Increasingly Released

We will always be thinking of something. Although often pitched as emptying the mind, meditation is practicing letting distractions pass through. Enhancing the capacity for conscious focus. That is the connection between money and yoga. 

If you have or build buffers for financial noise, and an engine to support your immediate physical needs and future development, you gain the ability to choose your point of focus. You can care about things that are bigger than you. 

What are you worrying about? Is it what you want to be grappling with? Can you involve yourself in solving problems that revolve around more than just you, your survival, and your status? 

With community wealth, we become truly invested in the bigger vehicle that solves those problems. We build universal capacity to deal with noise. With a longer-term commitment, it is no longer about mercenaries and sellswords who are rewarded and go on their way. We become a part of something larger. 

Focus can expand when you have confidence that the basics are secure. Focus can expand beyond money, as the money distractions pass through. 

Where money gradually takes more of the burden of working for money, and we are increasingly released to focus on issues that get suffocated by the rules of money-making.

Sani Pass

Releasing Tension

You can over-extend metaphors. When you care about something, you can see analogies in everything else. Meaning comes through connection. 

It may strike many as a misuse of the words when I talk about Financial Yoga. Money is something a lot of yogis would say they don’t care about. 

The reality is money is something that can control you, if you don’t control it. You can’t opt-out of the world of money any more than Arjuna could opt out of war in the Bhagavad Gita. 

Lots of people aim to do what they love when they grow up. My choice was more pragmatic. I studied money partly because I hated money fights and the souring effect of money anxiety on the things that are valuable beyond the weighing and counting of price. 

When you realise that money can make money, and you are in a position to build financial breathing space, you can start on a path that releases you from being forced to allocate your time and energy to money-making. You can practice focusing on the things that really matter, but don’t meet the constraints of money-making. 

That starts with releasing tension. Releasing tension starts with seeing where you are holding it.

Stilling the Waves

Planning is not something you finish. It is the regular process of reviewing your story. A form of journaling, where you can go back and see what you thought in the past. It is difficult to plan in isolation, because that limits your sources of information and support. It is important to have someone you can speak openly to. Not as a cry for help. Not because you can't do it, are weak, or are incompetent. Because you are human. 

Invest in friends who will challenge you. Find friends who won’t challenge you, but will listen deeply. To build a sense of autonomy and consent. To build a practice and set of tools for dealing with the pulse of life that feels productive, in whatever way you choose to define productivity. So your choices resonate and build on what matters to you. 

The beauty of being human is that that is such a difficult question. The answer evolves and cannot be reduced to numbers. It certainly can’t be reduced to two numbers where you divide one by the other, compare yourself to others, and spit out a chocolate box answer. 

It is not a conversation about more and less. It is not a conversation about categorising people into good enough and not good enough. It is not weighing. It is not measuring. Planning is just practicing being alive. Consciously taking each step. Stilling the waves of anxiety. Focusing on what matters.

Necessary Friction

Building wealth is not purely about skills and knowledge. There is not a pure play meritocracy with a completely level playing field. The reality is we all have to eat, and that requires a degree of protection to be able to incentivize investing in skills and knowledge. With 7.7 Billion people on the planet, a pure meritocracy with no barriers would mean almost all of us would have to point out that someone is better than us at what we do. That means building wealth does require some friction. Some boundaries. Something to allow you to build an engine and vehicle completely detached from you. That can support you, and your community, without judgement of their merit. To still the waves of financial anxiety, you cannot constantly be weighing and measuring everyone. There has to be some independent commitment. That requires a level of self-awareness, seeing what your strengths and weaknesses are, what your community is, who your clients are, and understanding the market you are in. Developing skills that do not define you, but are transferable between different problems. 

 

Where You Are

Once you have the capacity to pause, you can form a picture of where you are. You can get an understanding of what is noise, and what is worth focusing on. What really matters to you, and what meaning do you want to create? You can still the waves of anxiety to the point that you feel some sort of sense of control. Space allows you to step back from your immediate needs and glimpse the bigger picture. From that point, you can get the deep knowledge. You can do the deep work. You first need to build the capacity to reflect on what is important to you. That is the path to liberty. That is the path to letting go of the anxiety that wraps you up and gnaws at you. That path starts with acceptance. With the question of where you are, and what do you notice?  

Longing for Truth

There is a perception that if you are earning lots of money, you must have lots of natural talent. So you get respect. This is dangerous. In yoga, they speak of the seven stages of development of wisdom. Wisdom isn’t about skills and knowledge. Even though skills and knowledge, properly contained, is how we create wealth. Wealth itself is what the skills and knowledge get applied to. The problem with a directionality in seeing progress and meritocracy as “more” is privilege. The first of the yogic stages is longing for truth. You understand that you are connected to everything, but you still have work to do. Before you can get all philosophical, there is the stuff you have to do, and there is the stuff you want to do. The stuff of life. The experience of life. There are still actions required, but you have to want to get free from the waves of anxiety. That desire is the directionality worth valuing. 

The Directionality Worth Valuing

Becoming Accustomed

Pause before you look at people who are richer than you to learn about money. If you want to create a buffer for the noise. If you want space to breathe, then the best place to look is how you spend money. How could you live on half of what you spend? The best place to learn is from people who are living on half of what you are. The key to stilling the waves of money anxiety is the relationship between income and expenses. The ins and outs, and the balance between the two.

