Happy New Year, 2024

Wishing you wellness and happiness for this coming year!

I have been quiet. My last newsletter was in November, because I’ve been away on a 6-week journey in Brazil, deepening my practice in generosity.  

I want to share what generosity in action looks like for me as an example of a positive and healthy relationship with money. How does a human act when she/he/they has included and transcended the not-enoughness dis-ease? This deeper understanding took place in the great lungs of the earth – the Amazon. 

I assisted my meditation teacher, Catherine Pawasarat, on her journey to Vila Céu do Mapiá, an intentional and traditional community in the Purus National Forest, southwest Amazonas, Brazil. She spent a year there as a young woman, and was returning after 27 years to reconnect with them. 

Vila Céu do Mapiá was founded in 1983. It’s the result of the community work developed since 1974 in Rio Branco, in the state of Acre, by a group of rubber tappers, rural workers and indigenous descendants motivated and united by the spiritual tradition of Santo Daime (Ayahuasca).

The community was born with the objective of experiencing human and spiritual development in a new and fair system of community life, in harmony with and nourished by the forest. It’s an experimental, alternative solution for the current global environmental, social, economic and cultural crisis. 

Catherine Sensei and Qapel, my teachers, started their own conscious community similar to Mapiá, called Clear Sky Meditation Center, 20 years ago. It is also a thriving, conscious community that values people above profit. Living and working with people who value spiritual growth and awakening is easier…but, it’s not easy getting to a workable and evolving place with this kind of community. We needed seriously effective tools to help integrate our spiritual ideals with the real, human world, including people and their egos/personalities. Everyday life requires grit!

And one of those effective tools was looking at our money shadow, through the money archetypes. Generosity is a doorway to a kind, joyful, caring heart in many spiritual traditions, and for many of us in the West, the first step to becoming a loving and generous being is looking at our scarcity mentality around money. 

Because it’s the New Year, I wanted to write about my experience of travelling with my teacher, who has done an incredible amount of inner work and is a beautiful example of generosity in action. How does this human act now that she has included and transcended the not-enoughness dis-ease? 

You just don’t become generous. It takes work to know what to give when, how much, to what degree and to whom. It is very strategic and requires excellent skills in discrimination. For example, my teacher insisted we research how to stay well in the Amazon. She mentioned that many people get sick within a week of arriving there. It was an act of generosity to make sure we stayed well to serve the community in Mapiá and not become a burden on their resources.  We had taken all our shots and brought the necessary medication and supplements to stay well. The platypus and steripen water filters were life savers. None of us got sick. We were well enough to take care of and share our medical resources with other visitors who had fallen ill. The community was very grateful for our generosity in this way. 

Travelling as a visitor to places, we can have an attitude of “what can I get” instead of “what can I give.” Growing up in a consumer culture trains us to get the best deal for our money. This can create a feeling of emotional and psychological hunger in our beings. There is something out there that is going to satiate the inner starvation. And I say this with love and compassion. We’ve all been subjected to it throughout our lives in this modern age. 

My teacher’s intention was to reconnect and give back to this community that embraced her as a young woman in her 20s. All that time ago. I watched her uplift and upgrade everyone’s mindset as we walked through the different spaces in the village. 

Sensei had gone ahead of us to Vila Céu do Mapiá. We got a text from her asking us to buy ingredients for organic cleaners—vinegar, lemon oil, baking soda, etc. We make organic cleaners at Clear Sky, which we’ve used for the last 20 years and work fine. Our little motor boat carried the ingredients for 9 hours to the Vila. Sensei asked us to teach others how to make them. I was surprised by people’s responses. It felt like I was giving them precious gemstones. Word spread fast. It was the right thing, at the right time, to the right people. I followed up with a cleaning product manual for them to use. They have a Centro Medicina de Floresta there, where they preserve the traditional medicinal practices of the forest people – to avoid, treat and cure disease. I’m curious if they’ll use some of the tinctures they create in their cleaning products from now on.

There are many other examples, but my favorite is the dance floor conversation. Part of their spiritual ritual is to dance and sing to the divine. One of the older residents, Maria, complained of back pain from dancing in the ceremony all night. The temple is gorgeous, but they have not finished the floor. The floor is concrete. It is not great for people’s backs, particularly for the older folk in the village.  When Sensei heard this, she contacted Maya, a choreographer and dancer in our community who lives in France, to research supportive dance floor materials. Maya came back with options. Sensei asked Duncan, one of our community members, to talk to Oswaldo, the executive director of the village, about our findings. Did you know you can make a Sprung Floor with Tires or a floor using pool noodles? Fascinating. Oswaldo was thrilled to have this conversation about building a floor that supports the community’s bodies in their spiritual rituals.

