On the Evening of June 21, Two Years ago, the Upstairs Room at 
relationship to money—and to identity and purpose, and the way I'm living my life.
Guri: I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but for some reason, I always knew that love was more important to me than money. I started working when I was 17, so I went through this fear. To me, as a woman, money meant independence. It meant choice. It meant being able to have more freedom in life. In 1999, though, we started a non-profit organization, Service Space, where, for some reason, we decided one of our three core principles would be that we would not fundraise. That was just perfect.
As an organization, I can see how, 15 years later, we're in such a different place. We function so differently, and we attract very different people because of that one principle. There were so many times that people wanted us to actively fundraise, do grants and such. I remember I was always very clear that that would bring in a kind of messiness, that would take away from our motivation to serve.
Organizationally, fundraising always made sense, but personally, it was flipped for me. In 2005, Nipun and I went on a walking pilgrimage in India where we lived on less than a dollar a day between the two of us. It was an experiment in trust.
I went from this, "I earn my own money and I'm this self-made person" to trusting the universe for my every meal. The fact that we walked for three months and were taken care of the whole time really shattered my whole belief system. I realized it's even stupid to think I had done all of it up to that point. It really shatters that. As long as you continue to add value to the world, the world somehow meets to take care of you. For me, that was a huge lesson in simplicity. I also went through a phase where I almost had an aversion to money, which is a little bit negative because you can go to this other extreme.
I grew up with this idea of building a good career, making money, and creating security. But now, money comes in; it goes out. It has its own nature. You're not consumed with it. There are much bigger questions to ask in life, and questions around money are just a bookmark on the side. I think that it has found its right place.
Audrey: There are a lot of moments that come to mind on this topic. What I was reminded of is a moment a few years ago when I was in India. A bunch of us spent a day with a family in the slums. We all got together and we were paired up with a vegetable seller, a janitor, a rickshaw driver, a street sweeper and we were literally hosted by them in their homes. I was paired up with the vegetable seller. She didn't even want to take us to her home. She took us to her brother's home. We were there. She was showing us pictures and different things, and her daughters were preparing the meals. I tried to help but I messed it up more. So then we went in the living room and we're just talking.
She just looks me in the eye and says, "How much money do you make?" In that moment, my heart stopped. Here I was, in the slums, in this woman's home who's feeding me dinner, offering so much love, showing me pictures of all different things and just so open-heartedly giving everything she has. And I thought, "How do I even tell her?"
At that point, all these thoughts came out, "Well, I have to do the math to covert dollars to rupees." I was like, "Oh, I really don't know. Hold on, let me think about it."
I was trying to do the math, and I don't even think I gave her a straight answer. I just went around it and tried to make it get lost in translation. But that moment really stuck with me because I remembered wondering, "How did I become so complicated? When did all these walls start to go up?"
If I was a child, that would be such an easy thing to answer. It was like I want to live with that kind of transparency where I can tell her how much I'm making and not have all this complication around it.
When Birju asked, "What practice do you have around money now?" I think, lately or most recently, I've been trying to think about when I spend money, what am I spending it for? Am I spending it on that something that will last beyond me? Even it's just food, am I sharing it with somebody? Things like that.
Bhoutik: I'm really grateful for this dialogue because, primarily, because I just started my first paying job, and a lot of these questions have been coming up ruffling a lot of feathers without any answers. Thank you for sharing your stories and wisdom.
Pam: I grew up with a really messed up relationship to money. I grew up in La Jolla, California. My father was a public servant, so we didn't have very much money, but we were surrounded by people who had a lot of money. Both sides of my parents' families, and all of our extended family are from Nebraska and were working their way up to be able to live where they were living. So there was such a focus on money, and yet the people I was around who had money, their lives were really messed up with the money. I made a connection to money being what messes people's lives up. I've been playing with that through my life and my practices.
In my practices there are problems to be solved and questions to be lived. When it gets to money, that's one of the problems to be solved. So my practice is about getting to a detachment around money, and that causes me go into the deeper questions. That gets me to it simply being something we use to move through this life that's based on relationships, based on what really matters, and on what are the deeper questions? For me, the practice is being able to detach from the thing of money. and getting to the place of what's real wealth.
Aaron: I was reflecting on my story which I think is so ingrained and guides a lot of my practices. I was actually born in Michael Douglas’s, the actor’s, basement, believe it or not. My father was gardening for him. My mother was cooking for him. They always vowed to have a home birth, and this just happened to be where they were living at the time.
They had actually answered an ad in the newspaper, and it was the Douglas family. When I was a month old, we moved north of Montecito, which is "the wealthiest county in the country,” to Goleta. That area is working class with all the craziness of working class people, near a very strange place of incredible wealth where Oprah lives and all the way to areas with the campasinos I grew up with.
My father is a farm worker. I was raised on this farm which was very much a symbol for me in relationship with the working class view that my parents held. I grew up looking at the world through this very dynamic lens, where every conversation at dinner was always about a justice movement, and who was shot down in the street, and who was homeless, and who needs to come and eat at our table. It was this constant, almost obsession, with how to serve, how to speak to the suffering of the world, which is really an expression of my mother's heart coming from this deep place of love.
