The energy of money is woven through all aspects of our life. It’s a powerful energy that both attracts and repels us. It’s an energy that enables us to create great systems for the improvement of life on this planet. It’s also an energy that people have chased mercilessly and used to create great destruction.
It’s an energy we can’t avoid. We have to embrace it to make life work.
The beautiful thing about money is that it unites our spiritual and material life. It connects us with our deep inner desires for abundance, thriving and generosity. These can only be expressed in our physical reality. We create abundance through the choices we make. Thriving is lived through our body and our relationships. Generosity is expressed through our actions.
In my personal exploration of money, which started when I wrote the book, Love Money, Money Loves You, and continues to this day, I‘ve constantly studied and tested what makes the most difference. I’ve learnt from others and I’ve developed systems myself that work well for everybody who wants a healthy relationship with money.
This is a lifelong relationship. It’s also one of the most significant relationships of our entire life. It can make and break marriages, communities and nations. Given how powerful it is, it’s not surprising how conflicted it often is.
Exploring the energy of money
I believe it’s essential for each one of us to engage with our relationship with money. We need to explore it, embrace it and find a way to turn it into a genuinely healthy, fulfilling connection that will accompany us throughout our life.
It’s a relationship in which we will give and receive, invest and return, envision and create, spend and save, all the time using money to fuel our life decisions. It connects us all together and gives us the power to share our gifts with each other.
When we turn our back on the gift of the system of money which allows us to make a contribution to the world and benefit from the contributions of others, we turn our back on one of the most powerful energies in human life. To do this because of deep conflicts that arise from misunderstanding, bad teaching and the manipulation of power is a loss to our individual and collective experience of human life.
To recognise the power and the beauty of money and the freedom it gives us is to embrace one of the great challenges of human life. In this spirit, I would like to share with you the 12 key elements I’ve found to be essential, both for myself and for many thousands of clients I’ve worked with, for creating a lifelong, healthy, generous relationship with money.
Inner Technology
I often talk about inner technology, which is the inner work we do to make our life fulfilling and successful on our own terms. Many teachers say that business is 90% mindset and 10% what you do. In my experience, I find the mind is not powerful enough to to be the only faculty for engaging with business and money. There’s so much more to our being than the mind alone.
Doing business and making money involves heart and soul, energy and your consciousness, wisdom, spirit and a deep sense of who you are. This is the territory of inner technology.
The 12 key elements that follow are the fundamental inner skills you need to develop in order to meet the financial challenges of business and family life and thrive in the process.
1. Relax about money
The majority of people spend a lot of time being worried and stressed about money whether they’re living in scarcity or great wealth. To have a healthy, thriving relationship with money it’s essential to be able to relax about it. Relaxation comes when you understand what money really is, and how it helps to connect us all in beautiful ways through the sacred art of commerce.
2. Relax about work
Because we generally work to make money, the stress and worry around money bleeds into our work. It’s so common for people to do work that they don’t enjoy and doesn’t feed their soul, so they can make enough money to survive. It’s not surprising that we risk sacrificing our health and well-being, relationships and family, and our life enjoyment by working in ways that aren’t healthy or sane.
It’s time to find better ways of working, that are relaxed, enjoyable and light, while serving the businesses we work in, ourselves, our loved ones, and our lives. I call this working light. It’s an alternative to working hard. My way of teaching it is based on ancient Chinese methods of relaxation and healthy living, combined with our modern expectations for productivity and creativity.
3. Manage your energy
In order to work, be creative, be productive and contribute to society you need to manage your energy. It gives you the capacity to do what you set out to achieve. Otherwise your life is not fulfilling. Many people experience very uneven energy levels. They don’t have enough energy to do what they really want, enjoy their family life or have a rich and fulfilling social and personal life.
You can learn how to manage your energy both on a day-to-day basis and in the long term so that you’ll always have the energy you need to create whatever you choose to create. This is an essential skill.