I picked two beautiful examples where my teacher moved through the space, noticing the gap and meeting the need. There were many more. In order to see the gap and meet the need, you need to have cleared the tightness, the holdings in your heart. Any holding of any kind, means we haven’t cleared the shadow in our survival strategies. In this holding we have a hard time being spontaneous in our giving, which true generosity requires…to respond automatically in a situation of need. A great way to loosen and clear the holding, is through working on your relationship with money. 

Please reach out to me at [email protected], if you ever want to say hello. And you are more than welcome to join my 

FREE WEBINAR: Integrating the Money Shadow in your Spiritual Life, Jan 27th from 11.30 am – 12.30 am EST 2024

Money & Spirituality: Integrating Spiritual and Material (In-Person & Online), Feb 10 – March 2, 2024 from Noon – 2 pm EST

May this blog benefit all beings.



How creating a mindful container can save you time, energy and money

I am in bed. The worry and anxiety starts. There is a lull in the business. Yes, it’s August. It is usually a low time for the business. People are on holiday. But maybe this will continue? Better go back to the drawing board again and do some revenue scenario planning.

And I am hot and stuffy. I cannot open my window because the air is quite thick with wildfire smoke from the fires up north—terror about what’s happening to the earth. Not to mention wars and increasing inequities. A fear of annihilation comes up.

My wiser part says “Remember your practice. Focus on the breath. Breathing in. Breathing out. Gently and easefully.”  

I wake up the following morning with agitation and restlessness in my body. The mind starts again. Am I really doing the right thing? Am I really being of service? Is what I am doing meaningful? Things are changing so fast. Am I changing with the times fast enough? Am I becoming irrelevant?

My wiser part returns, “Remember your practice. Focus on the breath. Breathing in. Breathing out. Stay in the present moment. Gently does it. Just do what is in front of you. One step at a time.” Listening to the wise part of me keeps me calm and centred.

I am constantly asking myself “How do I keep this wise part soothing and managing the more unstable parts of me? I hear similar speaking parts of worry and anxiety in others too. Just change some of the content. It seems like the new normal for many people is a frazzled, distracted, self-doubting and fearful state of mind. 

So much unknown. Nobody has the answers these days. It’s a V.U.C.A. world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And as life explorers, we know that nothing is ever status quo. Impermanence is part of the human experience. But does it have to be this unknown and this fast?

Almost a quarter of the workforce will need to transition to jobs requiring additional skills, especially as automation accelerates. The World Economic Forum has identified emotional and social intelligence as a top 10 skill needed in this Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Research suggests that the demand for emotional and social intelligence will actually increase up to six times by the year 2024 and that 60 percent of hiring managers won’t even hire someone without a demonstration of these skills. 

It makes sense to cultivate our emotional and social intelligence. And I want to bring in a missing element. Something you can be radically responsible for. Something that is not talked about. Something that can save you time, energy and money. 

It is about creating a mindful container in our lives. An environment to hold our growing emotional and social intelligence. A supportive womb to gain new insights and growth as we navigate and transform through these times of upheaval.

According to Clear Sky Meditation Center, a mindful container has 5 principles to it. It includes nurturing a regular, consistent mediation practice and learning to apply awareness to all aspects of our life and work. 

Imagine being a better resource for ourselves during these uncertain and challenging times by cultivating our own mindful container. Building a positive womb for ourselves takes time. It is a gradual, step-by-step process. 

I will be co-teaching a weekend course on this in partnership with Clear Sky Meditation Center.  I invite you to step back, reconnect with yourself and your meditation practice, and take time to reflect on how you spend your time and energy. I invite you to learn how to create your own mindful container. To learn to centre yourself in the face of inner and outer distraction and of feeling pulled in several directions. To get really amazing at managing your time for the health and benefit of your growth and unfoldment. I encourage you to invest in the long-term sustainability of you.