The one other thing I wanted to share, coming back to money, is when I was about eight, my mother said, "We're taking a trip to Nicaragua." She's a public healthcare nurse and cook, and she was doing her work. First of all, I said, "Where is Nicaragua? Is that by Los Angeles?"
We ended up in this really strange land, and over the course of the three months we were there, we shared and we slept on a military cot. Every sunrise, we traveled through the banana plantations across this war zone, and visited this orphanage. I was always so amazed by how much spirit and love was shared, and how much community and giving there was on behalf of the people that "have nothing.” That really translated to me across culture and language. I think that's really how I live my life best. My North Star, is really to live from a place of service and love for fellow humanity, and this amazing planet that we live on.
Anuj: A monk once told me that the higher the level of consciousness and awareness we can bring about ourselves, the richer we get, the wealthier we get. The pursuit of happiness is more than money, and I'm happy to be to explore that here with you all.
Tapan: When I came in here and sat down, I sat down on my wallet. My wallet is really thick because I have a lot of money. So I was really uncomfortable. I was sitting like this. I took it out and put it next to me, and somehow it's more uncomfortable to have it here because I think I'll forget it, or someone will see it, and be like, "I really want his wallet."
I'm somehow more nervous to have it here. I think that really represents my dichotomous relationship with money. You know what they say, "More money, more problems."
I have a hard time with money. My basic practice with money is to spend as little as possible because I feel like if I spend a lot of money then I'll money, and if I need money then that means people can start telling me what to do because they know I need money, right? I have to work for somebody and do all these things. Right now I'm in this web of people telling me what to do, and that makes me really nervous.
My father wanted to be a doctor. I didn't. I have this narrative in my brain—"I'm not a doctor, so I better save all my money. What's going to happen? It's going to be horrible."
I really have that narrative in me. That's coming out of a place of fear, and not like the trust that Guri was talking about. I feel like it is a limitation, but I don't know how to engage in a way that doesn't give away my freedom and my agency and my ability to say “no” to things I don't want to do. That's the trouble I have with money.
CJ: Like most people here, I try to be a conscious consumer. I think about where things come from when I purchase. I barter with my friends. I try to live as simply as possible, but still be creative. I've noticed there's a lot you can't do without money. There were times when I couldn't even make friends. I'd moved to a new city, and I wouldn't have enough money to go out. So I wouldn't get to make friends. I wouldn't have enough money to sometimes take a bus. Or I couldn't afford a car, I couldn't drive to the event, so I would sit home alone. That was interesting time. The thing with money is that when we talk about systems, I cannot spend a dollar without thinking about the system it's part of in this global pyramid scheme we're in. I can't make any purchase at all without thinking of this thing that I'm part of, and that we're all part of—and now almost this whole world is part of. Systems are caused by patterns, patterns are caused by beliefs.
I'm so grateful, thank you for writing that in your book because your book actually was the missing piece I was looking for to figure out why I was so upset about money. I've been to these spiritual classes like, "All your needs can just manifest. You deserve $300 an hour."
Everyone can't make $300 an hour, and especially not in this pyramid scheme situation. For me, it’s living into the question and getting to be around people like you who are living into it. I'm starting a website, “Common Cents,” to live into these questions, too, and thankfully we're trying to have these dialogues.
Why do we believe that inequality is okay? Why do we believe that Team America deserves to have the world's resources? With these questions, I think that you have to be part of everything.
Lynn: Boy, what a complex and deep subject. My own personal practice I'd like to share is that I did to come to a place in my life where I realized I was probably going to have more money than I needed. So I sat with that and decided that I would regularly give money away. The immediate result was I wanted to control the money I had to give. The next learning was when I just gave from love and intuitively, that I was not supposed to be like the god of that money. I was responsible to get rid of it, and so that's my own personal practice.
Just something else I want to share tonight, I have a personal interest in furthering the implementation of the gift economy, and one of the thoughts I had tonight was when I give a gift it's a such an act of the creative force — and how can we have more of that in the gift economy? The last little thought is that the words worth and then worthy came to mind. And when we put the word “net” in front of worth, there should be no connection with “worthy.”
David: I guess I would start by saying I've been a lover of money since a very early age. Michael Douglas was actually quite an inspiration to me in the movie Wall Street. I became an investment banker. I didn't know what they did, but I knew they made money, and that was important to me.
At 33 I quit and became more of a philosopher, I guess. I did a lot of searching. I feel like one of the practices that feels really important to me is asking the question, "What is money anyway?" What is this thing that we're talking about? What does it mean? What does it represent how well do I understand its role in the world? What can I use it for? Because it's an amazing invention, really. It's incredible when you think about what we are able to create with money.
As I came to know myself a little bit better, I came to realize that fundamental to who I was, there’s a sense of—lack, I guess, is a good word. Something missing. I don't think there's anything that has more promise of filling that hole than money. I love ice cream, and I do binge eat ice cream to make myself feel better, but eventually I've had enough—eventually it makes me sick. But there's something about money that represents this unlimited possibility to fill all of the things that are missing in me.
