Subtle Change

Stilling the waves of money anxiety starts with understanding your relationship with money. With the stories you tell yourself, and the daily practice you create around that. How you wake up. What you choose to do. How you choose to think. What new information you expose yourself to. What areas of embodiment you are exploring. The movement, you are creating. The flexibility, you are creating. The strength, you are creating. The control you have over how you move. Your autonomy. Your transitions.

Understand the situation that you are in, and the situation you want to be in. Understand the path, and the required skills and knowledge. That starts with paying attention to where you are, reflecting on it, and seeing what your choices are. In a way that you are fully present and able to grapple with that with a sparkle in your eye. To see a point in subtle change. To celebrate marginal progress that adds up. That powers small achievable steps every day.

Detail from "The School of Athens" Raphael

Euclid studying Change

Comfort within Discomfort

Find comfort within discomfort. That does not mean pushing through pain. With yoga and stretching, to progress, you do not need to hurt yourself. You can learn within limits. You can learn by understanding the boundaries, and doing the work inside of that. Playing, and moving around, in your areas of slight discomfort. Be curious about transitions that are not smooth.

A lot of meditative work can be done through movement and dancing. Being aware of, “Ooo, this bit there is tight. I am going to move my shoulder more. I am a bit stiff in my lower back, I am going to do some moving there.” It is about understanding where you carry your tension. You can go for a run. A swim. Lift your arms over your head. Pick something up. Reach for something. Our minds learn in the way our body does. Through an embodied use-it-or-loose-it process of leaning into areas of discomfort (without hurting yourself) and building endurance and resilience. Through consistent engagement.

Twist and Breathe

The Robots

Price isn’t Value. Without insurmountable barriers, price is supposed to act as a traffic light. A competitive advantage isn’t what you are good at. It is the reason other people can’t do what you do. The obstacle. The privilege. The difficulty. The law of supply is that for a fixed cost of doing something, a higher price will attract a larger supply of people willing to solve that problem. You don’t get paid more for doing something more valuable. Price is a signal of scarcity. Not value. You have to determine how you value things, and then look at the traffic lights (given your values and intended destination) of the things that will help you get where you are going.

Clarity and Transition

It is only possible for us to think of one thing at a time. We can do lots of things at the same time. Multi-tasking happens when it is not at the conscious level. But we can only think one thing at a time. Like playing a guitar, it then boils down to the clarity of the sound that comes out with each thought, and the smoothness of the transition. How much control do we have over which particular thought we are focused on, how long we focus on it, and what comes next? How much attention do we give to the various things we are conscious of? In the meantime we carry on doing things. Life goes on without a pause button. Josh Waitzkin talks of “numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form” for his approach to learning. Using numbers and form to get a picture of each thought, and how we swap between them. Stepping back and practising the clarity and the transitions. Eventually, the numbers and form soak in. They become deeper. The healthy mental approach becomes the healthy automatic behaviour. Life still goes on, but a little more musically.