ALL ABOUT THE MONEY, BABY.
WHY LIE? MONEY IS ONE OF THE GREAT TEACHERS OF LIFE.
In my personal tree of knowledge, you will notice that money does not appear anywhere as a branch. It could be said that money is how energy is expressed through the branches of our worldly expressions, at least to some degree. While not at the forefront of any “spiritual” conversation, it is important to speak to money when speaking to life because money is perhaps one of the most empowering yet most deceiving things in our human existence. I love speaking to life in terms of reflections, those being between our physcical and non-physical worlds, and to this, money speaks to this in terms of human expression, as good as anything.
It has been said by many that money reflects energy, ultimately the value a given pursuit of a given individual is capable of realizing within a given culture. Yet the story is bigger than that. Money also reflects life itself. If we are paying attention, we will notice that half of life makes perfect sense while the other half is anyone’s guess. Money is the same. We can look around and see how, to a certain degree, the value of things represents what goes into them. A highly educated person doing ground breaking work is making a very respectable sum of money. A fancy car in which tremendous energy has gone into engineering and only the finest materials are used is commanding a hefty price tag. And then we have individuals running large companies, ships of sorts, taking on immense responsibility getting paid large sums of money for the success they are able to generate. However, equally we have people in the world getting paid ridiculous sums of money, sums that are absolutely disproportionate to what it is they are doing. And then we have the reality that some of the most valuable things in the world are purely subjective. Art, jewels, metals. What are they worth? Whatever someone thinks they are worth. Is a bucket of paint thrown at a canvas worth 10 million dollars? Sure, why not.
If you really think about it, this is life. A dance of logic and non logic. Therefore our relationship to money needs to be very similar to our relationship to life. If we look at life and try to decide what is fair or not fair, we will go mad, unless we are at the top of the food chain benefitting from an ideal relationship to life, which still requires an ability to let go of such unanswerable nonsense. A wise life is one in which we follow a path of self discovery and then we acquire and employ our wisdom to that realization. We need wisdom in relation to money but we don’t obsess about money. Why? Because as we all should know, we can be rich and miserable and who wants to be filthy rich and miserable. What a cruel place to be with all the stress that surrounds dealing with and managing money. And of course, the same goes that we can be poor and happy or poor and miserable based upon where we reside, what we do, our health, and what we choose to prioritize in life.
And let's not forget the flow of history. What does this means in regards to money? It means the value of money fluctuates with destiny. When life chooses to reinvent how people live, to reset, to make everyone question who really has what, money becomes intensely unstable. Money becomes the last thing you can count on. Only wisdom prevails, the constant ability to adapt, to zero in on what has value, to make it up as you go along day after day and not question the future because no one has a clue what that looks like, even the next week.
So what is money wisdom? Money wisdom is the realization that all pursuits and expressions have a given value in life. Our goal is to find our expression and then bring value to that expression. If we head first for money, we won’t understand the more important aspect of expression which is what gives us our purpose for living and our life’s meaning (which is kind of the same thing). The other aspect of life is that our paths in life have a preset value and that value determines the expression of our lifestyles. This sounds like an obvious and silly thing to say (like most of my lessons), however, if we surrender to how money plays into our expressions then we can spend more energy just taking care of tasks at hand. Some of us are going to spend most of our lives making just what we need. We have to really manage our money and it will feel like we are always walking on the edge of a cliff. But there are many, many people in such situations that out live people far more prosperous, and end up, in hind’s site, having blessed lives. We need to be wired for money. Some people, given 10 million dollars would squander it all to mismanagement in less than a few years, perhaps even be riddled with unpayable debts. Some people do not even flinch at the idea of having to manage 100 million dollars of cash and investments. It is a full time job.they savor like a competitive sport. There are monks that have nothing. They sit and wait for someone to offer them a bowl or two of rice a day and these small gifts are their only means to survive. They would not have it any other way. It keeps them tethered to their perception of life as a moment by moment experience in which simplicity and presence are of paramount importance. Sound romantic? Try it. Not for everyone.
How we connect to money is an expression of how we deal with life and because of this there is an enlightened way to deal with any relation to money, whether that be wealth, poverty, or slowly putting our dollars away for later day. If we are in conflict with our relation to money, then we need to learn from that relationship. And it is not foolish, but incredibly wise tolook in the mirror and ask our self, what is our ultimate relation to money. Do we honestly see our selves in a big house? Is that really us? Do we see our selves ina little cabin somehwere communiting into work? Making peace with the life we are meant to live is paramount to understanding success. Whatver position we are in, living in a mansion, or renting a little cabin, it all has a wise way of going about that business, and we need ot be wired to be that person. This is how I speak to money in my practice. A necessity for the realization of our paths. Our visions? That is all relative to whether our visions are in line with our true destiny, something we do not need to obsess about because life will unveil that answer to us eventually.