Join me for a weekend retreat, both in-person and online on September 15th, 2 pm PST / 3 pm MT / 5 pm EST / 9 pm UK – September 17th, 2 pm PST / 3 pm MT / 5 pm EST / 9 pm UK. The course is called Integrating Mindfulness. I invite you to consider coming in person to be on the land in nature as a resource. 

I am here for you. I care deeply for your well-being. I want you to take time out to be held. To learn how to manage your time and energy, develop supportive habits and build a regular meditation practice.  

You can read more about the course in detail here.

Please reach out to me at [email protected], if you have any questions or want to chat. May this blog benefit all beings. 

[:en]Feeling wrong around money?[:]

[:en]Many of us want to manage money skillfully, sensibly and thoughtfully.

We want to get good at negotiating a salary or setting a price reflecting our abilities. We want to spend money consciously, set a budget, and keep up with the budget. We want to look after our 85-year-old self. We want to use it to deepen our relationships with others. 

And yet, many of us let other people control the conversation about money. We end up making too many concessions that are not in our favor, focus on the wrong thing and take it too seriously.

Others give away services for free. Many women feel like they don’t have enough experience in their field, even though we do. They tell themselves they are not good with numbers. They end up putting in lots of work before the prospect has committed. Some underestimate the time the service will take and quote a too-low fee. Others feel like they are one of many doing what they do—and belittle their services even before they put them on the market.

Others feel they need to be more consciously spending. They set up a budget and then don’t follow their budget. Others spend, scramble, and get tight with money. Then spend it when they need it and deal with the consequences later. 

When you look at your life through the lens of money, you gain access to your whole way of being. Rather than feeling you are doing something wrong with money, see it as a mirror. It is a doorway into greater integration. 

Here are some ways to work with feeling wrong around money:

  1. Look into your interior state to judge your actions around money. Ask yourself, “Do my actions unfold and refresh me?” “Do my actions produce states of turmoil?” You are not making a moral judgment. It is about the resultant state. Is there a washing of your whole self with a greater feeling of life? Or does it produce conflict and blockage?
  2. Cultivate patience. Patience is seeing the pragmatic reality of the situation. Know your family and societal conditioning have formed patterns that will perpetuate. It is seeing the conditioning with serene detachment.
  3. Make persistent small efforts to drop the unwholesome. It is not the big efforts that help. The little efforts, the moment-to-moment cutting through verbalisation and fantasy, will succeed.
  4. Cultivate the strength not to feed these patterns of feeling wrong around money with a constant and calm effort. I encourage you not to fuel the negative.
  5. Moment by moment, drop the ego identification with feeling wrong around money. See how it manifests in behaviours, thoughts and feelings, leave it behind, and walk on.

The natural energy state will be present when we remove the blockage and unhelpful views around money. You, then, have much more potential than is allowed to work. Your part is to break through the chains that bind you simply.

If this article interests you, please contact me at [email protected] for a chat.



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[:en]Money as Mirror[:]

[:en]I have a life partner. He earns a lot more than I do. He is in the technology field, and I am in the counselling industry. He makes three times the amount I do. He finds my work has more impact on others than his. I receive less money. We talk about the inequality in our incomes. We are conscious of that dynamic.

As a couple, we each have our own money and a combined household fund. We are interested in having a budget that reflects our values and priorities. We create a budget that is inclusive of the differences in our salaries. We base our budget on equity rather than equality. We also name other essential contributions to the partnership outside of money to keep the power balance in check.  

Structure and routine around money.

Every so often, I get insecure and uncomfortable about what I earn compared to my partner’s salary. In addition, the inflation rate in the United States has hovered between 8 and 9 percent in the past months, signifying a rising cost of goods across the country. 

My income doesn’t go as far as it used to. And I get these bouts of anxiety come up now and again. 

When these feelings of insecurity arise, I always dig to see what is happening. I know it gets projected onto the earning power imbalance of my relationship with my partner. It is my work to sort out my feelings and tension before bringing it to my partner. 

I help myself by looking at money as a reflection. What has led me to get to this place? What were the decisions, thought moments and subtle recurring behaviours led me to this anxious state of mind?

The primary recurring behavior is I allow myself to drop my routine of being on top of my numbers for both my business and personal. 

When I dig deeper into dropping the ball around this, I realize I have forgotten my body in my busy mental world. I must finish this last email, even though my body screams to move away from the computer. I wolf down my lunch to get to my next client. I don’t take that 10-minute break between client calls because I need to send off that email. I don’t need to, but it seems so urgent at the time. I go over the session by 10 minutes, even though my conscience tells me I have crossed a line. I cross my boundaries of health and integrity. I betray myself.