4. Be clear what you want
Over the last century many books have been written demonstrating how important it is to be clear what you want in order to create or achieve it. There are principles of life that come into play whenever you want something. If you’re confused and unclear you’ll find it very difficult to experience that you can ever get what you want in life. If you allow yourself to be tense, nervous, anxious or self-limiting, you’ll find it very difficult to receive what you want even if it’s offered to you.
It takes a lot of skill and practice to cultivate clarity of desire and a relaxed inner environment that’s receptive and generous towards yourself.
5. Make wise decisions
Many decision-making approaches are fundamentally mental processes. Whilst it’s very important to have a foundation of rationality in any decision that you make, there’s more to it than this. A wise decision takes account of other aspects of your being.
- Your emotions and the emotions of other people involved in the decision
- Your heart and what you would love to see happen (not only what makes sense to the mind)
- Your soul (the part of you that longs for joy, inner peace and freedom).
If you want to make wise decisions you need to expand your awareness and your consciousness. You need to cultivate your ability to source a rich array of information on which to base your decision. You need to practise discernment as you sort through the information. And you need to be in touch with the rich, multi-dimensional, natural system of life, so your decisions are aligned with fundamental life principles. Wisdom is important.
6. Heal your significant relationships
Many people find themselves restricted in business because they’re easily triggered or find it difficult to work with other people. Many of these triggers and issues come from unresolved relationship problems from the past, including from your childhood. If you don’t resolve them they will continue to trigger you for the rest of your life.
It’s important to have a good process for cleaning up your past and present relationships, forgiving the people who have hurt you, letting go of unnecessary defences, setting clear conscious boundaries and opening your heart. It is so much easier to do business when your heart is open and your mind is clear.
7. Create and exchange value
Money is a system that enables us to contribute to society and exchange our contributions with one another. It’s the fuel in the system of exchange that flows around our entire planet.
Money is all about value. When you make something that is of value to someone else you have something worthy of exchange. In order to do this you need to have an understanding of what you value and of what others value, how you value yourself and how other people value themselves, and how to negotiate an agreement around the value that you’re sharing with others. With this inner ability you’re equipped to engage with the financial system of value exchange at any scale.
8. Love yourself
Most people I come across try their hardest to be kind to others but they’re very hard on themselves. They are their own worst critic and judge. They find it quite normal, even acceptable, to be angry with themselves, swear at themselves, weigh themselves down with guilt and even hate themselves for the mistakes they’ve made.
This creates a subtle energy and example all around you of self-rejection. Other people can sense it but they won’t usually know that it’s coming from you so it’ll feel as if it’s coming from them. And so we create a world where we find it normal to reject ourselves and yet we try so hard to love each other.
If you really want to love others it’s essential that you’re able to love yourself. If you really want to do good in your life it’s essential that you respect and love yourself. If you really want to be successful in business you need to know how to listen to, respect and love yourself.
9. Discover your soul’s purpose
It seems to be a universal human experience to crave joy, inner peace, freedom and abundance. These are the spiritual or inner values that motivate you to be creative, powerful and generous in your life. It’s common to seek these qualities through material accumulation, intense excitement and stimulation, and a wide range of activities (including addictive behaviours) that don’t support you to thrive.
If you want to experience fulfilment in business, work and money it makes a huge difference to know your soul’s purpose and bring that into your work. Can you imagine the gift of being a person who brings joy to the workplace every day? Can you imagine how fulfilling it would be if you can experience not only financial freedom but inner freedom at the same time? That’s the reason for engaging deeply with your soul’s purpose in your quest for a healthy relationship with money.
10. Clean up your karma
Karma is a beautiful system that enables you to recognise past behaviours you don’t wish to repeat, release them and change your ways. It’s not important whether you believe in past lives or not. Karma is a part of every life.
When you hurt others, you create karma. The consequence is that you experience others hurting you in a similar way. It’s not a cruel system of punishment. It’s a feedback system that allows you to see the consequences of your own behaviour.
