Right relationship is about balance, health, and sustainability. It’s also about service–how we help the world with the power we have.

I’m talking about our personal relationship to money–not how the world economies should treat money, but how we personally can come into alignment with the spiritual nature of money.

Money has a spiritual nature?

The truth is everything has a spiritual nature. What makes money magical is that it’s a unique form of condensed energy. As such, it can serve as a mirror, a teacher for us on our spiritual journey.

Beyond “Think and Grow Rich”

Getting in alignment or right-relationship is NOT a way to get rich overnight. “Think and grow rich” and the “Law of Attraction” are often ways to avoid looking at our deep fear of scarcity.

It’s true that as you grow in your understanding of money, creating it becomes much easier. As you learn to charge appropriately, market to the right people, and own the value of what you do, your business becomes much easier to run.

But that part’s not magical. That’s just about learning a system and getting better at it.

Right-relationship is about something deeper. It’s about that subtle inner tension we carry about money, which relates to our sense of power and security in the world.

Right-relationship means accepting that we don’t control everything about life.

Right-relationship means living in gratitude for what we have, being willing to use the power we have to do good, and the cheerful acceptance that we are not ultimately in charge of the Universe. Including our money.

Now this might sound funny coming from someone who advocates a weekly accounting practice, designing passive income schemes, and generally is known to fully enjoy the game of business.

All these things are true. I like the game, I love the game. But I know, in my heart, that I am only a player. Right-relationship to the game means knowing that you didn’t create it and you can’t control it. You can only play it, and play it well.

Is this getting too esoteric? Here are some practical ways right-relationship shows up:

How to get in right-relationship with money.

Stop avoiding. Face the reality, the truth of your present relationship with money. Stop looking for salvation. Stop spending money on overpriced programs that are going to solve all your money problems. Start accepting that the only way anything changes is by facing it on the internal plane.

Forgive yourself. Some people’s issues show up in relationships. Some show up in reckless behavior or addiction. Some show up in money. There is nothing wrong with having issues. We all have them. You’re just where you’re at.

Relax the grasping. Grasping is an instinctual response to fear. Think of a baby, latching on to its mother. Take a deep breathe. Notice when you get in sticky situations with clients and money, or overspend. Somewhere in there are attachments, deep unmet needs for safety and security that you are unconsciously trying to meet through your use (or avoidance) of money.  Get mindful. Breathe into the places that are afraid and dialog with them.

Start owning your own power. Money is a powerful thing in our culture. Knowing how to use it, knowing how it works, having practice and experience–these lead to real power. Let that be OK. Step out of the fear that you can’t, or that you’ll be corrupted by it. You won’t if you take responsibility and own your own choices.

Start using your money, your power, your will…for good. Right-relationship ultimately describes the relationship of the small and personal to the grand and majestic. To be in right-relationship with Source/God/etc means owning your power, and then letting that power be used as a tool for the larger good. Do what is right, regardless of the money. Play the game, but don’t be the game. Be a player in service of good.

These steps are roughly in order. The important thing to notice is you have to own your power before you can truly serve the world. Otherwise, you have nothing to offer. Without a solid vessel, you are useless as a tool. So work on yourself. Then let go of yourself.

We often live with daily emotional and spiritual scarcity.

We don’t feel good enough. We haven’t got enough done. We aren’t accomplished or important enough. We don’t feel like we are enough.

This scarcity runs through every sector of society. It infects us with doubts and stops us from pursuing our dreams and enjoying the dreams we have created.

It pushes us to achieve, overwork, and pretty soon we don’t have enough sleep, enough downtime, enough non-business social contact. It’s a constant nagging feeling of trying to catch up, trying to earn our place, trying to be good or do good.

At heart, it’s a spiritual scarcity.

The only true source of abundance, (the feeling of OKness deep in our bones), is in our connection to Source.

Spiritual scarcity means your connection to Source/God/etc is cut off or blocked or has just atrophied through disuse.

It doesn’t matter how much money or security you have, if you don’t have this connection on a daily basis, you will feel not enough. It’s just the way we are built. We can’t be fully satisfied except through that internal connection to Source.

When you try to create outer abundance, but you are doing it to shore up your inner sense of scarcity, it won’t work. Not really. You’ll create more and more evidence that you aren’t really worth it.

