One of the things I find fascinating about money is how taboo it is to talk about. It’s right up there with talking about death, perhaps even more so. Maybe it’s because they are so closely linked. Our survival depends on our ability to provide for ourselves and when we feel unable to do that, for whatever reason, it threatens our very existence.

I came across this 12:34 minute interview between Eckhart Tolle and Geneen Roth recently. Geneen and her husband lost their life savings in the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme and she wrote a book about her experience. I could viscerally tap into the panic she describes and have shared that same terror myself on occasion.

In 2006 I took what I called ‘a very temporary early retirement.’ I needed to do some deep healing work and was on a quest to find what I loved. My longing for a more cohesive life had been ignited a decade or so prior, when I read this passage in my chiropractor’s office. He had it hung in two places, one in the original masculine tense and another in the feminine, which I’m using here.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between her work and her play, her labor and her leisure, her mind and her body, her information and her recreation, her love and her religion. She hardly knows which is which. She simply pursues her vision of excellence at whatever she does, leaving others to decide whether she is working or playing. To her she’s always doing both.

I could afford to take a year off, or even two, but two and a half years passed and the needle had turned to red. As my debt grew so did my bouts of abject terror, but I could NOT find the motivation to go back to work.

Finally, after months of finessing my resume to mask the long gap, I called a former colleague. It was a timely reconnection. My inherent ‘knack’ for chaos management had stood me in good stead and within a month I was once again a gainfully employed consultant. Gratefully, I knuckled under and got to work.

I’ve taken several more ‘leaves without pay’ since then, but none that have threatened my safety  to the same degree. In 2014, after a couple of lucrative years, I decided to invest in my financial education. I enrolled in an intensive nine-month course that guaranteed to change my relationship with money, as long as I participated fully.

Lynn Twist, who wrote The Soul of Money, was one of the instructors. She speaks to Oprah eloquently about the ‘three toxic myths’ that we, particularly in the west, are culturally born into. They are:

1.     There is never enough.
2.     More is better.
3.     That’s just the way it is.

The last one is almost the most damaging, she says, in that we’ve bought into the belief that this is just the way it is about money.

I felt pretty good about my financial situation until we got to the Retirement phase of the course. In terms of investment dollars there is no doubt that I am my biggest asset, and there is both wisdom and a ‘missing ingredient’ there. My loose plan has always been to figure out what I love to do because I’ll be doing until the day I die. On that score I’m definitely getting closer, but the disconnect between what I do for money and what I do in life has not yet been fully bridged.

My dreams all revolve around community life, helping one another reach for our full potential—in our work, our health and our love. This community building is in service of what Lynn Twist calls “The Radical Surprising Truth about Life—that there is enough. We live in a world of absolute, exquisite, profound sufficiency.”

Lynn shared a story about her work with some of the Madoff survivors. Originally they called themselves Madoff victims, but when they changed their name to the Madoff survivors it completely changed the behaviour of the group. They started to be proud of how they were coping. They started a barter culture and found something that they never knew they’d lost.

This is what I want to foster. Collaboration. Mutual respect. Contribution. None of us has everything worked out, but we each have our own unique gifts.

How do you relate to money? Do the three toxic myths influence how you live your life? Let me know, I’d love to hear!