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Enough about sex. Let’s talk about money.
Have you noticed, there’s a global reckoning happening around money and value exchange? For far too long, we have invested in systems of extraction, scarcity, and wage slavery. We are realizing, perhaps far too late, how damaging this is to the planet and to the human spirit. We are enrolled and deeply invested in a program that ultimately serves wealth accumulation for the ultra-rich.
I have been clarifying my own relationship with money a lot this year, reflecting on different dimensions of exchange, and seeing through so much of the toxicity that is accepted as normal. Our shared assumptions and attitudes around money are so deeply ingrained, it can be hard to see how we perpetuate them. Looking into this within me has been uncomfortable, even painful at times.
There is so much to explore around money and related topics. But I am going to start this musing with the simple question: where should we invest?
Here we are in 2022, experiencing a massive financial contraction, collectively.
Both the crypto market and the traditional stock market went down significantly (some people would say crashed) earlier this year. Meanwhile, the cost of everything has been going up. So, wherever you are and whatever you have, it probably feels like you have “less” than before.
One of the big “aha” realizations that I had from reading The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist is that scarcity is not a poor people problem. Nope. It is an everyone problem. It is a societal mental illness.
What has been fascinating for me in living through the market crash this year, is seeing in sharp relief how scarcity mindset actually works. Beyond simply knowing that it’s a mind game, on an intellectual level, this year I have also experienced it as a mind game – very personally, intensely and viscerally.
I have friends and associates who span a wide spectrum of socioeconomic situations. I know people who have cashed out millions as early crypto investors and own real estate in multiple countries. I also know self-employed coaches and healers paid on a session-by-session basis, who work hard to make their monthly rent payments.
Personally, I am not close to either of these extremes. But my point is that it doesn’t matter whether you have a lot or a little. It doesn’t matter whether you invested everything or nothing. We are all feeling it, financially. The squeeze.
We are all in the same boat, more than we have ever acknowledged before. No human is immune from scarcity. If you have body that needs nourishment to survive, and if you have an ego-mind that tells stories to stay alive, then scarcity comes pre-installed as part of the basic operating system.
Growing beyond this default mode means awakening to the realization that this is an outdated program that no longer serves us. And then, consciously choosing to upgrade so we can help create a new reality.
What I have observed in myself is that the amount of fear, anxiety and stress in my nervous system has very little to do with the balance of my bank account. And it is totally unrelated to the status of my business or investments.
There are really only two things that have mattered to my overall sense of well-being: (1) One thing that mattered was the nature of my thoughts around what was happening in my financial reality. (2) The other thing was the amount of energy and attention that I spent in trying to manage it.
It may seem trite to say this – but money is temporary. Duh. Money is temporary. Right. That is so obvious, isn’t it? But I know that whenever I feel stressed out about money, it is because I am forgetting this fundamental, essential truth.
Everything we think we own has been given to us. Everything we call “ours” is on loan for this lifetime, or sometimes for an even shorter season of time. With that reminder in mind, I made some notes on investment advice to myself from myself. These notes came from the self-inquiry: if every investment vehicle is unsafe, and every business venture is insecure, then where is it best to invest?
The conclusion that I came to was that there are three things that are always beneficial to invest in, regardless of current market conditions. And all three are possible for anyone to invest in, no matter what their financial situation. These three things are (1) Resilience, (2) Resourcefulness and (3) Relationships.
Investment Tip #1: Resilience
Growth in this investment results from the convergence of many things: practice, awareness, and presence, to name a few. It takes years to develop. It’s not as simple or straightforward as going to the bank and buying a bar of gold. But in the long run, it is much more valuable. Some might call this inner peace. Others might call it inner strength. You might refer to it as a degree of unflappability. It’s the ability to bounce high with the big drops. It’s the ability to surf smoothly with the big waves.
Our investment in resilience can never be traded. And this is an investment that can never be lost. Whatever you decide to put into cultivating resilience within yourself, it will be infinitely valuable in enriching your experience of life. It allows you to enjoy the fruits of life more fully and to weather the storms more easily.
Resilience is the peacefulness of mind that allows us to stay calm and centered, and not to be so caught up in the financial ebbs and flows of our external reality.
Investment Tip #2: Resourcefulness
As I wrote in Regenerative Purpose, resourcefulness is usually seen as the cleverness that comes from constraint. But this is somewhat limiting. We diminish the inherent power of resourcefulness when we treat it as inventiveness that happens only because we are backed into a corner. This idea is rooted in an orientation of scarcity – it presumes that we can only be resourceful when something is missing.
But within the worldview of abundance, true resourcefulness is not about “making do” with what you have. The need to make a limited set of resources stretch is based on a lack mentality. True resourcefulness is not about “making things happen” either. The drive to use individual will to manipulate reality is an ego mission.
Resourcefulness is a process of alchemy, ultimately. There is a lot of stored value hidden within existence. We can unleash the potential energy of what already is, simply by getting things moving. Also, when we develop our powers of perceiving, we start to notice the current of energy that is always moving around us all the time. When we are aligned in the path of that energy flow, we can harness the value inherent in it by intentionally channeling and directing it.
Resourcefulness is the art and practice of seeing and responding to reality as already being intrinsically abundant. When we approach life in this way, the experience of resourced fullness comes from alignment, not from effort.
Investment Tip #3: Relationships
Last, but definitely not least, is relationships. This is often an overlooked dimension of economic exchange. I think this is the main key to returning to healthier exchange ecosystems. Relationships have always been the original backbone of any system of exchange. But we have lost sight of the sacredness of this as we have been overtaken by our addiction to growth, affliction of greed, and attitude of scarcity. To create healthier ways of exchanging, we need to refocus our attention on the way we connect and relate with each other as human beings. Relationships are essential to moving energy and creating value in the process of making exchanges.
When we walk around the world with a personal deficiency in either resilience or resourcefulness (or both) we cause damage to the relationships. This damage is inflicted unconsciously, either because we are desperately grasping onto what we have, or we are trying to control future outcomes.
I have witnessed a number of situations this year, where focus on profit took priority over care for people. This tradeoff may serve us financially in the short term, but it erodes our capacity for creation in the long term. With money as our mantra, we become a parasite to our own body, community, and planet. With this extraction orientation to Life, we never feel like we have (or are) enough.
We are sick as a society from this. Without nurturing strong healthy relationships, we cannot have mutually uplifting co-creative exchanges. And without co-creative exchanges, true human potential gets trapped and our trade is reduced to the zero-sum game of the extraction economy. We miss out on the creative power of moving energy, collectively and consciously. Without intentional investment in relationships, the natural process of exchange loses its healthy generativity.
Remembering our humanity in the act of making exchanges is what unlocks the generative, life-affirming potential of participating in moving energy. If we are not connecting, relating, and investing in relationships, we make soulless exchanges without birthing new value. In repeating this kind of exchange, we are mindlessly competing and depleting our life force energy, as we race to the bottom — the bottom of the limited resource well. And that leaves us all poorer in the end.
So, no matter what your current financial situation is, it’s a good time to take inventory. As we go into the last quarter of 2022, what is your investment status in resilience, resourcefulness and relationships?