The only way to truly heal is to:

1. accept your faults, accept your neediness and mistakes and all your feelings and pain
2. let that connection to source grow anyway

Our connection to Source is the most abundant thing in the Universe. It never goes away. It does not judge, it does not withhold, it does not punish, it does not care who or what you are. It’s there. It’s there and you can access it at any time. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to deserve it. You don’t have to pay it back. You just have to accept it.

All you have to do is ask (and let in the response).

The hardest thing for most of us to do is ask for help. To truly admit that we cannot make it on our own. We cannot do everything. We cannot make ourselves feel OK. We just can’t. We rely on something outside of ourselves. Humans are never truly happy until they feel part of the larger Universe and feel they are in tune with it and here for a reason. We simply cannot be happy as islands.

When we try to do it on our own, it’s out of fear. What if we ask, and there’s nothing there? What if there is no answer? What if you open up your heart and then get burned? What if you find out that the world is an empty screaming void after all? What if God wants you to do something you don’t really want to do?

I can’t really answer those objections. Except to say that it’s not like that. Those objections come from a consciousness of fear. Accepting grace comes from a consciousness of love. When you are in that space, the objections no longer make sense.

And it’s kinda beyond words. But it works. Sincere prayers are answered. The answer comes, somehow. I’ve seen it happen over and over. If you pray to win the lottery, it doesn’t work. But if you sincerely need help and pray for help and hand it over, help comes.

But don’t stop there.

Praying only in emergencies is like staying at the Ritz Carlton and sleeping in the bathtub.

Many people, even ones that don’t “believe in God”, will pray when they are panicked. And they get solace from it. But then they go back to their “normal lives”. The ones with the nagging sense of not-enoughness.

To live a truly abundant life, you need to depend on Source.

That means recognizing that all abundance received from the Universe is received through this channel.

Receiving from Source/God is a blueprint and basis for every other kind of receiving.

The outer world reflects the inner world. Your material abundance depends on your spiritual abundance. It all starts inside.

And that’s where you start to build that connection.

How?

It’s a muscle. You exercise it. You change your mind, you change your stories, you change your beliefs. It’s a habit, a practice.

The bottom line is that it’s a choice.

You allow it to happen. You allow yourself to be enough. You allow yourself to feel OK. You allow that feeling of scarcity to disperse. You stop clinging to it. You find that inner stream of OKness and you nurture it and feed it. You find the things and people that help it grow. You choose every day, who you want to be and what you want to believe. You set your sights and you start walking.

Being OK with yourself in this day and age is a radical act.

It’s worth it. You are already OK. You are already enough. Believe it, feel it, choose it.

And the money?

When you know you are enough, when you know the Universe is on your side because you truly belong to it, it becomes a much bigger game than just making money. It becomes about living as a vehicle for Divine purpose.

And when that’s the game? The money figures itself out. Or you get what you need to figure it out. It works, somehow.

Not that you still don’t have to do work in the real world. It’s still a 50/50 proposition. “God helps those who help themselves” and all that. But it’s easier and it flows, and you have a source of support you can rely on. This isn’t about magic. This is about true support. We are truly not alone in our journey. We don’t have to make it on our own. We are here as part of something larger. And understanding that changes everything.

Or the other side: a skilled artist decides to work at a cafe to have free time/brain-space to pursue art. They never build up enough money to buy a house they long for and always feel like they are scraping by.

Some people make compromises like that and are OK with it, but I’m here to say you don’t have to.

The idea that these two are in opposition is a culturally reinforced myth.

It takes skill and planning to create a vehicle (like a business) that lets you have all the security and all the freedom that you want, but it is possible.

But first you have to believe it is.

Why your brain is afraid of creativity

First, we have this cultural story, lots of them, about “starving artists”.

Then, we have our brains. They are hard-wired to want to, uh, eat. Not starve.

So if you feed the average brain this cultural story about “starving artists”, what is it going to want to do? Not be an artist!!

And that’s not bad. That’s it’s job. There is nothing wrong with fear. It’s just important to examine it and correct the stories that it’s based on.

Stop believing the stories are predictive

The stories about “starving artists” range far and wide and cover many types of professions. There is a lot of fear behind them. And a lot of real people played out these stories.

But that doesn’t mean that YOU will, or that it ALWAYS happens that way.

