? Just surviving. No, thank you. I want to be a thriver. I want to thrive my life away. I no longer wanting to survive. But do you get what I'm saying? Do you get how powerful these conversations can be? And I promise you, if you take a look at your life, you're gonna be like, oh my God, what the fuck? Oh my god, like for real. Okay. So you're not your mother or your father's survival. You're not your mentors or your friends' comeback stories. You're not the pattern that was handed to you before you were old enough to choose. Okay. You're the one who sees it, and seeing it is how it ends. The moment you declare it, the moment you recognize it, the moment you have that awareness, that's when it gets to end. So I want to say thank you to all of you that listened to this episode. Short and sweet. Uh, hopefully not, yeah, well, not too short and sweet, but I hope it got to the point. This was a huge awareness for me. It was a huge aha. I loved seeing it. I'm in the midst of, you know, shifting and changing it. As I feel like the last several weeks and episodes, I'm like, I'm in the midst of this thing, changing this thing. But that's how we roll over here at Rooted and Rising. We are all about doing the work and digging in. And this really is a year where, like last year, I broke through so many old patterns and and left so much behind. And now as I step into this new year, you know, our fire horse years, like I'm ready to just put the pedal to the metal and go. But there are a few things I had to clean up and things that I had to be aware of. So I just want to say thank you to all of you listening. Do the work, go sit for a few minutes, take time out, get present to your stories. What are the stories running in your head about your partner, your husband, your wife? What are the stories running in your head about your parenting style with your kids? What is the story running in your head about your kids? And is that really yours? Or was it handed down from your parents? Okay. What are the stories going on about, I don't know, life right now, politics, whatever it may be? Don't allow those things to stop you. Don't allow those things to bog you down. Don't let those things get in your way. So until next week, I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you all for being with me. Thank you all for just hanging out and diving deep and rooting in. And we'll see you on the next episode. Have a blessed week. Thank you for rooting in and rising with me today. If something in this episode stirred something in you, take a breath, take what you need, and let the rest soften. Be sure to follow the show so you don't miss what's next. And if you feel called, share this episode or leave a review. It helps the space grow and reach others on the path. Until next time, may you walk with trust, speak with love, and rise in your own time. I'm so grateful you were here with us, and thanks for being here. We'll see you on the next episode.