Returning to the concept or philosophy that money is energy and that money is what you trade your life energy for, doesn’t it follow that if clutter gets in the way of your life energy, that clutter also gets in the way of your potential for cashflow, and ultimately, wealthbuilding in general?

It’s intuitive, after all. Stuff takes up space like cholesterol clogging your arteries and unfinished business and baggage wearing you down emotionally. Stuff is an obstacle on the road to success, the travel on which can go much faster if you have a bit of wealth to help you along and support all those great opportunities that you’re ready to jump on.

Opening the floodgates to your future, right here, right now, is often said to occur when one releases attachments to things that are holding one back. What are these attachments? Attachments to things, “stuff,” junk, clutter, that all keeps you in the past. We know this.

It’s one thing to get rid of your clutter, but you need to be able to prevent it from coming back in the first place. It’s one thing to pay off your credit card, but you need to know that you’re not going to use it (or a new one) again. It’s one thing to bring in some new money, but if you spend it, you’re not growing your cashflow.

So how do we control the flow? Surely it’s not just about stopping the flow completely (e.g., never spending any money, never using any more credit cards)?

I’m currently in the process of decluttering before a big move. I have a lot of books that I don’t have room for, but which I think I still need. Some are rare-ish. Some just hard to get. Some are definitely fluffy, but I haven’t finished reading them and I’d like to. Some were definite impulse buys. As I was sorting through some of these piles, I thought about how silly some of the purchases were. But then I remembered that I also bought each one consciously, for a specific reason. This indicates several things:

(1) one part of me bought the book, another part of me sees it as “stuff” or as “potential money” if I sell it;
(2) these purchases were symbols, like little role models, representing to me a change that I had to make, or a direction that I wanted to go in or take action on. I bought them because they most represented that change or direction and I thought they would aid in my getting there.
(3) these purchases were also meant to be reminders, in case I forgot where I needed to go, what I needed to do, change, or learn. In case of going too far in one direction, a book I bought three months ago can remind me of an important step that I wanted to take. Again, it’s all about remembering why I bought it. It’s why I think that:

If you start purchasing consciously, your purchases take on the characteristics of your own conscious processes.

Talk about increasing your money consciousness. Consciousness has often been described as a “flow” — you know, the stream of consciousness, the fact that thoughts are unbreakable “wholes” and other aspects of metaphysical continua. So what does this say about flow in general? Let’s break it down:

(1) Consciousness is a flow;
(2) Life processes are a flow (they’re cyclical, always running);
(3) Monthly income is a flow (cyclical, re-occurring);
(4) Consumption is a flow (depends directly on #3);
(5) Living (the expenditure of life processes) is a flow (depends directly on #2);

Before you start thinking this looks too hokey or complicated, I just mean to make the point that there’s a case for thinking about all of these cyclical processes as part of the same overall flow, or at least, they’re interlinked in some very important ways. Suppose the following familiar scenario:

Bounds of energy and passion translate into doing a great job at work.
Your great job gets you a raise and calls about other opportunities.
More opportunities brings in more income.
More income can go to work making more money (through reinvestment etc.).
More money, eventually, gives you more options for living, which can lead to more energy, freedom, and passion for starting this cycle all over again and building on itself.

Maybe this sounds too simple, but you can see my point.

We should want to create leverage in our own lives. Our financial lives are often thought to be a microcosm of all of the other life processes we’re engaged in: social, emotional, physical, mental.

Creating leverage depends upon building synergy. “Life leverage” would be what I would call the “opportunity for options and actions.” The opportunity to have five choices instead of one. The opportunity to take a certain action and follow it through to produce a tangible result.

So I’ve raised several questions so far:

(1) How do we create synergy in our lives (and maybe, what is it?)?
(2) So what if our purchases take on our conscious characteristics?
(3) How do we “increase the flow”? (”More money!”)
(3) How do we “control the flow” (accumulating, borrowing, spending)?

I’ll take a stab at it:

The higher the level of consciousness (as in “conscious awareness”) you can maintain consistently throughout all aspects of your life, the greater will be your synergy and life leverage.

This synergy is a potential. It’s a kind of life energy (or “life leverage”) that can provide the springboard for accomplished action. It can help you both increase the flow and control the flow.

