Practicing with Money

At Home in the Muddy Water - a guide to finding peace within everyday chaos. by Ezra Bayda

At the beginning of this book there is a quote: "All I can experience and work with is what my life is right now. That's all I can do. The rest is the dream of ego" - Charlotte Joko Beck

The author comments that "... it made me realise how often we forget that practice is actually about living, about opening into whatever life presents. Isn't it true that we tend instead to equate spiritual practice with a particular technique such as sitting in meditation or with feeling a particular way such as calm or centred?"

(Her book) is simply about clarifying the confusion of daily living, cultivating equanimity even within the high-speed messiness of life and transforming our everyday suffering into the genuine life that all of us want. This entails knowing ourselves and all the ways we hold ourselves back in fear. These things are not easy but they are possible. Her intent is to communicate how to make the genuine life a lived reality. Using topics such as relationships, trust, sexuality and money the emphasis is on ways to become willing to "Just Be" right in the middle of life. To do this we must see the endless ways we keep ourselves stuck in the mud of our spinning minds, our habitual and protective patterns and of course our fears.

Chapter 10: Practicing with Money

Money issues, along with sexual issues obviously play a dominant role in everyday life. Yet we rarely consider either of these issues in terms of practice. Money issues tend to be seen as not even worthy of "spiritual" consideration. But given how much of our daily life distress is related to finances, it is unfortunate that we tend to overlook this crucial area of practice. Money issues make an especially rich field for practice because our relationship to money is predominantly determined by unconscious beliefs and behaviours. Money issues rarely are just about money.

What good is it to sit in meditation even if we're having great experiences, if we plunge into the anxiety of our financial situation as soon as formal practice ends? Practice includes everything, even the mundane world of money. Until we are free from our deep-seated beliefs about money, as well as our deeply conditioned behaviours, we cannot truly be free.

What's the practice here? It begins with knowing what we're up to, by precisely observing our believed thoughts around money. We can begin to discover them by asking ourselves questions such as the following: Do I experience tightness and anxiety around money issues? Do money issues provoke feelings of losing control, chaos, danger or doom? If so, what strategy do I fall into: excessive frugality, frantic obsessing or withdrawal into hopelessness ? How much of this strategy is based on fear-based projections that have almost no relationship to what's actually happening right now? With each belief and strategy that we blindly adhere to, we restrict and narrow our life.

It's only through endlessly observing our beliefs and behaviours that such patterns can be uncovered. And then what? The only thing we have to change is our awareness. The practice is first to see clearly our beliefs and strategies. Then we need to locate the well of fear from which they arise. Finally we must learn to gradually welcome the experience of fear into our awareness, especially the fear of losing control, of not feeling safe and in charge. THis requires courage - we need to exercise compassion here which comes from seeing our conditioning as just our conditioning.

So ask yourself "What is the price of practice?" The price may not be monetary, but it still needs to be paid, because we always have to pay the price for what we do.

A Zen student walked in to see the master. Sitting down he blurted out "There's something terribly wrong with me!" The master looked at him and asked "What's so wrong?" The student, after a moment's hesitation, responded "I think I'm a dog" To that the master responded "And how long have you thought that?" The student replied "Ever since I was a puppy"

An extract from "At Home in the Muddy Water" Ezra Bayda author of "Being Zen"