Understanding Your Relationship With Money
BY CRAIG RICHMAN
CHAKRA SEVEN: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES
Money is just a tool to live your best life. Money itself can never be the goal or instrument to inner peace and happiness.
Much of our behavior and money habits have been established in our past,but it does not have to define our future.
As a veteran financial advisor and yoga teacher, I have always felt there was a disconnect between the physical realm of handing your finances and the meta physical realm of creating happiness and fulfillment.
To live life on purpose, we need to not only make prudent financial decisions, but we always need spiritual guidance as a path to the self. This entails the physical work in yoga to start to peel the layers and begin to discover your best self!
THE FIRST STEP IS UNDERSTANDING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY.
Before we can start to begin a new journey with our financial future, it is imperative to understand our relationship with money. We need to understand it on so many levels that we ultimately create union between our money decisions and our deepest core values and highest commitments.
First, we must confront our challenges, fears, attachments, remorse, regret, and happiness around money. We need to confront our “money story” in order to begin our transformation.
Ask yourself the following questions: Be totally authentic about your feelings.
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- What is your most painful memory related to money?
- What is your biggest fear about money?
- What were you taught as the most valuable aspect about money?
- When have you been most positively or negatively moved by money?
- What were your parent’s values around money and how did you react to them?
Buddhist traditions speak of the “Wanting Mind.”
It’s like an outside force compelling us to squander our capital. The wanting mind insists that things need to change in order for us to be happy and money is one of its favourite objects to focus on.
The constant desire to want material things you feel will make you happy that actually only allow happiness in the moment until the next desire to purchase something that creates the same feelings of wanting. The financial toll of wanting is that whether it’s more stuff or more (you fill in the blank), too many of us fall prey to our wanting mind’s endless desires.
Perhaps the bible of yoga, “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali” explains in the second sutra that excessive attachment is based on the assumption that the object desired, once obtained, will create everlasting happiness. When an object satisfies a desire, it provides a moment of happiness. Because of this moment, our mind makes the possession of objects very important, even indispensable, until the next obsession.
Did you ever dream of buying an item in the moment? I always wanted a high- end BMW sports car. I leased a new BMW 335i sports sedan when it came out years ago. I had to have that car! Forget that the car was not practical for our family or the high cost of the lease including super unleaded gas, insurance and expensive high speed tires that had to be replaced annually. I am sure you get the picture. After the sale and excitement was gone, all I was left with was an expensive lease and an ongoing expense. My wanting mind was in high gear (excuse the pun). Was this purchase going to help me toward my life’s intention? Absolutely not, and worst of all, I didn’t even have an internal conversation with myself! If anything, this wanting mind purchase was directly NOT in concert with my money goals. I failed to be present at that moment.
But as in yoga, there is no judgement! Just try to improve moving forward. The answers are never “out there.” All the answers are “in there” inside you waiting to be discovered. By understanding the difference between the wanting mind’s desires and your more heartfelt goals, you will have a much greater likelihood of making progress toward your life’s intentions. And it will be sustainable.
We routinely allow money to dictate the terms of our lives and often to be the most single important factors in the decisions we make around love, work, family or friendships. Each financial choice you make is a powerful statement of who you are and what you care about!
It is time to start to create the union in essence to align our money decisions with our deepest core values and highest commitments. What are these values and commitments? You have to search your soul to contemplate what life should look like. What is so compelling to you that you can’t wait to wake up in the morning to deliver on your passion?
The work in the 7th Chakra is to feel the limitation of your old beliefs, release your limiting beliefs, feel the possibility of new beliefs and create a new paradigm of beliefs that will start your journey toward financial abundance.
When your money habits are in concert with your life’s intentions, you are approaching “union” as we learn to live consciously, fully and joyfully, in our relationship with money.
CRAIG IS AN INDEPENDENT FINANCIAL ADVISOR AND YOGA TEACHER. HIS PRACTICE CONCENTRATES ON GUIDING WOMEN TO CREATE LIFE
ON PURPOSE TOWARD FINANCIAL AND SPIRITUAL ABUNDANCE. FOR CHAKRA WORKSHOP DETAILS, PLEASE EMAIL CRAIG.
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5550 GLADES ROAD, SUITE 500, BOCA RATON, FL 33431
(561) 368-6400 • CRAIG@YOURFINANCIALZEN.COM
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