Spirituality and Money

Spirituality and Money Just How Spiritual Is Money?
©1994, 2003 by Andrea Conway

Two women browsing in our local New Age bookstore a few weeks ago picked up Deepak Chopra's new tape on abundance and talked about how disappointed they were that such an important spiritual teacher was now encouraging people to acquire affluence. Standing down the aisle from them, listening, I could sense the complete distaste they felt for the entire subject. Their dialogue stayed with me, a reminder that for so many of us involved in the "New Age," money is still a dirty word. Yet, if our main function as light workers on this planet is to transform mass thinking from its current vibration of fear and lack to the new vibration of love and abundance, healing our personal attitudes about money may be one of the most important contributions we can make to our world and to the universe.Why Us, Why Now?It's time now for more of us to accelerate our healing of personal and planetary attitudes about abundance. This healing is part of our overall reclaiming of personal power, assisted by the intensified light energies available to us now. We're entering a time when we must learn to channel these light energies through our bodies easily and joyfully. We live on a planet of bountiful abundance. If you have ever tried to count the number of leaves on a maple tree in summertime or the blades of grass in a field, you'll have some idea of the magnitude of natural abundance that surrounds us and is available to each of us all of the time.Lately in my work I'm seeing increasing numbers of people who want to start their own business - be it a single-person massage practice or a group endeavor delivering a new kind of product or service. And, as more and more talented, educated people are laid off by large corporations, they are looking at alternative ways to make money in the so-called "recession."To me, this recession that we fear so much is actually a fundamental and much-needed restructuring of the world economy, part of releasing the old idea that the corporation or the lifelong job would take care of us. On a mass consciousness level, we are letting that belief go as, one by one, we learn to be our own source of security. Even on Main Street in the middle-class North Shore community where I live, the past year has seen the opening of three new stores offering crystals, Native American handicrafts, and Guatemalan imports. Person by person, small business by small business, we're offering the gifts of who we are to the marketplace.At the same time, our negative beliefs about money, success, and abundance run deep. As more of us risk bringing our light into the world, we need to bring our attitudes toward money into the light with us. In doing so, we open up our ability to succeed, both in our personal endeavors and in bringing in the New Age.Money and Why We Fear ItLet's accept that we've had some compelling reasons to be fearful about money. In this lifetime alone, we've witnessed the severe damage to the ecology of our planet through industrial pollution in the name of free enterprise. We've also seen the worldwide effects of wars fought by expensive and destructive military weapons built with our tax dollars.Many of us may also have a karmic or past-life history of misusing money or power in general. Though most of us would like to think that we have spent a majority of our past lives being good, saintly or uplifting, it may be more realistic to acknowledge that, in order for many of us to have evolved to the point where we are today, we've had just as many past lives as downright creeps as we've had as seekers of light. And that's OK.It's all been part of the Piscean age (among others), in which we underwent a collective learning about duality that was necessary to get us to the point where we can now witness our judgments--good and bad--bless them all as the creators we are, and release them to the light. To me, being a light worker means knowing enough about darkness to recognize it and transform it. In order to recognize darkness, you have to have experienced it.Money, in and of itself, is neither good nor evil. Money is simply the physical expression of an energy, and the energy of money can be used positively or negatively. Our unfamiliarity with thinking about money as energy is what makes this concept mysterious at first. But think of electricity, another completely mysterious natural energy that we have over the past century become comfortably familiar with.Electricity can be used to generate beautiful, soothing light, or it can be used to electrocute people. Yet, relatively few of us carry around heavy judgments about electricity. When we need some, we just plug into it. We usually take electricity for granted. On an unconscious level, I would say we have a collective belief that we can trust in the abundant availability of electricity. That kind of trust in abundance is one we can learn to have about money as well--and then stand back and watch it flow into our lives.Transforming Fear into LoveOnce you begin to open to changing your attitudes about money, you'll probably find that even more fearful beliefs come up. This is part of the cleansing process. As you move through these fears, you will be permanently transforming your relationship to money.During the process, when you find yourself dwelling on negative pictures about money, it can help to remind yourself of some of the positive influences money creates.Perhaps you have a spiritual master who has used money to build a large meditation or yoga center where thousands of people come to bathe in the light of spirit. Or maybe you can think of a charitable organization you respect, one that is putting hundreds of thousands of dollars to work for the good of the world. I really enjoy my long-distance telephone company, which in 1993 created one million dollars to contribute to charities. Stuart Wilde, in his book The Trick to Money is Having Some, points out that whether we like to think of it this way or not, Mother Theresa has established a multi-million dollar business to perform the charitable work that is her mission in life.By putting a positive thought about wealth next to a negative one, you can effortlessly begin to create a new belief system in which money is accepted for the good that it can do. There's no need to make yourself wrong for having negative beliefs about money. There's no need to feel frustrated because you haven't "gotten" abundance yet. All you need to do is bring in a positive thought when you notice you are being fearful or critical. Remind yourself that you are in the process of change and that your relationship to money is becoming more positive all the time. Be gentle with yourself. You are releasing a very old, very deeply embedded thought form, and you are doing it for all of us. Thank yourself.

Reprinted from Spirit of Change, 1994, http://www.spiritofchange.org/.