The Real "Currency"
What we want from money
Hi everyone,
Welcome to all the new subscribers over the last two weeks. I trust something of my previous writings resonated for you and I hope the upcoming ones will too.
For those new to the newsletter … here is where I offer the principles and practices for bringing Zen mind to life and work. I usually precede my newsletters with a personal note around what’s going on with me, my family and my sangha. I always try to practice what I preach, so I figure my steps and mis-steps are relevant.
Before I get to today’s newsletter, on money and other currencies, here are some of other ways to engage with me and my work:
In the Game of Zen podcast (Spotify, YouTube, Apple) I have entertaining (I hope) conversations on applying Zen Buddhist principles to work and life. I would love for you to check it out, subscribe, like and share. I’m really enjoying doing the podcasts, and also learning it takes some work to develop an audience, so I appreciate you engaging with it.
I’m quite active on LinkedIn. I invite you to Follow and Connect with me there.
I lead Zen practice and teach through the Eon Zen Center, which I founded in 2015. We’re based in Boulder, CO, and we offer lots of remote and virtual options, including a year-long self-paced course called Zen Foundations. I am formally empowered as a Preceptor, and have a path in taking Buddhist vows for those called to lay ordination. If you are interested in formal Zen practice, I invite you to sign up for our weekly newsletter (currently on Mailchimp but we’re moving over here to Substack), and check out our programs.
Finally, my main work is one-on-one with high functioning professionals seeking to uplevel work and life, especially in times of transition and growth. I’ve been working recently with two intersecting profiles: those starting or expanding their own businesses, and those who are out of work and moving through the “in-between.” I have one- and three-month programs that will help you move the needle significantly. I’ve begun integrating work with functional plant medicine (psylocibin) into my personal coaching, for those who are interested. If you’d like to explore working with me, sign up for a free Discovery session, and we’ll see if I can help.
After that preamble ….. I’m landing this week in a strong place of purpose in my work. Last Saturday I led our sangha in a one-day meditation retreat that included about 6 hours of meditation, work practice, dharma talk and one-on-interviews. It was very strong, especially as we were all quite conscious of the waves of violence surging through various parts of the world. As always, everyone came out renewed, with a higher consciousness of what is most important in their lives.
And this week I’ve engaged two clients on personal medicine sessions as part of integrated coaching programs.
I hope your lives are grounded in supportive families and communities, with strong personal affinities and shared sensibilities. This is most important.
The Real "Currency"
“Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul. Access your assets—not only money but also your own character and capabilities, your relationships and other nonmoney resources. We each have the power to shift, change, and create the conversation that shapes our circumstances. The levers and dials of conversation are ours to use. When we listen, speak, and respond from the context of sufficiency, we access a new freedom and power in our relationship with money and life.”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life
Several years ago I had the opportunity to do several weekend workshops with Lynne Twist and her team at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. They were truly transformative for me. I think one reason is that the sessions were held in Upaya’s beautiful large zendo, the type of space I’ d been meditating in for decades.
Now here we were — fifty spiritual teachers and social entrepreneurs from around the country — talking about money. Not in the transactional language of marketing budgets and “cost of sales,” but in the language of the spirit: energy, attention, appreciation and flow.
It opened my eyes to the truth about money, which has served me ever since.
There is a reason money is called “currency”. It exists only as flow. It circulates from place to place, together with the exchange of material goods, services, energy and attention.
When Shunryu Suzuki was asked where the funds would come from to buy the land that would become Tassajara Monastery, he responded, “Well…. from wherever it is!”
When I first heard this, it blew my mind. It oriented my mind away from a very transactional, “spreadsheety” view of money, and more toward money’s essence.
As a wire carries a current of electricity, money carries the currents of abundance. A wire that is not connected to a power source is inert. Money that is not connected to abundance is also inert.
Money appears as the manifestation in the material world of an invisible field, that is also an inner energy.
We all have intrinsic, inner wealth. Zen calls it “the secret treasure.” It is actually “secret” because our normal egoic consciousness, which feels very isolated and tends to look at reality as framed by an inner-outer, me-and-you dichotomy, only sees the second order manifestation in the material world.
It knows the wire but not the electricity.
But all it takes is us to look inward with a certain quality of attention to recognize the inner wealth we all possess. The quality of attention is: consistent, confident, detached, grateful, humble.
What happens when the inner energy is recognized? It resonates with the broader field. Then things start to happen with manifestation in the material world, money, material and people. Affinities start to align. New people and ventures appear.
We can get distracted, though. When we are practicing meditation and we focus too intently on our quality of mind (am I calm? my mind is too active! I am not good at this! I am GREAT at this!) … all of that self-consciousness ends up being directly counter-productive to actually deepening our meditation.
In the same way, if we are too focused directly on money (I want more, I need it, what do I need to do to get more?, what will happen if I don’t?) ends up being directly counterproductive to engaging with the broader field of abundance, of what IS.
This consciousness about money may take some time to sink in. A part of our minds — often times the dominant part — refuses to see money in this more expansive way. It insists on seeing the baser conditioned view of money as nothing more than a transactional token.
That’s ok. It always takes time to fully internalize, to fully believe, the truths about ourselves and the world that emerge from awakened consciousness.
Buddha said we naturally respond to the world from a sense of insufficiency, and that is the very source of our problems. Lynne Twist says: “When we listen, speak, and respond from the context of sufficiency, we access a new freedom and power in our relationship with money and life.”
There are a number of ways to focus our minds on this “context of sufficiency.” The main way is to directly appreciate what is present in your life…. your body, breath, family, loved ones, community, nature. Sitting still for just one minute, notice that you do not have to DO a single thing to “get” these. They are immediately and continuously present in your lives. It matters not that they may be distant in time or space.
Ironically, it is actually this sense of sufficiency that we are really looking for FROM money. That’s how upside-down our thinking is! But when we see that money is merely a current from one center of sufficiency to another, we can get in touch with what we have and, most importantly, recognize that the anxiety that often arises around money is not only based on a false view, but might be getting in the way of the inner appreciation of our own sufficiency.
Focusing on your inner abundance — your energy, skill, expertise, attention, love — opens the channel for you to share with others. You move with and shape the current of change.
As your intention directs, so will you connect with the currents and currencies of the world.
This is a most interesting path for all of us, particularly in the materialistic culture we live in. But that can be an asset. The most challenging environments produce the greatest awakening and the greatest liberation. Monks of old used to meditate in the charnel grounds to be free from life and death. Being fully present in a materialistic society can wake us up to our fundamental sufficiency.
What a relief!
Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash