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Barbara Wilder

Escape Your Money Worries by
Changing Money into Love

by Barbara Wilder


"Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life. In its origin and its true action it belongs to the Divine." -- Sri Aurobindo


Money is quite possibly the most misunderstood commodity in the world. We all need it. Most of us want more of it. Few of us have enough of it. And a great many of us hate the damned stuff. It’s been called the root of all evil, dirty money, and filthy lucre to name just a few of its nicknames. For the past two thousand years people have equated poverty and spirituality. The picture in our minds of holy men and women wearing sackcloth and ashes makes it almost impossible for us to believe that we can have both enlightenment and wealth. After all, "A camel can pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man can enter the kingdom of heaven." or so we’ve been told our entire lives. Jesus threw the Money Changers out of the temple. Monks and nuns lived lives of poverty in monasteries for two thousand years, and in Asia Buddhist monks have been carrying their rice bowls, begging for food, for even longer.

Money is Love by Barbara Wilder

I am one of the people who bought completely into the notion that to be spiritual one must suffer and be poor. I held in contempt people who had lots of money, and I berated myself whenever I caught myself wishing for material gains. Then one day in 1975 my teacher, Russell Schofield, introduced me to a brand new idea. He said that in the new era, which we were then approaching, and now, twenty-seven years later, are on the very cusp of, humankind would begin to understand prosperity in a new light. He said simply that it was time for the good guys to have the money. He told me that a new ray of energy was being brought into the earth from the spiritual planes, which combines abundance and goodwill for all.

As an Aquarius, I loved the concept. But it would take me another twenty years to finally understand it in my heart. Though I was trained as a writer and actor, my life’s journey led me to become a financial executive on motion pictures. I hated money, and had very little facility with it, and yet, I was in charge of millions of dollars that literally passed through my hands on many feature films and TV shows. I hated my work. I longed to be acting in the films I worked on. Between movie jobs I wrote film scripts and hoped against hope to be able to sell them and get out of the dreaded money business. Finally, I escaped from Hollywood to Boulder, Colorado, where I expected to at last find peace away from the pressures of business and money. Instead my husband and I found an incredibly tight job market, which was made more difficult by an extremely high cost of living. Within a year we were forced to declare bankruptcy.

And then I met Stanley Messenger. It was definitely a fated meeting. We met at his 80th birthday party. Stanley, an Englishman and a leading authority on crop circles, was in the U.S. to give a series of talks about them. But it wasn’t crop circles that caught my interest that night. During a short speech before he cut his cake, he said three little words that went directly to my heart. Those words were, Money Is Love, and they changed my life forever. After his talk I approached him and asked him to explain more. He apologized and said he didn’t really know more. I didn’t believe him. I followed him from one public appearance to the next asking him to talk more about Money is Love, but to no avail. He had heard some friends in Scotland talking about using money as love, and that was all he knew. After a week Stanley went home to England and, I was left on my own to figure out why on earth these three words had affected my heart so deeply.

For a year I mediated on them every day. Along with the meditation I researched money and it’s history. By the end of that year I viewed money in a revolutionary new way. I had a blue print for a new world economy – an economy based on love instead of fear. Along the way financial life turned around, and we were on the road to financial recovery. From this vantage point I could finally look back on my career as a movie accountant and be filled with gratitude for the essential part it played in this journey.

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Money as we know it -- paper bills and metal coins -- is only one of the many forms that the energy we call money embodies. Before we had coins humanity used wheat and cattle as money and before that it was herbs, clay pots, baskets, beads and wild meat. In the fifteenth century, as the merchant class emerged, checks were introduced as money, and in the twentieth century credit cards were added. Now, as we spend more and more time shopping on the Internet money is becoming Virtual.

Let’s look at money’s sacred origins so that we can get a sense of the possibilities for the future. I’ll start with the pre-historic, approximately 40,000 years ago when people lived in clans and traded with their neighboring tribe. This is the era when the people of southern France and northern Spain were creating astonishingly sophisticated art on the walls of caves such as Lascaux. This art along with many other anthropological discoveries has led us to understand that the people of this era lived a completely spiritual life. They believed that they were part of the Great Mother and that everything on earth was integrated into a whole, which they knew as the sacred circle of life. Before a hunt the people did ceremony with the spirit of the animal whose life they were about to take. When the women went into the forests to gather herbs, berries and nuts they also did ceremony with the elemental spirits. When the meal was eaten it was consumed as a sacred event – one in which the spirit of the animal and plants came into each of them. Everything about food was sacred, so when they traded their sacred food with the neighboring clan, the act of trading was necessarily sacred.

This understanding that money was sacred lasted for thousands of years. When gold and silver coins were first invented they were considered, not merely symbols of the sun and moon gods and goddesses, but earthly extensions of the gods. Holding a piece of gold in your hand was like holding a piece of god. Before gold and silver coins became agents of exchange they were given back to the Mother God by depositing them in her springs and wells, or as offerings on altars in the temples. Wishing wells are a remnant of that ancient practice.

Interestingly, as humanity moved farther and farther away from the sacred circle of life and began building cities and fighting wars, the gold and silver coins began to be used for trade, simply because you couldn’t pay a soldier who was traveling across the land waging war, with herds of cattle or stores of grain. By the time of the great empires of Greece and Rome money’s connection with the Divine had almost completely vanished. Now, of course in 2002, in the age of materialism, we can see no connection whatsoever.

