Do you love money? Would you even want to love money? In this month of Love (even if Valentine’s Day is a distant memory) and Money (with SA national Budget Speech and tax year-end all coming up)…we thought we’d challenge ourselves to uncover our deepest feelings around one of the most searched, most prioritized, and most controversial topics – money.
As the Budget Speech plays out, you’ll most likely be drawn to consider your own budget or spending, and maybe even think of things like financial goals, impact of interest rate hikes, and side hustles. All of these information and action oriented approaches are great, and yet won’t help you with the biggest part of the equation – YOU – getting to know who you are when it comes to money, and the beliefs and emotions invisibly shaping your behaviours.
In our last post, we introduced the concept of Emergent Love. That Love that is eternal, going beyond the impact of conditions and otherness, and into the realm of unwavering oneness. If that is true Love, then surely as with the nature of all unwavering truths, it must apply universally and not only in certain situations. And so we end up here – questioning, philosophically, whether love and money intertwine with the concept of oneness; but also practically … can you, do you, should you, and would you, want to Love money?
Let’s start with the practical. How would you answer the two opening questions of this blog? Once you’ve answered, take a moment to understand how the questions themselves and your answers make you feel. If you answered no to loving money, ordidn’t answer but felt weird about the question, or even felt the need to qualify your feelings with an explanation or questioning the question, then you’re most likely like many of us – sitting with a deep sense of discomfort and limiting underlying beliefs around money – irrespective of the level of success or amount of money you’ve amassed.
If you answered yes, does this mean the opposite is true? While it’s easy to jump to this conclusion, it could actually be the same discomfort manifesting in another form. As an analogy, let’s say you have two people who fear authority. One person’s behavior could manifest as overly compliant and courteous to authority, whilst another could manifest as anarchy or sabotage…both being behaviours manifesting at different ends of a spectrum but expressions of the same discomfort. So if you’ve answered yes to the questions, consider the way you’re processing it. Does it feel slightly boisterous, maybe a little defiant, slightly arrogant or self-indulgent? If the thoughts and emotions fall somewhere in this realm, then it’s probably also indicating an underlying discomfort and tension around money and your relationship with it.
So what sort of thought or feeling would indicate a general comfort and healthy relationship with money? The best way to understand this is to experience it practically. Because money comes with so much emotional charge, beliefs and baggage, let’s choose a different topic – one without emotional charge, limiting belief systems, or religious paradigms. What if we considered air … the air we breathe. Now, most of us don’t go around thinking about how much we love air or oxygen. But if we were to be asked to think about it, to consider whether it was something we loved and would even want to love, chances are we could easily answer “yes”. Not only would we Love clean, fresh air, we’d probably feel a sense of wanting to Love the air, perhaps even wondering why we don’t give more love and appreciation to it. Most importantly, we’d probably feel a calm, almost natural sense of appreciation and love for it, no sense of moral questioning and no discomfort with the idea. Even if we landed on an answer of not necessarily loving it and rather having deep appreciation for it, it would be from a state of ease and not a position of defense.
There are, of course, a whole host of reasons why money feels loaded with moral and social judgments. It forms the fabric of so many conscious and unconscious institutions and choices in our society, from state to business to religions to relationships and so much more. We’ll refrain from tapping into the root causes today and instead stay on this first important step of practically assessing our feelings on integrating Love and money.
Through getting intimate and understanding the feelings that these questions and thoughts of money elicit within, we can start to identify our subconscious beliefs and gauge whether there are limitations to be Unlearned, and whether we want to shift to a healthier relationship with money. That could be anything from moving towards loving money, having a healthy detachment to it, or anything in between. The key is a healthy state of awareness and integrated relationship.
If you’ve taken a moment to assess your feelings and landed on a desire to shift your relationship with money… Where to from here? This brings us full circle towards the philosophical and spiritual aspect. Some of the ways in which we come to these suboptimal perspectives on money is seeing it as finite, reserved either for the power hungry or the super smart and special among us, or at the very least the necessary thing that we trade our freedoms and manual and intellectual capabilities for. A huge one is also that we see it as a critical thing that is both separate from us, as well as separates us from each other. After all, it’s seen to determine individual and societies competitive advantages – where we study, where we live, the holidays we take and the cars we drive, the business we undertake etc. So of course we see it as ‘other’, separate, a trade off, necessary evil for better quality of life, the great divider, and so on.
What if that was part of – if not – the problem! What if we built a relationship with money where we saw it as a natural extension of ourselves…like an arm or an organ,or like the trees who we’re in constant symbiotic relationship with through oxygen and dioxide exchange. This is not as esoteric as it sounds. It’s actually extremely practical and logical. Our physical and cognitive capabilities go into producing outputs that return resources to us in the form of money. We then use that money as a means of flowing resources to others for their physical and cognitive outputs in the form of products and services. It’s a beautiful exchange of value, of effort, of ourselves. So what if we formed a loving relationship with money and value. What if we framed our beliefs to joyfully and purposefully receive money as a reflection of value creation, as well as spend money as a means of receiving value creation from others? Not only would that shift our relationship with money – based on a very logical foundation of beliefs – but also release some of the separation and otherness felt towards money and each other. In addition, we’d probably focus much more on value and values both in the areas we expend energy for money (such as work), as well as where we spend and allocate our money…
And this should be the essence of budgets and budgeting. What is often thought of as a listing of income and expenses should be oh so much more fun than that. It should be the practice of getting intimate with what you value for yourself, as a couple if you’re in partnership, and perhaps as a family. It should be choosing to receive and flow your money towards those things that resonate with what you value and where your values lie. It can be the practical, tangible way to start seeing money as a virtuous connector of oneness and love.
We make the bold declaration that “Everything of real value must be rooted in love”. So if you need and want money, root it in love to realize its true value. Let love and oneness guide your relationship with money…. We call this Emergent Money.
