The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life by Lynne Twist, a Book Summary

“Money doesn’t have a soul, but we do, and we can give money soul. It’s a carrier, a conduit, a currency, and we can imbue it with the imprimatur of our soul, of our highest longings and deepest values. When we imbue money with soul, it changes everything. Of course, we can also give it meanings of power and domination–it can be a carrier for our greed, control, fear, selfishness, and manipulation. People, even countries, use money to oppress, control, and marginalize others. But money is neutral–it’s not guilty of anything! It’s a tool of our own creation and can carry whatever we choose to give it. To have
a conscious relationship with money is to recognize that you can design that relationship–examining, exploring, and reconstituting it for beauty, liberation, and joy.” (Lynne Twist)

Money as a Manifestation of Fear

Photo by: joits

Most of us think that we understand the facts of money: money is good, lack of money is bad; having more money is better than having less money; competition and scarcity are normal because it’s a jungle out there; the way to cure economic depression and hunger is to throw more money at the problem; and so on.

In other words, most people have an innate sense that there is simply not enough: that explains not only why they are always striving to get a bigger piece of the pie, but why some people suffer in poverty and hunger. However, basic analysis of the situation shows that there is more than enough food to feed the world–and more than enough stuff in your life to bring happiness.

This myth of scarcity breaks down into three parts:

1. There’s not enough. This is a myth that we use to delude ourselves into believing that there is a ‘pie’ of a certain size that can’t grow any larger and that if we don’t grab a bigger slice of it, someone else will. This belief creates a fear base that underlies many of our decisions and actions.
2. More is better. This belief causes us to always grab for that bigger piece of pie, even to the exclusion of others. It drives us into a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition and greed that heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race, but doesnt make life more valuable.
3. Thats just the way it is. This gives us a very weak excuse to act upon our fear and greed. It creates an environment of hopelessness and disempowerment and prevents us from re-examining the first two myths.

The truth? All of these are complete myths–there is enough resources for all. We use these myths to justify our fear and our greed.

To counter these myths, we need to look deeply into the human needs that are associated with money. Not just the needs of human beings in what she calls “resource poor” (developing) countries, but the needs of people who have resources, abundant resources, but who still struggle with their relationship with money and its meaning in their lives. This is because, it doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, you still have the capacity to make decisions that don’t truly reflect your ideals, and it is those repeated wrong decisions that leave people feeling empty and hollow.

When talking about sufficiency and contentment, scarcity and fear, the following question naturally arise, wouldn’t the poor all over the world be better off with more money in addition to gratitude for what little they do have?

Absolutely they’d be better off. There certainly are places, people, and times where the authentically appropriate thing is to reallocate resources to those who need it, but not always. Even in the poorest of the poor countries, and certainly those in Ethiopia or other places that need more money, more help, more resources, people are much more in touch with the context and grace of sufficiency than are those of us who have excess. It’s a real paradox. What we really need to do is to reallocate resources from fear to love. And often, what that really means is moving money!

More important than that however, is to understand that what people all over the world, including the poor, are longing for is an experience of sufficiency–which will not come from having more money. So, though we need to move money around in a way that helps people and makes the world more equitable and just, at the same time, we don’t want poor people in Ethiopia who need more money to look to money for their happiness in life, like so many of us in wealthy countries do. Even the rich have terrible, rooted feelings about scarcity and being rich has its own vicious cycle, often worse than the cycle of poverty’s grip. The conclusion remains the same, the psychology of scarcity is a real toxic myth.

So, we need to realize that so many of us separate our soulful life (the one centered around our values) and our financial life (the one centered around our money). Within each world, we behave differently: the soulful life is usually full of following the things that really matter, being fair to others, helping people, cooperating and so on, while the financial life is full of greediness, petty behavior, compromises to our values and more ofthen than not, full of unhealthy competition.

But why does this dichotomy have to exist? Why can’t the soulful side be on the same page as the financial side?

Money as a Manifestation of Love

Photo by: smasim

Using water as a the metaphor of money may help us to understand this better.

Water, is a very physical thing that people can relate to–you can bend down to a stream or river, put your hands in it and really feel it, see it run through your fingers. It can refresh or energize you, it sustains life. But drown yourself in it, and you die. Water can also carry life or toxicity into the world depending on how we take care of it and what we put into it.

Think of Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite. He was horrified by what became of something he invented for exploration and building. He could have been just an incredibly wealthy guy who made money off a tool that ended up being used for destruction, killing, and conflict, but he didn’t want to be known that way. So he took his fortune, changed the dharma of the money, and dedicated himself and his money to international peace and to awards for positive achievement. Now, of course, nobody thinks of him in any way other than the Nobel prizes, most commonly the one for peace.

