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C H A P T E R

t’s a bit odd, don’t you think, that our daily lives as adults aretightly interwoven with the reality of money, and yet the major-ity of us are never taught how to work with it—much less have a

conscious relationship

with it? No, it’s more than a bit odd. It’s crazy. Ascrazy as it would be to do away with driver’s training requirements.Imagine if our parents simply bought us a car at age 16, handed us thekeys, and said, “Hop in and just figure it out as you go.” Though it isoften unspoken, we unfortunately get this same message with respectto money. That, to me, is insane; and because collective insanity on awidespread scale undermines our true potential as humans, I felt apull from deep within my heart to do something about our relation-ship with money.Do you remember your formal initiation ceremony intoadulthood? How the candles and firelight flickered on everyone’sfaces, lighting them with a warm reddish glow during the part wherethe leader of the ceremony presented you with challenges that wouldteach and test you about the ways of money? Well, I definitely do nothave any memories of a rite of passage into relationship with money,and from what I am seeing in my work, almost no one else in ourculture does, either—because such an event is simply not a part ofour cultural fabric. For the most part, the whole realm of money isvery much a shadow, a taboo of sorts, and seems to be one of the lastunexplored frontiers in our lives. Fortunately, however, a noticeableshift is beginning to occur.

ari

essler

Three Gatewaysto Money Initiation

Bari Tessler has a Masters in Somatic Psychology from Naropa University. Sheis a teacher, therapist, and speaker, and founder of Conscious Bookkeeping.After many years in the Psychology Field, Bari jumped careers and movedinto financial and bookkeeping services. The Conscious Bookkeepingorganization is an integration of these two fields, providing a financialsupport team for individuals, couples, families, and businesses. The ConsciousBookkeeping team consists of financial therapists, financial coaches, andbookkeeping trainers who offer services and education to help peopletransform their relationship with money on a practical, psychological, andspiritual level. Visit Bari online at www.consciousbookkeeping.com.

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In the history of humanity, when something has held a place ofgreat importance in the daily life of people in a given culture, it hasoften been directly taught and addressed during initiations or ritesof passage that function to provide support during awkward butnatural periods of transition into new life roles. They facilitate thecompletion of one cycle and the beginning of another. In addition,initiation rituals offer the chance to learn how to live in society andcan help infuse mundane day-to-day activities with a sense of thesacred.While pursuing my master’s degree in Somatic Psychotherapy, Idid my thesis work on creating space for young women to go throughan initiation regarding their relationship with body image. Then, afterseveral years of work as a counselor and psychotherapist, I begangoing through my own rite of passage: an unscheduled, unexpectedinitiation into the reality of money. There was a large, ominous,$60,000 dark cloud of a school loan that I had ignored while in school.The payments were about to begin, and the loan ultimately becamethe catalyst for my awakening within the realm of money. Until then,I had been the kind of person who threw away every bank statementthat came in the mail. I never even opened them, and never reconciledmy bank account. Feeling the weight of the school loan on my back,I realized that I would never successfully continue onward unless Ilearned how to work with and relate to money.

The Meanings of Initiation

When you think about initiation, what comes to mind? For somepeople, it can be a grand turning point in life that involves goingthrough some kind of challenge or test—a gateway, if you will—leading to a profound transformation into a higher level of awareness,action, and consciousness. For some, this test is uncomfortable andfeels like a trial by fire. In a sense, this is true—they’re burningthrough old layers of beliefs, behaviors, stories, and experiences. Forothers, an initiation is a coming of age. I’ve heard people as youngas 18 and as old as 70 say that they would like to become adults interms of their relationship with money. For others still, initiation isdefined as a shedding of old ways and parts of ourselves that are nolonger serving us. Conscious Bookkeeping, the work I created withmy mentor, Tamara Slayton, incorporates qualities of each of theseto guide people through an intentional initiation regarding theirrelationship to money, finances, and economics.The path of Conscious Bookkeeping has been intentionally andcarefully designed to lead people into challenges at the edge of theircomfort zone—the kind of challenges that can lead to profoundtransformation. This transformation often results in five valuable giftswithin people’s experience of life: They walk away with more clarity,intimacy, knowledge, ease, and success.

The Three Gateways

On this path, the process of initiation into conscious relationshipwith money begins by passing through three gateways: financialtherapy, values-based bookkeeping, and life visioning. It doesn’tmatter which gateway a person enters through first, as each of themlead naturally into the others. The three gateways are interrelatedin such a way that each supports the others in a dynamic, symbioticprocess. For example, though it is a unique way to do one’s books, just using a values-based bookkeeping system alone could neverproduce the greatest potential results without being part of a dancethat includes a process of inquiry into our innermost beliefs, wounds,and hopes around the concept of money. And it would be a nearlylifeless and mechanical process without being wedded to the processof life visioning, in which goals, plans, and passionate life dreams areclarified and outlined. In this way, each of the gateways works withand supports the others. When clients and students of ConsciousBookkeeping are presented with our framework, it’s up to them tochoose the gateway they feel most drawn to walk through first.

