Developing a Practice

Yogas chitta-vritti-nirodhah

Chitta is all the stuff of the mind, intellect, and ego. Our awareness. Our anxiety. Our identity. Our conscious, subconscious, and dreams. The stuff that has soaked deep to form the way we see the world, and see each other. Vrittis are thought waves. “This too will pass”, but the danger is when we absorb the waves, and identify them. When we think we are the storms, winds, and rains of challenges that seem to attack us relentlessly. Money Anxiety comes in this form. Fear of where it will come from. Fear of where it will go. Fear of the aftermath it will leave. Once understood, it is possible to develop a practice to control the financial waves. Working with them rather than fighting. Eventually finding nirodhah (stillness). Financial Yoga is developing a practice to still the waves of money anxiety.

Embodied Thinking

The danger of elevating and separating thinking and work lies where we become disembodied. As Ken Robinson warns, when you start treating your body “as a form of transport for your head”. I read and write regularly about building endurance, resilience, and creativity. A base for this is financial security. There is truth in the saying that there isn’t a special entrepreneurial gene, most wildly successful entrepreneurs are just rich kids with safety nets. Safety nets aren’t just financial. Our physical health, community support, and an embodied approach to life is just as, if not more, important than a good idea and starting capital. There are good ideas, and there are good business ideas. Some are both. We destroy some good ideas by trying to filter them through the constraints that make them good business ideas. We also destroy some business ideas by not partnering them with good ideas that provide the qualitative environment for the lives we are trying to build. Even the things that aren’t connected, are connected.