As the U.S. economy careens toward that big cliff called Recession, there’s a scramble to understand just how we got into this predicament. The theories abound: The banks lent too much. People spent too much. Total consumer indebtedness is $2.5 trillion (1), and according to a recent Congressional report, the total cost of the wars in the Middle East are expected to exceed $3.5 trillion over the next ten years (2). Someone clearly fell asleep at the wheel.

But while we sit with our morning coffee and a newspaper pointing our finger at one or more of these culprits, we fail to realize that three fingers are pointing back at us, and the real challenge is to find out where we’re asleep at the wheel.

As a twenty-year veteran of yoga and meditation as well as a Certified Financial Planner, I am called upon to constantly look for what is unconscious within myself, as well as my clients. And what I notice in this time of great uncertainty and fear, is that we are mostly unconscious of what’s been driving our excessive spending and indebtedness, and what to do about it now that we’re waking up, just before we approach the guardrail.

You’ll Never Have Enough
What fuels most people’s desires for newer, better, and faster is what the Buddhists call the Wanting Mind. All beings in nature have a biological imperative to survive. Without this imperative, they die. Nothing in modern society is as closely tied to our survival as money. Is it any surprise that when we find ourselves wanting to buy a new pair of jeans, a portable DVD player, or a vacation we’ve been longing for, we exclaim, “I’ve just got to have it!” as though our very survival depended on that one purchase?

Free money
The usual braking mechanisms on our unfettered desire include our limited disposable incomes, a lack of available cash, and the occasional decline in the value of our houses, stocks and mutual funds. But for the last several years, the American economy and those who participate in it have had the luxury of borrowing money at uncommonly low rates, watching the prices of most electronics, clothing, and air-travel fall dramatically, and enjoying a virtually unblemished rise in the value of their homes, 401k’s, and other investments.

Combine the availability of what we came to perceive as virtually free money with Madison Avenue’s barrage of messages saying “you can have it all, now, and you’ll be happier too!” and you have the recipe for everything from the subprime crisis to the collapse of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the country, including financial calamity for its many hard-working and well-meaning employees. 

We see this same phenomenon in other people who have sudden inflows of money as well. 33% of lottery winners file bankruptcy at some point after their jackpot, and 78% of NFL players are unemployed, divorced, or bankrupt within two years of their last game.

Getting back on track
In yoga practice, when you overstretch one part of the body, you usually pay the price in another joint, tendon, or muscle. When you’re injured, an astute teacher will direct your attention to the larger joint which is ‘upstream’ of the injured area. So if your elbow is suffering, you’re very likely misusing your shoulder or upper back. If your knee is aching, the roots of your pain can often be located in a flaccid thigh muscle, an overly-flexible hip, or just a plain lack of core abdominal strength. Our economy is no different. The muscle which appears broken right now is the credit market, and by extension, the stock market and real estate values. But the true culprit is our own overconsumption.

To survive this recession together, we must individually become aware of the insatiability of our own Wanting Minds, that part of us which can never have enough. But awareness alone isn’t enough. As you go through your day, see if you can identify and let go of just one impulse of wanting. For example, you might long for the European sports sedan sparkling down at you from the roadside billboard, or long for a weekend getaway to escape the weather. Instead of rushing out to satiate this impulse, create a noticeable pause between sensing your want and taking action on it. This pause may create a small wave of grief or regret. “But, but, but . . . ,” your Wanting Mind might object. But allow one of these cravings to go unfed each day, and you’ll begin to notice a sizable difference in both your pocketbook and the stability of your contentment.

I’m going to lose it all
At times like these, even the most self-aware among us can have a difficult time coping with the vagaries of the economy—to the point where we may want to abandon a sound investment strategy or run out and engage in some retail therapy. Money is so closely tied to survival that our fears get blown out of proportion where personal finances are concerned. Instead of immediately acting on your tried-and-true methods of getting relief, look inside and name the feelings you’re hoping to get relief from. Ask yourself whether your plan will actually create lasting relief or is just a temporary band-aid.

And if the feelings are very intense, make sure you wait until the emotional storm has passed before you make major changes. If you wait a few days and the feelings are not changing, then share your plan with a neutral party to make sure you’re not unconsciously setting yourself up for more anguish in the future. Remember, no matter how bad your situation is, it’s highly unlikely that it’s about to lead to your death, even if your feelings are as severe as if it were! By turning our attention to our own motivations with money, we can, one by one, turn the tide of our impulsivehabits. In so doing, we can bring more sustainability and sanity to the economy as a whole.

