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EXPERIENCE LIFE MAGAZINE: "Conscious Bookkeeping"
By Courtney Helgoe
January-February 2008
"Mary (not her real name) was anxious. She
and her husband had separated, and now she was
going to have to manage her own money for the
first time in her life. In all her years of
marriage, she had never paid a bill or learned
to balance a checkbook — and she had a history
of emotional spending. She knew she needed help,
but she had no clue where to start. When Bari
Tessler, founder of the San Francisco–based
financial counseling company Conscious Bookkeeping,
learned about Mary after one of her firm’s seminars,
she recommended some private counseling sessions
with a member of her company. After nine months
of hard work, Mary, who is in her mid-50s, went
from having zero money skills to skillfully
managing her checkbook. Tessler suggests that
Mary is not all that unusual."
Click
here to read the entire article.
Conscious Bookkeeping
By Bari Tessler, M.A.
Three Gateways to Money Initiation
It’s a bit odd, don’t you think,
that our daily lives as adults are tightly interwoven
with the reality of money, and yet the majority
of us are never taught how to work with it—much
less have a conscious relationship with it?
No, it’s more than a bit odd. It’s
crazy—as crazy as it would be to do away
with driver’s training requirements. Imagine
if our parents simply bought us a car at age
16, handed us the keys, and said, “Hop
in and just figure it out as you go.” Though
it is often unspoken, we unfortunately get this
same message with respect to money. That, to
me, is insane; and because collective insanity
on a widespread scale undermines our true potential
as humans, I felt a pull from deep within my
heart to do something about our relationship
with money.
The path of Conscious Bookkeeping has been
intentionally and carefully designed to lead
people into challenges at the edge of their
comfort zone—the kind of challenges that
can lead to profound transformation. This transformation
often results in five valuable gifts within
people’s experience of life: They walk
away with more clarity, intimacy, knowledge,
ease, and success.
The Three Gateways
The process of initiation into conscious relationship
with money begins by passing through three gateways:
financial therapy, values-based bookkeeping,
and life visioning. It doesn’t matter which
gateway a person enters through first, as each
of them lead naturally into the others. The
three gateways are interrelated in such a way
that each supports the others in a dynamic,
symbiotic process.
Financial Therapy
Many people have done some form of inner healing
work, be it psychotherapy, coaching, or individual
self-inquiry. Often, however, even people who
have done significant self-exploration have
never directly faced their relationship with
money. In a sense, they have never shared their
money story.
Because money plays such a key role in day-to-day
living, it is often closely entangled with our
core psychological issues, challenges, and wounds.
To free ourselves of constraints in relation
to money, then, is to seek healing for these
core wounds in our psyche. And to heal these
core wounds, we must inquire into their nature
with gentle courage.
At the gateway of financial therapy, our challenges,
frustrations, fears, and joys around money are
like a red tab on the wrapper of a gift package
within our mind. When we pull the tab, the packaging
unravels to reveal what lies within: the real
issues beneath our surface emotions around money.
When we see what’s really driving our frustrations,
fears, and struggles with money, however, it
certainly doesn’t look like a gift. In
fact, it looks more like an old, black, tangled
ball of psychological yuck. For most of us,
it isn’t until we have gone through the
process of psychological and emotional healing
that we can see the reward. It can be challenging
work, this process—but then, most initiations
involve inherent challenge. In the end, we come
out with skills that allow us to begin polishing
up not only the yucky mess of our limitations
around money, but other recurring tangles, as
well. This is because the way we relate with
money is often the way we relate with most everything
in life. If you heal your relationship with
money, you will very likely heal other parts
of your life, also.
This process of bringing awareness and understanding
to our inner relationship with money is the
central focus of the gateway of financial therapy.
It begins with inquiring into your past experiences
with money, starting with what you learned from
your parents and grandparents. For example,
when you look back on your memories of when
your mom or dad paid bills, do you remember
them as being calm, joyful, and happy, or stressed
out, frustrated, or even angry? Oftentimes,
the most powerful lessons about money are taught
through behavior and emotion, rather than words.
