Consciousness and Money

08 Jun Consciousness and Money

Consciousness and Money: A late 17th-century satirical print on the pursuit of money, described on its Wikimedia Commons page as four figures “labelled ‘Frugallity,’ (sic)  ‘Flattery,’ ‘Prodigality,’ and ‘Covetousness’ who pursue a coin with the wings and legs of a fowl bearing the head of a classical ruler.” More about this interesting image is at the link.

Consciousness and Money

“How do we make money feel-able and hyper-concrete

in a time of digital transfers, e-payments, and direct deposits….

designed to make spending unconscious and compulsive?”

In a recent email exchange, Dylan Perese, soul-colleague, composer, and psychotherapist, asked me the question that opens and inspired this post.

Concrete vs. Feel-able

Concrete

I want to start by saying that I do not believe that money is concrete.

Whatever we picture money, we are picturing a representation of money (mansion, expensive car, fancy clothes, cash).

When we try to grasp money–with our fingers or our minds–we find it is never solely that. If we think we grasp it concretely, we will find much we have missed about how money is put into play in our world–how large amounts of it flow, how minutely it moves, where it’s assumed to be found, where it’s actually found. Sometimes, it is electronic–highly ungraspable. Sometimes, it is held in assets and highly graspable: boats, vehicles, buildings. Much of what is valued as money, interestingly, is potential: look at the stock market–there’s little concrete about the “money” moving there. Labor; energy; value: you can surely contribute more ways of grasping money in the comments.

I want you to have a strong sense of money as something in serious play. I want us to know enough to be able to play with it yet take it seriously as the spiritual, spellbinding force consciousness has shown me it is–as I show you in this post.

Feel-able

And yet money can absolutely be “feel-able,” as my soul-colleague put it. I love his inspiring desire to awaken with regard to money rather than let our culture keep making it “unconscious and compulsive.” Unconscious = manipulable. If we refuse to awaken around money, we are letting ourselves be manipulated with spending it, as well as earning it, saving it, giving it away, and investing it.

One way to feel money is to use cash more often, as he has suggested to me. Using cash allows us as mammals to have the crucial experience of touching what we are tracking. I deeply honor our protective, wise, mammalian instincts.

In fact, when I lead this money workshop, I often start by asking participants to “go and get some money and bring it back.” I don’t specify anything more.

Sometimes they bring back a paper bill, or coins. Or they have only a credit card and it doesn’t feel like money.

Sometimes, they have no money nearby, and that is instructive.

No one has ever gone to get a checkbook. Checks feel empty, interestingly, until we fill them up with name, date, amount.

Ways I Bring Consciousness to Money

Another way I bring consciousness to money is tracking actual cashflow by hand rather than relying on electronic banking statements.

Contrary to what you might think, our own moment-to-moment accounting of cashflow is much more accurate than the bank’s tracking: if we are willing to do the work of recording what we spend and bring in in the moment we spend or receive it.

I always know a lot more about my minute-to-minute income and expenditures than the bank does. And I only get into trouble financially if I don’t trust what I know!

If you doubt the great importance of building financial consciousness on such a minute practice, consider chapter 63 of the Tao te Ching:*

[The master of the way of the Tao] anticipates things that are difficult while they are easy, and does things that would become great while they are small. All difficult things in the world are sure to arise from a previous state in which they were easy, and all great things from one in which they were small.

I learned to do this hand-tracking every time I spent or receive money many years ago from a financial guide named Beth Crittenden. No guarantee this is still what she advocates we do to bring consciousness to money–but I do. I advocate it, and I do it. Money is such an important part of my life-flow, and source of power. I want to honor it in my life by paying attention to what I do with it.

My Discipline (So You Can Make It Yours)

The words “discipline” and “disciple” are related. I’m a disciple of consciousness with money and this hand-tracking is a key discipline I practice.

I track, by hand, every time I spend or receive money, all income and expenditures of 50 cents or more, in my check register. This includes cash, checks, and electronic transactions.

I also track, in the same way, money I bring into my checking account from my two savings accounts, one for household expenses and one for personal expenses. Then I transfer money into and out of my checking account from these to cover what I’m spending on my household or my person.

I have a government (COVID) loan of $10,900 I pay $54/month on (so far without making a dent in the principal). I also have a credit card with a $500 credit limit I keep paid off. You’ll find a lot of this and more discussed in my post, “Gratitude for Becoming Financially Fierce” and if you read my post “How I Get So Divinely Much Done,” you’ll notice that I apply the same finely grained consciousness to money as I do to what most consider routine, which I call “ritual.”

The Form I Use to Do It

Every month, I use a chart you can download and customize here to bring consciousness to all my income but using specific categories I am most interested in. (The chart is customizable after you download it because what you want to bring consciousness to specifically will surely be somewhat different categories.)

The income categories I am interested in tracking include individual clients, nonprofit organizations, editing, online courses, my private yearlong coaching group that opens up each Fall). The expenses categories show what I am most interested in about how I spend it (see the line items under “Expenses” in the chart) and are also influenced by what expenses the IRS find interesting.

