Independence Day

Now—I’m not claiming that one serious look at our finances is all it takes to cure me of my fears and make me a money master. BUT, it’s a start. I told you I was going to read Maria Nemeth’s The Energy of Money, and I have been. So has Rick. It’s a super book, and each time I open it and read a few pages, I have an “Aha!” moment. The one I had the other day was in response to her assertion that when you have financial issues, you are probably not applying your life’s guiding principles to your finances. She challenges you to state your non-negotiable “rules for life”—and then see if you are upholding them in the area of money. And I realized that I was not! I really was not! What are my guiding principles? My absolute, bottom-line rules for living? They are:

Be open—hide nothing.

Be honest—even when it’s painful.

Live with integrity—promote wholeness and harmony.

When it came to my financial life, I was doing just the opposite—with myself. I was doing my best not to come face to face with the realities, trying to keep money matters a secret from myself (remember my crippling belief system that it is safer not to know about money), and avoiding every opportunity to bring matters into harmony and heal them. Whereas I insist on complete integrity in all other areas of my life, sure enough, I had failed to apply my guiding principles to that most important part of life. But today, I was willing to look—REALLY look—not just see the paper with the figures on it, but look at what they represented. And, amazingly, it felt empowering instead of disempowering! Just like every fear, it is much more powerful when it's stuffed in the closet. Bringing it into the light of day helped me know that, basically, it is just another part of life that requires focus. Oh, yeah—we did an invocation before we started our "meeting," and it set the right tone and felt empowering.

What Maria teaches is that learning how to deal with money is a matter of learning how to manage energy. I figure if I could be that far off base with my handling of the energy of money—basically NOT handling that energy—there must be a lot more energy that I am mishandling, or failing to handle, that I’m just not aware of. She promises that by improving your energy management skills in one area, they will improve in all areas spontaneously. So…I’m excited to see what unfolds as I begin to have more integrity with my financial life. I’ve already seen a few glimmers today!

Rick and I have set up a kind of a game with a great reward to help me pay closer attention to spending. I won’t outline the specifics of it, but I believe it’s going to be a fun way to help me make wiser choices so that we can make progress faster toward debt retirement. I can hardly believe I’m actually excited over the prospect over being more responsible and accountable about spending. By the way, Rick is being so helpful and wonderful about all this. I’m sure it’s a big relief to him, too, for me to be willing to get real about money!

So today was not just the 4^th of July—it really was a celebration of freedom—freedom from the tyranny of my fears about money and the beginning of a new relationship with energy! Hoorah! Happy Independence Day!