All these small decisions take me to a place of not feeling supported, insecurity and feeling like I am not earning enough. I end up making it about the salary difference with my partner. 

There is a moment of aha, and disappointment with myself for being here again. However, I am also able to get over it quickly, move on, and return to tending to my affairs with love and compassion. 

What do I do to move on so quickly?

Here are a few tips on how to move on so quickly from feeling unsupported to being back in balance:

  • Learn to conserve and manage your energies well in the moment-to-moment experience.
  • When your body needs a break, take that break. If you don’t have enough time, give yourself an extra 5 minutes. You might find yourself being more efficient with your energy afterwards. 
  • Focus on the breath. The breath is always there for you. Take a few moments to gently and easefully focus your mind on your in-breath and out-breath. 
  • Get up and sing and dance like crazy for 5 minutes!!!
  • Focus on a mantra or prayer during the day. I use this prayer of loving kindness as much as possible to nourish my mind. 

May I be free from enmity. May I be free from hurtfulness. May I be free from troubles of mind and body. May I protect my happiness. May all beings be free from enmity. May they be free from hurtfulness. May they be free from troubles of mind and body. May they protect their own happiness.”


I dare you to protect your happiness in the next week. When you start worrying about finances, allow it to be a mirror and a teacher to you—wishing you lots of love.

Have a beautiful day, my friends.



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[:en]The Money & Mindfulness Dance: It may not be about money at all![:]

[:en]Many people feel stuck around money.  Perhaps you feel wrong about money. You may feel like you are not energetically able to receive. Or you might put blocks up to prosperity and can’t name why.  Sometimes we make it all about the money. What I always tell my clients is, let’s take a more holistic look at your life. Let’s see what might you be projecting onto money that may not be about money at all. It might have roots in your wider life.  There may be a lot of unnecessary suffering around money that is really about something else.

“The behaviour wasn’t to do with his relationship with finances”

Let me give some examples that might resonate with you.

Manuel would constantly check his bank balance.  He knew exactly how much money he had at any given moment. He had read every money book out there. He was obsessed and compulsive about looking at his numbers. As we explored this, it turned out the behaviour wasn’t to do with his relationship with finances. What was really going on was Manuel was in a job working as an employee but wanted to set up his own business. The apparent obsession with money was an avoidance of stepping into his own power. When we dug deeper, Manuel revealed his father had started many businesses that boomed and then failed.  The avoidance of following his entrepreneurial talents was actually a fear of becoming like his own father. It had nothing to do with money.

“The underlying issue turned out to be communication”

Here is another example. Sasha had decided to leave a safe comfortable job to pursue her dream of having her own business. She was successful in getting grants, knew how much money was coming in and out & paid her bills on time. She was on it. However, she kept compulsively checking her bank accounts multiple times a day. She felt compelled to over-strive to show how on top of her finances she was. She was constantly over-anxious about money. She was driving herself to burnout. When we explored more deeply, her father had frequently given her money. He saw her as not capable of succeeding in life and needing his support. Her partner had seen this and took the same view. He didn’t really believe in her and did not see her warrior side. The underlying issue turned out to be communication. Helping Sasha and her partner to truly see each other removed this perception of Sasha being incapable. Sasha’s growth and freedom had more to do with transcending limiting views and creating a strong support system around her. It didn’t have much to do with money. 

“Mindfulness, a supportive environment, and money work all dance together.”

How can you start to unpack this? What is a money issue in your life? What is a different underlying struggle getting put onto money?

In this blog, I want to share some ways that mindfulness can support your ability to self-regulate your emotions, states & behaviours around money. 

  1. Mindfulness practice creates resiliency and strength you need to face and understand feeling so wrong about money. It gives you the awareness and clarity to be with the hurts and begin to unpack and heal them.
  2. In my experience, before you can get to work on your money you may need to to take a bigger view. Which may mean working on the foundational building blocks of your life. Are the foundations such as your space, your structure & routine or your communication in order or not? The process I use for this is the idea of creating a mindful container. This is a supportive environment or womb that supports you to be present, connected and aware. Is your supportive container nurtured enough to deal with your anxiety around money?
  3. Mindfulness, a supportive environment, and money work all dance together. Bringing these together gives a powerful recipe for transforming your struggles around money. By looking with mindfulness, it becomes clearer what is a money issue, and what is something else.  You can put the money part in its rightful place. You can come to understand if it is really about communication, or about aligning with your vision or something else. It helps you be able to navigate the journey with ease and make decisions around money with awareness and clarity. It supports you to be prepared psychologically for the next stage of growth, to energetically receive abundance.