Our brains have a way of making our stories come true. So what story do you want to live? A creative person who always struggles with money? A financially secure person who is never quite satisfied? Or a person who has defied the odds, and created a way to make a good living that supports their deepest creative yearnings?

Feed your brain something more useful

Find some new stories. Find people who have the lifestyle you want – BOTH creative and financial. Find people who didn’t listen to that story, didn’t give up either need, who had a vision for more and followed it.

The beautiful thing that happens when you really believe this is possible – and that neither energy has to be sacrificed for the other to come to fruition – is that these two powerful energies – the will to survive and the will to be creative and free – they combine and become the will to thrive. And harnessing that combination will give you the power to create a life that you truly enjoy.

(This post inspired by Sarah Dopp’s post Feed the Freak)

I recently attended a workshop called Naka Ima that greatly clarified the nature of attachments and how to release them and I want to share my findings with you, because I think attachments are one of the main things that get in the way of creating abundance.

Preferences vs Attachments

Each of us has preferences, desires, and things we enjoy. These are a natural part of us and make us unique, interesting, full human beings. I used to not be willing to let go of attachments because I thought they were me. If I let go of my attachment, what would be left? Would I want nothing? Would I be enlightened and boring, content to sit and do nothing all day, with no ambition and no desires?

Well, it turns out no. Instead, letting go of attachments frees us to calmly and peacefully create and enjoy what we truly love.

In fact, attachments usually get in the way of us getting what we want because we end up frantic, rigid, or in other emotional states that push our goal further away.

How Attachment Gets in the Way

Let’s take an example. I’ve met people who are desperate around money. They feel poor, and they are desperate to know how to make more money. This attachment of “I want more money now” often leads them to make poor decisions about money. They might sign on to a get-rich-quick scheme or make risky decisions about the money they have.

Some people are attached to control: “I don’t want to lose money”, “I don’t want anything in my business to go wrong”. So they don’t take healthy risks that would let their business grow.

Personally, I discovered a lot of attachments around people that were distracting me from focusing on my business. Some were attachments around my parents, former lovers, friends. With all my energy wrapped up there, less was left over for my business or creating a life I enjoy.

Lastly, when working with clients, attachments can create “demand energy” – you go to make a request of a client and you come off as angry, defensive, or the whole communication is murky and uncomfortable. Releasing attachments brings clarity and ease to communication by creating an inner relaxedness in you before you reach out to communicate.

Releasing Attachments

Here are some concrete steps toward releasing your attachments. I highly recommend working with a spiritual counselor familiar with the issue of attachments or taking the Naka Ima course as well.

1. Identify the Attachment

Think of an issue you feel tense, angry, upset, or strained around. Identify what it is that you are specifically wanting or not wanting. Be very specific and follow the energy of your emotions to find the statement that is most emotionally charged for you. For instance you might start with “I want more money” but end up realizing that the real attachment is “I don’t want to be poor” or “I don’t want to be homeless”. This might also be an attachmen of “I want people to perceive me as a person who has it together”. Underneath our striving for money fester a great deal of attachments!

You may identify specific attachments around clients, such as “I want Susan to let me have creative control in this project” or “I really want this project to be finished by Friday”. 

When you have an attachment, say it out loud. See the attachment as a distinct entity, and energy in your body. Name where you feel it – is it a clenching in your stomach? A tightness in your shoulders? Do you feel sadness? Fear?

2. Ask yourself if you are willing to let go in this moment.

You only have to worry about letting go in this exact moment. Don’t ask if you are willing to let go completely, utterly, and forever. Just focus on right now. For a moment, could you let go of that attachment? Could you be OK with whatever you want not happening?

3. Breathe

This step is crucial. Attachments become encoded into our bodies and letting go requires releasing them in the body. Consciouslly breathe and relax as you become willing to let go. Do not will yourself to let go, simply breathe and relax. Focus on the outbreathe, forcing the air out and then letting your lungs refill. Breathe through any emotions that come up and let yourself fully feel and release them.

If you’ve successfully let go of the attachment, you will feel different. The tension will be gone from that place in your body and you will feel different in your body. There will be a sense of expandedness and openness.

As you practice it you will learn to recognize what it feels like in your body. For me, it is a softness in my belly and a feeling of safety and groundedness.