If you want to spend more in a certain category—and sometimes I recommend this if we are coaching and you are a tightwad Tyrant type I feel needs to loosen up—this chart will help you do that in a conscious way. Or you might want to spend less in a certain category; working with this chart will also help you do that. For more information on the money types, see these blog posts. If you want to know what type(s) are part of your make-up, consider this inexpensive moneycoaching course of mine or book an exploratory (free) meeting to discuss moneycoaching with me. Healing our money types means healing the voices in our heads around money, which can project some unhealthy stuff onto our ways of being with money! We get these voices from culture, family, ancestors, traumatic as well as positive examples we have ingested, often unconsciously.

The chart works so well! As I wrote in “Becoming Financially Fierce”:

Each month, I add up all the money I spent, and all the money I received, and do a little dance of gratitude.  Don’t get me wrong–I have negative months!

Gratitude for the Truth: My gratitude is for the relief and power of knowing exactly what money I have coming in and what I have going out.

In other words, I’m fierce with the truth of my money flow and that’s what I want for you, too.

Bringing Money to Light

One of my first names for my fundraising and coaching practice was “Bringing Money to Light.” Don’t get me wrong: I love the name RAISING CLARITY. It’s so big and so perfect, I’m still growing into it.

But I am definitely still bringing money to light. I like the play on words: bringing money to light as a fundraiser and moneycoach means finding it where my clients didn’t see it. It also means bringing money into the light of consciousness from out of the stinky unconscious/hidden place our culture has put it.

Bringing money to light has a definite spiritual aspect to it. I consider my work spiritual as well as healing, helping us have more money in our lives, see the more money already in our lives, and work with the money coming through our lives in creative, flexible, interesting and interested ways.

Spelling Money

We humans invented money. This is important if we seek to bring it “to light.”

Our invention of money is a lot like our invention of grammar: we made it up, applied it, and bow to others we let define when we are doing it right and when we are doing it wrong.

The image at the top of this post shows however that there are a number of different ways to “do” money. And most of the ones I like aren’t even in that picture!

Interestingly, however, grammar comes from the same root as glamour.

Spelling.

A glamour is a kind of spell.

And grammar comes from the word for letter, gramma, referring to spelling.

Grammar/glamour give us rules of spellcasting, spellmaking.

So although money has no existence in the natural world, if it didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent it by now, there are such powerful spells we can cast with it if we give ourselves the power to define when we are doing it right and when we are doing it wrong.

Enspiriting Money

G-d talks to us through money. G-d’s not proud: if money is a grammar we speak, They will speak to us in it. There are really interesting spiritual teachings about money in this post on Sufi and Christian teachings, and this one on Hindu and Buddhist teachings. When I say they’re interesting, I don’t mean theoretically; I would not be RAISING CLARITY if I stayed in the realm of theory. These two posts, like all the ones I write, are designed to be put to use. If you read them, you will find ways to change your practices around money.

Another way to change your money practices and consciousness is to try each of the steps of this 12-Step exercise I created to help shake the hold capitalism has on our consciousness with money.

Equanimity with Money

Money can be terrifying because it feels like “they” can take it away whenever they like. They can stop the flow into our lives. And then we will be…without. And we know “without” is the worst way to be. So “they” have us over a barrel. And can make us do their bidding for money.

But money does not belong to “they” who terrorize us. There is no special party or person or demographic with a lock on money: look at all the different ways people make money. Some are reprehensible, some life-sustaining. Some seem neutral.

Money doesn’t seem to follow any moral reasoning; it seems to flatter oligarchs and abandon street kids.

But over time, I have come to see that money does follow a pattern: free-flowing, dynamic, bold, and creative. These are the qualities money vibes with.

When we are terrorized by those holding money over our heads, what is first to go out the window? Our free-flowing, dynamic, bold, and creative mindset.

If it seems like money avoids us at those time—it does.

This is why cultivating equanimity with money is important: so people have no power over you to withhold money—you know you can make more. You know how to restore your inner balance with money, pick yourself up out of terror and place yourself back in the free, dynamic flow of money’s energy with boldness and creativity.

Note these are not pretend qualities of yours; these are your qualities just like money is yours.

No one owns money—we all do.

No one owns the qualities of creativity and boldness—we all have them.

Fear can block our awareness and our exercise of these qualities that bring us money. That’s why I created an event called “Cultivating Equanimity with Money.” “Equanimity” means inner balance; it means money’s highs don’t make you high and its lows don’t make you low. I recorded the event so you can enjoy its teachings right here.

Questions and Next Steps

Questions? Ask them in the comments.

Like my approach? Here’s a three-module course that’s a guided, doable, in-depth dive.

Or book a call with me to explore moneycoaching or fundraising. Our call is exploratory; it’s free of charge because it is free of obligation to either of us, a true exploration.

*But see also this interpretation of the Tao’s chapter 63.