It's Not About the Money: Shifting the Patterns in Your Finances

As I am wrapping up my income tax preparations, I have money on my mind...the problems with it, the not enough of it, the where-did-it-all-go of it, the outrage that my taxes are helping to fund political policies I find to be abhorrent....and so on. Concurrently, I'm reading an interesting book by Geneen Roth called 'Lost and Found' which draws some very direct parallels with how we manage our finances and how we manage our lives. How we use our financial resources is in truth not separate from how we use any other resource; time and energy, for example. Most of us (me, included) tend to position our money issues outside of our awareness of the vast mid-range of variables regarding the ebb and flow of resources and their inherent cyclical nature. We tend to lock onto an all-or-nothing mind-set and go from there; often with very destructive results.

Roth refers to this as the 'what-the-hell' myth and writes:

"The what-the-hell myth comes from the mind that believes in black or white with no in-between. If we've blown it a little, we might as well blow it all the way. If we eat a bite, we might as well eat the entire thing. If we've bought a pair of shoes, we might as well buy the purse, the stockings, the skirt that goes with them. It's a mind-set left over from being children who haven't yet learned to hold the tension of opposites (or that the mommies they worship can also be mean and tired - and that that doesn't mean the end of the love as they've known it). In this black-or-white thinking, you're either good or you're bad, you're right or you're wrong. One wrong move and you're off the deep end."

My own inquiries on money matters brought me back to a lesson from my teacher Spotted Eagle on evolving our finances:

"It is important to notice where you have a habit of indulging in nonproductive tension: the tension between the outcome you fear and the outcome of your fantasies. With observation and a willingness to grow, you can make the shift to a different kind of tension, the one that will actually assist you in making a change: the tension between the essence, the feeling experience, you have now, and the essence you desire.

It is also important to notice that the emotional wave can block the experience of essence. This is quite obvious when we are talking about anger, fear, or confusion, but it is also true when we talk about excitement, which is an emotional reaction to the expectation that a fantasy for a future form will come true. When the wave is one of excitement, we can easily confuse this with the essence of joy. But clearly it is not joy; it is medication of your fear.

Where these inquiries can take us is to a perspective where we can begin to see this polarity of thinking, and the way the mind seesaws back and forth between the outcome you fear and the outcome of your fantasy. We can all easily see how the mind makes up a fearful future when it is in raw contact with uncertainty. But there is another side of Mind that is equally problematical. 

The following is a common example which illustrates how we can really damage our confidence, and work at cross-purposes to having clarity in the now: 

Let us say you have been struggling for a long time, and finally, you get a break. You have a great week where everything appears to go your way. What is the first thing the excitement wave does? Mind takes these facts in the now, and uses them to make a prediction about the future. That prediction is usually: ‘Everything is okay now! Phew! What a relief! The future is going to look like this!’
Whatever you do, do not fall into this trap of positive thinking, expectation, and positive predictions. These are all interpretations of the moment, and they have nothing to do with the moment itself and what we must notice about it. At times like this it's useful to add the words 'or not' to whatever statement or conclusion we come to regarding our circumstances. In this way you can train your attention so that you stop predicting anything about the future, negative or positive. Train your awareness to hold the moment by getting through to yourself that the future does not exist except in your imagination.

This is all part of a process whereby you can set yourself on a course of identifying your own mythology and illusions about your finances, and how your mind uses positive and negative fantasy to cloud your perceptions of reality and keep you out of power. What will make you powerful is the development of your ability to be present with the uncertainties that are there, and to make now-based choices between your actionable options in the now, neither scaring nor deluding yourself, and facing what is with unflinching willingness."