But the connection is still there. It just needs to be uncovered. Jesus wasn’t angry for money "being" in the temple. He was angry that the Money Changers, who had originally been part of the sacred workings of the temple, were making profits off the suffering of the people. Rabbi Nilton Bonder says in his book, The Kabbalah of Money, "The definition of wealth, according to Talmudic interpretation, is 'Abundance that does not create scarcity.'"

During the Middle Ages Usury, the act of charging large sums for lending money, was a sin. In those times people only borrowed money if they were in dire straits, and to take advantage of a person in such circumstances was considered to be against God’s law. Now, of course it is one of the biggest businesses in the world.

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Money is nothing more and nothing less than energy exchanged between people for survival on this earth. Energy is limitless. Only our fear and our limited way of thinking make the energy that is called money seem scarce. Because we have forgotten that money is part of the sacred circle of life, we all believe that there is only a small amount of money in the world, and that we all have to fight for our tiny share of it. As members of the human race, we have all collectively bought into this false belief system. But we don’t have to be a slave to this lie any longer. We can change it by changing our minds. We can change it by remembering that money is part of the Divine.

As we work each day to find our spiritual truth, we can add the mantra, Money is Love, to our practice. Money is, in fact, the embodiment of the Divine’s love for us. The Divine, God, the Universal Source, or the Great Mother, however you wish to envision the loving intelligence that is, or guides, the universe, cares for us like a loving, nurturing mother, but we can’t accept her abundance if we don’t believe she wants us to have it. The only scarcity in the world is in our minds. The only scarcity in the world lies in the depths of our lack of self-love. Individuals and whole communities and societies live with this lack of self-love. Self-love comes directly from our hearts and from the heart of the Divine Source. When we love ourselves, and we love the Divine, we love everyone and everything around us. When we love, we give, and when we give with love everything we give and receive multiplies.

Thought directs energy, and energy follows thought. That is the principal behind quantum physics. We can direct the money energy that flows through our lives and through the planet with our thoughts. Our current monetary-system is based on the divide-and-conquer mentality of a patriarchal fear-based economy. To change this we simply need to move toward a more feminine, inclusive, and nurturing love-based economy. Half the world lives on less than two dollars a day for no other reason than that our economic system is driven by fear instead of by love. Fear is the father of greed, anger, frustration, and rage, which leads to power-mongering, terrorism, poverty, crime and war. Love, on the other hand, is the mother of caring, sharing, nurturing, and including, which leads to peace, joy, goodwill, abundance, and prosperity for all. Money flows through the planet like blood flows through the body, touching and affecting everyone and everything in the world. When money is diseased with feelings of fear, lack, anger, and greed it poisons the world just like diseased blood poisons the body.

Since, money is nothing more and nothing less than the exchange of energy between people for the purpose of survival, all we need to do to create a more balanced world is to enter each monetary transaction – each exchange of energy between one another – in a state of loving, caring, and sharing. When we begin to treat money like an agent that can carry these feelings of loving, caring and sharing by spending, giving, earning and receiving money as love, we will create balance and prosperity for ourselves and for all the earth’s people and for the earth itself.

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You can begin to change the money in your life and in the world from fear to love by doing some very simple things. First of all choose Money is Love as your mantra. It is a very powerful mantra. Repeat it throughout the day, especially when you feel fear, anger, or stress about money. Write Money is Love on all your checks and credit card slips. This will help you break down the negative emotions that surround spending money. It will also infuse the money you are spending with love, so that when the money travels through the world it will carry your intention of love wherever it goes. Write Money is Love on all the checks that come to you, and also on your deposit slips, so that the money you put into your bank will be infused with love and multiply. Hold all your cash between your hands and send a flow of love and light into the cash with the intention of healing the money from all the negative emotions that it has picked up as it has circulated through the world. Spend this healed money with the spirit of love.

These simple actions, thoughts, and intentions have the power to transform your money worries forever. Money is energy and energy must flow. Spend your money on a flow of love and receive your money on a flow of love. Stay in the moment. Know that you are beloved child of the universe, and that you have the power to change your life and effect change in the world. Remember, "Thought directs energy, and energy follows thought." We can direct the money energy that flows through our lives and through the planet with our thoughts. Money is the blood of the planet. Heal the money and we can heal the world.

The great Indian master, Sri Aurobindo, says. "The money-force has to be restored to the Divine Power and used for a true and beautiful and harmonious equipment and ordering of a new divinized, vital and physical existence, in whatever way the Divine Mother herself decides in her creative vision. But first it must be conquered back for her…"

By changing money into love in your own consciousness you will not only become prosperous and joy-filled, you will also become a facilitator of this divine mission.

© Copyright Barbara Wilder 2002. All Rights Reserved.


Barbara Wilder
Barbara Wilder is the author of the MONEY IS LOVE: RECONNECTING TO THE SACRED ORIGINS OF MONEY. A nationally known workshop and seminar leader, she has appeared on talk shows hosted by Shirley MacLaine and Uri Geller. Wilder spent the first twenty years of her adult life in the motion picture business, first as an actor and later as a production controller on film locations throughout the US and Europe. During that time she embarked on a study of metaphysics. This combination of money and metaphysics led her to begin uncovering the inherent truths about money. Currently Barbara lives in Boulder, Colorado with her poet husband Patrick Pritchett, where she writes, teaches her workshops, and works as a personal coach. Her forthcoming book IN THE COMPANY OF POWERFUL WOMEN: Eleven Steps to Finding and Expressing Your Wisdom and Power in the Second Half of Life, is based on her workshops for women in the second-half of life. She also is an award winning screenwriter and teaches screenwriting at Naropa University from time to time.

You can visit her at her website: www.barbarawilder.com

 

Visit Barbara Wilder at:
www.barbarawilder.com


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