I met the venerable Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH), who died a few months ago, at his retreat center in southern France in August 2013. I was there with my family on a nine-day family meditation retreat. He was 87, with enough energy to teach everyone for eight hours a day in English, French, and Vietnamese. Despite there being twelve hundred people present, there was spaciousness and ease. Even when we were waiting in line for meals, we were practicing mindfulness and the waiting was part of the meditation.

TNH taught simplicity. He led a simple life, refused luxuries (including first class flights), and his guided meditations were simple and easy to understand. He said that our lives are challenging because we’re obsessed with regretting the past and worrying about the future.

What if we train ourselves to focus on the present moment? Could everything, even our big life decisions, become much easier?

In my experience, living in the present moment is the perfect recipe for financial success, joy, and freedom.

It’s an understatement to say that life feels complicated now. Is the pandemic really over? What will happen with Ukraine and Russia? Is there hope for peace, a sustainable planet, and will I be able to afford a home or my favorite ice cream with inflation springing forth?

I’m sure, however, that TNH would say right now is the ideal moment for practicing the simplicity of mindfulness. When life or our finances feel complicated, it’s time to get simple. 

Here are two of TNH’s meditation scripts:

1) Breathing in, I’m aware I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I’m aware I’m breathing out.

2) Breathing in, I have arrived. Breathing out, I am home (in my body).

To apply this to finances, keep in mind the specific financial anxiety or worry that’s taking up the most space in your mind and repeat the first meditation today for five minutes, then repeat the second one tomorrow.

As your breath becomes shorter and more subtle as the minutes progress, you might shift to saying in on inhale and out on exhale, or arrived on inhale and home on exhale. At the end of the five-minute meditation, ask yourself: What happens to the bodily sensations and thoughts (associated with financial worry) over that time? Is there any clarity that emerges at the end? Is there a small, easy action you could take with your finances today to lessen any pain you may feel?

Here are five ideas for bringing this simplicity of mindfulness to your finances:

1. Develop awareness of your inherited money beliefs that limit you. But instead of trying to push away or ignore a belief like “I’ll never be rich,” or  “I’m not good with money,” or “I’d be happier or less stressed if I had more money,” welcome and befriend that belief. Then, be quiet for a minute and ask yourself, how would you relate to money and success if you had inherited the opposite belief? It takes courage for us to see the beliefs that we are gripping, but that same courage gives us the strength to discern new beliefs, including those antithetical to our own. The more we can befriend these inherited beliefs and not try to eliminate them, the more likely we are to create a more fruitful relationship with these beliefs (and see them as part of the past that let us get to the point where we no longer have to be bound by them). Befriend and loosen up your allegiance to your inherited beliefs, recognize that you could have received the opposite beliefs (as some siblings do), and your mind and wallet will thank you.

2. Know Your Numbers…the truth will set you free. So many of us avoid looking at our personal numbers, even people with MBA’s. However, when we know the numbers, we can sit with the reality of our finances, instead of the fiction of them. Fictions have a purpose - in dreaming for the future, etc. - but there’s no place for fiction when it comes to numbers. The reality of them must always be faced head-on. Things could be worse or better than we imagined, but either way, it’s important to know. A brain that knows the truth will be less fearful and more supple and insightful if it knows what it’s dealing with. Write down these numbers on a poster size piece of paper: Your expected total monthly income from all sources, taxes, total living expenses for basic necessities, additional living expenses for “luxuries,” for the next month. Then on another poster paper, write down the total of your non-retirement assets, your retirement assets, the value of your home minus the mortgage, and any other debt. Looking at your numbers, letting go of making any decisions, invite yourself to feel increasingly at ease seeing the numbers. What do you notice as you see the numbers clearly? What does it feel like inside to know the truth of your finances? This is a doorway to financial power and freedom. Knowing is the first step to acting. So the more you know, the easier it will be to act appropriately in response.

Here’s a way to figure out the best response, ask yourself what you’d recommend to a friend who has the exact numbers you wrote down for yourself? Tricking your brain into thinking your situation is your friend’s situation will allow your brain to generate a much more objective response. Plus, we tend to be wiser and kinder when we’re offering feedback to a friend versus ourselves.

3. Sit down, close your eyes, let go of everything on your mind, and focus on this money meditation for challenging money emotions, that comes from TNH’s structure that we discussed earlier:

    Breathing in, I’m aware of anxiety, worry, or any other difficult feeling.

    Breathing out, I’m aware I am enough.

As your breath gets shorter and quieter, focus on the word worry on inhale and enough on exhale. If the word worry itself produces anxiety, know the discomfort is only momentary, and on the exhale it will be countered by feeling the ease of being enough. 

4. Coming into this present moment. TNH emphasized the freedom available when we stop dwelling on the past and worrying about the future. When we’re paying attention to the sensations in our bodies, the colors and shapes we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we smell, there’s a moment of freedom from our money worries. This is the place where we are free from rumination, and it’s the place where we often gain our most fertile insights. The “noise” of the past and future clouds our ability to think creatively. Keep sensing this moment, keep letting go of the worry about the future, and the right actions to take will become apparent. As the saying goes, when you take care of the moments and minutes, the years will take care of themselves.

5. Bring focused attention and awareness to your daily money interactions and thoughts. Start becoming aware of how you feel when you spend, save, give, invest, and earn money. By becoming aware of your reactivity or impulsiveness, you’re training and cultivating a more equanimous mind that will be less reactive to life’s inevitable and unexpected curveballs, especially with finances. This will make you less likely to indulge in bad habits like excess online spending or judging yourself harshly for earning less than others.

While these meditations might seem a little odd, my experience has taught me that they really will lead to constructive action with your finances. When you’re not striving for more or to improve yourself, your parasympathetic nervous system can rest, and when our parasympathetic nervous systems are rested, we’re more likely to discern better financial opportunities, charge appropriately for our services, and make wiser investment decisions. In our modern culture where no one believes they have enough of anything, I say that we’re enough right now, and that we can all start living and acting from a place of enough regardless of how much or how little we have. The reason is because when we believe we’re enough, we also believe that we have something of value to offer others. When we do things that are enough for others, the whole economy, including our own, begins to thrive.

The next time you notice your mind thinking, “If I had this amount of money, or if I owned a beach home, or got that raise, I’d really be okay,” let go of clinging to that thought. In doing so, you will eliminate the suffering you feel from not having it and create the freedom in the moment necessary to get it. This is TNH’s message - the present is where our joy and freedom lie.

Staying present strengthens your equanimity. And we all need equanimity in the fragile world we’re experiencing. Simplicity results from not making something messier than it already is. Equanimity takes us out of the constant fear based reactivity - that reactivity makes life and our finances more complex and stressful than they actually are - and opens us to possibility. I wish you simplicity with your finances and breathing room in your life. I think TNH would concur.



Letting go is easier said than done, so I recommend a short practice that I call “The Money Breath”. Here’s the practice:

• Bring to mind a money challenge you’re currently experiencing. 
• Close your eyes and become aware of any muscle tension, thoughts stirring, and other body and mind sensations. 
• Gently inhale through the nose for 3 counts. 1, 2, 3.
• Pause and hold the breath on the count of 4.
• Slowly exhale through the mouth for 5 counts. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 
• Do 2 more rounds of this breath and then allow your breathing to come back to normal.
•  Ask yourself: How do I feel in this moment compared to when I started this Money Breath? (Also, check out the Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting my Money Breath on its front page!)

If you’d like to learn more about how to manage money anxiety with money meditations, check out my new course, Your Inner Compass.