Is Money the Root of all Evil?
How I Changed My Mind About Money
You are allowed to change your mind about anything at any moment in time. It’s more challenging than one might think. That’s why the word “convert” usually gets applied to someone who brings over one belief, party or view to another. Our world view around money is formulated through family, upbringing, education and world experiences. Most of us never consider how we might be able to shift our view on money from scarcity to abundance. Here’s a little symposium of how I did.
In the corner of my mind for years, I hid a secret. It was a dream life of the person I knew I was meant to be, but somehow didn’t feel capable of being. And here’s the list why.
My dream life seemed too good to be true and there should be a certain amount of suffering and struggle to stay relevant with my family, friends and the rest of the world.
No one else is living the life I dream of, so it must be impossible.
I needed to start 10 years ago. It’s too late in life. I need to be practical and save for my future.
I don’t have the right support around me. I’m a single mom with no family in the area where I live. I’m all alone.
I don’t have enough money or resources to make it happen and I won’t be able to make enough money to provide for myself and my family.
I have no idea how it could ever come to be or where to start. It feels daunting and overwhelming.
Let me be clear, this is not a secret life about doing what I love and feel passionate about. I’ve been doing that for years. It’s not about living in an amazing place or having an epic relationship. Those boxes are checked for me. This is about wealth and abundance. This is about believing that money can be sacred reciprocity.
See, I come from privilege. I watched my dad go from rags to riches chasing millions. I saw his success and I learned from him that money does not make you happy when you work 80 hours a week to run a company. He grew a successful company from the ground up, brought it to market and sold it. My brothers and I only saw him on weekends and my parents got divorced on account of not really knowing each other after so many years of that lifestyle. (Fast forward years later, my dad is one of the most content, happy and in love people I know, living a very simple life). However, what was implanted in me from a young age was, you only get ahead with hard work and money=sacrifice of time and intimate relationships.
Encouraged to do what I love by my parents, I went to art school. There I learned that real artists are starving and slightly tormented, otherwise they are sell outs who make work that look good over people’s couches. Van Gogh sold one painting his whole life and cut off his ear, right?
In the late 90’s corporate greed and the degradation of our planet was brought to my attention, which solidified that money was the root of all evil.
Adding to that my years of teaching, studying and practicing yoga and Buddhism, I gained the idea that money and spirituality don’t mix. A life of humble service prevents the least karmic effect and to desire wealth would only create more suffering. But there was a feeling of scarcity, debt and unease that often came with the conglomerate of “do what you love and be happy” “starving artists are most authentic” and “non desiring, content, self-sacrificial yogi = the path to enlightenment”.
That was my relationship with money in a nutshell. Anti-establishment, self-sacrificing and authentic. And like any commitment to a path of self development, our limits and hang-ups get brought to the light. Recognizing and mapping out the beliefs I have around money has been a huge step in understanding my mindset and making change.
Let’s get back to when I mentioned that this wasn’t about an inability to live an amazing life or have epic relationships. I’ve lived on a 25 acre organic farm situated on a river with a yoga retreat, I’ve lived on a sailboat for a month, spent months traveling through Japan, Sri Lanka, India, Europe, the US. I currently live steps from the beach with an organic garden, compost, campervan and a sweet home office. My life has been amazing.
There is something that I’ve always done since I was a kid. It was the way my mother taught me to pray. To pray for the future and feel what you want to experience as if it's already here, she would advise me. This is the essence of so many manifesting teachings. I am a powerful manifestor no matter how cheesy that may seem. This ish really works. The teaching of I AM is powerful.
Essentially we are consciousness, a little fractal of oneness or great spirit or God, encapsulated in the limitations of a physical form that is full of feelings and sensations. This consciousness is the I AM. This consciousness is the creator. So whenever we say I Am _______, this creative force, this consciousness begins to work magnetic powers to draw ______ to us. Creator just creates, without judgement of good or bad. This is potent mindset medicine and requires us to create space and embody the ether element.
As a yoga teacher and artist, I’ve put the focus on creating, healing and being present with and for everything but money. I trusted that I would be provided for and for the most part I was, except for these episodic crises’ I would have where the feeling of scarcity took over. Those moments always led me to the work of manifestation. The power of our thoughts. And although my yoga and buddhist teachers had taught that our thoughts create our reality, I never experienced it fully until I started making the shift to a mindset towards wealth and abundance. Neville Goddard’s teachings which can be found on YouTube explain Christianity and how the mind creates reality in a way that clicked for me.
Reading Daniel Pinchbeck’s book, How Soon Is Now, sparked a desire to do my part in the climate crisis. I was compelled to look at the way I was contributing, like the carbon imprint that my jet setting around the world several times a year was making. At the same time contributing to kelp foresting efforts and other forms of carbon sequestration tugged at my heart. I started to imagine what I would do with billions of dollars to shift climate change.
But let’s take a step back, because most of us can’t even get clear on what we want. It is the suffering of difficult life experiences that give us the fire to say, “Enough! I can’t take this anymore. I don’t want this!” Whether it's pain in the body, financially scraping by or relationships where we don’t feel seen, heard or understood, let alone are being harmed, discomfort is the catalyst for transformation if we allow it to be.
When we know what doesn’t feel good then we can get clear on what we do want. The yoga sutra says when afflicted by negative thoughts, think the opposite. Easier said than done. What I have found to actually make this happen and add that potent feeling that brings change is a pause or rest in between the negative spiral of thoughts and the opposite. Whether a nap, retreat, walk in nature or a pause to notice something in the present moment that can pop us out of the negativity, we need a little space in between. This is the gift of ether.
Ether or space is the 5th element along with water, fire, air and earth. Since the mind is not a tangible or locatable thing, it exists within the element of space. Mind can be one of the most challenging things to change in our lives. But once we understand the properties of space where the mind lie and notice the patterns of specific mindset, we can naturally begin to make the shifts towards what we want to experience in our worlds. Ether can be accessed as mentioned before through any kind of pause that disrupts the patterns of the mind. Those pauses were the gifts I used to notice the informative years that framed my ideas about money. Embodying space, for me, looks like the remembrance that I am that I am and what I say I am will always come to be.