Embrace mistakes

Today I will remember that I am human. I make mistakes, show vulnerability and am inconsistent at times. Our lives are easier if we accept these imperfections rather than creating a facade of invincibility. Today I will be gentle with myself and not judge anything I say or do too harshly.



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Insecurity as strength

I fear losing my relationship, my sanity, my serenity, my health, my job, my life. Living means insecurity. There is no escape, no protection from it. Today I accept insecurity as strength; without it I become complacent.

Find Light in Dark Times

Chapter 6:

Money Tree Needs Light

(sample excerpts)



Assuaging of the Waters

The Assuaging of the Waters, painting by John Martin, 1840, photo by author


Find Light in Dark Times gives you philosophical and spiritual tools to help you recover from losses of all kinds, then emerge into the light. These are sample sections from Chapter 6 on money, which includes material on job loss, investment loss, home price loss and bankruptcy.



You are a money tree. You grow. You produce money as fruit. You need light to thrive.

You spend huge amounts of your life making money, thinking about money, spending money, saving money, worrying about money, sometimes losing money. How does money relate to spiritual growth?

Think of money the way you think of oxygen. You need enough oxygen to meet the demands of every breath you take. Let’s say you inhale ten times a minute, the equivalent of about five million breaths a year. In most areas there is plenty of oxygen in the air to supply your breathing and that of any number of other people. Oxygen comes free. But travel to high mountains, even above 10,000 feet elevation, and you quickly discover that scarcity of oxygen dramatically reduces your comfort. At extremely high elevation, such as on the upper slopes of Mount Everest, few people can survive for long without supplemental oxygen.

As with oxygen, scarcity of money dramatically decreases your comfort. Gasping for money is nearly as awful as gasping for breath. No matter how calm your mind becomes through meditation and spiritual practice, severe hunger or thirst will disturb that peace. Malaria, cancer or injury will disrupt spiritual balance. Lack of money to buy what you need to survive and thrive will derail the most enlightened spirituality. A true test of spiritual strength comes when money pressure squeezes every dollar and there’s not enough to meet your essential needs.

Money allows you to purchase the basic necessities for a life of any kind, spiritual or not. You would not require money if you could otherwise obtain what it can buy: food, clean water, warm clothes, shelter and medical care. But few people have situations where these items are provided by others. So you need to earn or be given sufficient funds to take care of your needs. You require sufficient income.

Some spiritual seekers renounce money as they spend years in retreat on ashrams, in churches or meditation communities. They disengage from the stream of money that flows through their lives. Such disengagement is illusory. The money still flows through them—just handled by someone else, perhaps the ashram guru, church leader or meditation master.

Just as your breath holds one key to spiritual growth through meditation, your money holds another key to spiritual growth through work and other enterprise. You can grow as fast through attention to money and loss of money as you can by attending to your breath.


. . . (Spiritual Currency section)

The words “currency” and “current” have related roots in language: both have to do with running and flow. Your spiritual work with money involves channeling a flow of money toward yourself and those close to you. In a way, you are a flow director. You create ripples of value in the market in which your skills circulate. The resulting flow of value keeps you in currency.

Most people orient themselves toward money by seeking to accumulate it, store it, guard it, the way we described collecting oxygen in the beginning of this chapter. But a far more powerful spiritual approach to money is to work toward redirecting its flow. Sometimes this takes only subtle shifts, using your skills or talents in a slightly different manner. Suddenly the flow of money pours toward you. No need to hoard it; there will be plenty for you and everyone around you to dip your bowls into as it passes through your life.

If you are a creative person, the flow of currency comes from your own font. You become a source of new wealth as if you were an oil gusher. You gush money just by expressing who you are. The more you express, the greater the gusher. There is no scarcity of such currency. Your well only goes deeper as you do. Your flow increases along with your awareness.

As soon as you shift to thinking of yourself as a currency director or source, your participation in financial or business markets around you has a fresh purpose. No longer do you try to get wealth; you express wealth. Your prosperity increases along with your growth. Plenitude becomes a given, an intrinsic part of you, not something you aspire to or hope to obtain from a job or career. Prosperity is not somewhere out in the world; it flows from within. You become prosperity as your consciousness expresses it.

As soon as you have attracted enough currency to satisfy your needs, extra amounts can flow around you for other worthwhile ends. Unless it is used for foul purposes, currency is never bad. It is positive spirit manifested as money. You can pour it into the parched lakes of other people’s lives to relieve their drought. Money is spiritual moisture, spiritual rain. Let it wash over and through you. Welcome money’s life-giving properties. Allow its wetness to seep in.

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