How I Feel Is Different From Reality - A Money Perspective

How I Feel Is Different From “Reality.”

This alternates between feeling like the biggest cliche ever, a la “money can't buy happiness”, and being the most profound realization.

A part of us is deeply programmed, wired, embodied, to worry, be in lack, fear.  And then every loss or challenge we experience confirms this.

Our wiring for lack is understandable on many levels, and importantly, most of our grandparents and great grandparents if not our parents struggled to survive.  They passed on to us important lessons in words and in actions - we were immersed in their experiences, raised with their construction of the world.

So even now, people with healthy incomes, strong skill sets, winning personalities, good health and home ownership worry about not having enough.  I see this worry as like worrying about terminal disease.  It can happen.  Financial ruin happens a lot less frequently than illness in fact.  It is wise to live a healthy lifestyle physically and financially and to do the things we generally know support our health on both arenas.  But fixating on an unlikely scenario only feeds and hi-lights the suffering we encounter.  Worry about it if it happens.

While I was making a significant income in capital markets I went through a financially challenging divorce.  I felt so vulnerable.  He felt he had a right to so much of what I had earned.  I had not protected myself.  I felt unsafe, deeply betrayed, and confused.  I was up at night for hours every time a lawyers letter would come in.  I was scared.

What was I scared of?  I was fine.  But I couldn't feel into that. At that time the lawyer's letters were falling into an already formed hole of loss and fear inside me and I couldn't see the difference.

Eventually with the help of my own lawyer I came to a helpful reframe.  This loss is like a risky investment gone bad.  I imagined I had invested in a penny stock that had collapsed.  And I moved on.  The brilliance of this reframe was that I took responsibility.  It was a bad investment on my part.  I could own it and let it go.  Eventually with love.  That's not to say I wouldn't protect myself in the future - I would - but now I understood that my boundaries are love for myself and this creates the possibility for an even more beautiful relationship. 

None of this had anything to do with my income or assets in a material way.  I mean yes in a sense (I did make a big payment) and no in a sense -  I have enough.  More than enough.  I don't say that lightly. It is a statement made after years of work on the ways in which I do not feel safe in the world. And so in the past decade I have rebuilt something that doesn't rest on money.

And so now my income is less than it was, I've made investments in myself and in businesses that tie up my finances, and I have no job security and no official professional classification.  And yet - I am completely relaxed.  Because I know in my body that it is not money that takes care of me.  It is life.  I am life.  

Do you remember a time you fell in love or had a mad crush on a person to the point where you were almost delusional?  You saw a whole world that didn't exist.  You saw traits that you longed to see.  And when reality hits and the person turns out to be all too human - what a shock.  And yet once we understand that love in its freedom - allowing each other to be who we are, being ourselves fully....  this kind of connection brings so much passion and possibility....  this kind of relationship is wondrous.  A constant peeling back of projections and seeing each other clearly.  Taking responsibility for our experience in life including in our relationship.  When blame ends, everything is possible.

Our lives with money are like this too.  We are wired with ideas, stories, needs, beliefs.  We have little education on how to actually be prosperous.  Capitalism doesn't help - feeding us images of prosperity that miss the point.  And so we panic, fear, get excited, worry....we are up in the night based on fantasy.  The work of financial health is stripping back each of these projections.  Of taking responsibility for those projections, and then transmuting them into power through feeling and releasing them.  

And then we can enjoy money.  We aren't trying to control it.  We aren't afraid it will leave.  Without attachment we allow it to come and go.  And like any being money appreciates this.  It has the room to surprise you.  To knock on your shoulder and say.... "hello!!!".  To delight you, to ravish you... you two will figure it out.

Like my divorce, I am not saying we don't protect ourselves.  We do - insurance, wills, contracts - these are all prudent.  But they are prudent when done from a place of love and security - of an embodied knowing that money is not our supply.  These are like the agreements we make in love.  They can change over time but they are important as they create the container for huge amounts of passion and energy.

You can see that this is about inner work.  It isn't about how much we have.  It's about our relationship with life.  It's about trust and surrender.  Not to the point of being abused - not at all - we protect ourselves.  We are responsible and yet we don't try to control either.  

On the day of our mediation I read Pema Chodron's "When Things Fall Apart".  I cried and cried and committed over and over again to having the soft heart of a bodhisattva despite every challenge.  That I would not allow myself to become bitter, I would release anger and learn to protect myself.

And now I don't make the income I used to make.  But I don't worry about money.  Ever.  If a stab of panic comes through my body I breathe.  I send myself love.  And I only make financial decisions from a resourced place.  By that I mean a place where I know that I do not lack for anything.

It is the responsibility of those of us who have enough to recognize that we have enough.  To do the work of healing our projections on money and enjoying it.  Allowing it to send us its love and its messages and to carry us forward into the work we are here to do.  

And a final point. Not everyone has enough. Our society is not constructed justly. It is our responsibility to recognize what we have and live it fully so we can make change. I am not glossing over real financial struggle. I am highlighting financial struggle that is created based on inter-generational loss and struggle and that obfuscates the truth of the moment thereby minimizing and blinding us to the truth of real needs right in front of us.