These unspoken, often unconscious lessons then
guide us in how we earn, spend, save, borrow,
and invest money. And because they are unconsciously
delivered, integrated, and put into action in
our own lives, they are also unconsciously passed
along to our intimate partners, children, friends,
and coworkers. Financial therapy is one way
to end this perpetual cycle of unconsciousness
around money.
Values-Based Bookkeeping
There is a myth out there that bookkeeping
and accounting are dry and boring, but this
is far from true! Bookkeeping is actually a
fun and very dynamic system. You just have to
use it in a way that makes it more enjoyable.
The first step in passing through the gateway
of creating a values-based bookkeeping system
is learning the language of accounting. This
important step can empower anyone and everyone
who ever believed that they were incapable,
that it wasn’t creative, or even simply
that they should already know this stuff but
for one reason or another hadn’t yet learned
it. And all it requires is a willingness to
come face to face with things you may have heard
of in passing, but avoided learning anything
about.
When most people hear the word “budget,”
the feeling that arises in their body is one
of constriction. I don’t know many people
who love the word budget so much that they find
themselves running home to do one. The resistance
most of us feel is directly related to the unconscious
lessons we learned about what budgeting is:
scrimping, clamping down, and generally holding
tightly onto our money while we let small, precise
amounts of it squeeze out into predefined categories
such as rent, utilities, credit card bills,
entertainment, and so on. The word budget, and
the concept it traditionally represents, tends
to induce an often-unnoticed attitude of fear
and constriction.
We can, however, take another perspective on
budgeting. We can look more deeply into this
aspect of bookkeeping and ask, “What’s
really going on here?” What we find is
that—though most people don’t use
it consciously in this way—a budget is
a tool designed to help us align our spending
patterns with our intention. The second thing
we notice about budgeting is that it tries to
help us map out a future plan for spending patterns
that are supposed to be an expression of our
intentions. From this perspective, we can see
that budgeting involves a map and some intentions.
So why don’t we call it a “Map of
Intention”? Much better, yes?
Creating a Map of Intention is more than just
assigning a new name to an existing model. It
is a new approach to planning how we’ll
spend our money in the future—an approach
that is based not in fear and constriction,
but in excitement and joy. Through this process,
we discover where our values are being met and
expressed— or unmet and unexpressed—through
both our spending and making of money.
We begin by looking deeply inside and coming
up with a list of all of the things that feel
important to us. This can include anything that
we feel is of value, such as keeping our body
healthy by eating organic food and practicing
yoga, donating money to a nonprofit, or going
on a meditation retreat once a year. The list
of values is then compared with the categories
in our Map of Intention. We see immediately
if all of our values are being represented in
the Map, and if not, we can add categories or
rename ones that are already there. For example,
when one of our clients was going through this
process, she asked herself: “Okay, Rent,
what is that really? Rent feels like a bag of
bricks tied around each of my feet. What is
that money really providing me? Home…safety...love
shack…a sanctuary. Ahh, much better. I’ll
call this category Sanctuary.” For her,
the word “sanctuary” reminds her of
the deeper meaning of what that money brings
her each month: a feeling of home, of safety.
She realized the value in having a home that
is a safe sanctuary, and that value is now expressed
in her Map of Intention. The rent check became
a sanctuary check.
The value-expressing categories that are created
in the Map of Intention then appear across the
board in all of the other reports and financial
statements. In this way, the path of Conscious
Bookkeeping leads us to create an entire bookkeeping
system based on our values. The first time people
see what were once boring, dry financial reports
now filled with their personally meaningful
categories, they feel unexpectedly excited.
This system supports us in living true to our
own highest vision for our life—but it
can’t work unless we use it, and use it
often, which is why we invite everyone to engage
with this type of bookkeeping every few days,
or at least once a week. Making this into a
practice involves continually cycling through
a number of simple stages that turn this into
a working, dynamic, life-giving system that
generates frequent financial feedback. This
is what the practice looks like: When we go
out into the world and purchase things, we put
the receipts in a little accoutrement, or wallet,
or bring them home and file them in a special
box. Then, every few days we enter the receipts
into our Quicken or QuickBooks register. Afterward,
the receipts are stored in folders that have
the same names as the expense categories in
our Map of Intention. This process is repeated
often so that it becomes a habitual practice.
