Does it take courage?
Dharma, money, and being pulled by what you really love
In the words of mama Angelou:
Do you know, do you comprehend, in this moment, who or what you serve? We all must be serving someone or something
Whom or what are you choosing to serve right now?
It takes courage to ask this question of yourself
But without courage, you can't practice any other value consistently.
When I was in my late 20s, I was a tech lawyer in San Francisco. Made $150,000 a year (in the year 2000!). Office on the 38th floor with a secretary, who was great. Lived in a nice studio in of the Castro. I thought I had an ideal life. But I was miserable.
I couldn’t articulate it, and I wasn’t even conscious of it, because I couldn’t see other possibilities: I hated being a lawyer. But my family fled the Communists to arrive in the U.S. and had sacrificed to create a life for me. So without realizing it, I felt trapped in the life set forth for me: financial security, respect, ease.
“We spend the first half of our lives defining ourselves by the sentences: “I am what I do,” “I am what others say about me,” or “I am what I have”” - Henri Nouwen
Another put another way, my consciousness and sense of possibility was narrowed so I couldn’t see any other path. And then life intervened: in the dot-com bust of 2001, I was laid off or fired. I was a bad lawyer. Looking back, I simply didn’t care enough to do a good job. There was some soul part of me already rebelling. To my everlasting gratitude, my law firm gave me career counseling (I think they knew before I did). I had to do a battery of tests: the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram etc. Made a list of skills, rewrote my resume, looked at my list of contacts. At the end, I had to write a mission statement for my life. I didn’t even know where it came from or what it meant, but what I wrote has remained true ever since:
I want to help people learn and feel closer to their communities.
Again, at the time I had no idea what it meant. But it has remained true ever since. I became a Quaker school teacher. I worked as a intergovernmental coordinator promoting sustainability efforts between Oregon cities. I founded Portland Underground Grad School, a school and community for lifelong learners. I teach Financial Freedom.1 I’m a spiritual director. All of it: helping people learn and feel closer to their communities. Living out a mission statement has made all the difference.
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. — Gospel of Thomas
“Oh, you were so courageous”
There’s a longer story here2 and when I tell it, people often say, “Oh, you were so courageous.” But was it? It’s always baffled me because I’ve never thought about it as being courageous. If you knew what you what you truly were meant to do, wouldn’t you do it too? And if you didn't know, at least commit to finding it? Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton writes:
"Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
So many thoughts:
Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be… As social creatures, we spend so much of our lives working for the approval of others. Of society. In our society, we look for approval by defining ourselves by our jobs (what we “do for a living”), the things we consume (products or experiences), or how we present ourselves (our homes, our clothes). And we call it success. My friend Jessica sent me this Instagram post (click on the image to go deeper).
…if only we knew what we wanted? Literary critic and Stanford professor Rene Girard said in his theory of memetic desire that the way we learn what to desire is to watch people we admire desire it. People, after their basic needs are met, watch what other people want, and then mimic it. Creating the socially correct kinds of desire is the function of social status, belonging, shame, and group identity. As Krishnamurti put it: “You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts.” You think you’re desiring your desires. You are not. You’re desiring culture’s desires.
Why do we waste our time doing things… But as we mature, that becomes a waste of time. Pursuing external validation and mimicking the wants of others becomes empty. A deeper, personal voice starts whispering within you: this culture of working and spending is ultimately unfulfilling. The first half of life has to disappoint you. This dissatisfaction with the external world is the basis of Financial Freedom. You have limited time here on earth, and none of it is guaranteed. Don’t wait to do what you are supposed to do. Otherwise you may never do it.
… if we only stopped to think about them… Surprise! Our capitalistic society doesn’t want you to listen to your innermost desires, so everything is built to distract you. That is the primary theft capitalism takes from you: your time, your attention, or most accurately, your presence. When I was busy becoming a highly paid lawyer, I didn’t have the space or consciousness to feel what’s inside what I really wanted. Busy-ness is the thief of interior knowing: you can’t feel the full weight of your desires when you’re constantly running on the hedonic treadmill. You can’t feel your deepest longings until you shed what society has taught you to want. You need attention and presence to feel them. Which is why I found myself after my firing, it was unlikely to happen if I hadn’t. That’s why I fear most for my friends who are successful or good at their jobs. Validated from the outside, it’s hard to hear what’s going on inside.