Financial Therapy

Many people have done some form of inner healing work, be itpsychotherapy, coaching, or individual self-inquiry. Often, however,even people who have done significant self-exploration have neverdirectly faced their relationship with money. In a sense, they havenever shared their money story.Because money plays such a key role in day-to-day living,it is often closely entangled with our core psychological issues,challenges, and wounds. To free ourselves of constraints in relation tomoney, then, is to seek healing for these core wounds in our psyche.And to heal these core wounds, we must inquire into their naturewith gentle courage.At the gateway of financial therapy, our challenges, frustrations,fears, and joys around money are like a red tab on the wrapper of agift package within our mind. When we pull the tab, the packagingunravels to reveal what lies within: the real issues beneath our surfaceemotions around money. When we see what’s really driving our

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frustrations, fears, and struggles with money, however, it certainlydoesn’t look like a gift. In fact, it looks more like an old, black, tangledball of psychological yuck. For most of us, it isn’t until we have gonethrough the process of psychological and emotional healing that wecan see the reward. It can be challenging work, this process—butthen, most initiations involve inherent challenge. In the end, we comeout with skills that allow us to begin polishing up not only the yuckymess of our limitations around money, but other recurring tangles, aswell. This is because the way we relate with money is often the waywe relate with most everything in life. If you heal your relationshipwith money, you will very likely heal other parts of your life, also.Within the Conscious Bookkeeping method, this process ofbringing awareness and understanding to our inner relationshipwith money is the central focus of the gateway of financial therapy.It begins with inquiring into your past experiences with money,starting with what you learned from your parents and grandparents.For example, when you look back on your memories of when yourmom or dad paid bills, do you remember them as being calm, joyful,and happy, or stressed out, frustrated, or even angry? Oftentimes,the most powerful lessons about money are taught through behaviorand emotion, rather than words. These unspoken, often unconsciouslessons then guide us in how we earn, spend, save, borrow, and investmoney. And because they are unconsciously delivered, integrated,and put into action in our own lives, they are also unconsciouslypassed along to our intimate partners, children, friends, and co-workers. Financial therapy is one way to end this perpetual cycle ofunconsciousness around money.This unconsciousness can show up in another area of our innerrealm as well, as the secrets we hide around our money issues. Fromborrowing money that we never pay back, to inheriting large sumsof money, to never tracking our spending and never reconciling ourbank statements, there are plenty of stories about money hidden inthe basement of our mind. When the stories, beliefs, and feelingswe have about money are brought into the light of consciousness,however, we see that we can edit them. And that is the essence of thegoal in financial therapy: to transform our unconscious stories aboutmoney into conscious tales that illuminate our path to a greater senseof freedom and happiness.

Values-Based Bookkeeping

There is a myth out there that bookkeeping and accounting aredry and boring, but this is far from true! Bookkeeping is actually a funand very dynamic system. You just have to use it in a way that makesit more enjoyable.The first step in passing through the gateway of creatinga values-based bookkeeping system is learning the language ofaccounting. This important step can empower anyone and everyonewho ever believed that they were incapable, that it wasn’t creative,or even simply that they should already know this stuff but forone reason or another hadn’t yet learned it. And all it requiresis a willingness to come face to face with things you may haveheard of in passing, but avoided learning anything about: a chartof accounts, which includes reports on assets, liabilities, equity,income, and expenses; financial statements, like a profit and lossor balance sheet; and that stale cracker of bookkeeping—budgets.In order to teach people about how to use these reports andstatements, we change some of the names, and, more importantly,invite students to name categories within the reports themselves, sothey more clearly resonate with a deeper sense of personal meaning.The act of renaming engages us in a process of first becoming intimatewith our intentions and passions in life—our deeply held values—and then expressing those intentions, passions, and values right in thevery structure of our bookkeeping system.For example, when most people hear the word “budget,” thefeeling that arises in their body is one of constriction. I don’t knowmany people who love the word budget so much that they findthemselves running home to do one. The resistance most of us feelis directly related to the unconscious lessons we learned about whatbudgeting is: scrimping, clamping down, and generally holdingtightly onto our money while we let small, precise amounts of itsqueeze out into predefined categories such as rent, utilities, creditcard bills, entertainment, and so on. The word budget, and theconcept it traditionally represents, tends to induce an often-unnoticedattitude of fear and constriction.We can, however, take another perspective on budgeting. We canlook more deeply into this aspect of bookkeeping and ask, “What’sreally going on here?” What we find is that—though most peopledon’t use it consciously in this way—a budget is a tool designed tohelp us align our spending patterns with our intention. The secondthing we notice about budgeting is that it tries to help us map outa future plan for spending patterns that are supposed to be anexpression of our intentions. From this perspective, we can see thatbudgeting involves a map and some intentions. So why don’t we callit a “Map of Intention”? Much better, yes?