When we get our bank statement each month, we
reconcile the statement, print out reports,
and look through them to see how well our spending
behavior matches up with our Map of Intention.
This is essentially a check-in process to see
how well we’re doing in terms of spending
our money in ways that express our values.
Along the way, different people will tend to
“fall asleep” at different steps.
Some people check out at the grocery store and
don’t bring home receipts. Others fall
asleep when they get to the step of printing
out the reports because they’re terrified
to see the reality of their spending patterns.
Whenever we lose awareness of what we’re
doing in relationship to our money, we have
an opportunity to begin the process of self-inquiry
into the underlying thoughts and feelings. If
we’re having strong feelings around seeing
our reports, for example, we place our attention
on the sensations and feelings that arise in
our body, seeking to gain insight into what
may lie beneath them, or what their true nature
really is.
Sometimes people feel resistance when they
imagine bookkeeping as a regular, ongoing practice.
When this comes up, I ask them to imagine what
they would feel like if they didn’t exercise
every couple of days, but waited, instead, to
do the entire month’s worth of exercise
all in one day, or if they waited until the
end of the month to do a whole thirty days’
worth of brushing their teeth. The consensus
is always that they wouldn’t feel very
good at all. Unfortunately, many people wait
until the end of the month to take care of all
their financial business, such as gathering
receipts, entering them into their register,
and reconciling. Others don’t even do that,
choosing to wait for several months, or even
an entire year, letting all of this bookkeeping
work build up as they go about their lives in
a state of financial unconsciousness.
Often, people who initially have some resistance
to making bookkeeping into a regular practice
end up telling us that, while it took a little
time for them to adjust, the process soon started
to be fun. They find themselves continuing with
the system out of their own natural desire.
Life Visioning
Why are you here on this planet? What is the
real purpose of your life? What burns in your
heart with a passionate glow? What things must
your soul absolutely do before facing the inevitable
reality of death? These are big questions, which
we humans have been asking ourselves for tens
of thousands of years. This is why they are
a foundation to the initiation process of the
Conscious Bookkeeping path. In fact, the ultimate
goal of this practice is to discover and live
true to the answers to these questions. Each
of the elements of Conscious Bookkeeping is
intended to help us create a life in which the
dream answers to these questions become the
lived experience of our day-to-day life.
So, why the “conscious” in Conscious
Bookkeeping? Simply put, each aspect of the
path is intended to help us raise our level
of consciousness in relationship to money, so
that we can use the positive power of money
to realize our highest aspirations. And when
we raise our level of consciousness in relationship
to money, it is almost inevitable that we will
naturally become more conscious and awake in
relationship to other aspects of reality. The
limitations of the system are defined only by
your own investment.
While visiting India, a friend of mine was
introduced to three Buddhist monks. During their
conversation, my friend learned that each of
the monks had memorized the entire Pali Canon,
which contains hundreds of discourses, or teachings,
given by the Buddha. My friend asked the monks,
“What is the essence of the Pali Canon?”
One of the monks leaned slightly forward for
emphasis and calmly replied, “Know what
you’re doing.” To me, that’s
another way of saying, “Be fully conscious
and awake in relationship to all aspects of
reality.” Conscious Bookkeeping helps us
to begin that process by initiating us into
conscious relationship to money. Like any good
initiation, this process can be both challenging
and rewarding. We are brought face to face with
our shadows around money, and in the end emerge
into greater clarity, intimacy, knowledge, ease,
and success. Through this financial rite of
passage, we can begin to relate to all of life
with the same kind of awareness.
Bari Tessler has a Masters in Somatic Psychology
from Naropa University. She is a teacher, therapist,
and speaker and founder of Conscious Bookkeeping.
After many years in the Psychology Field, Bari
jumped careers and moved into financial and
bookkeeping services. The Conscious Bookkeeping
organization is an integration of these two
fields, providing a financial support team for
individuals, couples, families, and businesses.
The Conscious Bookkeeping consulting team consists
of financial therapists, financial coaches,
and bookkeeping trainers who offer services
and education to help people transform their
relationship with money on a practical, psychological,
and spiritual level. Bari is also a featured
author in the anthology, Einstein's Business.
Visit Bari online at www.consciousbookkeeping.com
Updated January 2, 2008