Part of my practice is understanding myself more and understanding my relationship to money. I like to think of money as a vector; it's really just an energetic carrier for whatever we give to it. As Joseph Campbell says, "It's a storehouse of energy." I feel like everybody is talking about this to an extent—just to let the way we release money into the world be an emanation of the energy of our heart.
Germán: This subject is so incredibly deep, and it can be incredibly troubling, too. Thank you for the vulnerability of your stories. It's very touching, and invites me to look at what I have to share about money.
One story that came up, after many years of not remembering it, was when I was probably 12. I didn't want to go to school anymore. My father wanted me to be successful in life, so his way of inviting me to not be a failure in life was that he came one night with a sack with something in it. I didn't really know what it was. He just put it on the bench at the entrance of the house.
A couple of hours later, he asked, "Do you know what's in the sack?"
I said, "No."
"Well, there's a shoe shining box with a little stool. If you don't want to go to school, you're going need it for your work.
That made me feel very vulnerable and very scared. I felt that my options were very reduced at that time. With time, I realized that he was just sharing through his Catholic upbringing and his own sense of lack because he was a doctor.
He studied as much as he could, but he was never really as successful at making money the way he wanted. Like some of his friends were referred to by others as being really successful because they had a lot of money. We never really experienced that, but we never really lacked anything.
I'm amazed how incredibly emotional and powerful this conversation about money is, something I believed to be so superficial. It’s going right into the core of who we are, our families, our culture, where we come from, and I find that very valuable.
Sriram: I never had that conversation with my father because I became a doctor. I joined the university maybe six or seven years ago, and the first orientation was by the chair of medicine. He said, "Fame or fortune—pick what you're going to bring to the university."
My time at the university was splitting time between some of the poorest parts of our planet and San Francisco. My first six months as a faculty member, I was taking care of fairly wealthy patients and I took care of a very, very wealthy CEO who was dying of cancer. The other six months, I was in rural Burundi and Rwanda. At that time, Rwanda was the poorest country on the planet. Over the course of five or six months, I saw probably 12 or 14 kids die of malnutrition. You start to connect the dots and, essentially, they’re dying of poverty, for lack of money.
Working alongside colleagues when I was in Burundi there was about 50 physicians in the public sector. They were getting paid $150 a month, and they went on strike. There was so much need. And they wanted to increase their salary to $220 per month.
I was a new 29-year-old medical graduate and I was probably making a hundred times more than any of them. It just felt like the Matrix in terms of the way everything was flipped upside down. These health professionals were taking care of the people who were suffering the most on the planet, and they were getting compensated the least.
I was working as a colleague alongside of them and straddling these two worlds. In my last couple of days in East Africa, I remember taking care of a woman, who in her scarf, had all her possessions in the world. And she was dying. Right before I left, she passed. Then the very next week, I was taking care of a very wealthy CEO, and he was also dying, and there was a tremendous amount of anxiety.
On some level, how you lived was how you died. The amount of grace that you have in life, no matter how much money you have, could lead to very different ways of dying. At the same time, there's still this tension between how to make sense of doing what feels like much more important work in some parts of the world, and being alongside colleagues who are struggling, and doing very important work at the same time. I think I still have the tension of how to make sense of that, and how to balance that.
Mark: A friend had an idea back in the early '70s to take inter-city kids down the river. We were doing it, and only wealthy people would go. I had the privilege of joining him. We got donated old rafts, and we started taking people down the river.
It turns out somehow a stranger in a strange land had planted a seed. We had a peanut can behind the seat of our red truck, so anytime we got money, we put it in there. Any time we needed it, we took it out. Many years later, I told my wife about it, and she agreed that's why I sort of lived with money.
Guri, there's something you said… I sense that the more I was drawn to serve, even if it looked impossible, enough resources kept coming in to cover things. I lived relatively low on the financial front, and I feel like I’m one of the richest humans on the planet, with friends all around the world, and, on many levels, I feel extremely rich.
I'll just say, too, I’m in deep gratitude for this conversation. But it feels like in our collective humanity we've been seduced by this thing of money. It's become the biggest religion of the world. Now we're getting to learn what’s sacred, and we have to learn how to convert the flow of this resource to serve the future, not just the old, fearful, antiquated ways.
Shamik: Like this gentleman here, the investment banker, I also started off doing some very extreme banking jobs. I just felt too much of a conflict. I felt very uncomfortable. At the same time, I was thinking the whole time, about all these ultimate questions and trying to figure out what money was. I was overtaken by a very large vision for a very large novel. I just acted on mystical faith and went into a metaphorical cave for the next half a dozen years. I just really simplified my life, and lived an extreme experience. It certainly was a struggle, mostly because of the psychological isolation while I was doing that.
The topic of the book was actually like this discussion—the relationship between money and real wealth. It’s sort of an America story when America was founded. Even before the Puritans came, money was supposed to be a signal of real wealth, of how loving you are. It's a fascinating topic. I've been thinking of writing about these things. So that's what I'm trying to do, to function in the world, living, enjoying while continuing this transcending journey.
