Maybe pricing was never about affordability

A realization about pricing that deeply transformed how I witness my work.

Image created by the author using AI

There’s been a massive debate about charging for your work in spiritual spaces. For years now.

Should you charge for your work? Should you not?

Is it purer if it is offered freely?
Does the sanctity of the space reduce if we charge?
Or should we see it like a business and charge our worth?

Everywhere I look, the conversation keeps circling these questions.

I sat with the same confusion for years, too.

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My grandfather and father-in-law are both astrologers. And all their life, they never charged a single penny for their service.

They had stable 9–5 jobs, serving people on the side through word of mouth whenever time permitted. Mostly taking time away from their families. They simply helped whoever arrived.

Every spiritual person around me did the same. They volunteered. They served. They either had a 9-5 or survived on donations if they were men. Women took time from their families, or they served fully in the temples.

Coming from such circumstances, it was no wonder that during my early days in business, I kept struggling to price my services.

Charging my full price for everyone felt wrong. Giving it for free felt wrong, too. The soul simply didn’t allow it.

So instead, I did the next best thing.

In the discovery calls, I asked, “This is my price. Can you pay?” with my power, my being and confidence shrinking. If they could, they did. Otherwise, I’d ask, “What’s your budget?” and take them as scholarship clients.

Somewhere inside, something always felt…off. Even though I loved what I did, even though I knew I was walking my purpose, it didn’t feel a billion per cent right. Now, looking back, of course, I had to walk that path to learn some crucial soul lessons.

Over the last 2 years, though, a realisation has been settling in layers. The kind that doesn’t arrive in one big moment. It just keeps showing up again and again until you can’t unsee it, until you can feel deeply in your body, not just your mind.

For some people, it is in their soul purpose not to charge for their spiritual services (or any service). And if they do, the money earned from it will not stay anyway because that’s not the path they were born for.

And for others (like me)…I have to charge for my services. It needs to be aligned. When I shrink my power, assuming I’m accommodating others, the energy of the service doesn’t give its full impact. It actually demeans the work I do, and I’m not respecting the energy that flows through me.

That’s my path.

Once I started seeing this clearly, I began to notice the most common question in my sessions

What about affordability???

“My work is meant for so many people. It’s transformative. I can feel it. I would never want pricing to be a barrier for people who can’t afford it.”

I’ve heard different versions of this statement a billion times now. From friends, clients, everywhere.

But here’s the thing.

Your work is NOT for everyone.

Yes, yes, yes… many of you have read this statement multiple times.

But I don’t think most people truly understand it.

Every offer of yours is a frequency. It comes through you for a specific reason, to transform specific lives. Including yours.

It’s NOT for everyone.

And I’m not talking about the offers you have in your mind that you want to release just because someone else is doing it.

I’m talking about the ideas that show up in the middle of the night. Or the moment you wake up in the morning. The ones you’ve been procrastinating on for months. The ones that once you start implementing…you can’t stop.

One of my clients finished writing about her second offer in a Word document and launched it within the span of three hours. Out of the blue, five people randomly joined her cohort. Now she’s already being called to run the second batch.

When such an offer comes through, I can bet all my lifetime savings that if you sit quietly with your soul’s voice, it will give you all the answers you’re looking for.

• Structure.

• Who it’s meant for.

• Words to describe it.

• Number of spots (if any).

• And yes…even the price.

Your soul is always fucking precise. You just need to listen, trust and believe.

For example, when I launched Unspoken Selves last year, I had spent months and a ridiculous amount of energy creating it. Logically, it should have been a $30 or $40 product.

Logically.

But the soul was specific.

$9.

Not one penny more. Not one penny less.

With my 1:1 work, it has been the same.

At the beginning of 2025, I was charging $1500 for four sessions. Then, around February or March, there was a deep calling to reduce it to $500 for four sessions. Literally one-third of my previous price. Later in October, there was another nudge to increase it by $750 for four sessions.

When I first lowered it, the mind immediately jumped in with its own logic.

“Oh it’s better to cater to six clients paying $500 than two paying $1500. What are you going to do during that time anyway? Just sit around?”

What surprised me most in that moment was how disrespectful I was being to myself. About my time, energy and frequency that came through.

But deep down, I still knew this price had come through for a reason. And it did.

Looking back now, I know I would not have gotten the chance to work with some truly beautiful souls otherwise. It wouldn’t have been the right match.

When I increased my prices later, two new clients entered my world almost immediately.

But the moment that hit me the hardest happened on a discovery call. We were speaking about the work, about what she was moving through. And then the topic of pricing came up.

I could literally feel my own energy dip while talking about the price. Of course, she noticed. That’s the thing about working with empaths and highly sensitive people, isn’t it? Nothing can really be hidden.

She paused and said something I’ll probably never forget.

“Just because you don’t trust your prices, I’m not going to take it as a reason to not trust our work together. I believe in it fully. And that’s enough.”

I have never cried more after a discovery call in my life.

But the moment that made everything come together happened in a session a couple of months ago.

We had ended our previous session with her saying she had some ideas she wanted to launch. So we decided that would be the focus next time. As she began sharing the ideas, I kept asking questions based on the energy I was sensing.

Does it feel right in your body?
Are you including anything here because you feel like you should?
What happens if these two aspects from different ideas came together instead?