“Weave and integrate awareness into all of your daily activities, conversations, home and work”

Maybe you feel that you need to up your mindfulness – to develop a meditation practice or to start one. Or perhaps you feel you need to find some balance in your life. You might want to create a supportive environment around you so that you can work on the deeper issues.  Or you might want to bring more awareness to looking at your life holistically. Maybe you want to unpack what is money and what is something else being projected onto money.

If any of these resonate with you, I invite you to join me for my upcoming Integrating Mindfulness course. This is in partnership with Clear Sky Meditation Center, and partner and co-teacher Duncan Cryle. 

This six-week course helps you: 

  1. Strengthen and deepen your meditation and mindfulness practice. 
  2. Create a supportive container – or womb – to support your daily mindfulness practice and your year-round growth. 
  3. Weave and integrate awareness and mindfulness into all of your daily activities, conversations, home and work.

Or relax and enjoy this 2-minute video about the contents of the course below.

Integrating Mindfulness Course Overview

Course start date: March 18th – May 6th (meet 6 times with a 2-week break)

You can join after March 18th, as the first session will be recorded.
Course duration: 2 hours
Day: Saturdays from 9 am PST/10 am MT/Noon EST/1 pm Sao Paulo/4 pm UK time/5 pm CEST
Find out more about the content of the course here: https://www.clearskycenter.org/event/integrating-mindfulness-holisitc-living-2023/
If you’d like to meet with me to discuss if the course is a good fit, feel free to book something in my calendar.
Or email me at [email protected]

In loving kindness,
Karen[:]

[:en]Healing My Relationship With Money[:]

[:en]I had always had enough money — that wasn’t the issue.

Growing up in a middle class family, there was always enough. And as an adult, I worked as a recruiter at a hedge fund and had done very well with investments in cryptocurrency.

Yet, for some reason I felt a sense of tightness around money.

I was always wanting to make more, fearful of losing what I had, always thinking three steps ahead and carefully calculating financial decisions.

I thought I was being smart and strategic, yet in reality, it didn’t always feel good.

In short, there wasn’t enough flow, freedom, or generosity in my relationship to money.

I thought I had the whole money thing pretty well figured out, but my curiosity or intuition felt otherwise, and I found myself taking Money Coaching with Karen McAllister.

As we got into the work together, I came to realize how much tightness, fear and greed I had internalized around money.

As an American, a big goal of mine was to amass as much wealth as I could as quickly as possible so I could retire early. Yet through working with Karen I saw that this was an expression of an unhealthy view of and relationship with work — imagining that work is necessarily drudgery and inherently cannot be fulfilling.

She showed me how much of this tightness around money was inherited from my culture, from my family, from the environments I found myself in, and people I surrounded myself with.

In a real way, this tightness and compulsion to accumulate was an expression of a hyper-capitalist culture and I came to viscerally realize the suffering inherent within this view.

And it turned out that a huge part of the antidote was generosity — give it away, give it away, give it away. Giving away not just money, but interest, attention, kindness, and acts of service, all of this contributing to a virtuous cycle of benefiting others and benefiting myself by loosening up this inner tightness and helping me step into greater ease and flow, not just around money but in all aspects of life.

Yet the generosity didn’t stop there. I started exploring alternative career paths, looking for something fulfilling that would directly benefit others and allow me to express generosity through my work.

And as a result of this exploration, I made the decision to go back to school to study Traditional Chinese Medicine.

If not for money coaching, I wouldn’t have realized how I was holding myself back with my internalized tightness around money and wouldn’t have made the leap to start on a new career path more aligned with my personal vision.

