Interviewed by the house of souveraine
Melanie (Madhuri) Phillips once took the sannyasin vow. Today she teaches women that wealth belongs inside a spiritual life, and that it begins with learning to receive.
1. You lived in an ashram in India and took the sannyasin vow. What was the relationship to wealth on that path? And what did you have to understand before wealth stopped feeling like something you were supposed to want less of?
I spent six months living in an ashram in India, where I took the sannyasin vow: a commitment to walk the path of renunciation while still living in the world, having a career and taking on all the responsibilities of a worldly life.
The message I absorbed there was that wealth and material possessions belonged to the realm of ego, and that the ego itself was something we were meant to abolish. At least, that was my interpretation, but it felt prevalent. And because I was a very good little disciple, I took it all the way in, and money, wealth and having beautiful things became tangled up with the belief that they weren’t spiritual.
It’s taken me years to unravel that belief system, and in some ways, I am still unwinding it.
What I needed to understand before wealth stopped feeling like something I was supposed to want less of was that there’s no separation. Life is, period.
Spirit isn’t present in the ashram but absent from the bank account. It isn’t found in renunciation but lost in materialism. What matters is our relationship to these things: the motivations, values and standards beneath how we create, hold and use wealth.
I now believe we need more heart-centred, conscious people willing to hold wealth. Wealth is connected to power, influence and decision-making, and when wealth is held by people who care deeply about humanity and the planet, different decisions and a different reality become possible.
We can’t keep shying away from wealth in the name of spirituality. Financial flow allows us to contribute, create and effect change in ways we simply cannot when all of our energy is consumed by survival.
2. You have said you carried ancestral wounding around money. What did you inherit, and how far back did it turn out to go? What did you have to stop believing about yourself for that to land?
I inherited a belief in scarcity and lack, and that you have to work really, really hard for money. And I inherited the belief that other people’s needs are more important than my own.
All of it was rooted in separation.
These stories go back generations on both sides of my family. My grandparents lived through world wars, and my family emigrated from Britain to Canada when I was very young. I can see how narratives of not enough (which may have been the actual truth in previous generations) have travelled forward and how they create contraction and fear: a constant bracing against life, as though something’s always about to be taken away.
The inner work I do around money is some of the deepest spiritual work I’ve ever done for myself and my clients.
Healing our money wounds asks us to get really honest. It reveals where we don’t believe life has our back, where we don’t fully trust Source and where we’re still trying to control, protect, overwork and prove our worth because, underneath it all, we aren’t sure we will be held.
Those are the gaps in our faith. The places where our spiritual beliefs have not yet become something we truly trust and embody.
For me, that work meant recognizing how deeply I had connected worthiness with giving, and how uncomfortable I was with receiving.
I had to stop believing I was only worthy when I gave, produced or performed.
3. You teach that a woman is not separate from what she desires. A woman reading this may be genuinely stuck, and you have known those years yourself, riding a bike because there was no car. What is the first move out of that, and how does she make it without being told her circumstances are her own fault?
I spent decades feeling like there wasn’t enough, and my outer world reflected what I believed was possible for me. I couldn’t afford a car, so I biked all over Vancouver teaching at different yoga studios and exhausting myself. I owned a yoga studio, yet I lived in a dingy basement bachelor suite and ate rice and beans. There were so many experiences in my life where I felt completely stuck.
If that’s where you find yourself now, whatever you do, please don’t turn this into another reason to blame yourself. I’ve been there, and it’s a complete waste of time and energy.
Instead, look honestly at your life and ask: What have I been tolerating that isn’t in alignment with the truth of my magnificence, my lovability or my innate worthiness? Where have I accepted less, abandoned myself or continued participating in something I know is no longer true for me?
Taking responsibility isn’t the same as assigning blame. It doesn’t mean you caused every circumstance or that everything that’s happened to you is your fault.
It means recognizing the choices, patterns and tolerations that are yours, even when they’ve been unconscious, and realizing that you now have the power to choose differently.
That’s the first step toward liberating yourself.
4. Why is receiving the hardest part? A woman can do the inner work, name the pattern, and still close when something good is handed to her. What is going on there?
Receiving can feel so difficult because part of you is still living inside an outdated identity, one shaped by conditioning, beliefs, memories and a nervous system that’s learned that receiving isn’t safe.
Receiving is vulnerable.
Giving feels safer because it allows us to remain useful, needed and in control.
For many women, worthiness has become inseparable from giving. And not simply giving, but overgiving: putting everyone else first, exhausting themselves, martyring themselves to other people’s needs and eventually feeling powerless or victimized by the very dynamic they’ve participated in creating.
It becomes a cycle. I give to prove my worth. I burn myself out. I feel unseen and resentful. And then I give even more, hoping that this time I’ll finally receive the love, recognition or safety I’ve been trying to earn.
