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Yogi Times: "Conscious Bookkeeping"
By Bari Tessler, M.A.
March 2007
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.
Click here to read the entire article.
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
