If you're on a spiritual path and you want to understand your relationship to money,
You want to both learn how to make more of it,
Bring more into your business or your life,
And also want to look and figure out,
Okay,
Where are my shadows around it?
Where can money actually expose certain parts of me that are going to be difficult to look at?
This is for you.
My spiritual path and money have always been interrelated.
I quit a corporate job in 2015 after having a spiritual awakening.
So right away I had to figure out how do I make a living and pursue something that I actually care about and at first I Had a lot of resistance towards money.
I said I didn't care about money.
I didn't want to it doesn't matter I just want to be spiritual and meditate and and I'll be provided for and I switched that mindset pretty early on and there were four beliefs and Lessons that I've learned that have been hard-worn and I want to share them with you so that they might help you on your The first belief or maybe even call it a principle.
It's easier to make a lot of money in a short amount of time than a little money over a long period of time.
I heard this recently from Myron Golden and it really spoke to me.
It shook a chord with the truth of my experience.
There's actually been a book that speaks to this principle called 10x is easier than 2x and it's basically saying that there are leveraged opportunities that we can find that bring in a disproportionate amount of revenue compared to the energy that we put out.
And I believe that when we are more aligned in our path,
We are able to find those opportunities with more ease.
And one of the experiences that I had with this is that when I was working at my company,
I was making $39,
000 a year,
Working 40 hours a week.
I then got a promotion and I was working 50 hours a week and making $43,
000 a year.
So just a little bit of raise.
It was a lot harder work.
I then had these spiritual experiences,
Had this whole epiphany and ended up quitting my job with no money saved,
With no plans on how I was going to make money.
I just jumped and I leapt into the unknown and God had my back.
I had a friend reach out to me and said,
Lou,
I'm sure you made a sound financial decision,
But if you didn't,
Which I didn't,
He said,
Let me know and I'll connect you to a friend who has this opportunity where you can work for a week out of the month.
And you can make a bunch of money and you can come back and you can work on the thing that you're pursuing.
And so that opportunity took a little while to materialize,
But eventually I was able to do this job,
Which was mystery shopping cars at car dealerships.
I made about $4,
000 to $5,
000 for each trip,
About a week of work.
And in the year after I quit my job,
I made more money working a fraction of the time.
It was much easier to make more money over a short amount of time than a little money over a long amount of time.
One more example of this.
In 2018,
I was teaching yoga at studios for about $35 a class.
I was teaching my own meditation workshops where people would come and donate about $10,
$15.
And that was not equating to a sustainable income.
I still had to do that car dealership shopping job to make ends meet.
And then I got an opportunity to teach teachers at a school where I got paid $2,
200 for four hours of in-person work.
Obviously,
There's a lot more work in preparation,
But four hours,
$2,
200.
It flipped a switch in me to realize that I can make that work in a way that schlepping around yoga class to yoga class,
Making less than minimum wage could ever work.
I just had to find those opportunities.
I just had to find those schools and create leverage.
And that's the biggest thing that having our own business allows us to do is create create leverage of our time,
Our effort to the amount that we can make because we're controlling and choosing how much people are paying us and we're finding our own opportunities rather than being an employee and having opportunities given to us.
And so it was another example of,
Oh my gosh,
If I can just get two of these opportunities a month,
Which are technically only eight hours of work,
That would be $4,
400 and that would be enough for making a sustainable living.
It's easier to make a lot of money in a short amount of time than a little money over a long amount of time.
This is a quote from Hal Elrod.
1000 watts and you plug a 60 watt light bulb in.
That is much too much energy going into that light bulb and it's going to fry the light bulb.
That's what happens to lottery winners.
They haven't built the body and the awareness to hold that much energy.
It burns out their system and they often end up broke and much worse off for having won it.
And so it's worth asking ourselves,
How is the person we're becoming a reflection of the money that we're receiving or vice versa?
The money that we're receiving is actually a reflection of who we're becoming and what we're able to hold and the inner work that we've done on ourselves.
When I quit my job,
I mentioned to you that it took a while for that other job to materialize.
And in the meantime,
I was driving Lyft and Uber and I had a wacky spiritual sort of experience where I made a misjudgment.
I won't get into the details,
But basically I got on a flight and I went to go meet someone that I was going to seek mentorship from.
That person did not want to meet me.
And so I made this big mistake of spending a bunch of money on a that night flight to go across the country for it to not be what it was and to feel defeated and to come back.
And overall,
That trip cost me a thousand dollars.
And it was a thousand dollars that I really did not have at that time.
And so I was in a really dark,
Low place with this all.
And I was walking with a friend in Mission Beach,
San Diego,
And we were walking by.
He had seen one of his friends and so we stopped for a moment so he can talk to his friend and his friend had mentioned to him that Lyft was doing this promotion where if you signed up another driver,
You would get $1,
000 per driver that you signed up.
My ears perked up.
Oh my gosh,
I drive Lyft.
I didn't see this email.
I run home,
Get on my computer.
Sure enough,
The email's in promotions.
I go on it.
I call everyone I know and say,
Hey,
Would you do this thing?
I end up getting six people saying yes,
They're going to do it.
I get so excited.
Oh my gosh,
I'm gonna make $6,
000.