The conversation went on for almost an hour. Back and forth. Back and forth. Consistently tapping into her body to feel the reaction, to follow the soul nudges. She already knew what she had wanted to do, and had just needed a small push.

Slowly, the murky waters started to clear.

Her energy slowly settled into being calm, stable and expansive.

She was excited now, talking about how she wanted to hold the space.

It was a four-month cohort she had been thinking about for almost a year, but kept procrastinating on. It was the right time, she said.

Then I asked THE question.

How much do you want to charge?

She blinked. Then gulped.
I could immediately feel her heart and throat chakra tightening.

Then in the smallest voice…

“Probably $200 a month?”

Silence.

I knew it wasn’t it.

“Maybe $300? $400? Gosh Shruthi I don’t know. Can you please tell me and I’ll just paste it there.”

She knew what was coming. We had done this before. But sometimes the body just needs to remember again.

So I said:

“Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders.
Visualise the circle. The space. The energy of it.
Sink into the frequency.
Can you see it? Feel it?”

“Yes.”

“How many people are there?”

“Seven souls. We’re sitting in a circle. Each one is goldenish blue. And there’s a white thread connecting all of us. It’s beautiful.”

“Feel it fully.
(a few moments later…)Whenever you’re ready, tell me the price.”

A beat passed.

(Almost a whisper)…“$700 per month.”

“How does it feel in your body?”

“I feel so calm in my soul. It feels absolutely right. But my mind is freaking the fuck out.”

“That’s okay,” I shared. “Both can exist together.”

Over the next two sessions, we did deep nervous system work so her body could feel safe with that price.

What stayed with her most from that meditation, though, was the anchor she received. Whenever fear came up, she could return to that circle. To that space. It was almost like the container itself guided her.

When she eventually opened the cohort, six perfectly aligned souls responded and entered the circle.

It was only later that she learned that some of them had taken a massive leap of faith by investing in themselves. They were on their own money journeys too.

The universe does work in beautiful ways.

The folks who connect with your energy through your offerings have their own journeys to walk. About money. Healing. Receiving. So many things.

They don’t just stumble into your space randomly. They meet your energy to receive specific pieces of the puzzle…sometimes lessons they didn’t even know they were ready for.

And when you’re not true to your heart about your offer, you end up jamming that frequency. You either close the door to the people who are actually meant to find you. Or worse, you invite people who were never meant to be in that space.

You know those stories of people giving away their services for free, and no one comes…and the moment they start charging, the spots fill almost instantly?

It’s the same thing.

Because pricing is simply about the frequency of the offer. That’s it.
It’s about the precision of the soul.

The spaces we create come through us for specific reasons. They have their own purposes. And for that purpose, there is a specific price. Period.

We don’t always need to know why.

There’s no logic to it. There can’t be.

Just look around online.

You’ll see spaces that look almost identical being charged anywhere between $50 a month… and $10k a month.

How will we ever reason that? We can’t.

And that’s the point.

It’s not about whether to charge or not charge. It’s not even about how much to charge. It’s about what the space came here to do and for whom. And the price that comes with it.

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Here’s the thing. A lot of what gets in the way of all this is how much we try to make ourselves palatable. Our actions are always mirrors of our inner beliefs.

When someone says, “that’s too expensive, I want to make it more affordable”, I usually ask:

Expensive for whom?
Affordable for whom?
Do you trust that the right souls will arrive based on the frequency?
Do you believe you need to minimise yourself for the right people?
How do you genuinely view the work and energy that comes through you?

And if you do find yourself constantly justifying your price…

Are you justifying it to others? Or to yourself?

My Shamanism teacher used to say:

“Shruthi, stop using the word “affordability” especially for your assumption of others. Its deeply disrespectful and you’re putting your beliefs onto them. That’s not your job.”

More often than not, when we sit with this long enough, it isn’t really about pricing.

Somewhere underneath, there is always a mix of worthiness, shame and guilt quietly sitting there. Fear of visibility. Success. A beautiful concoction, as always.

Sometimes it’s the feeling that we can’t fully explain what we do yet.
Sometimes it’s the fear of being seen as “too woo”.
Sometimes it’s the strange place where service and business get tangled together.

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All of this might be bringing something up for you right now.

Maybe an idea that has been sitting quietly inside you for a while. A space that has quietly been forming inside you for months…sometimes years. A space you keep thinking about creating… but haven’t fully trusted yet. Or you’ve passively started the process and begun to put feelers out there.

I see this all the time in my sessions.

At the end of the day, I simply guide souls by bringing them back to their bodies.

Because you already know the answer. It is always inside you.

All we really need is the space for the murky waters to clear so we can see what is already there.

Sometimes these ideas arrive randomly while you’re doing the most mundane things. Sometimes they slowly build piece by piece until suddenly everything lands at once.

But the resistance almost always shows up during action.

Writing the landing page.
Deciding the price.
Sharing it with the world.

That’s where the mind gets loud. That’s where we start questioning everything. At times, all we really need is the space to hear ourselves clearly again.

To sit with the idea.
To feel the space it wants to become.
To listen for the quiet precision underneath all the noise.

If you feel like something inside you has been trying to come through…
a space, an offer, a way of serving that feels yours deeply…this is the work I do with people.

We sit together and listen. Clear the murky waters until what’s already there becomes impossible to ignore.

And from there, the next step usually reveals itself.