Someone who is earning a lot of money, but spending even more, will be progressively getting more into debt. Making it increasingly hard to reduce their expenses. Becoming accustomed to a lifestyle they can not afford. Even if their income is growing, they are not on the path to financial freedom. They are going to be stressed, and full of money anxiety. Whereas someone who is earning half of what you do, can offer you lessons on how to gradually build up a buffer.

The Dance of Ins and Outs

Feast and Famine

A key step to stilling the waves of money anxiety is changing your idea of what money is. Shifting from seeing money as something you spend, to seeing it as something you put to work. Stillness starts with breathing space. With a positive gap between what comes in, and what goes out. There is a level below which this is incredibly difficult or impossible, but there are plenty of wise women in townships around South Africa who will teach you humbling lessons about financial planning. Without downplaying the challenge of finding work, or obstacles to developing skills and knowledge, the path to empowered decision-making lies in detaching from cycles of feast and famine. Stating the obvious, you need a source of income above your basic minimum needs. After that, the job your money gets is as important as the job you get.

"Still Life with Water Melons" Penny Siopis (1985)

The Nut of It

 “vitarka vicara nanda smita nugamat samprajnatah” Yoga Sutras

“Samadhi with consciousness is accompanied by reasoning, discrimination, bliss and awareness of individuality.”

What exists beyond the things we are aware of? The unseen beyond the waves of thought and anxiety. You can choose to simply “not care about money” because you don’t think it is important, but understanding it gives you greater control over it, rather than it having control over you. Meditating on things in space and time (Savitarka) allows you to progress to thinking of things outside of space and time (Nirvitarka). To find bliss (ananda) and get close to the seed of complete awareness (smita). The Dutch call the point, “the nut”. The reason. The thing. The purpose.  Siddhis seem like “supernatural” powers, which come from understanding. From developing skills and knowledge that seem stronger than the waves which control the rest of us. But truly conquering the waves of money anxiety is realising it isn’t about you or how impressive you are. Unless you change what you think of as you. Still, invest in skills and knowledge as part of your practice. Gain understanding. Always be learning.

Fairy Tales

In order to find calm within the chaos, you need to be able to process it. Narrative Therapy aims to help identify values and associated skills and knowledge as people construct stories about themselves and their identities. If you are able to put some distance between “you” and “your story”, you can take a bigger role as the author rather than a character. A lot of anxiety comes from our relationship with money. The story of money. The story of how that connects us to events, people, goals, failures, and what we do every day in a very practical way. The story you tell yourself, about yourself, sets the boundaries of what you think is possible. What is desirable. Frames the choices you make. Frames the problems you focus on. Narrative Therapy emphasises that “The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem”. Stilling the waves of money anxiety starts by understanding our relationship to the stories we tell ourselves about money.

"Fairy Tales" Jessie Wilcox Smith

The Battlefield

 “Tatra sthitau yatno bhyasah” Yoga Sutras

Abhyasa is the continuous effort towards firmly establishing the restraint of thought waves.

Stilling the waves of money anxiety requires developing a sustainable practice over a long period of time. It isn’t about “get rich quick” schemes and easy solutions. One of the main texts in Yoga is the Bhagavad Gita, which tells the story of Arjuna on the Battlefield. The chaos is going nowhere. The practice you develop is to find that point of calm within the struggle. To cope. It isn’t just moments of silence found in practicing meditation, outside of life. The aim is to develop new scripts, habits, actions and reflections that combine to deal with whatever life throws. To have the endurance and resilience to draw from and see through the chaos. Each day. For the long term. With commitment and focus.

Arjuna

Stand Up

Part of my practice of Yoga has been reining in my inner competitive South African male. Cumulative hours of pre-Rugby match pep talks mean there is enough “Pick Me” and “Stand up and be counted” in my deep soaked scripts to power many Bobby Skinstad commentary sessions. Although the headstand is a big part of the Sivananda style of yoga I follow, it isn’t the point. Aggressively trying to get into postures leads to injuries. Instead, Tim Minchin style “micro-ambition” is better. Small, achievable, sustainable goals that build good habits. One step at a time. Slightly deeper. Slightly more relaxed. Stilling the waves of money anxiety starts with acknowledging where you are. Being aware. Then gradually building a practice.

Powering Creativity

Money is a blunt incentive. A way of getting commitment when you don’t have a deeper connection to the cause. Like salt, fat, and sugar in cooking, it is the easiest thing to grab at. To turn to more as the default answer. My preference is to get to a point where you take money off the table. If you think of money anxiety as temporary waves, used to push us one way or the other, then stillness allows you to focus on what is truly important and worth identifying with. You don’t want to identify with money. You do want to identify with your purpose. This means internalising disciplines. Internalising ambition. Internalising decision making. Creating buffers to absorb the waves, and engines to power your creativity.

Turbo Generator

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.

Holding the Flood

Money anxiety has the ability to flood our minds. This can be long-term stress where we don’t know how to overcome the barriers to the income required to fund the consumption dictated by our vision of what our lives should look like. The homes we want. The holidays. The entertainment. The fashion. The signals of conspicuous success. It can be stress about the trade-offs, even if we can over come those barriers. Habitual work for money consuming every morsel of energy we possess. It can also be short term anxiety. More immediate. Where the financial waves make our decisions as we hop from crisis to crisis. With brief gasps of air in between bills, or the rising damp of debt nibbling at our foundations. Before controlled movement, comes calm. Finding a path to stillness.

Holding the Flood