But we can move out of this!
It begins with awareness, then working with the identity and subconscious beliefs that tell us who we are allowed to be and what it’s safe for us to have.
This is much of the work I do with my clients: helping them recognize and reprogram those patterns so they can receive without guilt and know that their worth was never dependent upon how much they gave.
5. What is the actual difference between overflow and overdrive? How does a woman know which one she is in, and what changes when she is no longer in overdrive?
Overdrive is performative. It’s rooted in lack and scarcity: the belief that we must push, prove and produce in order to be worthy or safe.
Overflow arises when we’re aligned, balanced and receptive, allowing Source energy to move through us and become its most exalted expression.
A self-aware woman will begin to recognize when she’s in overdrive because she can feel it in her body.
She’s tight, contracted and bracing against life. Her shoulders are raised. Her mind is racing. She feels anxious, overwhelmed and at the mercy of everything being asked of her.
She feels as though she has to keep performing, proving and reaching for an impossible standard of perfection. Her body may begin to show the strain through things like chronic exhaustion, digestive problems, menstrual issues or a dependence on caffeine and stimulants just to keep going.
When she’s no longer living in overdrive, she softens. She opens. Her shoulders drop. Her smile becomes natural again. Energy moves through her without force, pushing or constant stimulation.
She doesn’t perform her worthiness, but becomes a channel, a vessel of the divine.
6. How does a woman know she is not living in her purpose? What is she doing in a normal week that tells her?
A woman often knows she isn’t fully living her purpose because something else keeps tugging at her heart: an idea, desire or calling she can’t let go of, no matter how many times she tries to dismiss it (because it’s rarely logical!).
In an ordinary week, it may feel less dramatic. She might feel flat, as though she’s lost her mojo. She doesn’t quite feel like herself anymore, or perhaps she no longer knows who that self is.
Sometimes her body begins asking for her attention through physical symptoms. Not as punishment, but as an invitation to look more deeply at the choices she’s making and the life she’s living.
7. If a woman reading this takes one thing from you and uses it this week, what is it?
Go to your bathroom mirror, look directly into your own eyes and say, “I love you.”
Keep looking and saying it until you move beyond simply seeing your reflection and begin to truly see yourself (like, really see you).
Do this often. Notice what arises.
Allow yourself to witness you, love you and be fully present with you.
8. Tell me about climbing. When did you start, and what keeps you going back? Does it shape how you think about wealth? If so, how?
I started climbing sporadically eleven years ago, in my 40s. I started dating a rock climbing guide from the States, and we’d meet up and go and climb things together, which was fun but also nerve-wracking.
It wasn’t until we split up that I began to get more curious about climbing and would go out with friends. I really began to enjoy it. It’s taught me so much about my capabilities, and I used it to rewrite my subconscious around my health, as I had an autoimmune condition for nearly a decade that left me exhausted much of the time. So climbing became one of the tools I used to rewire my beliefs and identity about having post-viral fatigue syndrome.
I keep going back because it’s challenging. Perhaps I’m a sucker for punishment. More accurately, I’m super interested in building resilience and activating my potential. Climbing scares me, and I often feel inadequate when I’m on the rock, so
I work on these limiting beliefs and the energetic frequency in real time while climbing. I speak lovingly to myself even when the wounded ego wants to tell me how terrible I am at climbing.
The connection to wealth is that abundance is limitless, and this is what I seek to experience in my life.
Climbing is one avenue for me to transcend my limitations. Despite feeling nervous or scared or out of my element, I keep looking for the next step, the next hold, even when it seems impossible. There’s always a way.
This interview appears in Issue 002, Overflow, with Melanie (Madhuri) Phillips on the cover. Read the full issue.
WISE, WILD & WEALTHY
by Melanie (Madhuri) Phillips
A 6-week financial awakening for women ready to step into overflow, without force, hustle or proving their worth.
Melanie (Madhuri) Phillips has been teaching for more than twenty-five years. Her roots are in Clinical Ayurveda, but the work she does today reaches into identity and the beliefs that shape a woman’s life. She works with women on who they believe themselves to be and what they believe they are allowed to receive.
She was a professional contemporary dancer first. An injury in her final year of university ended her career on stage.
What followed took her to New Zealand and then to India, where she lived in an ashram. She shaved her head and took the sannyasin vow, the path of the monk who stays in the world rather than leaving it.
Later came almost a decade of autoimmune illness that doctors struggled to understand. Melanie turned to Ayurveda because she needed a way to understand her own body. What began as survival eventually became part of her life’s work.
Her life has also included profound loss. After the sudden death of a former partner, she wrote Living After Loss. She has written three books.
Today her work has taken her to wealth, which she speaks about as an energy, something a woman calibrates herself to rather than only earns.
She also climbs.
Photography: Millissa Martin
