Money and Love – an invocation/prayer
Please note: the following is my attempt to transcribe and make sense of the notes I took at the “For the Love of Money” Worship in Oakland, California on October 8th at the Humanist Hall. Some of it may not make much much sense, or there may be fleeting bits of wisdom within the prose below. I do not expect it to read like a narrative or ‘normal’ blog rather, it is infused with poetry, knowledge and tidbits of information that I am still attempting to digest. Please feel free to ask questions or chime in with your thoughts on the struggle of power concerning love and money. Thanks for reading.
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The PRAYER: to live in a world without fear, with love, of the possibility of each moment coming with dignity; being able to say “this is what I need and this is what I have to offer.”
The exchange. Three teachers. Charles Eisenstein, Gigi Coyle and Orland Bishop, at the Humanist Hall.
The intention was to rethink our relationship with money and love, especially concerning how the two are related- and how they should be treated. And how can we support each other in the relatively-uncharted waters of what to do with money and love?
Today, we are seeding a change in the system.
Money (and power) enter into our love story rather early in life.
When people say, “let’s be realistic,” they usually mean let’s talk about the money. If only we had enough money…
Money and love have both evolved becoming a planetary force.
Who needs my love and money? There is never enough of either in this alchemical transition.
Money so often is thought to dictate what is practical and what is realistic. Money also establishes reality by the kinds of behavior it encourages. There always seems to be more debt than there is actual money.
We are all in competition for not enough money and in that reality a certain aspect of our nature arises where everyone is self-interested and focused on what they can get, everyone else be damned.
For some time, money and love have been perceived to be in direct opposition to one another, as if to say there is no money in our love arenas, and vice versa – It is a financial compromise and, arguably, one that leads to a sort of suicide of our souls. We are taught that we have to let go of what we love in order to make money. That we must choose money over being able to do the work our hearts guide us to do.
Money was constructed to be an oppressing force, but the agreements can change, and that is what the purpose of this workshop class was – to dig deeper into the agreements we made years ago, and to discuss how we can evolve those constructs.
Collective trauma is the glue that holds together the structures that keep us apart.
Money and Love can share a common angle: they are both something you can give to others.
Feeding or taking care of someone is often an act of love, a gift.
Money is allowed to be a system of bringing together these gifts and needs.
LONGING is a force that drives our gifts and needs.
We long for the freedom to be generous!!
Love and money originated in the gift – the opening of the self, giving of the self, and an extension of one’s self. Perhaps they originated in the same place, and perhaps the wounds of love and money originated in the same place: when relationships became controlling and subject to domination, and we began to see the world as property, we now see each other as property. Corruption evolved.
Patriarchy is the ownership and objectification of women. The same happens in reverse in Matriarchy, and men become objects. You can substitute the genders for each other. This is a class war going back to the beginning of time.
Before we had money there was barter, and certainly possessions.
“Love existed long before money. Power, too. Barter was the dominating mode before we regarded a hunk of gold as worth exchanging for food, or sex, but love entered into barter, also: When you had to trade skills for skills the negotiation was more intimate – you learned what you had that the other didn’t, and vice versa, and could groom how the
price played into pleasure or penury – and you’d do it for love – but not money!
Love may predate the notion of money entirely. But yes, the wounds of love and money may share a common origin: Fear. And we are still living in those cultivated evils every day. Points to consider:
Money and our sex lives are our most private matters, not to be discussed.
It’s not a measure of good health to be well adjusted to an unstable world.
Debt is a connection to a specific person or entity. It may stretch your boundaries unlawfully.
Gratitude = natural debt. It need not be repaid.
We need a return to transparency – for the healing of love and money.
We need to address our fears.
Determining what is good and what is sacred in our lives can often depend on what we fear. When we avoid our own fear we limit the imagination, inspiration, and intuitive direction of our spiritual guidance that tells us which doors to go through so we can learn what is on the other side.
FEAR = Chemistry. There is a stage in life when we lean in to fear as children. We desire to be in touch with the unknown. We engage in impulses of uncertainty. Needs awaken us. Fear is the gap we strive to transcend. Once we enter into it we have to pull in something new that isn’t given by inheritance. Knowing this feeling requires some measure of trust. Our age helps us transcend that gap. Our wisdom.
Fear is harmful to powers of creativity beyond the field of our inheritance. By bringing fears into awareness new things become possible. Discussing our fear of money (and love) is the way to change those fears. To transmute them.
Fear might be cultural but the response is human. Fear can override the system:
We spend so much energy on fear that could be spent on love! We focus on the fear of not having freedom, or money or time. The fear of being alone. The fear of pain. The fear of not being successful. The fear of walking down your own path or not walking your own path.
Sacrifice is the longing for the why: Why do we fear? Why do we love? Why do we need money? What do we need love so bad?
So we were asked the question: what part of our civilization has to die because it’s locked in an old paradigm?
Materialistic views of the world are dying. The idea that we are separate is dying.
We must let go of what is dying, of what we fear.
Money is loves shadow.
Sanctify means to give meaning
Sacred reciprocity has many forms, and money is only one.
Be in the longing.
To be in longing is a source of belonging.
Trusting doesn’t mean not acting.
The problem is separation. The answer? Connection.
Value exchange binds a community.
Love is the worlds most natural currency.
We can make things and concepts more useful and real by creating a context. For example: a chair can be a table, too. Here, we are allowing things to return to their consciousness. What has died can be restored. A thing is dying if we cannot speak to its spirit. We must remember primal intuition of what it means to put meaning into language.
What do we want to say to money?
What you can do is help your community allow money to flow in a healing direction. Have a vision, then invite money to support that vision. Do an experiment: Offer your work without any expectations for what it is worth and allow your ‘customer’ to determine value. See how the values flow. Allow your store/shop one day to be ‘suggested’ donation and see how much more money you can make when you allow the wealth to come to you without force. While these concepts are superfluous and a bit of a stretch for some, for others, it is precisely the kind of trust and transparent communication we have been seeking for years.
This is a call to tribal wisdom: how do we come back to relating to each other so that we can take care of the flow of money and love.
Time doesn’t go by us – it goes through us when the time is right.
The lands don’t belong to us we belong to the land.
Treat money and love with upmost respect. #InGodWeTrust
All in in all, the workshop for me personally was a nice reminder that even the cold and sterile can be sacred and injected with holy energy. We do not have to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over, rather we can address those mistakes, look at them head on, look at what we’ve learned from them and then persist onward in the direction of our dreams. I am focusing on not letting money be the barrier holding me back in my life, rather allowing it to be the energy field that carries me forward only when in need. I have often set up paying my bills in work trade and accepting other forms of payment in the ways of food and services instead of cash. I encourage you to be open to this new paradigm of money and love and how they are connected at a root level.
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