Above all, I discovered the freedom in stepping out of my cultural narrative and giving to something beyond myself.

by Devon Streich[:]

[:en]Shake, Rattle and Roll: 4 Ways to Close the Flight or Freeze Loop[:]

[:en]When we go through upsetting, confusing or unusual experiences in our inner lives we experience mental distress. This can result in changes to our behaviour and can impact our relationships. It’s often those closest to us who first notice that we’re in mental distress. Who among us hasn’t either said or been told: “You don’t seem like yourself at the moment” at some point in our lives? Suffering is linked to mental distress and happens when we experience something unpleasant that we want to avoid. It could be associated with a perception of possible threat or injury to a person.  

Both mental distress and suffering are universal human experiences. In other words, part of being human is being subject to pain, and mental and psychological stress. It is a normal part of life. In Buddhism, they refer to universal suffering experiences as the Four Noble Truths, which is 2,500-year-old teaching. What I love about Buddhism is it gives a clear map of how to transcend suffering and have more peace, clarity and wisdom in your life.

Trauma seems to be the word to use these days; I hear it talked about a lot. But as Gabor Mate says “what you think is trauma is not; it is just life.”  Trauma is not the same as mental distress or suffering, and while people may be distressed after experiencing a potentially traumatic event, not everyone will actually become psychologically traumatized. 

Why? Some individuals may have resilience and willingness to seek help. These traits are called “protective factors”  in the field of Preventive Medicine and Health Psychology.

Protective factors are “conditions or attributes (skills, strengths, resources, supports or coping strategies) in individuals, families, communities or the larger society that help people deal more effectively with stressful events and mitigate or eliminate risk in families and communities.”

Imagine! The importance of having a supportive community and society for our well-being! This would save a lot of money we put into medication and hospitals.

However, some topics in our communities and society are taboo to discuss. One of these is money.  How can we have coping strategies around money, if we are taught not to talk about it? For many of us, it was a secret. It was rude to talk about it. Because of this, I hear a lot of feelings of shame confusion, guilt, loneliness, stress, and anxiety when people talk about money to me. My clients may display other attitudes like anger, denial, stinginess and entanglement.  I hear the phrase “feeling burdened” by money. It seems that we heap so many emotions onto this topic, and because we can’t talk about them we try to suppress them. This doesn’t seem helpful to me. Over the years, I’ve incorporated emotional releasing techniques to help my clients release some of these negative emotions from the body.   

Releasing negative emotions is vital to our survival, and I have an interesting story to tell you that illustrates this. 

Many years ago I was on an African Safari in the Kruger National Park, where I watched a lion pounce on an Impala. The Impala went limp and stopped breathing. For some strange reason, the lion left. After a few minutes, the Impala started to breathe again. What fascinated me was what it did next. It sat up, shook and trembled for a while before it got up and ran away. 

I asked my guide about this, and he explained “the Impala is shaking or trembling, which comes from the limbic brain – the part of the brain that holds emotions–  this sends a signal that the danger has passed and that the fight-or-flight system can turn off. They are literally finishing the nervous system response to release the traumatic experience from the body.” 

He continued “In the animal world, animals “shake off” the freeze response caused by a life threat. When animals suffer trauma, it has been documented that they will literally shake it off, which helps the animal discharge the energy of the traumatic event. 

“What happens if they are not able to shake it off?” I asked.  “Animals often die if they cannot shake off the trauma,” he told me.

I thought immediately about my client’s feelings of shame, confusion, guilt, loneliness, stress, devastation, stinginess, anger, denial, entanglement and anxiety around money. Are they shaking these emotions off? I researched this and learned that when humans cannot shake it off, they don’t die, but the freeze response evolves into mental or physical illness. We fail to send the signal to our nervous system that the danger has passed and we can release the pain and fear.

Perhaps, we need to make it ok to include some shaking and trembling coping strategies around money and life. These can be included, alongside talk therapy and other modalities, especially when you don’t fall under the trauma category.  

Here are four ways for you to shake and tremble when the fight-or-freeze response to life and money arises. I guarantee you will feel silly doing this! Give it a try anyway, you may be surprised by its effectiveness. Of course, you will need a quiet place for most of them. But you can do the first one when you are at work or with others, by excusing yourself and using the bathroom.

  1. Put your hands over your mouth. Scream into your hands silently or out loud. Move your belly to keep the energy flowing. 
  2. Put a pillow over your mouth. Scream into the pillow as you move your belly to keep energy flowing.
  3. Stand with hands extended over your head. Move your legs as if running in place and have your arms mirror leg movement above your head. Scream out, “Ahhhhhhh!” and keep the energy moving.
  4. Lay on your belly or your back. Have pillows under your extremities. Throw a temper tantrum as if you are two years old.