Another phrase that relates to money as water is the word ‘wealth’, which comes from the words “well-being.”

What we call wealth should be more about our ‘well’ of ‘being’–the one from which we all draw to find our place, to know we belong, to have the experience of receiving and giving love. It is about gratitude, which has two branches–gratefulness and thanksgiving. Gratefulness is that experience when the bowl of life is so full it’s almost overflowing. It’s literally the “great fullness” of life. And when it starts to overflow, it transforms to thanksgiving and all you want to do is share, experience, and contribute. If people–with or without great amounts of wealth–live their lives in the space of gratitude, looking into the great fullness of life, they’ll find contentment.

That’s what wealth really is about. If some one has more than he/she really need, he/she can expand that sense of well-being to places where it’s not so prevalent or available. In financial terms, though many of us keep track of our net worth and strive to increase it each month or each quarter to achieve a state of financial self-reliance, we need to embrace the notion that once our net worth reaches a point of comfort, we should strive for zero growth of it. This doesn’t mean that we should begin to spend like mad, but that we should take that growth in our net worth and apply it towards causes and values that are important to us.

So, we need to make our relationship to money more explicit and we need to turn the default on its head. That is, making our money, whether a bucket-full or a handful, an expression of our values and ideals, rather than the money (or fear of scarcity) driving our life decisions. As such, we can make money represents our life energy and use it to express our “soul” or our values. We can put our soul in our money and direct it wisely. It can be a representation of who we really are.

Instead of viewing money as a scarce commodity to be pursued, we can function from a base of sufficiency we have enough money to use it wisely as stewards to provide for ourselves and for others, to create a legacy. We can become more concerned with allocation and less with accumulation.

At this point, you might ask: to “get right” with money, do you have to be “right” in all three areas–earn, spend, give it away–or can you make compromises in one or more areas?

It simply comes down to being true to yourself and your integrity in all areas. If you work for a company that’s harmful to the environment or exploits child labor or something like that, and you don’t do anything to change, your integrity is compromised even if you spend it and give it away in “admirable” ways. Of course, people need to have jobs and make a living, and sometimes those are compromises. But, there’s just not enough pressure from society for people to take a hard look. So, if people are involved with something they don’t feel really good about inside–whether that’s making money or investing it a certain way–just by having that feeling and thinking, they work to at least be a change agent inside an entity. You really can be in the belly of the beast and still be a point of light in the darkness. It’s similar to this ultra-excessive consumer society we all live in. Can you still be true to yourself without removing yourself from it? Yes. Here’s how.

Turning the Tide

Photo by: Steve Roe

Buckminster Fuller, the futurist who invented the geodesic dome, said we need to change the basis of our society from a competitive “you or me” basis to a partnership “you and me” basis.

The first step towards this turn would be to understand what is sufficient? What is enough?

It has a lot to do with the present moment, and with “being present.” Think of it in these terms: at any moment of time we have exactly what we need. We can also take some cues on sufficiency from nature–everything on the earth grows to its exact size needed, and then quits growing. When you breathe in, you take in the exact amount of air needed. And you breathe out the exact amount needed. Sufficiency is that perfect moment when we’ve had exactly enough to eat, or enough sleep, or the feeling that we know this conversation has gone on exactly the right amount of time. It’s worrying too much about the future or lamenting the past that has people behaving inconsistently about money and their relationship with it that is so harmful.

Here however, we must make a clear distinction between the idea of “enough” and the idea of “abundance.” Most people strive for abundance, but the truth is that abundance means that you always have more than you actually need, and acting on this basis means that in fact you are risking denying things to others in order to create an overflow for yourself. You are acting out of your fear, and possibly a little greed too.

A much better target is “enough;” find the things–tangible and intangible–that make fulfills you and then use the overflow from that to make the world a better place. For most people, this might mean that one should find the point where one’s effort produces what one’s family needs, then spend the rest of the time chasing one’s values: for example, raising one’s children well and working on bringing about social justice and environmental restoration.

The second step towards this turn is to asses how we spend our life energies.

Just like an investment appreciates over time because of the dollars invested in it, anything of value appreciates over time in relation to the amount of attention we pay to it. Thus, take a look at what you spend your time focusing on in a given week. These are the things in your life that you are truly trying to grow; the other things are being left to wilt. Keep a log, if you want, of the time that you spend focused on various areas of your life: your career, your family, your interests, and so on.

