04 Jul Freedom Includes Peace with Money
.jpg "Freedom includes peace with money. Do these ancient and modern piggy banks symbolize freedom? or imprisonment? Saving or hoarding? It's entirely your definition that counts. Museum display of various types of personal banks from piggy banks to ancient Greek clay container. Photograph by Tilemahos Efthimiadis on Wikimedia Commons.")
Freedom includes peace with money. Do these ancient and modern piggy banks symbolize freedom? or imprisonment? Saving or hoarding? It’s entirely your definition that counts. Photograph of a museum display of personal “banks” by Tilemahos Efthimiadis on Wikimedia Commons.
Why Do We Say Freedom Includes Peace with Money?
We help people have peace with money through our moneycoaching and fundraising. But we’re not so naive or self-centered as to think that peace with money is all it takes to have freedom. That’s why we say freedom includes peace with money.
Money Doesn’t Buy Freedom
If you’re a new reader, you might not realize that it’s peace we connect with freedom–not money! Money doesn’t buy you freedom. In fact, if you don’t know what to do with it, it’s easy to let money imprison you.
We’ll never advise a client to “go for the money,” earn more, raise more, hoard more, even save or invest more in order to have freedom. (We might advise raising your rates, asking for a higher salary or a larger gift or grant because your work is worth it. That’s different!)
“More money” is not where freedom comes from. Money is a material answer to material needs. It buys nothing but stuff. Stuff is nice, but usually the opposite of freedom. (People are too often simply imprisoned by their stuff. We can help with that.)
Peace is When You Stop Struggling to Balance Money and Freedom
Our recent post invited people to stop struggling to balance money and freedom. It yielded two thoughtful comments that deepened this post.
One comment was from our new soul-colleague Darryl Burks:
There is a deeper issue to this. What is “freedom”? Our culture teaches us that freedom means we get to spend time doing “fun” stuff and work is definitely not fun. So the issue is that we don’t understand that we get to choose our life and create our reality….
For us, peace (not money) is deeply connected to freedom.
Stop Struggling = Start Having Peace
It’s official. It’s immediate. You stop struggling, you begin to experience peace. A second comment on last week’s post was from long-time soul-colleague Tamme Marggraf, who responded
Good catch, Beth, to not see myself as struggling! Got the vision of NOT struggling but that included seeing myself as struggling and growing from there. HA on that!*
I loved Tamme’s open-hearted willingness to see herself having made a deal with Life she was willing to unmake. Growth can come without struggle. The story we live is hugely impacted by how we frame it.
Inner Peace is the Start of Inner Freedom
Inner peace is fundamental to inner freedom. And for us at RAISING CLARITY, inner freedom is what we mean by “freedom.”
For me, as for Darryl (in my above excerpt of his longer comment), freedom is so much more than doing “fun” stuff. But I don’t personally mind if people define freedom as doing fun stuff–as long as they define freedom for themselves.
My idea of fun is sitting in stillness. Freedom for me means time, especially time to sit in stillness.
But who cares what freedom is to me? What is freedom to you? Have you asked yourself? Spend some time defining it and then you can publish your definition in a comment to this post.
Oddly Enough, It’s Peace That “Buys” Freedom
Peace with money is having a peaceful relationship with your spending, having, earning, investing, donating and even your playing with money. It is a deepening sense of inner alignment among all the different voices in you telling you how to handle money. When they start to agree, you begin to feel so peaceful–no matter what the world is telling you about money, or your parents, or your children, or anyone else.
And then you can stop selling your time to buy money to buy freedom. Your freedom belonged to you in the first place! We can find ways together to help you stop selling what is already yours–your inner peace, and your inner freedom–in order to buy them back. (This blog is intended in fact to give you ideas of how to do that for free.)
*Italics are my addition to Tamme’s words.
Darryl Burks
Posted at 14:48h, 04 JulyYou are so right that money doesn’t buy freedom and it certainly doesn’t buy peace. The missing factor here is fear. In our current culture we are taught to be dependent and helpless, as if life was something happening to us or being done to us and our security comes only from the government or our employer, whoever is giving us money. As a result we “fear” true freedom because if we are free then things that happen good or bad are our fault, our responsibility. So I think the perception becomes, if I have money then I will also have security then I can be “free” to enjoy life. Maybe it’s a sort of psychological trick we play on ourselves, as long as we are struggling to make “enough” money, as long as freedom is out there somewhere in the future, then we don’t have to face the reality of life being a result of our own choices in the here and now. So we turn money or wealth into some mythical dragon we must slay or at least tame, believing all the while that it will never really happen.
Beth
Posted at 23:03h, 04 JulyDarryl, this is a beautifully written description of the ghost of fear in our cultural closet. Perfect. I had not thought about fear as the root. Thank you so much! You inspire me.