The Conscious Heart (25 page)

“Then there was my mother. My grandmother and my mother were so different that I wondered how they managed to be from the same family. My grandmother hated smoking; my mother was a chain-smoker. My grandmother was soft and warm and a great cook; my mother was tough as nails and used the kitchen primarily as a place to put her papers and typewriter. Their common point of contact, though, was in the deep grief that both of them harbored about their various losses. My mother, in particular, had a great deal of bitterness about being left destitute by my father’s death. But in addition to the real-life financial obstacles she faced, she had attitudinal barriers that were at least as important.

“My mother was a dynamic, brilliant woman who had a number of maddening personal characteristics. She took great pride in being a bastion of poor, hardworking decency in a world of ‘fat cats’ and ‘spongers.’ She had a great many opportunities to prosper from her talents as a writer, yet she seemed to go out of her way to keep them from materializing. On one occasion she wrote a book-sized history of central Florida, only to refuse the offered payment for it. My brother and I were dumbfounded that she would do a year of work for nothing, on the principle that ‘it wouldn’t look right’ to take the money. On another occasion, she refused to take money from the government’s soil bank program for a fallow watermelon field she owned. My brother and I fervently wished she had taken the money, for over the next ten years we had to endure several hundred variations of the story of how the ‘fat cats’ in Washington had wanted to pay her for not growing watermelons. Even though I rebelled against her attitudes at the time, I now realize that I was soaking them up as well.

“When I went back further into my history, I uncovered an even bigger piece of the puzzle. The only wealthy person in the history of my family was my grandmother’s uncle Jimmy, who had owned a furniture factory before the Civil War. A patriotic southerner,
he turned his furniture factory into a munitions factory for the rebel side. When the smoke cleared, practically everything was wiped out. The equation: Wealth equals loss plus defeat. To complicate this equation, my grandparents fought about a related issue on and off for the sixty-plus years of their marriage. My grandfather had been a hardworking but penniless man when he married my grandmother. Uncle Jimmy had stepped in with the money to build a house for them, the house they lived in for the next sixty years. The house became something of a monument to my grandfather’s ineptness at earning money, and all it took to start a skirmish between them was a sneer on my grandmother’s part about ‘who this house really belongs to.’

“As I evaluated all of this, I realized that I came from a long history of completely impoverished attitudes about money. The underlying ethic was healthy: Work hard. But it was weighted down with enough negative baggage to make it come out more like: Work hard, and you’ll just barely keep the wolf from the door; be proud, be poor, and above all don’t be like those filthy rich people. When I examined each of these attitudes, I saw that I could stand some improvement in most of them. I liked being proud and working hard, but I was definitely no longer interested in being poor or harboring grudges against rich people. So one night I sat down on the floor of my (small and sparsely furnished) apartment and asked myself how I would like my life to be in regard to money.

“After an hour of mulling it over, I formed several conscious choices. I decided that I wanted my overall wealth-attitude to be:
I always have plenty of money to do everything I want to do
. When I really reflected on it, wealth meant one key thing to me: freedom. If I had plenty of money, I could go wherever I wanted, send my daughter to any school she chose, live where I wanted. Other than freedom, I could think of no other compelling reason to have plenty of money. I didn’t really care about owning a fine house or a fancy car or a portfolio of stocks (although I have acquired such things over the years), but freedom was and still is crucial. Even
though I live in much better circumstances now than I did back then, Kathlyn and I have miraculously managed to increase our wealth and responsibilities without any sacrifice of freedom. In fact, I feel much freer now than I did over a decade ago, when I began the process.

“From this foundation I added several other details. First, I wanted my money life to be simple and easy. I didn’t want to spend much time looking after it. Then I developed a specific goal: that I would have enough money to go without working for at least a year if I so desired. With this shift in attitude, I began the process of transforming my life so that material abundance was part of it.

“When I met Kathlyn, I’d been living with these goals for a few years, but I had not tried them out in partnership. It was one thing to be completely responsible for my own money, quite another to combine finances and money-beliefs with another person. I wanted to bring her into the game, so I explained to her how my attitudes had shifted and asked if she would be willing to join me in a mutual goal toward complete financial abundance and the enjoyment of it. This request provoked a big yes! followed shortly by a bundle of big fears. It turned out that Kathlyn had to confront as many limiting programs from the past as I did, although they were of a different nature. She had been more of a sixties activist and hippie than I had, so she had to confront ideological issues such as ‘How can I be rich in a world where so many are going without?’ She had personal ghosts from the past to clear up too. Her parents, though now very comfortable financially, were children of the Great Depression. These attitudes had instilled a contraction in Kathlyn around the subject of money. She and I shared the script of ‘always living on the edge’ of poverty, and sure enough, each month we played it out.

“In several conversations we came to an agreement that we would mutually confront our limiting money-programs as allies, not as enemies. We made a conscious commitment not to fight any more about money. We agreed to channel the energy that we had wasted in money arguments into deep inquiries into our personal
issues that held us back. This decision was important, because the energy that is eaten up by money conflicts in relationships is awesome. That same energy can be redirected in the service of mutually determined goals, if both people are willing to take responsibility for creating abundance and to put their personal money-programs up for scrutiny. That’s a big if, though. As I know from years of counseling couples, many people would rather be right than happy and prosperous. Looking back, I feel a deep heart-tug of appreciation for Kathlyn and her willingness to put everything on the line. She was always willing to examine her beliefs about herself and the world, and to trade those beliefs in for new ones that seemed like better ideas.