Michael: I grew up having a serious psychological dilemma around this issue. On one hand, I had an enormous desire to get money, I think it's known as greed.
Incidentally Twee, I hate to do this, but I used to be a classics professor, so I have to do this, if you don't mind. The Bible doesn't actually say that money is the root of all evil. It says, "the root of all evil is greed," radix malorum est cupiditas. I think that's useful for us to know.
On the one hand, I had this enormous greed, if you will, to get money and do wonderful things with it. On the other hand, I had absolutely no ability to earn it. Try telling your Jewish father that you just dropped out medical school, which I had to do.
I've been through various amazing adventures which would take too long to tell. I came to the realization that in order to get over this dilemma, I had to break through the belief that I was a material being. So that led me to a practice of meditation, which I'm not very good at. It's taken me decades and decades, but by golly, I did crack that belief a little bit. And that makes me a lot more comfortable in having the minimum amount of money that I have. Along with that practice—this is going to really knock your socks off, Mark, because you're not wearing any—those of you who know me will absolutely not be surprised to hear that I'm now going to reference Gandhi. In addition to doing this spiritual practice myself, I also studied a person who actually achieved simplicity, which I have been striving unsuccessfully to achieve.
Okay, so Gandhi and economics in 39 seconds, I think I can do this. There are two principles that he developed we can use that really open up the mystery of his economic system. One is we are now experiencing an economy of desire. I can make you want something, I can get you to buy it, and it doesn't matter to me whether you need it or not. I have to make you worse in order for me to succeed.
And that system is death. That simply cannot be sustained. We need to shift it to an economy where we all will satisfy our legitimate needs in cooperation with one another. That's the first of the 39-second principles of Gandhi. The other one is trusteeship—the idea that rather than owning money, I'll use it. If there's more than I need, I'll pass it on for somebody else. If there's less than I need, I take steps to get what I need. So that's what I wanted to share with you all in my gratitude for the high level of this conversation and your friendship.
Prasad: My practice has been recognizing that money is just a belief and I experimented with it all my life, from being a physicist, to a marketing manager with Apple, to a philosopher and a teacher. I decided somewhere along, I wanted a balance between my contribution to the world and making money. I found I could manifest anything I wanted to. I could get as much money as I wanted to, and I didn't see much of a problem regarding whether, let's say, money is good or bad by itself. I could give in any form I wanted, and I could get in any form I wanted. I didn't have any moral dilemma regarding that aspect of it. I feel sometimes we make it more of a problem than it is. The key is not to hold on to it. As long as I don't have an attachment to it, I feel we can make as much money or we could give it away. That has been my experience and I'm continuing to experiment with it.
Dmitra: For me, money is a study and a mystery. I seem to value my time more than I do money, but lately what I've noticed about my use of money is that I'm still fearful about it. Ther fear comes from my conditioning. I have learned to lived on very little, but the little I live off of is very good quality like my nutrition. Because I'm a social worker, and I see what happens to people when they don't have enough money at the end of their lives, I’ve practice putting away 30% of what I make for the end of my life, for my search—enough money to be in communities in search of truth, and to be able to travel. Yes, it's still a study for me.
Stephanie: I’m blessed with a lot of energy, and I get to spend a lot of time doing a lot of interesting things. The work I get paid to do is preschool in a Montessori school. I'm honored to be able to do that with these kids. It brings me a lot of joy to see money in a three to six-year-old classroom. If a student comes in with a nickel in his or her pocket, it's just another object in the room without the kind of value we place in it. I hear children say, "Oh, I have one of those, too, at home."
That brings me a lot of joy and reminds me of the story of Sri Ramakrishna when he's sitting by the banks of the river with money in one hand and rocks in the other. He's looking at both of them, and decides to throw both of them into the river. But then he changes his mind because he doesn't want to offend the goddess of money.
The way that I try to include not getting paid with money is maybe to offer French lessons for some of the children who I work with via trade. We can talk about this funny story with the parents, but eventually by the end of the year, one parent is offering me eggs from her chickens. It's wonderful, but she's giving me more eggs than I can have in a week, and even more than my dog would like to have. I was able to tell her, "I really like the eggs, but I think maybe half of that is all I could use."
We got closer because then she said, "I'm very happy, and if you'd like more—if you’re having guests—then just ask." It just felt like there was this relationship there that wasn't as deep before. We came to understand each other through this exchange of our needs in a very open conversation.
Leah: When Birju asked the question, my first response was my relationship with money is so messy and confusing that I want to hold the question of what is a practice? I don't really have a practice, but I will share a practice of a friend of mine. Recently I was hanging out with her, and she had this book of a hundred stickers. When I was saying goodbye, she took one of the stickers and put it on my shirt. Her mom came in the room and she said, "Oh my God, that's her favorite sticker.”
