What's the experience you're committed to having?
Consciousness, choice, and freedom through budgeting
I started a podcast! Each episode is a lesson in my Financial Freedom 1 online course, with an alumni coming back years later to explain how the lesson has affected them. Here’s the first one. You should listen!
Waking up to our conditioning
In this episode, Whitney talks about how actually choosing a budgeting tool (YNAB) has changed her life. What I find profound about this episode is Whitney talking about looking at one’s budget is a real-world decision to be conscious of what you’re doing, and if you’re living out your values. And not everyone wants to be conscious. But with consciousness comes choice, a chance to escape what the yogics call our conditioning.
Being able to see our relationship to money is just another way to see our kleshas, the five poisons that obscure our true nature. The yogis and Buddhists teach that ignorance, egoism, attachment, avoidance, and fear of death create our perceptions and control how we think, act, and feel about this world. They might as well been talking about our money scripts: money avoidance, money worship, money status, and money vigilance.
That’s why I love talking about personal finance and spirituality. Money is one of the most important ways we interact with the material world (perhaps the most important?). A place to see our ignorance, egoism, attachment, and avoidance. Unless we find right relationship with our money, it’s hard to be in right relationship with anything else.1 Without consciousness about money, we’re operating under the influence of our internal conditioning and societal priming and thinking it’s success.
Addiction is the absence of choice
A large part of our spirituality is simply our struggle between freedom and conditioning. Between me and not-me. How could money not factor into that?
Back to the podcast episode, Whitney talks about how consciousness creates choice, and with choice comes freedom. It reminds me of what my friend and mentor Terces Englehart, owner of Cafe Gratitude, says about her journey to recovery from her eating disorder:
What is the experience you're committed to having?
Terces’s fundamental belief is that any addiction is the absence of choice. Our conditioned responses are so automatic that, in the moment we don’t know we’re making it.2 The goal of recovery is expanding the space between stimulus and action and living intentionally. Choosing the experience you’re committed to having, whatever the circumstances are.
Terces told me about her intention to always choose gratitude:
There are so many ways to be in the world. Being grateful is just a great way of meeting on the world.
You don't have to feel guilty of being happy. In our world, work and achievement are most valued.
Most we're not stuck with the culture we're both with. We get to choose the culture we live in and unravel the dysfunctional culture, without making it wrong.
You don't have to bust it up. Get it complete and start fresh and anew.
Don't make it wrong. It drags it forward.
Gratitude is something almost everyone can agree on. Across political boundaries. It's an opening I want to work in to bring people together.
You can't get to God without being grateful.
People have argued about God for eons but gratitude is a great gateway.
Because people have made up their minds before knowing what the options are, I'm interested in ways that you can invite someone to something that doesn't get stopped by their mental process.
Grateful brings your mind to the present moment. It brings you to your heart. It nows your mind. Your ego can't exist in the present. Gratitude is like a secret trap door.
As I wrote last week, gratitude is one of the best ways to fight the hedonic treadmill, our human tendency to take things for granted. As Whitney mentioned, consciousness creates choice, and with choice comes freedom, the freedom to do something different. My other friend and mentor Vicki Robin3, author of Your Money or Your Life, always said that the first step to financial independence is liberating your mind. Ultimately, more than passive income equaling monthly expenses, financial freedom is a pathway to freedom from your conditioning. A way to see your ignorance, egoism, attachment, and avoidance and make a choice to live differently.
As Whitney says, budgeting is choosing to be conscious. About the present/future. About me/not-me. About freedom/conditioning. And importantly, there is no such thing as not choosing. Not budgeting is a choice too. The choice to be less conscious of how you live out your values.
What’s the experience you’re committed to having? There are so many ways to be in the world.
It starts with consciousness.
Postscript
Listen to the podcast and if you like it, share it with others! I would love you to subscribe and rate too, it will move me up the podcast rankings.
A hefty minority of people on this mailing have taken FF1. If you haven’t consider joining the April-May cohort. You’ll see the inner and outer path of financial liberation. If you taken it, share with your friends!
And if we grew up learning about money in capitalism, our relationship with money is particularly deformed.
In capitalism, purchasing is a conditioned response. So too is achievement.
An all-women post!