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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.
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 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
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