Why money and spirituality need to be friends
Reclaiming the sacred in exchange
Today I have been reflecting on the distortions and dis-integrations that exist in the collective field around money. This comes after facing indignation and outrage that my offerings cost too much money — according to the judgment of Internet strangers that I’ve never met.
Money as originally conceived was a way of making exchanges with delay in time. But we were still making exchanges with people we know — our extended family, neighbors and members of our local community. (If you haven’t yet read Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein by the way, I highly recommend it.)
With globalization of commerce, money started being used to make exchanges not only with delay in time but also with distance in space. And with this, money got desecrated because we lost connection with the human aspect of exchange.
We can no longer see the sources and means of production for all of the things we consume. The petrol we put in our cars, the processed food we eat, the clothing we wear, the electronics glued to our hands, all made possible by the sacrifices of invisible others laboring in horrible conditions in distant lands.
We don’t see the damage that our over consumption produces. Out of sight out of mind. The neighborhood corner store was replaced by a big box shop with corporate policies. Community was eliminated from the ways we exchange. Only commerce remains and profit rules supreme.
It’s no wonder we forgot that we are part of an ecosystem, and that our existence is interdependent. It’s no wonder we got lost in the story that we are separate, and that we must work hard to survive, alone and isolated.
We buy from faceless corporations. We try to acquire as much as we can, while paying as little as possible. We try to find our self-worth in buying stuff we don’t really need. We accumulate and seek more and more — possessions, as well as experiences — without care for how we contribute and give back.
All this is endemic to the abuses of late stage capitalism and the elite-run system of extraction. It’s no wonder we have such a troubled relationship with money.
Many materially-oriented people are solely focused on money as their primary anchor of identity and security. Money is central to everything in our default reality, and it must be collected and protected at all costs from a survival perspective. We treat money as a god, when in reality it should be treated as a servant.
Many of the self-identified spiritual people I know want nothing to do with money. They block and reject and judge money as being intrinsically evil.
But it’s not money’s fault that it has been misused for however-many centuries. That’s on us, as the users and abusers of money. We can change that. But to change it, we need to be willing to engage with it.
As a trauma response to extractive capitalism, the hive mind (of those who care for collective benefit) has manufactured a false dichotomy. It believes that poverty is virtuous and wealth is a sign of moral defect. Perpetuation of such thinking is a clever trick to keep money far, far away from the hands of those who would use it creatively and consciously.
Money itself is actually nothing. It is a mind-created entity. It is a side effect of a shared hallucination. What we see as “good” or “bad” about money is constructed, by the way we use it and the stories we tell about it. I want to advocate for a movement to reclaim money from the profane and make it sacred again.
Money has no energy inherent in it, as an inanimate and inorganic object. The only life force that it contains is the life that we breathe into it: money carries our energy, our frequency, our intention. It acts as an extension of its steward, with arms and hands that reach into the created, external environment.
But when we add creative energy, vision and intention to money it becomes a vehicle for positive change. And on the flip side, when we leak our money energy without realizing what we’re funding, then we are complicit in the atrocities we see.
How many of us dutifully paid taxes this year even though we can see clearly how this money is misused? Fear of retribution stands against desire for revolution. Our silence and obedience is given in place of voice and values. We adhere to the rules of systems that have no loyalty to us, that were never designed for our well being.
Protesting against war demonstrates a rising of energy and show of solidarity. But now we’ve seen how such collective action proves impotent when it comes to making real change. If we want war to stop, we have to stop funding the entities that profit from it and proliferate it. Protesting and posting on social media has little effect unless and until we cut the energy feed. Individually and en masse.
When we buy most of our goods and services from big companies, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly what our money is paying for. There are simply way too many layers of separation between buyer/receiver and giver/seller.
In Chinese, there’s a term guanxi that refers to one’s business or professional network. The characters depict a gateway to relationship. The term implies that in the web of trade, you are trading with people you know personally.
We need to return to ancient ways. We need to restore a sense of relatedness to the things we buy, and reinstate our humanity to the ways we exchange.
Money needs to be infused with higher consciousness and higher consciousness needs to inhabit money. When wielded with love and consciousness, money is a potent force of creative energy, which can transform reality on the human dimension.
We need more of us embodied and awake, lovingly mastering the ways and forms of creation in physical reality. We need to stay firmly rooted here, making conscious, courageous decisions that go against the established system. We have to resist the urge to dissociate into other realms when faced with the ugly.
This is a path to creating heaven on Earth. This is devotion to bringing the Light to touch ground. This is the practice of breathing Spirit into form.
This path is not easy. And there is so much that is stacked against us breaking free from the powers that be. We need grounded intention, shared spaces of connection, and the support of community. I am offering an 8-day immersion in Thailand later this year where we will go deep into power and purpose and the intricate complexities of embracing your whole personhood in 2024. More information is available on my website: heywendymay.com.