Eri: It's comforting to hear that money is confusing to everybody, and it's confusing for me. The practice I've been trying do about money is just see that money is like an energy that flows through me, so that I can accept it and let go. In principle,
Guri: I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but for some reason, I always knew that love was more important to me than money. I started working when I was 17, so I went through this fear. To me, as a woman, money meant independence. It meant choice. It meant being able to have more freedom in life. In 1999, though, we started a non-profit organization, Service Space, where, for some reason, we decided one of our three core principles would be that we would not fundraise. That was just perfect.
As an organization, I can see how, 15 years later, we're in such a different place. We function so differently, and we attract very different people because of that one principle. There were so many times that people wanted us to actively fundraise, do grants and such. I remember I was always very clear that that would bring in a kind of messiness, that would take away from our motivation to serve.
Organizationally, fundraising always made sense, but personally, it was flipped for me. In 2005, Nipun and I went on a walking pilgrimage in India where we lived on less than a dollar a day between the two of us. It was an experiment in trust.
I went from this, "I earn my own money and I'm this self-made person" to trusting the universe for my every meal. The fact that we walked for three months and were taken care of the whole time really shattered my whole belief system. I realized it's even stupid to think I had done all of it up to that point. It really shatters that. As long as you continue to add value to the world, the world somehow meets to take care of you. For me, that was a huge lesson in simplicity. I also went through a phase where I almost had an aversion to money, which is a little bit negative because you can go to this other extreme.
I grew up with this idea of building a good career, making money, and creating security. But now, money comes in; it goes out. It has its own nature. You're not consumed with it. There are much bigger questions to ask in life, and questions around money are just a bookmark on the side. I think that it has found its right place.
Audrey: There are a lot of moments that come to mind on this topic. What I was reminded of is a moment a few years ago when I was in India. A bunch of us spent a day with a family in the slums. We all got together and we were paired up with a vegetable seller, a janitor, a rickshaw driver, a street sweeper and we were literally hosted by them in their homes. I was paired up with the vegetable seller. She didn't even want to take us to her home. She took us to her brother's home. We were there. She was showing us pictures and different things, and her daughters were preparing the meals. I tried to help but I messed it up more. So then we went in the living room and we're just talking.
She just looks me in the eye and says, "How much money do you make?" In that moment, my heart stopped. Here I was, in the slums, in this woman's home who's feeding me dinner, offering so much love, showing me pictures of all different things and just so open-heartedly giving everything she has. And I thought, "How do I even tell her?"
At that point, all these thoughts came out, "Well, I have to do the math to covert dollars to rupees." I was like, "Oh, I really don't know. Hold on, let me think about it."
I was trying to do the math, and I don't even think I gave her a straight answer. I just went around it and tried to make it get lost in translation. But that moment really stuck with me because I remembered wondering, "How did I become so complicated? When did all these walls start to go up?"
If I was a child, that would be such an easy thing to answer. It was like I want to live with that kind of transparency where I can tell her how much I'm making and not have all this complication around it.
When Birju asked, "What practice do you have around money now?" I think, lately or most recently, I've been trying to think about when I spend money, what am I spending it for? Am I spending it on that something that will last beyond me? Even it's just food, am I sharing it with somebody? Things like that.
Bhoutik: I'm really grateful for this dialogue because, primarily, because I just started my first paying job, and a lot of these questions have been coming up ruffling a lot of feathers without any answers. Thank you for sharing your stories and wisdom.
Pam: I grew up with a really messed up relationship to money. I grew up in La Jolla, California. My father was a public servant, so we didn't have very much money, but we were surrounded by people who had a lot of money. Both sides of my parents' families, and all of our extended family are from Nebraska and were working their way up to be able to live where they were living. So there was such a focus on money, and yet the people I was around who had money, their lives were really messed up with the money. I made a connection to money being what messes people's lives up. I've been playing with that through my life and my practices.
In my practices there are problems to be solved and questions to be lived. When it gets to money, that's one of the problems to be solved. So my practice is about getting to a detachment around money, and that causes me go into the deeper questions. That gets me to it simply being something we use to move through this life that's based on relationships, based on what really matters, and on what are the deeper questions? For me, the practice is being able to detach from the thing of money. and getting to the place of what's real wealth.
Aaron: I was reflecting on my story which I think is so ingrained and guides a lot of my practices. I was actually born in Michael Douglas’s, the actor’s, basement, believe it or not. My father was gardening for him. My mother was cooking for him. They always vowed to have a home birth, and this just happened to be where they were living at the time.
They had actually answered an ad in the newspaper, and it was the Douglas family. When I was a month old, we moved north of Montecito, which is "the wealthiest county in the country,” to Goleta. That area is working class with all the craziness of working class people, near a very strange place of incredible wealth where Oprah lives and all the way to areas with the campasinos I grew up with.
My father is a farm worker. I was raised on this farm which was very much a symbol for me in relationship with the working class view that my parents held. I grew up looking at the world through this very dynamic lens, where every conversation at dinner was always about a justice movement, and who was shot down in the street, and who was homeless, and who needs to come and eat at our table. It was this constant, almost obsession, with how to serve, how to speak to the suffering of the world, which is really an expression of my mother's heart coming from this deep place of love.