“The key to beginning was: ‘Take charge of designing your own money script. Think it up the way you want it, and consciously choose it.’ As soon as Kathlyn and I made the commitment, the means began to suggest themselves. I have often found that commitment starts the creativity flowing. If your goal is big, you won’t know how to get there at first. But if you pay attention, the path will start to reveal itself. Among the goals we chose was a specific one, which seemed outrageously high at the time: We wanted to have ten thousand dollars in cash savings. To give you an idea how fast the principles in this chapter worked for us, the next time we sat down to choose specific goals, about two years later, we set a hundred thousand as our stretch-goal for our savings account. A few years later we had attained this and had upped our stretch-goal to $1.2 million.

“Shortly after Kathlyn and I made the commitment to our financial abundance, certain thoughts popped into my mind. The thoughts were of a man I’ll call James who had loaned me money many years before. At first I didn’t know why my memories of him were surfacing. Then one day I saw clearly why, and this insight had life-changing consequences for my material well-being.

“I realized I was having these thoughts because they represented broken agreements on my part. James, who was my boss, had loaned me money at a time when I really needed it. In 1970 I
had borrowed $240 from him to cover tuition to finish my master’s degree. Shortly after I took my degree, James and I got into a conflict. I wanted to move to a different job, but he wanted me to continue working for him. I had my usual self-righteous attitude about his wrongness, and I used my anger at him to justify not paying him back. This event had lain completely buried in my mind for fifteen years! Through some detective work I located him in New England. He had fallen on hard times and was living in a small room at a YMCA. I wrote him of my transformation and sent him a check. His grateful response was deeply moving. It allowed me to see a part of him I’d never touched before.

“I also surfaced memories of another man, John, a kind soul with a lot of money who had approached me after seeing a therapy demonstration I did in the mid-seventies. He asked me if there was any way he could support my work, and I blurted out that he could loan me $750 to help me fix up a building, which would become the first Hendricks Institute. He did, we opened, and in the busyness of the next couple of years, I only saw him a few times. Then he moved out of town and disappeared from view. Since I was not able to find him to pay him back, I decided on an alternative: I sent donations to charitable organizations I thought he might support.

“Very shortly I came across a book called
Seed Money in Action
by Jon Speller. This remarkable little book describes a completely new type of tithing, one that fit our ‘lead with gratitude’ philosophy. The old idea of tithing is to take a tenth of what you earn and give it away. The book’s one main point is that each of us can begin the flow of abundance by becoming a philanthropist. The instructions are very simple: Set aside a specific amount of money each week or month, and donate it consciously to a charity, church, or cause you support. Send your money out into the world with the idea that the more you give away, the more you get back. Then you will have more to give away. The book recommends that you send the money with the thought that you will receive tenfold in return. You are ‘leading with gratitude,’ making the first move, instead of waiting to get before you give. It is a subtle shift, but one
that engages a new physics, or metaphysics, in your life. You are saying, ‘I’m now going to participate in the world as a source of philanthropy.’ You become an initiator of abundance rather than a consumer, proactive rather than reactive.

“The amazing thing is: It works! I’ve taught this now to many people, and nobody who’s tried it out has ever argued with it or reported less than great success. The only people who argue with it are people who haven’t tried it. I did my first experiment with fifty dollars, which I sent to an organization that plants trees in areas where desert is encroaching. Interestingly, I totally forgot about the project until a month later, when I received five hundred dollars from an unexpected source. When I told Kathlyn, she said, ‘Looks like the project is working.’

“ ‘What project?’ I asked. She laughed, and pointed to the copy of the little book sitting on the edge of my desk. I stared dumbfoundedly at the book and the check for five hundred dollars, then I got it, and we both laughed.

“As we practiced this concept on an ongoing basis, the numbers grew larger until we were ‘leading with gratitude’ to the tune of thousands rather than fifty dollars each month when we would sit down for our philanthropy meeting. As of this writing, our most recent month saw us with over sixteen thousand dollars for dispersal. I had lunch on the West Coast recently with a former student who had learned this process well and had used it to manifest several million dollars. He was now giving away a third of his income every year, yet he was seeing his net worth grow at the same time.

“The key, which Kathlyn and I use every month of our lives, is: ‘Make a conscious commitment to philanthropy, act on it, and open up to having a backdraft of abundance come your way.’

“In summary, I can see three main transformations which have generated financial abundance in my life:

1.
Realizing that I could choose consciously my own relationship to money
. This step involved confronting my programming and replacing it with ideas more congenial to my own
values. When Kathlyn and I chose to quit fighting about money and rechannel that energy into productivity, our prosperity began to increase rapidly.

2.
Clearing up incompletions from the past
. This step involved much soul-searching and looking for places where we had broken agreements or had left something unsaid. The action steps—completing whatever needed to be completed—always brought a fresh burst of life-energy and a new wave of abundance.

3.
Becoming a conscious philanthropist
. This step is an ongoing practice of sending money out into the world with the intention of creating harmony while prospering all concerned, including ourselves.”

We have managed to create a life of abundance and satisfaction without ever making a budget or doing many of the usual things that people do to become financially independent. Instead, we have relied on consciousness-shifts and key spiritual principles to generate money-harmony. May these ideas work as well for you!

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any people use an attachment to a past relationship in order to avoid intimacy in the present. During our first year together, we confronted this issue in ourselves, and found that a combination of psychospiritual and material-world shifts needed to be made in order to move through this pattern.

From Gay’s perspective: “I was very surprised to find out how much the material attachments played a role in my difficulty letting go of the past relationship. Being a psychologist, I tend to deal with relationship problems by using psychological techniques like
getting in touch with my feelings, expressing them clearly, inquiring into my childhood programming, and so forth. It often doesn’t occur to me to look at more obvious areas like real estate. I found, though, that it is often a combination of inner and outer attachments that keeps us hooked to the past.