1 Federal Reserve; June 2007
2 http://jec.senate.gov/Documents/Releases/11.13.07IraqReportRelease.pdf

I’m sitting on my meditation cushion in my closet, my usual spot, and it’s about 6:30am. My sons are already awake and downstairs with their two best friends, who’ve had a sleepover. I’ve been sitting for about thirty minutes, and the boys have been playing beautifully. Then I start hearing something that sounds a lot like hammering. Perhaps thumbtacks are being nailed into drywall. Perhaps screwdriver handles are being used as drumsticks against the wood of the tv cabinets or the dining room table.

I feel the upsurge of a question that desperately wants to escape my mouth – with volume. “What in the world are you guys doing down there?” But on this particular morning, I’ve been sitting with the mantra of allowing everything to be exactly as it is. In case you didn’t catch that, I’m sitting with allowing everything to be exactly as it is.

So I bite my tongue, and listen to the sounds of four hard objects striking wood. My mind races to the possibilities; a few hundred dollars of drywall damage; small indentations along the top surface of the dining room table; gouges in the hardwood floors; exploded yogurt containers all over the kitchen. “I really ought to stop this.” I think to myself. But this is ostensibly what my practice is about, today, letting things be exactly as they are. And so I do.

Eventually, I make my way downstairs, and I find that they’ve placed frozen tubes of yogurt in plastic bowls. Because the yogurt was too hard, they were hammering on it with spoons to soften it up inside the wrappers.

Because of this experience, the rest of the morning was much easier than I’d expected it to be, what with me single-dadding it with four boys between the ages of five and seven. The common triggers for my reflexive anger, control, or frustration didn’t have their usual firepower.

While the example above is quite particular to parenting, this practice of becoming intimately aware of our usually desperate reflex to react, protect, and control pays handsome awards in almost all of life’s important arenas; love, money, and sex, to cover just a few.

Given that my specialty is money, (as in It’s Not About the… ), let’s chat for a minute about how allowing things to be as they are can help free us of long-standing financial habits we’d really like to break.

The initial tendency when we notice things starting to not go our way in the financial world, as with my gaggle of boys, is to rush to our tried and true strategy for feeling okay about ourselves again, smoothing over the fear and anxiety which were starting to arise. For some, this could mean retail therapy after getting a bank statement filled with overdraft fees (if this sounds like you, read about the Pleasure Seeker ), while for others, it might mean overhauling the investment accounts to better weather the impending recession (if this sounds like you, read about the Saver).

Regardless, the key to freedom lies in allowing things to get pretty hairy inside before we react in our habitual ways in the outer world. This can cut both ways, however. Some people are used to grabbing the financial bull by the horns when the going gets tough, and for these types, they need to stop doing and just observe what feelings their inactivity brings up. As Sylvia Boorstein so eloquently states it, “Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There”. But others tend to put their heads in the sand and avoid looking at financial issues squarely in order to get through. For these types, ‘letting things get hairy’ means pulling out the yellow pad, calculator and pencil and actually figuring out where things stand rather than avoiding the subject altogether. This goes against their grain of just going out to have a coffee with a friend to bitch about the election or the price of European shoes given a weakening dollar.

A PRACTICE; In the next week, pay attention and notice when some interaction with or touched by money sparks a strong reaction in you. Notice what your mind  is telling you to do about it (what I call your Financial Core Story). And just this once, don’t drink the old familiar Kool-Aid. In fact, try the opposite tack. If a sideways glance from your svelte sister-in-law would normally send you hunting through catalogs for a new black skirt, try instead to focus on giving something away to someone else. If you’re a starving artist who gets riled up at the mention of Corporate America’s profits, try saving and investing some money, and finding the most ethical places you can to put it. Whatever your tendency, see if just this week, you can experiment with flexing some atrophied muscles. If it’s too hard to relate to, ask a friend who lives more in the way you’re trying to emulate to give you some coaching. The freedom and space this practice will give you to truly allow things to be just as they are is remarkable, and according to many a spiritual teacher the key to true inner freedom.
Brent Kessel is the author of the HarperCollins book, It’s Not About the Money (forthcoming April 1st), and the co-founder of Abacus, one of the nation’s top sustainable investing firms. Brent is teaching his It’s Not About the Money workshop over Easter weekend at Kripalu.    
www.BrentKessel.com