The one other thing I wanted to share, coming back to money, is when I was about eight, my mother said, "We're taking a trip to Nicaragua." She's a public healthcare nurse and cook, and she was doing her work. First of all, I said, "Where is Nicaragua? Is that by Los Angeles?"
We ended up in this really strange land, and over the course of the three months we were there, we shared and we slept on a military cot. Every sunrise, we traveled through the banana plantations across this war zone, and visited this orphanage. I was always so amazed by how much spirit and love was shared, and how much community and giving there was on behalf of the people that "have nothing.” That really translated to me across culture and language. I think that's really how I live my life best. My North Star, is really to live from a place of service and love for fellow humanity, and this amazing planet that we live on.
Anuj: A monk once told me that the higher the level of consciousness and awareness we can bring about ourselves, the richer we get, the wealthier we get. The pursuit of happiness is more than money, and I'm happy to be to explore that here with you all.
Tapan: When I came in here and sat down, I sat down on my wallet. My wallet is really thick because I have a lot of money. So I was really uncomfortable. I was sitting like this. I took it out and put it next to me, and somehow it's more uncomfortable to have it here because I think I'll forget it, or someone will see it, and be like, "I really want his wallet."
I'm somehow more nervous to have it here. I think that really represents my dichotomous relationship with money. You know what they say, "More money, more problems."
I have a hard time with money. My basic practice with money is to spend as little as possible because I feel like if I spend a lot of money then I'll money, and if I need money then that means people can start telling me what to do because they know I need money, right? I have to work for somebody and do all these things. Right now I'm in this web of people telling me what to do, and that makes me really nervous.
My father wanted to be a doctor. I didn't. I have this narrative in my brain—"I'm not a doctor, so I better save all my money. What's going to happen? It's going to be horrible."
I really have that narrative in me. That's coming out of a place of fear, and not like the trust that Guri was talking about. I feel like it is a limitation, but I don't know how to engage in a way that doesn't give away my freedom and my agency and my ability to say “no” to things I don't want to do. That's the trouble I have with money.
CJ: Like most people here, I try to be a conscious consumer. I think about where things come from when I purchase. I barter with my friends. I try to live as simply as possible, but still be creative. I've noticed there's a lot you can't do without money. There were times when I couldn't even make friends. I'd moved to a new city, and I wouldn't have enough money to go out. So I wouldn't get to make friends. I wouldn't have enough money to sometimes take a bus. Or I couldn't afford a car, I couldn't drive to the event, so I would sit home alone. That was interesting time. The thing with money is that when we talk about systems, I cannot spend a dollar without thinking about the system it's part of in this global pyramid scheme we're in. I can't make any purchase at all without thinking of this thing that I'm part of, and that we're all part of—and now almost this whole world is part of. Systems are caused by patterns, patterns are caused by beliefs.
I'm so grateful, thank you for writing that in your book because your book actually was the missing piece I was looking for to figure out why I was so upset about money. I've been to these spiritual classes like, "All your needs can just manifest. You deserve $300 an hour."
Everyone can't make $300 an hour, and especially not in this pyramid scheme situation. For me, it’s living into the question and getting to be around people like you who are living into it. I'm starting a website, “Common Cents,” to live into these questions, too, and thankfully we're trying to have these dialogues.
Why do we believe that inequality is okay? Why do we believe that Team America deserves to have the world's resources? With these questions, I think that you have to be part of everything.
Lynn: Boy, what a complex and deep subject. My own personal practice I'd like to share is that I did to come to a place in my life where I realized I was probably going to have more money than I needed. So I sat with that and decided that I would regularly give money away. The immediate result was I wanted to control the money I had to give. The next learning was when I just gave from love and intuitively, that I was not supposed to be like the god of that money. I was responsible to get rid of it, and so that's my own personal practice.
Just something else I want to share tonight, I have a personal interest in furthering the implementation of the gift economy, and one of the thoughts I had tonight was when I give a gift it's a such an act of the creative force — and how can we have more of that in the gift economy? The last little thought is that the words worth and then worthy came to mind. And when we put the word “net” in front of worth, there should be no connection with “worthy.”
David: I guess I would start by saying I've been a lover of money since a very early age. Michael Douglas was actually quite an inspiration to me in the movie Wall Street. I became an investment banker. I didn't know what they did, but I knew they made money, and that was important to me.
At 33 I quit and became more of a philosopher, I guess. I did a lot of searching. I feel like one of the practices that feels really important to me is asking the question, "What is money anyway?" What is this thing that we're talking about? What does it mean? What does it represent how well do I understand its role in the world? What can I use it for? Because it's an amazing invention, really. It's incredible when you think about what we are able to create with money.
As I came to know myself a little bit better, I came to realize that fundamental to who I was, there’s a sense of—lack, I guess, is a good word. Something missing. I don't think there's anything that has more promise of filling that hole than money. I love ice cream, and I do binge eat ice cream to make myself feel better, but eventually I've had enough—eventually it makes me sick. But there's something about money that represents this unlimited possibility to fill all of the things that are missing in me.