Practicing Letting Go

Letting go of attachments is something you can practice on a daily, moment-by-moment basis. It’s like riding a bike or learning the piano - as you get better at recognizing attachments and releasing them, it gets easier and easier. The result is an abiding sense of inner calm and being able to be present in the moment with whatever arises. I highly recommend it!

1. Knowing who you are, what you want from life, and what you have to offer.

2. Offering yourself to the world with love.

When we’re doing both, things are good. We are aligned with our inner self, and with the laws of the Universe, and prosperity happens naturally.

But getting there? That’s a journey.

For years I’ve been focused pretty much on the first one. What do I want to do? What do I love to do? What makes my heart sing? How can I get my needs for contribution and stimulation met? How can I be happy? What is my purpose in life? Who am I anyway?

Now I feel ready for #2. Do I love my customers? My colleagues? How can I open that flow? How can I bring love to the table, and let go of everything unlike love? How can I open my whole heart to the world? How can I experience the Divine flow that comes with giving myself to life?

Wait. What does love have to do with it?

I am defining love as “an open and generous flow of energy between lifeforms”. Prosperity I am defining as “giving and receiving an abundant flow of personal energy”. Sounds pretty similar, right? Oh, and money? When you remove all the baggage and meaning we have added on to it, money is just a condensed form of energy.

Prosperity is about both love and money.

If you focus on money without love, you miss something. You end up alone, cold, grasping–trying to control the world into meeting your needs. If you focus just on your own bottom line, or your own navel, you miss the juicy exchange of energy that can happen on a planet full of other loving beings. If you contract in fear, not sure if your needs will get met if you open up and let the energy of love flow through you and your business, you’ll stay in a self-created shell and never feel the glorious experience of being fully involved in the world.

If you focus on love without money, you also miss something. If you focus just on giving and giving, and don’t include your personal self in the equation, you will get burnt out. If you do things out of an idea of “selfless love” that doesn’t include your personal desires and needs, then you’re missing the reason we’re embodied in human form. Fully expressing your unique personhood is part of the ride. And money is part of that embodied existence. A very useful part.

The Prostitute Archetype

Many people have become afraid to have money, because they think money will turn them into people who care only about money. There is this idea that money is inherently corrupting. I think that is B.S. of the highest order and is a denial of free will.

But I also think that people often do go through a phase of being “corrupted” – i.e. playing out the Prostitute archetype, where you hand over a part of your soul for more money. Upon first experiencing success, many people go through a phase of doing things to get more money, and fudge their ethics. They use manipulation, or shortcuts, or other things that are not really in alignment with spiritual truth. They get greedy. Or they stop paying attention to what really makes their soul sing, and start producing a product that sells instead of giving from their heart. They focus on money and forget about love.

It’s a risk. But I see this as part of the learning process, part of the journey. Some people seem to get stuck there, but you don’t have to be. And you don’t have to be afraid of it. The journey takes heart, but I believe you’re up for it.

If you don’t risk “corruption”, you’ll never move beyond fear.

Ultimately the experience of being human isn’t about being perfect, or good, or generous right off the bat. It’s about your soul being forged in the fire of experience. To hold off from that experience out of fear of falling into the mud is a basic fear of living. It’s lack of trust in your soul to handle the experience and bring you through. It’s saying no to the journey.

Where are you on the path?

Are you trying so hard to be “good” that you are denying the expression of who you really are?

Or are you so invested in your personal good that you’ve forgotten how to be of service?

Or are you stuck in fear, not willing to jump into the river of life and trust that your soul is guiding you in your journey?

There are many steps in the journey. Wherever you are at, choose to move forward. That’s all it takes. 

Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other. – M.C. Richards

Abundance is flow, it’s the thing happening at the right time, better than you expected, glorious and full.

And when it happens, you have to let it in. You have to let it become your new reality. Let go of the pain of the struggle. Grieve it and let it go, so the new is able to be felt, to be embraced.

Gurdjieff said that the hardest thing for his students to give up was struggle. It gives meaning, and when you drop it, you have to create your own meaning instead, out of nothing but your being. Instead of meaning-in-opposition, you have meaning-from-creativity. Which in the end is more deeply nourishing, but it can take some getting used to, some reminders, some changes in mental habits, some stretching and experimenting and willingness to be different — letting go of stories and assumptions and the known, embracing the new and mysterious, cultivating curiosity and beginner’s mind, and trusting yourself in new lands.