… are just the opposite of what we were made for? We think life is about gaining these things: prestige, control, security, respect, money, advancement. And gaining it, getting more of it. Neverending. That was my path as a lawyer. But at some point in life, if you’re lucky, you realize your soul wants none of those things. I got fired, my realization was forced. Most times, it has to happen to you, a great failure or loss. Your sense of who you are, of the control you have in your life, has to be shaken. As Barbara Brown Taylor wrote, “No one asks for darkness, it comes to you.” And in the darkness, you realize you were meant for something greater, more dangerous, and more fulfilling:
The ego wishes comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming… All those whom we admire in history had to go through something, and when they did, they learned on the other side that they were still there, though the world was different. Then they began to step into their possibilities and felt more completely the support of energies within.”— James Hollis
Again, I’m sure it takes courage. It takes opportunity, whether it was forced upon you, or you give it to yourself. An opportunity to be fully present to and moving towards the Love that whispers in you. If you heed the call to the Love in you, your life becomes a grand adventure.
The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. — Joseph Campbell
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. — Helen Keller
Any religion that is not about adventure is already dead — Matthew Fox (theologian)
When you hear the call of your dharma, will you go? This is Quaker integrity: an alignment of your outer actions with your inner truth. Is there any more important question?
And then there’s the part about money
Of course, personal finances play a huge role in all of this. Abraham Maslow would tell you can't pursue your dharma unless your basic needs are met. My ability to change careers was inextricably tied to my personal finances. When I left my $150,000 a year lawyer job to take a $30,000 a year Quaker school teacher job3, I was able to do so because I only spent $20,000 a year4. Similarly, when I left the Quaker boarding school to move to Portland Oregon, I left without a job and trusted that I would figure it out. When you only spend $20k a year, you have a longer runway to look for what you really want. It's also easier to build the savings and investments needed for that runway.5 When you spend less money, you have more choices.
Conversely, when you spend more money, you have fewer choices. I have many friends who are doing things they weren’t meant for. First, they are rewarded with good money and prestige. Second, because they are competent and successful, they spend a lot of money. In addition, because they are competent and successful, they are constantly busy, so they don’t have the time and presence to hear the call of their innermost desire. In other words, a lack of attention about your money means the loss of intentionality with your life.
If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth. — Stephen Levine
Joseph Campbell once said that what we’re looking for isn’t meaning or purpose, but a sense of deep aliveness. Aliveness is the reward of enoughness. Of voluntary simplicity. Of financial freedom. It’s a more inspired life, “inspired” meaning “in-Spirit.” These disciplines of enoughness, voluntary simplicity and financial freedom to help you stop chasing external validation and help you sink into the vibrancy of your real desires.
Many of the spiritual teachers of the world have likened our lives to ‘a sleep and a forgetting.’ The mystic path, rather, is predicated on awakening, on going off robot and abandoning lackluster passivity to engage co-creation with vigor, attention, focus, and radiance. - Jean Houston
Many of us are essentially asleep, even as we walk around in broad daylight. We're so focused on the restless narratives and repetitive fantasies unfurling in our heads that we only dimly perceive the larger story raging in all of its chaotic beauty around us. -- Rob Breszny
Bet on your Self
“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”― Carl Jung
Carl Jung believed that moving into the second half of your life is one of the biggest changes in identity. It’s the movement from believing yourself as the ego mask to identifying your True Self, the soul behind the mask. There is something within you that is richer than anything you’re begging for from the outside world. Father Richard Rohr calls this process “Falling Upward,” the soul falling up into itself.
“You can’t take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people’s agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations. You are moving out of roles and into the self.” - Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life
The Self is the Western term for Buddha nature or Christ consciousness, personifications of the archetype of wholeness. Whole means containing in unity all the opposing forces in the psyche in a befriending and productive way. The work of each individual is to join in that process that wants to happen. How ironic that we are calibrated to resist what might most expand us! - David Richo
Yesterday I attended a Zoom workshop with Columbia professor Lisa Miller, a leading researcher on the neuroscience of spirituality. She asked us to bet on our Self:
Does your higher Self, the deep spirit within, have your best interests in mind?
Dr. Miller said that, in postindustrial global culture, we have a core addiction with life summed up as the internal conversation: “What do I want? How am I going to get it? Got it? What do I want? Next? How am I going to get it? Gotta get it gotta get it.”
She says the craving brain neurologically has the same state of addiction as being engaged to drugs and alcohol. The ego believes that it always needs to be in control:
I would say even foundational to coming of age and young adulthood to spiritual growth at midlife to crossing the bridge as an elder, as well as a deepening through trauma, loss, and despair has to do with not having life unfold as I wanted. I lost something I wanted. It could have been something like a job or money or it could have been someone I love. These are not trivial by any means. These are real things. We're not being shallow. We are just realizing that the ego does not control our life. And yet in these moments, we open up.
We learn from society: “What do I want and how would I get it?” This is the seat of addiction. Any behavioral or substance addiction, whether it's internet pornography, or gambling or any other behavioral or substance addiction. We can change our conversation with life: “What is the deepest spirit of life showing me now?” It’s the closed system of the ego vs the open dialogue of the deeper self.