Reflect on how your body felt before and how it feels after doing these. Experiment with each; you might prefer one over the others. Let me know if you found it helpful!

If you are interested in doing some emotional and psychological work and releasing around money, please join me for the Heart of Money in October or Money and Spirituality, Starting in January 2023.

And of course, if you would like to chat with me, and get to know me, send me a quick note at [email protected][:]

What can we do to prepare future generations to handle wealth through inheritance?

Recently, a young woman, in her 30s, came to me looking for help to prepare for some changes that were going to happen in her life. She was about to receive a big inheritance and she wanted to be prepared psychologically for that to happen. 

She said “I know my patterns. I have been getting some pre-inheritance from my Dad over the years. When I have this money coming in from my dad, I have to figure out what to do. And I end up feeling stuck from realizing my potential and my skills. My education and my background don’t show up in my income.”

“I get stressed when I think of receiving a bigger inheritance. And I get really anxious thinking about a bunch of problems I will cause for myself when it comes to that money. And I am not sure why. I cannot put my finger on it.”

Because her family has more than enough money, she recognized that she developed an innocent kind of child’s entitlement growing up. Every time a pre-inheritance arrived in her bank account from her Dad, she named the emotional tension it brought up. She would feel like she needed to act or do something in case she was going to be cut off from the inheritance. This resulted in her being frivolous with the pre-inheritance. She was buying things she didn’t need and spending lavishly. And then she would feel wrong about how she spent the money, especially because of her privilege and the ever-real gap between the haves and have-nots.

She would feel like she was imprisoned by the inheritance. A sense of being too taken care of by her family financially meant that she would leave her body and zone out for weeks after the money arrived. And at the same time, a deep desire to want to be cut off from her family financially to free herself of the golden handcuffs. She would daydream of being disinherited, and independent. “I was happier when I didn’t have any money”, she reminisced.

I am writing this article today to address those of you born between 1944 and 1964.  If you are part of that generation you may be thinking about how to pass your accumulated wealth to the next generation. I invite you to think deeply about how you can also prepare yourself psychologically to give away your wealth in a way that doesn’t cause stress and anxiety to the younger generation. How can you help them to be open and receive well this money you built up? 

After all, it is your money. You have earned it. They have not. When you earn your own money, there is confidence in yourself that comes with that, and you cannot pass that confidence on. In my experience receiving an inheritance, money that they have not earned tends to shut down the person’s life energy. It’s an unintended consequence. The inheritor can become paralyzed and stuck in reaching their potential. However, if this inheritance is sensitively and thoughtfully transferred the outcome can be very different.

Forbes writes “Baby Boomers, are expected to transfer $30 trillion in wealth to younger generations over the next many years. This jaw-dropping amount has led many journalists and financial experts to refer to the gradual event as the “great wealth transfer. At no prior time in the history of America has such a vast amount of wealth moved through the hands of generations.” 

Are we preparing the way for inheriting generations and beneficiaries to handle this large up-levelling of wealth?

Well no, not really. According to a 2018 study by The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA) Institute, only 11% of Millennials showed a “relatively high” level of financial literacy, with another 28% of the group displaying a “very low” literacy rate in finances. Gen-Xers are suffering also, showing struggles with spending and saving habits.

Personally, I think it is not only about encouraging the younger generations to improve their financial literacy but also about learning how you and they are built around money emotionally and psychologically. 

I often see money as a mirror. From my own experience in this work, I have seen that our relationship with money in our families tends to display the hidden hurts and unresolved issues passed down over generations. Money is a nexus that is the doorway to greater integration and healing of our family dynamics.

How can you and your adult children navigate this journey of wealth transfer with ease and awareness? How can you help them to avoid creating obstacles or roadblocks? How can you proactively help to ease through this transition rather than be bumpy at each stage?

It’s an interesting time in our history, with no standard operating procedure to guide us. But it presents us with a wonderful opportunity to rewrite our own money narratives and create a more positive impact for our heirs. I invite you to do your own work around money and be an inspiring role model for future generations. And I wish you lots of love, support and happiness as you navigate this journey. 

If you ever would like to chat with me about this, reach out to me at [email protected]

Blocks to Prosperity

Blocks to your Prosperity all in your head?