Use your purchases like you use your receipts. They tell you where you were, what you bought, why you did it even. Tally it up and do the balances. Did that source of “income” (the new purchase) match up with a corresponding “outcome”?

Obviously I can’t answer all of these questions here, but I wanted to open them up for discussion and further thought. I’d love it if you help me work on these and try to figure out some of these relationships. If you’re new here, you might want to subscribe to my feed for more updates, and please also leave a comment below about what you think. How are you in control of your life energy? How are you increasing your life leverage or “moneyenergy” as I also like to call it?

There’s probably a good reason why we use the language we do when we say we’re feeling “stuck” or “broke.” I think there are real connections, and I’d like to understand them better. I don’t just want to swallow some Hallmark recipe for “the law of attraction.” C’mon, let’s figure out what it really is! We can do that by starting to pay closer attention to the things I’ve talked about here.

Dominguez and Robin (the authors of Your Money or Your Life - see my previous post) make a good point in regard to sharpening our focus around money, that is, in regard to increasing our money consciousness. They talk about having spiritual discipline.

“Religions, ancient and modern, and the personal growth workshops of the human potential movement all have techniques for training the mind to be here now, “in the moment.” For example, “counting breaths, keeping the attention on each incoming and outgoing breath; repeating a phrase over and over in order to focus the wandering mind…

“To this list we add another discipline designed to sharpen awareness - one that is… more easily accepted by our grounded, materialistic Western mentality than some of the more “esoteric” practices.

Instead of watching your breath, you watch your money… Keep track of every cent that comes into or goes out of your life.

I agree with these authors. This seems like an exercise that is equally difficult to do but could have just as much ability to “train” you. It’s much more rigorous than simply keeping a general budget. And if you already balance your books, do you really do it down to the last penny? If so, that’s great. It’s something I will have to work on. But I like thinking about it in this context. It makes much more sense and I can see the rewards more clearly than just doing a balancing act for balancing’s sake. This would make you spiritually accountable in some sense - which is also financially accountable, since money = your life energy.

Does anyone remember this great definition of money from the authors of the classic book Your Money or Your Life (Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, 1992)?

I bought this book about four years ago, read it, quickly forgot about it. I’ve picked it up again recently by a chance browsing through my local library. I think I like it even more this time. And I realize that this is the concept that I was trying to move towards in calling my blog MoneyEnergy.

Dominguez and Robin say that the “one consistently true statement we can make about money that will allow us to be clear, masterful and powerful in our relationship with it” is the idea that

“money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.”

“Our life energy is our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us. When we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money. This truth, while simple, is profound… Life energy is all we have. It is precious because it is limited and irretrievable and because our choices about how we use it express the meaning and purpose of our time here on earth” (54-55).

So I just made a list of all the jobs I can remember having done so far in my life. It’s an interesting exercise if you let it see where it takes you. I’ve had many different types of jobs, many of which I felt were frustrating and/or unimportant at the time. It presents an interesting picture of what I’ve traded my life energy for. I see now that in many of the cases, if I remember how I took a certain job, I was often doing it based on what was convenient or easy or what just happened to “fit” at the time. I’m much more conscious of what I will trade my waking hours for now.

Most of us buy money with our time. We put actual hours in at work. We trade our time - our life energy - for the pieces of paper and coins we call money. What will you use this money for? It should represent a fair trade on your waking life. Are you squandering away your waking life? Does your life energy dissipate - so that you don’t know where it all goes?

The authors have a complex 9-step plan for becoming more conscious of and controlling your life energy. But here are two simple steps: record every cent that comes into your life, and every cent that leaves your life. Do this at least for one month so that you can clearly see where your life energy is going. Does it represent what you really want to do with your life? Is this what your life should be traded for?

The other exercise is to calculate the actual amount of $ you earn from your job and turn it into a dollar per hour amount. Include the time it takes you to get ready for work, to “relax” after work, to shop for clothes to wear to work, etc. etc. This will be your “real” salary, what you’re really trading your life energy for. You might see now that it’s even more important to be sure that you’re giving up your life for what it’s really worth.

What do you think? Have you read this book? Do you have similar thoughts or solutions?