The Real Value of Money
[This article has a 7.5/10 woo rating]
Money is interesting. But most writing about money is boring. So I recently asked my Twitter followers: “have you ever read anything that changed the way you thought about money?” My question went viral and got over 3 million views.
One of the answers led to a breakthrough in the way I understand the true value of money.
By far the most popular response was from writer and technologist Siddharth Sharma:
I am yet to find anything written about money that expresses the epiphany I had some years ago. Money is electricity, not coal. Its power is in the flow. If you try and hoard it, it degrades. It has to be kept moving. And then the mindset shifts from asking how do I acquire it to asking how do I step into this flow of trillions and trillions of dollars changing hands every day? This then makes it much easier to also spend money - when you see yourself as an ephemeral steward of it as it passes through you.
There are few who feel joy when they pay others but this shift has changed everything about how I have set up my business. I want to pay people and increase the flow rather than sequester as much of it for myself and dam the flow as a result.1 Lastly, money is energy. Large quantities of it will not get you peace and relaxation any more than a hundred barrels of gasoline in your house will. This is why you don’t want to hoard it.
Somewhat coincidentally, I’ve been reading the book Busting Loose From the Money Game by Robert Scheinfeld. It’s definitely the most bonkers thing I’ve ever read about money.2 He makes an almost identical point that money is more of an energy flow. One of the most woo concepts is what he calls “Cosmic Overdraft Protection.” Scheinfeld argues that once we start operating from the perspective that money is an unlimited energetic flow, a creation of consciousness itself, we effectively never run out.
Even with my new higher woo threshold, this idea triggered me. The fear of running out of money is a primary limitation on the choices I make with my life.
I soon realised the real value of money was in revealing this trigger itself.
Breaking the Spell
Nadja Taranczewski is a coach and psychologist that specialises in money. We had a short conversation specially for The Leading Edge. She led me to a personal breakthrough live on camera. And it might have a similar effect on you (Spotify/Apple podcasts links).
One of her simplest and most powerful questions is simply ask you to complete the question “Money is….”
Try it yourself now.
She hears three broad kinds of answers: negative, positive and mixed.3 People with negative projections would say something like “money is dirty.” Somebody with positive projections would say “money is freedom, self-confidence, luxury or power.”
People who hold positive projections can suffer from the illusion that they must earn money to deserve their existence, and that running out of money makes them worthless. These projections often have deeply personal causes.
The real value of money is in showing you where your shadow is. Where the parts of you that need to be integrated are.
In our conversation, Nadja tells the pretty harrowing story of a client of hers who was operated on without anaesthetic as a child (this was shockingly done until well into the 1980s4). This led her to feeling that she was “a worthless piece of meat.” This left her reluctant to write invoices for her own business. Once she became aware of this neglected shadow, she reclaimed it by saying “I’m a worthless piece of meat. And that’s O.K..” Not only did her money issues resolve, she also gained the much greater prize of a more integrated consciousness. The result of successful money work is what Nadja calls the priceless “feeling of being more carried by life.”
Of course, this fuzzy feeling is somewhat less valuable if you and your family then starve to death. But Nadja also believes in the possibility of what I’ve called “the most heretical idea in Western civilization.” If we follow the right path, we will be held by life. That “Cosmic Overdraft Protection” is in some strange way a reality. This is because there’s an energy flow that’s more powerful than money. This is the creative force of consciousness and love.5
It’s not that money isn’t “real” (whatever that means), it’s that there’s a force that’s more powerful than money that can influence the flow of everything including money.
We evolve our consciousness by walking the path, the Tao. If we do what we love in service of love, unexpected abundance will follow. The flow of love then matters more than the flow of money. But we can then only give as much as we can receive. As Rumi said “your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” This is the value of shadow work like Nadja’s; you can’t fully receive love if there’s a part you’re rejecting or blind to. Money tends to be one of the biggest barriers on our path to love, therefore money triggers are critical indicators of precisely where we need to integrate our consciousness.