Heaven Principle (Spirit/Vision)

Heart Principle (Compassion)

Earth Principle (Real-world)

To change a belief you have to first realize that you are not your beliefs. You have beliefs, most of them from your parents or our culture at large. If you want to be wealthy or otherwise change your life, you have to start choosing your own beliefs, the ones that work for you.

You may have beliefs that say money is hard, depressing, and possibly evil. We’ve all been there, but now is the time to decide what you actually want to believe about money. What is really true for you?  

Steps to transform your money consciousness:

1. Become aware of your money programming. “What beliefs do I have about money?”
2. Challenge them. “Are these beliefs helping me?” “Are they mine or do they come from my parents, my church, etc?”
3. Grieve any experiences that led you to adopt negative beliefs. This step is very important if you have a strong emotional attachment to the belief. If you believe life is a struggle because you’ve really had to struggle, let yourself cry and grieve those experiences. Grieving is the only way to release that kind of heaviness. It’s a gift you give yourself, to be compassionate and honor that pain, and give yourself the time you need to move through it.
4. When you are ready, explore new beliefs that resonate with you and feel light and playful and free. Don’t try too hard to “change” old beliefs – just start moving forward with new ones that feel better to you.

These are the beliefs that work for me. Explore and find the ones that work for you!

If you focus on strategies too early, your mind might rebel and say “I don’t want to do that. Too hard, too boring, too complicated” and then give up. Instead, I want to inspire you to have a creative and playful approach to your income by connecting you to an expanded view of money and business.

Below is a chart of two different mindsets about business and money. The first one is typical, but leads to working the rest of your life in the same way. The second is the mindset of people who build their business into an asset that makes them more and more money as they work less and less.

I have another friend who is very into “prosperity consciousness” and would talk about her plans to open a retreat center one day. She had no idea how the money would “show up” but she believed she could will it into being if she had enough faith. After all, she believed in miracles–they happen every day. Meanwhile she was supported by her parents and struggled with credit card dept. She had a distaste for the actual details of money–she would say “I don’t want to be about money”. This masked a fear of being able to truly support herself on her own abilities.

Over the past several years I’ve watched as she has started her own cleaning business, and slowly but surely gained confidence in her ability to set a budget, earn a living, and support herself. She still works with consciousness principles, as do I, but these have finally taken on more than theoretical meaning for her as she confronts her real-world fears of dealing with that actual green stuff, money.

While I agree with the “Law of Attraction” wholeheartedly, I think sometimes people go into a fantasy place with it. They think “If I just think the right thoughts, checks will arrive in the mail.” This is spiritual B.S. and a form of denial. Let’s not kid ourselves. When someone tries to sell you that line, look at how much you paid for that book, that movie, that seminar. They are offering you something and you are paying for it. That’s how money is made. And you can create a product or service and sell it too. But it will take more than wishful thinking. If you look at the people who are selling you products about prosperity, you can bet they did more than just wish for you to give them money. They created a product that had value and marketed it and you bought it. That’s how it works.

I do think our attitude is the cornerstone of our success, and I do believe that there is a spiritual ecology to money, business, and life itself. I believe that the Universe does support us in our true mission in life and customers are naturally attracted to people, services, and products that reflect that true purpose.

However, I also think that most people with a pie-in-the-sky attitude are not dealing with their real issues and are using “abundance” thinking to stay in denial of their very real fears. They don’t believe in their own ability to actually make money and be successful. It is this confidence that is the heart of what makes the Law of Attraction work, which is why people who try to use it from a place of scarcity and lack of self-confidence do not succeed.

On the spiritual plane, we attract not what we want to believe, not what we think we should believe, but what we actually believe. This means that if we are at our core afraid of money and don’t have confidence in our abilities, that is the energy we are sending out. The cure for this isn’t more meditating and “clearing energy”. The cure is to be honest with ourselves about where we actually are with money and start where we are to develop the skills and confidence we need.

Whatever it is that scares you or intimidates you, start learning about it. Education and practice are the only ways I know to develop real confidence. By all means, keep working with your belief systems and your consciousness. Just don’t stop there. Get your hands dirty. Start learning about money. Start some kind of small business venture. Start wherever you are, but start.