I was elated.
Sure enough,
I'm not the only person that has this idea.
Lyft's getting too many people signing up for this.
They shut it down within the next four hours.
Out of the six people that I reached out to and they said yes,
Only one person took the initiative and actually signed up before Lyft shut it down.
They went on their rides and I ended up getting $1,
000,
The exact amount that I had just spent doing this crazy thing,
Even Stevens.
God was like,
No,
Lou,
You're not ready for $6,
000,
But we'll clear the energy.
We'll give you back what you need.
And it was just a example of,
Wow,
I wasn't ready for that.
And what's crazy is I've since cashed checks for 6,
500,
I think $11,
000 was the biggest check that I've cashed for work that I've done in school and school systems.
And when I've cashed those checks,
There wasn't this feeling of oh my gosh,
There's a you know,
There's not a lot of energy and I think that's something that we need to understand about money is Removing the charge removing the trigger.
So sometimes money can be a trigger for negative emotions But it's also this trigger for like a high we might get a lot of money and feel this elation and and I'm Positing that that's actually two sides of the same coin that money should feel like it's normal It doesn't it's because if we feel the high we get addicted to the high Or we get averse to the low.
It's a very spiritual concept.
It's the Buddhist concept of attachment and aversion.
It's the same thing that happens with money.
We're either averse to it because we don't want to deal with it because it's not feel good or we're attached to it because we like the high.
And so,
If you can just receive money like you receive water,
You just drink a little bit of water on a daily basis and we don't have a lot of feelings around it.
So,
I think it's important to explore the charge that we have around money and the way that you're going to let more money in is having less charge around it,
Positive or negative.
Number three,
This is less of belief,
Just a learning,
But I wanted to keep it in here.
Pride about money is just as toxic as greed.
In 2020,
I made $55,
000 in my business.
In 2021,
I made $105,
000 in my business.
That was the biggest leap I've ever done.
And that's that number that people talk about where you really move into away from just surviving to having some more disposable income to being in a more thriving state and I experienced that hugely it was such an expansive year and what started to happen from that is I started getting attached to that number and putting my identity in being this person who makes this number and And it didn't really get that much higher over the next few years.
I know a lot of coaches say,
You know,
I made $30,
000 and then $100,
000 and then $300,
000 and then $1,
000,
000 and then just kind of kept going on astronomically and that's just not been my experience.
I plateaued at around $100,
000 for four years until this year where it's actually went down,
Which has broken certain beliefs I had about money.
And I share this because I realize and I really believe I'm in a lesson learning phase right now that I realized that having that identity of I'm a six-figure coach,
There's a pride.
There's a pride to it that I was actually identifying more with this idea of who I was than with the goodness,
The truth and the beauty of really what my work and what my service is about.
And as the biblical quote goes that pride goes before the fall,
It happens all the time in everywhere.
You see it all around in the world,
In spiritual places,
In cults,
In all of these places,
There's a fall.
And not to say that I fell from like this huge,
You know,
High,
But there is something with humility.
The thing about humility is it brings us down to the earth.
It helps us understand.
It brings us lower so we can literally stand under and see something from a new perspective.
And so,
This year I've been humbled financially and it's allowed me to look and see,
Whoa,
Look at your attachments that you've had to this,
That you hadn't even realized.
And I feel like my work now is is in releasing those attachments so that I can then see and actually grow and actually learn how to hold more.
Because remember,
The one piece of our level of personal development is related to our level of success,
That we receive what we can handle.
And so I'm learning that how can I open up to receiving this in a new way and really using the lessons of being humbled.
So be careful about being Prideful about the money you have a boasting about the money you have and number four.
It's not my money.
It's God's money I learned this from a beautiful organization called wisdom and money and they help affluent people use their money as a vehicle for spiritual growth and When I think of this concept of it's not my money.
It's God's money.
I Step away from hoarding it I step away from it being personal to me and I open up up to being a steward.
Inspired to donate to them.
If I feel like I'm going to invest myself,
It's going to be beneficial to my mission so I can do my work in the world,
Then it's okay.
I'm just moving God's money around to that person who's just like me trying to make a living doing their work.
And so in this,
It becomes very communal and there's just a real beautiful element to see it because at the end of the day too,
We're not going to take our money with us.
And even if we create generational wealth for our kids and our and our grandkids and all those which we would love to do,
Even at some point,
They're gonna die.
They're not gonna take it with them.
Eventually,
It's just here.
It's just in this realm.
And who created this realm with this world that's spinning around the globe in this massive ball of fire?
To me,
That's where the money's gonna be.
And I use the metaphor of God to name that thing.
So it truly is God's money because it's only here in this one realm.
So I hope that's helpful to explore.
Please let me know what this stirred up in you.
You.
I'd love to hear in the comments.
And if you like this talk and want to do a practice around working with your relationship to money,
I have a meditation called allowing money to flow easily.
And in this meditation,
We will work with that first belief of it's easier to make a lot of money in a short amount of time than a little money over a long period of time.
So we're going to be working with that belief and exploring how you could find the flow and the current in your life where that is true.
So go ahead and check out that meditation,
Allowing money to flow usefully.
And I look forward to practicing with you soon.
