If anything can be termed an odyssey in modern life, it’s the wealth quest. Every single person on the planet is on it and it is highlighted as the very purpose of life itself by most.
Your wealth journey began the day you were born. You brought wealth into someone’s life – untold, immeasurable wealth. New life, what price can be put on that? The preciousness of human birth is a key reflection in Buddhism. It is said that human birth is as rare as a turtle swimming across all the oceans of the world coming up for air every thousand years, putting her neck through a single hoop which is also floating somewhere in the oceans! Imagine that!
Contemplating the preciousness of human birth is very useful, as it naturally leads you to think about what you should be doing with this precious gift. Shopping up a storm – for sure, making lots of money – definitely, but what then? What do you do with your life journey? And how do you align it with your wealth quest?
Before you begin a journey you must find out where you are. That is an obvious but profound truth. You absolutely cannot get anywhere unless you know where you are. No exceptions.
Knowing where you are means stopping for a moment to assess your condition with kindness and without judgment. Where are you? What is going on in your life? Where are you in terms of your life journey? Are you aware you are on a journey? Do you know where you’re going? Where are you along your wealth journey? Is your money-making in alignment with your ground plan? Is it woven together with your purpose and your spiritual path?
‘In the middle of my life I found myself in a dark wood’
from Dante’s Inferno
Wealth expansion and the spiritual path are often looked at as mutually exclusive. Yet money-making is a journey to the self. It is a journey of discovery. It is a journey towards a destination of new beingness. And without a destination, there can be no journey.
The journey to money-making is an exciting one; it is like a quest and an odyssey. You set off armed with only your vision and your enthusiasm. You meet challenges and overcome monsters and demons. You must cross treacherous terrain and grow, grow, grow, before you can arrive at and capture your prize, your goal.
Goal is important. Not goal as an object you acquire, but goal as the destination of a journey. A destination has a landscape, a feel, a sense, a feeling. A destination will change you. And that, after all, is what you are after, a new you.
Because making money is a journey of discovery of the self. Not only the superficial one- or two-dimensional self, it is also the discovery of the deeper self, the hidden, unexplored and unexpressed self – and the dark self. This is the self that contains all the magic. The self that will unlock all your treasures. The self that guards all wealth. The dark self is the twin self of your heart.
Facing and transforming the dark self is the greatest aim of money alchemy. This is the very real lead that you need to transform into gold. And we all have lead – lots of it. Jung said, ‘the greater the being, the greater the shadow’. Uncovering, facing and transforming our shadow is the main part of all the life journeys and it is especially the case with the money journey.
‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious’
Carl Jung
Money will provoke and activate every fear, every insecurity and every shadow you possess. When you commit to a wealth journey, when you take the decision to take money as a teacher and to open wide your coffers and reveal your treasure, be ready!
Money is a great teacher, the greatest really, which is why money is at the core of so much on the planet as a whole – and also in our lives. Not only that, but as your money-making journey helps you grow, so your shadow grows with you. So money-making has an in-built transformational component to it. It’s really quite fabulous (if you maintain a sense of humour…). The more your money grows, the more you grow. That is the best part of the journey!
To start the journey you must find out where you are. Reflect on where you are, right now in your life, in your path, in your journey, in your wealth creation programme, whatever that means to you. Meditation is useful for this. Observing the mind. Not identifying with it, just observing the thoughts that arise. In the same way you can observe yourself. Discover where you are. Take stock. Make some notes about it.
You are reflecting on money as a journey of transformation, of becoming, of expansion of the self as much as of wealth. You are looking at journey as having a point of departure, this being the here and now. You are considering that if you don’t know where you are, you cannot get to where you are going, or to anywhere for that matter.
You can consider some other questions too. What does wealth mean to you? Who would you need to become, to be wealthy? What would you need to let go of – and have – to be and feel truly wealthy?
‘A wealth you cannot imagine flows through you’
Rumi
The reason more people are not wealthier is because they do not know what that means. It is an abstract, like ‘I would love to have lots of money’. What does that mean? If you can’t imagine what it means, you won’t become it. People become wealthy when they become specific. People become wealthy when they know what that means to them, not only in terms of the objects and amounts involved – the physical, concrete reality – but also in terms of how they want this wealth to make them feel.
“We say I am not quite sure where I am, or where I am going, but I will sit here and try to work out if going by bus or by train is better. I will look at all the timetables, work out the routes, calculate the fares and figure out how hard I have to work before I can afford these fares. (This is called a retirement plan). I will bitch and moan every year that the fares are getting more expensive.
Eventually, I will say I can never afford to go on this journey. Not that I ever knew where I was or where I was going. For if I did know where I was and where I was going, I may have discovered that it’s near enough to walk – I never needed a bus or a train.” From Money Alchemy – Kiki Theo
Making money is not an event. It is an ongoing process of evolvement of self. This means you need to pack a lunch at least, if not a suitcase. And you need to find out both where you are and where you are going before you set out on your journey.
Do not think of making money as something that will happen one afternoon in between lunch and tea-time. And then you just carry on with life as you know it. It is not like that. Making money will change you – and displace you. So be ready to become a new you in a new place. Who is that you that you want to become? What does that you feel like? Where is that wealthy you living? Deep down inside you know – and that space is your destination.
The other reason more people do not make more money is fear of travel. They want to stay where they are. They want to remain who they are, doing things the way they always have been. They fear change and may even be resistant to it. Often they don’t know who or where they are or who or where they want to be.
The wealth odyssey is a grand and exciting adventure! It is called life. To have a great trip you must know you are on a journey. You must know where you are, as well as where you are going. Most importantly you must know what that feels like. The destination of your money journey is a new expanded you. So the question is not so much, ‘how much money do you want to make’, it’s ‘who do you want to be’. And more specifically, how do you want that to make you feel?
When you know where you are and where you are going – and how you want to feel when you get there, – your wealth journey has begun. Enjoy!
