“I have today to love my life. Something really good is going to happen to me today. I can feel it. Miracles big and small, I notice them all. Yes, yes, yes! Thank you.”

Her voice is cheery and soothing. It always perks me right up for the day ahead.

“I have today to make a lot of money. I see money everywhere I look. Money comes into my life easily and effortlessly from multiple sources on a continuous basis. I make money when I sleep, I make money when I open my email, I make money…”

My alarm goes off for the second time, and I’m forced to stop listening to my daily dose of Money Magnet Mantra Meditation by Diane Forster.

I pull out my pods and get out of bed. I go to my front door through the front room, where I’ve cleared my money corner (according to the feng shui gurus), opposite which I have removed the mirror (Reflects the good away from your house!) and where I have placed instead a picture of a ship coming into harbour (I can’t remember where I got this one from, but you gather your pearls where you find them) and then I open the front door and welcome in good things and notice the abundance of the world around me.

The manifestation moguls say you should see all of nature in its abundance. Since I have a tree growing outside my house, I would usually focus on its many leaves as evidence of this.

But since it’s winter, I consider the blanket of rotting leaves on the ground instead. One has to make do, I suppose.

On the steps outside my front door are also two little Fu dogs (thrifted). At the back door is my Maneki Neko cat, which welcomes visitors. (Do you know how difficult it is to find a cat welcoming in money, which is actually the one waving its right paw, not the left, which is the one we most commonly find in South Africa?)

Afterwards, I make tea and settle down at my computer, under which I have stuck a R20 note. I get to work.

After doing all of this, am I, in fact, seeing, as per Diane Forster’s message, money everywhere I look? No. Am I making money with every email I open? Also no.

Has all this appropriated abundance theatre – the feng shui, the cats, the dogs, the lucky pennies – done anything at all to bring in actual hard cash? Absolutely not.

Well, not anything I could prove in a court of law. What it has done is shift my perspective on how I think about money and abundance.

Not just as a paycheque that I may or may not have and not as something that I do or don’t have enough of at any given time, but as something that is more than the paper and metal in my wallet or the digital numbers on a screen.

Something that is more closely aligned with thought and perceived value than with a gold bar.

The metaphysical woo-woo gurus will tell you that money is energy; that it’s a shared hallucination that we tap into or not, depending on our own stories of worth and value.

I think there’s something to this. Say what you will about Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki’s take on the influence of your childhood money story rings true.

Think back to your childhood. Did your folks talk comfortably about money around the dinner table, or was it a hush-hush subject?

Was money considered fun, serious, a problem, difficult to get or something to hold onto?

I didn’t come into the world with a negative view of money. I didn’t question where money came from, how much you had to work for it, or how morally right or wrong it was.

And yet by the time I was a teen, I’d been taught – directly and indirectly – by my family that getting money was hard work, that it was scarce, that it turned people “bad”, that we weren’t the fortunate ones, that debt and risk and hard cash wasn’t polite dinner table conversation and definitely not anything to have fun with.

That has undoubtedly affected how I deal with and make money in my life.

What these symbolic trinkets and affirmations do for me is help me rewire my own story about money, from one of lack and discomfort and dull hard work, to one that sees wealth as more than just money, and money as fun and interesting and good.

Say what you will about a waving cat and a wild-faced Fu dog, but they’re really quite jolly.

It might not make me any richer in cash terms, but it does make money more fun to think about.

The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author, and do not mirror the views and opinions of BrightRock.