When you’ve built up a lot of karma, especially from past lives, it can be very confusing because you don’t understand why so many people hurt you in ways that feel undeserved. It usually leads to significant levels of self-sabotage and self-condemnation.
When you learn how to release karma by cleaning up the hurts you’ve caused others and releasing yourself from the burden of guilt and shame, you find inner freedom and the ability to express yourself at a level that you’ve never known before. This creates an environment in which you can confidently become as successful as you want in a way that is totally aligned with your purpose.
11. Align with the light
Most of our lives are spent in the world of duality. We have up and down, good and bad, cheap and expensive, boring and exciting, and are constantly playing with the ranges of experience that make up human life.
But there’s another dimension to life which is not based on this duality. I call it the Light. When you know this diension you’re able to find peace and stillness at any point along the range of human experience. You’re able to understand others without judgement, even when they do things that are utterly incomprehensible to you. You’re able to find the silver lining in the darkest cloud. You’re able to accept life’s greatest challenges with inner peace.
You know a deeper truth even as you live through the turbulence and movement of health, relationships, money, politics and world events.No one can control or manipulate you here. It’s a deeply personal experience. It’s where you discover the truth of who you are.
12. Be a gamechanger
All the previous Elements come together in the 12th Element. To find true fulfilment in your relationship with money is not just about making money. It’s about knowing and expressing your purpose wherever you work. It’s about working in a way that’s light for you, inspiring to others and profoundly impactful. It’s about being at peace in your relationship with money so you can attract all the resources you need at any time to be able to create whatever you choose.
If you truly dedicate yourself to becoming highly skilful in the inner technology that I’ve described above you naturally become a gamechanger. It doesn’t matter whether you work in a purpose-led business, a more traditional setting or your work is in the home or your community. To be a gamechanger is to have deep values and share them; to have the courage to do what you know to be right and true; to create and add to the beauty of the world; to know joy; and to express freedom for all to share in. This is the true fulfilment of your relationship with money.
The spirit of generosity
I believe that one of the most powerful things we can do to make the world a better place is to cultivate the spirit of generosity in business. Businesses influence so many people. They have more freedom than governments and other organisations.
The 12 Elements build the spirit of generosity inside you. They give you the inner relaxation and spaciousness you need to be able to receive and share generously. If you bring that into your work, we all benefit.
How to create your own healthy relationship with money
If these 12 Key Elements of a lifelong healthy relationship with money are resonating with you and you know that you need to address some or all of them, I invite you to join the Thank You Money program.
Thank You Money is a system for healing and transforming your relationship with money. It leads you step-by-step through each of the Elements I’ve described above.
Each Element lasts for one month, giving you the chance to immerse yourself in the energy, consciousness and inner technology of mastering that topic.
The entire program lasts 12 months. You can also divide it into three parts (with 4 Elements in each part) or sign up for a single Element whenever you want.
In Thank You Money, I work with energy and consciousness above all else. I teach you the fundamental principles that enable you to expand your relationship with money in a way that’s aligned with life and nature.
I believe in working light and I also believe in learning light. By immersing you in the beautiful energy of money that I came to know and love through my book, Love Money Money Loves You, I would like to introduce you to a relaxing, enjoyable and beautiful way of learning that will change your life forever.
As you come to recognise the truth of what money is and explore how you could live in a radically different relationship with it, you naturally find lighter ways of working, more aligned ways of attracting and creating wealth and simpler ways to bring your purpose into every aspect of your life.
This is a life lived generously. Generous towards yourself and generous towards others. It’s far more fulfilling than abundance alone.
The spirit of generosity speaks to our time in history. Through generosity we take care of ourselves, each other and our environment. It happens through our work and in our relationship with the generous, loving energy of money.
- If you’re ready to sign up right away, please go ahead: Thank You Money.
- If you have questions or would like to explore whether it’s right for you, please book a Discovery Call.
- If you’re already doing Thank You Money and would like to share it with a friend, please join our partner program as we’d love to reward your generosity: Partner Program