In Busting Loose, Scheinfeld describes these money triggers as “Easter Eggs.” He suggests that every time you feel discomfort around money you allow yourself to experience the full intensity of the emotion. You then reframe that emotion as a creation of your own soul to show you where your power is hidden. You then simply say something to the effect of “I reclaim my power from this creation NOW!”
When you beat a boss in a video game, they drop power ups. For many people, money concerns represent the biggest bosses.
The problem is that living in money scarcity represents a more disconnected level of consciousness than living in loving, creative abundance. So it’s hard to even comprehend the possibility of a force more powerful than money. Transcending beyond this limitation is going to be a central feature of a broader societal shift.6
But we can still start by acting as if it’s true. This is faith as action not passive belief. If there’s an intelligent benign force that helps guide our evolution, it might use money triggers to help reveal where our power-ups are. Once you start deliberately noticing this, the the universe will then test your newfound awareness. I received a blatantly obvious money test within a day of my breakthrough with Nadja. How do we know how to respond to each test? At least that answer is relatively easy. As Neale Donald Walsch puts it:
What would love do now? No other question is relevant, no other question is meaningful, no other question has any importance to your soul.
1 This immediately made me think of Earth Elder Mindahi Bastida’s remark that, “water that doesn’t flow starts to stink.”
2 It has a few problematic aspects in my opinion. I detected a little of the "everything is just a dream and ultimately means nothing" vibe, which always strikes me as somewhat avoidant. Likewise there’s a lack of directionality to the evolution of consciousness. It seems to ignore the whole point of soul lessons and responsive reality: that the aim is in service of love or becoming more source-like, rather than simply the creation of whatever we want. This may be unfair criticism or a misreading, but reflects my gut feel.
3 Nadja’s two-part article on this topic is really worth reading. “If money in principle has a hard time finding its way to you and you often fight for resources, you probably have unconscious negative projections (Type 1) onto money. If you have money but are often worried about losing it or concerned about how to acquire more, you probably have unconscious positive projections (Type 2) onto money. And if you earn money but somehow never have any money, if you are often plagued by feelings of guilt and then voluntarily and involuntarily find ways to get rid of money as quickly as possible, then it is likely that you are wavering between the projections of both types, between disgust and greed (Type 3).”
4 Source: Newsweek: “The belief that babies' nervous systems were undeveloped and they therefore could not feel pain meant they were not provided with anesthesia as standard practice. Instead, babies were administered muscle relaxants to stop them from moving during invasive procedures…. surveys of medical professionals conducted as recently as 1986 indicated that infants younger than 15 months were still receiving no pain relief during surgery in many hospitals across the U.S.” Sometimes the prevailing materialist scientific paradigm is wrong guys.
5 Shadow work also prevents us from wanting the wrong things. If consciousness is in fact more creative and impactful than materialist science currently accepts, that’s a lot of responsibility. Essentially: we can “manifest” our desires in reality to a greater degree than scientific materialism currently accepts. New Age manifestation doctrines like The Secret give me the heebie jeebies not because they are false, but because they might be right. Since humans could talk we’ve been telling a variant of the “be careful what you wish for myth.” We ask the witch for a spell or the genie for a wish unaware of unintended consequences. This is how our blinkered, egoic intellect messes with complex adaptive systems.
6 My friend Steve Sanduski recommended one of his favourite Barron’s interviews with Lynne Twist. She tells the story of meeting the prophetic genius Buckminster Fuller in 1976. He said that the world was moving from a zero-sum structure to positive sum. “It would take 50 years because humanity’s institutions were rooted in a you OR me scarcity paradigm and we’d need 50 years for them to become so dysfunctional that they will no longer be repairable. And from the demise of this old paradigm would spring a new paradigm, a you AND me paradigm where there is enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life.” 50 years from 1976 is 2026; the same timeframe I’m hearing in an increasingly bizarre number of places currently.