The easy answer here is that there isn’t enough time in a day to give proper attention to the all the things that you might want to give attention to. What that actually means is that you’re not allocating your time in a way that matches your values, and for many of us, that means you’re spending too much time focusing on your career and money-making motives and not enough time on the other things that are important to you. So, refocus your life energies to what is important for you, what fulfills you, what is enough and at the same time, overflow you.

The third step is to realize that collaboration creates prosperity.

In other words, the best gift we can usually give is sharing our skill and our time and not our money, particularly when we can use that skill to teach others how to walk for themselves or make it possible for them to do so–give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever. Or better yet, we can collaborate with others and combine our time, money, skills and passion, and dedicate it to a worthy cause that can give us a sense of fulfillment and meaning, and make the world a better place for all.

But here, you might say, sure, it’s all fine and beautiful, but reality is not so ideal. That’s where the fourth step comes in: you need to take a stand.

One of the biggest challenges, at least to a degree, will be stepping away from the normal flow of the so called modern society. Most of us spend our time worrying about accumulating wealth and buying stuff that we don’t really need and talking about things that are of no real importance. This might be the most difficult step, to really choose to do something different. To take a stand against these things and choose a different way. This means that instead of following along with the flow of everyone else, the first step to chasing your real dreams of changing the world are to stop following their flow. Figure out what’s enough for you, where your real passion lies–your dream–and just stop chasing the money above all else.

The next step to carrying forward a dream is to really understand it, and the way to do that is through conversations.

In an interesting way, the internet has really caused this to take off, as it has enabled people to become involved in movements and causes and conversations that were inaccessible to them even a decade ago. If you want to change the world, find out how it works. Ask questions. Dig in and find that place in the dream where your skills can really make a big difference. Ask more questions. Do things. Be involved in the process. Let’s say you’re a web programmer and you believe in alternative energy resources. Look for a nonprofit group that espouses the same ideas that you believe in and volunteer your skills with them–help them design websites and web applications that can collect donations and reach out to more people who may be able to help.

The final step is more a result than an effort, but is the center of the rippling water: the need to create a legacy of enough.

When you take a stand, change direction, and clearly commit to a cause greater than yourself, you set a great example for those around you, especially for your children. Instead of giving them an example of always battling just for more money and more stuff you don’t really need, you give them an example of battling for a cause that can affect the lives of countless people and authentically bring about change.

You can do this in a multitude of ways. Get your family and your community involved in projects. Take your child along with you as you volunteer. Involve your neighbors and friends in what you’re doing if they’re interested. Let them know by what you do that there are other options than merely following rampant consumerism, that they can, through their financial and personal choices, bring about real change.

By listening to our soul speaking, and accordingly transforming our relationship with money, we can integrate our soulful life and our financial life. By being the change we want to see in the world, the ripple of our dip in the lake of life will traverse in all directions making the world a little better than before we entered it.

About Lynne Twist

Lynne Twist — a global activist, fundraiser, speaker, consultant, and author — has dedicated her life to global initiatives that serve the best instincts in all of us. She has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and trained thousands of fundraisers to be more effective in their work.

Lynne has spent more than three decades working in positions of leadership with many global initiatives including: ending world hunger, protecting the world’s rainforests, empowering indigenous peoples, improving health, economic, and political conditions for women and children, advancing the scientific understanding of human consciousness, creating a sustainable future for all life.

An original staff member of The Hunger Project, an organization started in 1977 to end world hunger, Lynne served as a leader of this global initiative for 20 years. During those years she created and managed the worldwide fundraising operation. As she traveled the world learning how to work in a multitude of different cultures, Lynne developed profound wisdom about our relationship to money and the way it governs, dominates, and stresses our lives.

The compelling stories and insights gained from her experiences inspire Lynne’s keynotes and workshops, and are the foundation for her best selling, award winning book The Soul of Money.

Lynne founded the Soul of Money Institute to express her commitment to supporting and empowering people in finding peace and sufficiency in their relationship with money and the money culture.

Lynne and her husband have three adult children and three grandchildren and live in San Francisco, California.

Sources

This article is like an alphabet quilt, remixed and stitched from bits and pieces I took from the following sources:

1. Amazon.com customer reviews: The Soul of Money by P. Lozar, Jon Leland and Mary Anne Fields
2. Book Review: The Soul of Money by Weibel Lines
3. A book review: The Soul of Money, by Michael C. Gray
4. Review: The Soul of Money by Trent
5. 10 Questions with Lynne Twist on the Soul of Money in Journal of Financial Planning, June 2005