Debt is a great teacher. There is nothing wrong with debt, but there is wise debt and foolish debt. If we take all of our money and head to the casino and find ourselves buried in debts, not wise debt. If our debts are leveraged to give us an increase in value in our societies, a school loan, a wise business loan, then our debts are not bad things. In fact there are few successful business people who have not had periods in their lives when they were buried in staggering debts. You want to start an airline? How about 9 figures of debt to pay off? Wealthy people know the game of money. Poor people do not see the game side of money. Money feels more like water dripping slowly out of a spigot and all you can do is kick and curse the spigot hoping more will come out. There is an aspect to money that ties into what could be called the game of life. To play a game we need to be in a high state of mind. We need to rise above what appears to be reality and plug into how things really work, which is the aforementioned dance of logic and non logic. The challenge here is that many a person has followed some “success coach” or another thinking they can jump up to this level and gleefully master the art of playing with money like a game. The potential disaster here is that not everybody is a player.
You will notice, if you are in the right circles, that people who excel at “playing the game” of life, are natural born players. It is an art and a skill and one that comes with rules and regulations. Play wisely and you get the rewards. Bend or break rules that you are not allowed to bend or break and you may find yourself behind a set of bars for a long stretch of time. What is that saying, nothing in life comes for free? When we play the game of life, we end up in a world of players. Some are really good at it, maybe better than us. And so while we may play, we also get played. That is part of being a player. So it is a very dangerous thing to play a game we are not wired to succeed at and thus, no crime to master the art of working wisely and diligently and maybe taking a few steps down from trying to sit at the top of the game, a place that get rich quick coaches will convince you is everyone's path to wealth.
It is my personal opinion that we all have a successful version of who we are. If that success is defined wisely, it is never just about money and so each of us has an opportunity to realize success as it is meant for us. All success should feel like work. Constant work. Just good work. A low paid teacher who loves to teach may have a low paying job in a school riddled with miserable politics. But if that teacher can, over time, find their way to making a little more money and working somewhere that they love to come to work to, that is success. That is the path. Not trying to offset their unhappiness by jumping into some ridiculous real estate scam attempting to play a game they are not wired to win at.
Life will reward us all for our wisdom in regards to how we invest our time towards our expressions. Wisdom is the key word. If we sit stagnant and angry at a given situation forever, there is no wisdom there. Life, however, will also remind us that there is no end of the road to managing our resources except death. That is to say, even in our rewards, the bills keep coming. The responsibilities keep coming. Life constantly checks to make sure we are engaged in some manner. Even recently, I read about the highly succesful Founder of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, getting taken advantage of by a trusted associate as we was on the last years of his life. A reason to be paranoid? No. Just a reason to be aware that the game of money is bound to the game of life as long as we live, no matter what we do or do not have, and we will always be intertwined with that relationship. Our relationship to money will, not so strangely, take us through everything. Our self perception. Our self esteem in realtion to life. Our ability to see and accept life for what it is. Our past and our relation to our parents. Our perceptions, true or false, about what money can or cannot buy. And certainly, our frustration with the world, its non-negotiable systems, and the fact that no matter where we sit in life we are surrounded by checks and balances, counterforecs that humble us as to our place in the grand scheme of life.
So our relationship to money should be as follows in this particular view of things. Expression first. Who are we? What makes us tick? What is it we can do that best expresses our core nature while bringing some value to our place and time? Step one. Then we can go about the wisdom part. We may be broke as can be when we begin. We may even be carrying buckets of debt. This can and should be our motivation to learn how money works through and around our expression, never out of desperation, but out of wisdom. This is the challenging part. When we are hungry we just put whatever is around in our belly. But when we slow down and stop thinking about the hunger, we can think more about what it is that we really should have in our bellies. What is it we really need and how do we wisely express the energy from the nourishment we get? Let’s face it, money is a form of nourishment.
Let money be your teacher in all situations. I know so many people who beat themselves up for being in tough financial situations. And I have been there for years myself. Then you look back and realize all the time and energy you lost beating yourself up and nothing has come from it. No money, no wisdom, no confidence or esteem, just wasted time and energy. And so money can teach us how hard we are on our selves for things that we cannot control, which is a lot of things. Let money reveal to you your priorities and remind you that all choices and priorites come with trade offs. Our goal is to pick the trade offs that leave us with the life we feel is best for us.
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