Money Is Not Your Only Resource.

When we left Atlanta, we sold most of what we owned, knowing that we not only were traveling for 40 days without a home base, but that we were, at the end, moving into an apartment that reduced our living space from 1600 to 600 square feet.

We cut, and then we cut some more and yet again some more. And we still kept and shipped too many things. (That’s me in front of everything we owned.)

Traveling did wonders for us in many ways. The least of that was how little we needed. We wore one of the same two outfits everyday. We had two pans; two bowls; two glasses and a camp stove. At night sometimes, my husband would lie in our tent and say, Home is right
here.

If we learned anything, and we learned a lot, it was: What we need and what we don’t.

We learned that what we need materially is much less than we’d thought. We also learned that there are some things we do need: a home to call our own, space for creative work (for me, painting; for him, animation), to not be nomadic so much as mobile.

These things are coming together for us beautifully, and in many ways, simply. The way they are coming together is not at all what we had planned. We look at each other sometimes and say, it’s better than we’d imagined, and yet, in a way, not at all what we’d imagined.

We live in a house—now multi family—that was built in 1880 and bought by my grandfather in the early 1950’s. We live in the heart of my family (which I was never inclined to do, by the way, I was always the child who lived away). We have resources available to us that did not originate with us. We did not have to buy ladders and paint pans, rollers and brushes, drills or saws. We restored and reused furniture rummaged out of basements (not because we had to, but because it was fun and it was there.)

We are getting what we most want—housing price stability, a custom space of our own, the resources and flexibility for a creative and mobile life, natural beauty, a walking town, access to the ocean—in an unlikely form.

It started me thinking about non-monetary exchange and right relationship with resources. All of a sudden I have all these resources at my disposal—and while I purchased some of them with money, many of them were not acquired that way. They were instead relational. They involved a different exchange, an exchange that was non-monetary and was within an ecosystem. Everyone in the ecosystem benefited from the exchange but the exchange was not one-to-one like a monetary (or even a barter) exchange.

At the same time, I entered into an exchange with a colleague to support her in writing her book and to support me in creating the form of my body of work. We did not and do not pay each other, although the depth and value of the work is that of high-level, paid work. Instead—and this was upon her initiative—we explored openly what a valuable exchange would be for each of us, and we agreed upon that. It’s flexible, it’s valuable, and it’s working.

Why? Because we are both invested in the energy and value of the exchange. We are both adept at and highly aware of both giving and receiving, in energy and in form. That is the essence of exchange, and it is essential to right relationship with resources.

I have heard and seen this circulating so often over my seven years of owning a business: if you want to increase revenue, do not trade, only make yourself available to monetary exchange.

I have come to experience this advice—as well as many other common adages—as limiting and counter productive (at best, manipulative at worst).

When you decide that you are not open to anything but a monetary exchange, you cut yourself off from all other abundant ways in which the Universe can and does supports you.

You fail to see them, you overlook them, you judge them, because they are not in the “right” form: money. You may judge yourself.

During a detox, my Swami would say, Food is not your only energy source. It’s the same here, Money is not your only resource.

Open yourself to the very real (likely) possibility that when you get what you want, it will not look like you thought it would. Open yourself to every way you can be full and fully supported in your life and your work. And see the resources appear all around, right there in front of you.

I invite you to explore your relationship with money, energy and exchange, as if flows from your very nature, beginning this Friday at 2 ET.

I’ll be hosting 3 weekly live exploration calls, Fridays at 2 ET:

October 21: Your Energetic Foundation: Security, Power & Flow

October 28: Your Innate Nature

November 4: Your Right Relationship with Resources

We’ll continue the conversation between calls in a private FB group.

This exploration is experiential. We’ll use movement and sound, art and words.

I invite you to explore. I invite you to experiment. I invite you to embrace your own unique relationship with money and exchange.

There’s no email opt-in. Just click here to join the private FB group.

There is no charge. There is, however, an exchange. (After all, that is what we’ll be exploring: the energy and forms of exchange.) I ask that you share with me what that exchange is for you: what are you contributing and what are you receiving.

This is a deepening of my work and a deepening of our relationship. I’m not selling you into a program. We’re literally exploring where this takes us.

Click here, and I’ll see you in the FB group.