Today, as with virtually every Saturday for the last eight years, I woke up with the intention that I would not do any work of any kind – no email, no talking about work, no thinking about work issues – until Monday morning. My kids and their friend who’d had a sleepover awoke at 5:40am, dressed up in camo costumes, and began playing the loudest game of ‘secret agent’ I’d ever heard. I clearly wasn’t going to get back to sleep, so I stumbled the twelve steps from my bed to our closet, pulled my cushion off the shelf above my shoes, and plunked myself down for my morning meditation.

To me, meditation is not about stopping all thoughts and insisting on a warm honey-like love syrup circumambulating my spinal column. Ideally, meditation is about surrendering control more than increasing control. Control is what the mind is seeking in virtually every waking moment. It wants to be more secure, happy, still, and positive.   

But as I sat there and meditated this morning, I watched the thoughts arising with their little pleas of “Follow me, I can make you happier.” And most of them were about my work, notwithstanding my commitment to have a day free of any professional toil or thought.

Why was this? As I evaluated the content of the thoughts themselves, I noticed that most of them were just continuations of the thoughts I’d been having Monday through Friday of this week. There was a momentum to my thinking, a sled track that I’d been skimming down all week, and now, sitting on the top of the hill and hoping to go down a different path, the well-worn tracks of my week were sending me careening past all-too-familiar scenery. Why had I expected anything different?  One of my favorite poets is Rumi, and one of his poems says “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.” I feel as though I’m waking up and even before the experience of empty or frightened hits my conscious mind, my thoughts are all about avoiding ‘empty and frightened. The ‘study’ I’m opening the door to is my business life and all its strategies for achievement and meaning.  

The thought arises “I’ve got too much to do in the limited mount of time available.” All last week, I believed that thought. And I would feel a constant sense of being behind the eight-ball, unable to catch up. I so badly wanted to be able to complete things almost as fast as I thought of them. “I’ve got this to do and that to do and oh yeah, there’s still those four things from this morning.”

And then, in the midst of my yoga practice, I realized that this too is just a thought; a thought with no more and no less value than many other thoughts. The only thing which gave it a sense of urgency was itself.

With that realization, all my to-do’s for today suddenly lost their urgency. I asked myself “what happens if I don’t get fully prepared for the review I’m conducting?” The answer was “Nothing, we’ll just reschedule it.”

“And what happens if I don’t get my blog written in time?”  Again, “Nothing, it will just post a little later.”   Then my mind raised the stakes. “And what if the stock market is down 500 points today and three clients call to say they just can’t take it anymore and are leaving?” I realized I’d lose some money, and possibly have to make some strategic decisions to keep the company financially sound, but the level of life-and-death fear which accompanies my usual to-do-urgency was gone. None of these were life-or-death.  

But my most repetitive thoughts about money, what I call the Financial Core Story in my book  do have a sense of urgency about them. From a very young part of myself, this Core Story believes that if I ‘get it all done’, I’ll accumulate enough money to never have to worry again, never be abandoned by a father or stepfather, and be secure for the rest of my days. This is one of the refrains of the Saver , one of the eight financial money types . As I sat there in the early morning hours, the roosters just beginning their usual call, I wondered how I could get some relief from this endless litany of inner demands. Just then, it dawned on me that what I most need is the financial money type I’m most resistant to, the one I’ve lived out least of all: the Innocent . I needed to surrender all this need for control. I needed, in that moment, to have faith that whether I fulfill all the to-do’s or not, life will work out as it should, the refrain of the Innocent.

With that realization, my shoulders dropped a quarter inch and my jaw unclenched ever so slightly. I felt deeply peaceful for the first time in days. That which I had most resisted throughout the week had become my very salvation. And I saw more clearly than ever before the grace and peace which can come from embodying that which I’ve avoided for so very long.   

Brent Kessel is the author of the HarperCollins book, It’s Not About the Money (forthcoming April 1st), and the co-founder of Abacus, one of the nation’s top sustainable investing firms. Brent is teaching his It’s Not About the Money workshop over Easter weekend at Kripalu.     www.BrentKessel.com

Book discussion and booksigning: 7:30pm