Last weekend, I hosted a gathering at my house called The Consciousness of Money. Nine of us spent 3 days together in a deep exploration of our relationship with the Energy of Money. It called for us to be honest, kind, receptive and generous. It stretched our capacity and shifted our views of ourselves and each other. And it gave us insight into key financial trends that are already emerging and will continue to grow as the old economy is gradually superseded.
One of the strongest themes to emerge was generosity. As we released the limited thinking that surrounds most of our relationships with money it became clear that the energy of money is essentially the energy of the generosity of life itself.
Life is endlessly giving of itself. We’re constantly receiving the gifts of life. There are principles by which this giving and receiving takes place. The giving never ends but we have the power to accept or refuse the generosity.
Many of us choose to refuse much or most of it. We usually say this is because we don’t feel worthy or deserving or we don’t value ourselves. Even the wealthy often accept money transactionally but struggle to accept other gifts on offer. This means they don’t experience true prosperity, which includes personal happiness and fulfilment.
But is this really about your worthiness or deserving? Is it only about how you value yourself?
I don’t think so. After many years helping people create greater wealth and success in their lives along with happiness and love, I’ve come to see that this is never just about you. In fact, believing it’s all about you is the biggest limit you can place on yourself.
Life isn’t counting your personal worth or your value. Life doesn’t calculate who gets more and who gets less. It simply gives without end. It gives to the wealthy and it gives to the poor. It gives to those who feel they deserve it and those who don’t. It gives to the worthy and the “unworthy”.
But money has to keep moving. If you reflect on it, money only has real value at the point when it’s passed on to someone else. As long as it sits under your bed it’s paper and metal. As long as it sits in a bank account it’s a bunch of numbers. Money that’s invested is constantly being used by others to create value. Money that’s saved in a bank account is also being put to use in ways that most of us rarely think about.
So we get confused when we see money as something that belongs to “me”; something that “I” should be collecting or accumulating or possessing for “myself”. That kind of thinking puts us in a dysfunctional relationship with money.
Life showers us with gifts so we can give to each other. That may be in the form of a transaction (you give me something and I’ll give you something in return) or it may be indirect (I give to others and others give to me). Sometimes it’s stuff you can pay for. Sometimes it doesn’t have a price.
As long as it’s moving we get to share in the generosity. If we try to stop the flow we start to feel limited.
This doesn’t make it wrong to build wealth. Quite the opposite. It’s an encouragement to create more financial flow, open up your ability to receive more and become more generous. It’s a scalable principle from which you can develop the habit of deep generosity.
As one of the participants at The Consciousness of Money reflected towards the end, we’re constantly giving. Whenever we show up for our family or for our work, whenever we pay for something or pay our taxes, whether we give money to worthy causes or give our time to deliver services to help others, we’re expressing and sharing in the generosity of life itself.
It makes a huge difference to be conscious of this. Consciousness changes the game you play at its roots. And the consciousness of money allows you to do good and create a better world by definition.