Poverty, population issues, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality. The world faces many great and terrifying problems. Many of us can feel helpless and hopeless. I certainly do. And I am committed to doing my little bit in my part of the world. Every small individual transformation can have big impact, as my client work often shows me. 

Tamires is an entrepreneur from Sao Paulo, Brazil who came to me for help a while ago. I deeply admire and respect her work. She was really passionate about making her business an agent of world benefit. She was inspired and motivated to have the businesses not only give financial surplus but create social and environmental impact.

Yet, there was something blocking her way into prosperity and her business’s development and growth. She didn’t know why, but she was struggling with money and she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want it to be a big company just for the sake of growth. She was clear that the company would grow because the mission wanted it to grow.

Yet, she held the questions “What is my relationship with money,” and “how that could be blocking my leadership as an entrepreneur trying to develop my business and my own financial life per se?”

I studied with Lynne Twist for a few years in her program called “Master your Money, Transform your Life.” She talked about how we are unaware that we’re inside an unhealthy framework of thinking about money. This paradigm is before decisions, before thinking, before consideration, and before discernment. It is a way of seeing that we don’t even realize we have. This framework of thinking Lynne calls the “scarcity mentality,” which she says has a set of unconscious, unexamined assumptions. 

Tamires reflected on these questions: 

  • What is the set of unconscious, unexamined assumptions that I am holding around money? 
  • How could that be blocking my leadership as an entrepreneur trying to develop my business and my own financial life per se?

Tamires began to step back and realize she was inside of a framework of thinking which is unhealthy. We explored this together in our sessions. Over time she began to free herself from it. 

She changed the way she thought about money, from seeing wealth as a negative to a more balanced view. “It’s not a problem to want money. It’s not a problem to want to be rich

I’m experimenting with real life, the real world and understanding money by having it, not by not having it. So I think this is a lot of fun.”

“I now understand that money is really, really good if you have a good relationship with it. I used to think that money was bad now. Now I think money’s good. And I can say that without feeling guilty.”

After changing her framework of thinking about money, Tamires’s business changed too.“My business grew. I stopped trying to hold it back. I understood that the business wanted to grow. And it was not my wish. It was the business’s wish. So it grew a lot, by at least two or three times of revenue.”

There was a ripple effect that spread outwards from Tamires. “It also changed a lot in the culture of the company,” she says, “because since I’m one of the co-founders and I started to cultivate this orientation towards money, not only me and the business started to prosper, but also the team. So we had people who also grew along with the business, and now they have better wages. Now they can have a better life in many ways. So it was very beneficial to everyone involved.”

What is your framework of thinking about money? Do you have a scarcity mentality and could it be blocking your way into prosperity? Transforming your money mindset can transform your business’s development and growth. 

I offer a complimentary session to chat with you about your relationship with money. Do the money quiz and reach out for a chat.

 

Interview with Duncan Cryle and Karen McAllister on integrating mindfulness into our daily lives

Duncan Cryle is Senior Director at a global software company with over 25000 employees where he also leads a company-wide mindfulness program. He was previously one of the pioneers of IBM’s mindfulness community. He is founding member of Clear Sky Center in British Columbia, Canada, and is co-executive director there. He co-teaches Clear Sky’s Integrating Mindfulness and 3 month residential mindfulness-in-action program.

Karen McAllister is founder of the Mindful Money coaching and is passionate about building the bridge between spirituality and money. She believes that our current relationship with money reflects a spiritual crisis in the human race. She is a founding member of Clear Sky Meditation Center in British Columbia, Canada. She has been Director of Fund Development since 2008 & Board Chair from 2014 to present. She co-teaches Clear Sky’s Integrating Mindfulness and serves the community in helping them clean up their relationship with money.

In our conversation we discuss the following:

  • What is mindfulness and how people can apply it to their lives
  • What are common challenges to integrating mindfulness into our daily busy and chaotic life
  • Duncan and Karen’s personal and profession journey of integrating mindfulness into their daily lives
  • What is Clear Sky Center
  • Duncan’s role in in his software company and how he teaches mindfulness to other employees at his company
  • Karen’s work as a mindful money coach
  • What is a mindful approach to money and finances
  • Why it is important to bring awareness and healing into our relationship with money

For more information, you can find  Duncan Cryle and Karen McAllister on LinkedIn or Karen’s website at https://themindfulmoneycoach.com