Part of my practice is understanding myself more and understanding my relationship to money. I like to think of money as a vector; it's really just an energetic carrier for whatever we give to it. As Joseph Campbell says, "It's a storehouse of energy." I feel like everybody is talking about this to an extent—just to let the way we release money into the world be an emanation of the energy of our heart.
Germán: This subject is so incredibly deep, and it can be incredibly troubling, too. Thank you for the vulnerability of your stories. It's very touching, and invites me to look at what I have to share about money.
One story that came up, after many years of not remembering it, was when I was probably 12. I didn't want to go to school anymore. My father wanted me to be successful in life, so his way of inviting me to not be a failure in life was that he came one night with a sack with something in it. I didn't really know what it was. He just put it on the bench at the entrance of the house.
A couple of hours later, he asked, "Do you know what's in the sack?"
I said, "No."
"Well, there's a shoe shining box with a little stool. If you don't want to go to school, you're going need it for your work.
That made me feel very vulnerable and very scared. I felt that my options were very reduced at that time. With time, I realized that he was just sharing through his Catholic upbringing and his own sense of lack because he was a doctor.
He studied as much as he could, but he was never really as successful at making money the way he wanted. Like some of his friends were referred to by others as being really successful because they had a lot of money. We never really experienced that, but we never really lacked anything.
I'm amazed how incredibly emotional and powerful this conversation about money is, something I believed to be so superficial. It’s going right into the core of who we are, our families, our culture, where we come from, and I find that very valuable.
Sriram: I never had that conversation with my father because I became a doctor. I joined the university maybe six or seven years ago, and the first orientation was by the chair of medicine. He said, "Fame or fortune—pick what you're going to bring to the university."
My time at the university was splitting time between some of the poorest parts of our planet and San Francisco. My first six months as a faculty member, I was taking care of fairly wealthy patients and I took care of a very, very wealthy CEO who was dying of cancer. The other six months, I was in rural Burundi and Rwanda. At that time, Rwanda was the poorest country on the planet. Over the course of five or six months, I saw probably 12 or 14 kids die of malnutrition. You start to connect the dots and, essentially, they’re dying of poverty, for lack of money.
Working alongside colleagues when I was in Burundi there was about 50 physicians in the public sector. They were getting paid $150 a month, and they went on strike. There was so much need. And they wanted to increase their salary to $220 per month.
I was a new 29-year-old medical graduate and I was probably making a hundred times more than any of them. It just felt like the Matrix in terms of the way everything was flipped upside down. These health professionals were taking care of the people who were suffering the most on the planet, and they were getting compensated the least.
I was working as a colleague alongside of them and straddling these two worlds. In my last couple of days in East Africa, I remember taking care of a woman, who in her scarf, had all her possessions in the world. And she was dying. Right before I left, she passed. Then the very next week, I was taking care of a very wealthy CEO, and he was also dying, and there was a tremendous amount of anxiety.
On some level, how you lived was how you died. The amount of grace that you have in life, no matter how much money you have, could lead to very different ways of dying. At the same time, there's still this tension between how to make sense of doing what feels like much more important work in some parts of the world, and being alongside colleagues who are struggling, and doing very important work at the same time. I think I still have the tension of how to make sense of that, and how to balance that.
Mark: A friend had an idea back in the early '70s to take inter-city kids down the river. We were doing it, and only wealthy people would go. I had the privilege of joining him. We got donated old rafts, and we started taking people down the river.
It turns out somehow a stranger in a strange land had planted a seed. We had a peanut can behind the seat of our red truck, so anytime we got money, we put it in there. Any time we needed it, we took it out. Many years later, I told my wife about it, and she agreed that's why I sort of lived with money.
Guri, there's something you said… I sense that the more I was drawn to serve, even if it looked impossible, enough resources kept coming in to cover things. I lived relatively low on the financial front, and I feel like I’m one of the richest humans on the planet, with friends all around the world, and, on many levels, I feel extremely rich.
I'll just say, too, I’m in deep gratitude for this conversation. But it feels like in our collective humanity we've been seduced by this thing of money. It's become the biggest religion of the world. Now we're getting to learn what’s sacred, and we have to learn how to convert the flow of this resource to serve the future, not just the old, fearful, antiquated ways.
Shamik: Like this gentleman here, the investment banker, I also started off doing some very extreme banking jobs. I just felt too much of a conflict. I felt very uncomfortable. At the same time, I was thinking the whole time, about all these ultimate questions and trying to figure out what money was. I was overtaken by a very large vision for a very large novel. I just acted on mystical faith and went into a metaphorical cave for the next half a dozen years. I just really simplified my life, and lived an extreme experience. It certainly was a struggle, mostly because of the psychological isolation while I was doing that.
The topic of the book was actually like this discussion—the relationship between money and real wealth. It’s sort of an America story when America was founded. Even before the Puritans came, money was supposed to be a signal of real wealth, of how loving you are. It's a fascinating topic. I've been thinking of writing about these things. So that's what I'm trying to do, to function in the world, living, enjoying while continuing this transcending journey.
Michael: I grew up having a serious psychological dilemma around this issue. On one hand, I had an enormous desire to get money, I think it's known as greed.