So this is not about me sending it off and getting what I want, I want to lose less weight, I want him to say yes, I want that job. This is about turning and saying, “Let's have a new conversation: spirit, life, are you showing me now?”
The ego cracks when we don't get what we want, it's actually the opening, and we feel the ultimate relationship, if we say yes.
Are we, narrowly, makers of our paths? Or are we foundationally discoverers of our journey? Are the most important parts of our lives built narrowly in our control or is there a deeper dialogue with life itself, the great force in, and the deeper structure of reality?
All of this maps to losing my career as a lawyer. A deep addiction to What do I want? How can I get it? How can I get more of it? The ego cracking and a surrender to a deeper dialogue with life. The loss of control and a willingness to say yes to whatever life presents me. But it took me losing my job for that to happen. Father Richard Rohr once described the ego as “the desire to be safe and superior.” Again, I didn’t want failure and loss to happen, it happened to me. I wanted to be safe and superior. No one wants to experience loss or be humbled, but universal pattern is only only ego-stripping experiences lead us to surrender to a new self. That’s why I worry about my friends who are “successful.” How can you let go and surrender, if you don’t have to?
All mature spirituality in one sense or another is about letting go and unlearning the patterns that naturally come to the ego. Every one of us needs to be stretched to live at our best, awakened out of dull moral habits, shaken out of petty and trivial busy-work. — Father Richard Rohr
“The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —James Hollis
Life is its own therapy, if you pay attention
My new friend Lester Fu, a hypnotist, told me:
Any modality of healing is only the initiation. The real healing happens in life. Life is its own therapy.
Life is its own therapy. Our lives are built for our healing, but only if we pay attention. And plenty of people are not paying attention. A Great Love is calling everyone and everything to act beyond and outside their self-interest and for the good of the world, to operate with a power larger than their own. That sense of aliveness that Joseph Campbell tells us to heed, if you follow it, it will heal you. It will change you too.
Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul… We aren’t made to live on the superficiality of things. We may be clever, bright, and all that, but what we produce lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings… A deep spiritual experience is bound to effect a change in the moral structure of one’s personality. - DT Suzuki
So all the way back to Maya Angelou: Whom or what are you choosing to serve right now? The ego’s need for wealth, prestige, safety, and comfort? Or the soul’s desire for break out of the mask and show the True Self? The Sufi poet Rumi has some advice:
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”
In other words, whatever you love will draw you closer to your True Self. The Irish poet, John O'Donohue wrote, “May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.” Father Richard Rohr asserts in his most recent book, The Universal Christ, that “anything that moves to you love beyond yourself is Christ.” Your dog or your children. Yoga or time communing with nature. A mission to help people learn or a call to save habitats from destruction. Whatever you love is a movement of the Christ body. Start there. And then let it grow larger and larger until it encompasses everything. The mystical path is to see That-of-Love in everything, everywhere, all at once.
Rumi said:
“Let the beauty you love be all that you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
Your deepest desire. May it be all that you do. That is movement from that your ego’s need to be safe and superior to risking it all for your deep Love of the world. That’s the opportunity in the second half of life. Not everyone gets there. But building the container of your finances will help.
Also know that your deep love will lead you to deep grief. Your dog will die. Your children will suffer. Our planet will degrade. Your Great Love is a opening to grief too. And that is a second Quaker definition of integrity: an interior sense of wholeness and undivided completeness with everything happening within you.
“To be entirely present to oneself is the highest thing and the highest task for the personal life.” — Soren Kierkegaard
That is the promise of financial freedom. Martha Beck wrote, “How you do one thing is how you will do everything.” I interpret that here: how you treat your money is how you treat will everything. You can treat money as the freedom to pursue what you truly love, not what culture has told you to love. Or you can simply use it as another way to feel safe and superior. But if see you money as a tool for your liberation, the path to financial freedom becomes the path to the soul. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
May you find yours.
ASK: I’m doing a two-month stay in Santa Fe NM to see if I would like living here. I would love to get connected to wonderful people. Do you know anyone to introduce me to? Thank you!
Next cohort is March-April 2023. Most people on this newsletter have taken it. Please spread the word! If you haven’t you should! Here are testimonials. Taking control of your finances to live the life you want is life-changing.
it involves my first authentic spiritual experience and an expulsion from my family, let me know if I should write about it sometime
Plus free room and board.
I recognize that I was single, so I didn’t have the financial obligations of a supporting a family, which is another layer of this.
When your passive income meets your expenses, your runway becomes infinite.
I have definitely been feeling lately that I am living my dharma, living a life, like you said, where we are pulled by what we love. It is a HUGE gift.
Yes, please write about footnote 2! 💜