It’s virtually impossible for most people to think of money and not feel an instant rush of emotion. 

More often than not, these emotions tend to be negative. 

Many are flooded with thoughts of the hot, quick and aggressive stereotypes of the finance world and big business. Money becomes corrupt, dirty, sinful, a necessary evil. 

Others grow despondent, feeling like they’re just not good with money and never will be; as though it is a system and they’re either stuck in, or will never be a part of.

But what if it didn’t have to be like this?

What if we could learn an encouraging approach to money?

Money is culturally integrated into nearly every single part of our lives, including how many people have come to define their self-worth. 

Finding a way to make money a friend is vital to our wellbeing.

There has been a movement growing within the finance community over the last thirty years to help people reduce the amount of stress money places on their lives and health.

It’s called Mindful Money, and it is simply the practice of integrating mindfulness techniques into our financial habits and thoughts. 

Money Trauma

Just over thirty years ago, I became one of the first financial advisors to start applying mindfulness techniques to money. I felt compelled to after a traumatic situation early in my career left me astounded at my own money madness. 

The building of a firm I was working at caught on fire, and all my client’s documents were set ablaze.

Where most people would have run away from the flames, I ran into the building to salvage what I could of my client’s financial documents, which ended up being hardly anything. 

Afterwards, I couldn’t believe what I’d done. 

I was lucky to have escaped injury or death. 

I asked myself why I’d believed that money was so important that it was worth risking my safety.

I began to take a much closer look at the deep-rooted connection between our emotions and our finances, and I found that every single part of our psyche is capable of being influenced by money. 

Money and Western Culture

The western world runs on capitalism, a philosophy built on the expectation that people behave in accordance with rational self-interest. But what I found was that most decisions about money people made were based on less on reason and more on emotion, which often led to irrational self-interest.

People took risky investments that never paid off. They bought things they couldn’t afford hoping to soothe a pain inside themselves. They hid debts from their spouse thinking it would save the relationship, only to watch everything fall apart.

Why?

Because so many of us have been trained to equate financial worth with self worth, vent hough we know this ideas is harmful to the wallet, self-esteem, and in my case, physical safety.

Despite the west’s culture of individual exceptionalism, so many of us aren’t capitalizing on the exceptional tools we already individually possess.

But we can start with one simple shift in mindset - by changing how we see money.

“There’s nothing inherently evil about money. It’s a tool with neural power that can be put to use for good or ill. The only question is how you’ll use what you have.”

-Spencer Sherman

Money is Magic

Any two people anywhere in the world can use money to make a trade. It doesn’t matter if they speak the same language, have anything in common, or even if one person doesn’t have anything that the other wants. Money makes it possible. 

That’s magic in the same way that communication is a form of magic - they’re both abstract concepts with meaningful physical realities that are used when we interact with others.  Money isn’t just a medium of exchange: it’s a language.

(Side note: communication and money may have even evolved together - the first written accounts were made to record merchant transactions…and also to make ancient customer complaints.)

For the same reasons that communication gets messy though, money can get complicated too.

We may struggle to obtain clarity. Doubt ourselves. Feel as though we’re never getting it right no matter what we do.

This is where mindfulness techniques can help. 

How Mindful Money Works

Meditating is a fundamental component of mindfulness, and therefore Mindful Money. 

If you watch someone meditate, though, it looks like they’re trying to disconnect from reality, but what’s actually happening is the exact opposite. 

The very word mindfulness implies that the mind is becoming more full and meditating is training a mental muscle - the more we practice getting ourselves into a calm state with something as emotionally-charged as our finances, the more we can get the strength of clarity needed to make better decisions and act upon them.

Taking the time to meditate and  become more conscious of our thoughts and actions is a way of becoming more connected to reality, no matter what it may look like on the outside. 

Becoming more conscious, realizing we’re capable of confronting our financial realities, and empowering ourselves to take control of our financial destinies is the essence of Mindful Money.

When I began to apply mindfulness techniques to money, one of the first things I noticed was that I was able to make better decisions because my parasympathetic nervous system and my mind were both relaxed. 

My inner wealth and outer wealth both began to grow.

I realized that our own minds are the most effective wealth management tools we will ever possess.

What Mindful Money Isn’t

Mindful Money is not manifesting money, karma, or a philosophy of ‘think and grow rich.’ These schools of thought exploit the abstract nature of money and attempt to convince people there’s a mystical force they simply need to tap into and the world will be theirs.

This think-and-grow-rich has often been used in manipulative ways. It can damage people’s self-esteem by making them feel like there’s something wrong with them if riches don’t come their way after informing the universe of their desires. 

Mindful Money, on the other hand, is a practical approach that helps us manage the abstract components of money while bringing our thoughts and behaviors into consciousness so we can optimize them for our benefit. 

Mindful Money is not about trying to control an outside power that’ll make us rich. It’s about empowering ourselves so that we can gain as much wealth as we need to reach our sense of enough. 

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Learn more about how to apply mindfulness techniques to money every Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. PT during my free live course, Fearless Finance.