Incidentally Twee, I hate to do this, but I used to be a classics professor, so I have to do this, if you don't mind. The Bible doesn't actually say that money is the root of all evil. It says, "the root of all evil is greed," radix malorum est cupiditas. I think that's useful for us to know.
On the one hand, I had this enormous greed, if you will, to get money and do wonderful things with it. On the other hand, I had absolutely no ability to earn it. Try telling your Jewish father that you just dropped out medical school, which I had to do.
I've been through various amazing adventures which would take too long to tell. I came to the realization that in order to get over this dilemma, I had to break through the belief that I was a material being. So that led me to a practice of meditation, which I'm not very good at. It's taken me decades and decades, but by golly, I did crack that belief a little bit. And that makes me a lot more comfortable in having the minimum amount of money that I have. Along with that practice—this is going to really knock your socks off, Mark, because you're not wearing any—those of you who know me will absolutely not be surprised to hear that I'm now going to reference Gandhi. In addition to doing this spiritual practice myself, I also studied a person who actually achieved simplicity, which I have been striving unsuccessfully to achieve.
Okay, so Gandhi and economics in 39 seconds, I think I can do this. There are two principles that he developed we can use that really open up the mystery of his economic system. One is we are now experiencing an economy of desire. I can make you want something, I can get you to buy it, and it doesn't matter to me whether you need it or not. I have to make you worse in order for me to succeed.
And that system is death. That simply cannot be sustained. We need to shift it to an economy where we all will satisfy our legitimate needs in cooperation with one another. That's the first of the 39-second principles of Gandhi. The other one is trusteeship—the idea that rather than owning money, I'll use it. If there's more than I need, I'll pass it on for somebody else. If there's less than I need, I take steps to get what I need. So that's what I wanted to share with you all in my gratitude for the high level of this conversation and your friendship.
Prasad: My practice has been recognizing that money is just a belief and I experimented with it all my life, from being a physicist, to a marketing manager with Apple, to a philosopher and a teacher. I decided somewhere along, I wanted a balance between my contribution to the world and making money. I found I could manifest anything I wanted to. I could get as much money as I wanted to, and I didn't see much of a problem regarding whether, let's say, money is good or bad by itself. I could give in any form I wanted, and I could get in any form I wanted. I didn't have any moral dilemma regarding that aspect of it. I feel sometimes we make it more of a problem than it is. The key is not to hold on to it. As long as I don't have an attachment to it, I feel we can make as much money or we could give it away. That has been my experience and I'm continuing to experiment with it.
Dmitra: For me, money is a study and a mystery. I seem to value my time more than I do money, but lately what I've noticed about my use of money is that I'm still fearful about it. Ther fear comes from my conditioning. I have learned to lived on very little, but the little I live off of is very good quality like my nutrition. Because I'm a social worker, and I see what happens to people when they don't have enough money at the end of their lives, I’ve practice putting away 30% of what I make for the end of my life, for my search—enough money to be in communities in search of truth, and to be able to travel. Yes, it's still a study for me.
Stephanie: I’m blessed with a lot of energy, and I get to spend a lot of time doing a lot of interesting things. The work I get paid to do is preschool in a Montessori school. I'm honored to be able to do that with these kids. It brings me a lot of joy to see money in a three to six-year-old classroom. If a student comes in with a nickel in his or her pocket, it's just another object in the room without the kind of value we place in it. I hear children say, "Oh, I have one of those, too, at home."
That brings me a lot of joy and reminds me of the story of Sri Ramakrishna when he's sitting by the banks of the river with money in one hand and rocks in the other. He's looking at both of them, and decides to throw both of them into the river. But then he changes his mind because he doesn't want to offend the goddess of money.
The way that I try to include not getting paid with money is maybe to offer French lessons for some of the children who I work with via trade. We can talk about this funny story with the parents, but eventually by the end of the year, one parent is offering me eggs from her chickens. It's wonderful, but she's giving me more eggs than I can have in a week, and even more than my dog would like to have. I was able to tell her, "I really like the eggs, but I think maybe half of that is all I could use."
We got closer because then she said, "I'm very happy, and if you'd like more—if you’re having guests—then just ask." It just felt like there was this relationship there that wasn't as deep before. We came to understand each other through this exchange of our needs in a very open conversation.
Leah: When Birju asked the question, my first response was my relationship with money is so messy and confusing that I want to hold the question of what is a practice? I don't really have a practice, but I will share a practice of a friend of mine. Recently I was hanging out with her, and she had this book of a hundred stickers. When I was saying goodbye, she took one of the stickers and put it on my shirt. Her mom came in the room and she said, "Oh my God, that's her favorite sticker.”
Eri: It's comforting to hear that money is confusing to everybody, and it's confusing for me. The practice I've been trying do about money is just see that money is like an energy that flows through me, so that I can accept it and let go. In principle,
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"You actually start having a sense of trust and things just work out." - Thoughtful quote
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Greed, lust and pride are perhaps the greatest sources of brokenness and violence in the world, these show us a better way. Thank you.
What an amazing compilation! Thank you to all the folks who put together this beautiful labor of love.