“The real source of the suffering in our relationship with money, is the lies the culture tells about money, that we support, that we’ve agreed to, and we’ve bought into.”
Lynne Twist, SheEO Activator + Author of The Soul of Money
In this episode
This special episode of the SheEO.World podcast was recorded live at the SheEO Summit, March 8-9 2021. Listen in as Lynne Twist, SheEO Activator and Author of The Soul of Money, discusses how we can transform our relationship with money + life.
She also talks about:
- 3 toxic myths and how we can shift our thinking away from them:
- The Lie of Scarcity: “There isn’t enough”
- More is Better
- “That’s just the way that it is”
We invite you to join us as an Activator at SheEO.World.
Take action and engage with Lynne Twist:
Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe to the SheEO.World Podcast.
Podcast Transcript:
The podcast is being transcribed by Otter.ai. (there may be errors, run-on sentences and misspellings).
Lynne Twist 0:00
The real source I think of the suffering in our relationship with money, is the lies the culture tells about money that we support, that we’ve agreed to and we’ve bought into.
Hannah Cree 0:15
This talk was recorded at the SheEO Summit March 2021, titled The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life, with Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, and SheEO Activator. Learn more about Lynne Twist at thesoulofmoney.org.
Lynne Twist 0:32
My name is Lynne Twist, I wrote a book called The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life. I also have an institute by the same name. And I’m also the co founder of Pachamama Alliance. I want to thank you for joining this session. This is really not about data and numbers and financial acumen. It’s really about you and your relationship with money. And I would say that, for most of us, and I can’t accuse you of this exactly. But I would imagine if you came to this session, it may be somewhat true for you. Money is an area of anxiety, an area of upset an area sometimes where we’re scrambling sometimes where we don’t think we’re worthy, sometimes an area—and not just you, but probably everybody on Earth, who thinks there’s something that they’re doing, that’s not quite right. Even people that I’ve worked with that are billionaires, women and men, feel that their relationship with money often is tainted by something they shouldn’t have done that they did do, or something that they should have done that they didn’t do, like invest in Google or Apple or long time ago, stuff like that. And we also have a lot of stress, and anxiety and upset often with our families, our family of origin, our parents, or aunts and uncles or our grandfather, or that, that childhood that was rough, or someone yelled at us about money.
So most people, I would say pretty much everybody I’ve ever met, has baggage in their relationship with money that feels wounded, their feels hurt their feels kind of screwed over they’re particularly women, particularly women, a lot of women are, are at the effect of men in their relationship with women, not just capital, not just financial wizardry that’s taking place by men primarily in Wall Street and other places, but by the energy around men, and women and money. So if you are upset, anxious, stressed, bothered, worried, and sometimes suffering in your relationship with money, you’re absolutely normal. You’re absolutely normal. If you’re not, you’re a little bit of a mutant. That’s what I say. And we should be taking your workshop. But I looked under the rocks, why are we so always upset about money, and even people with piles of money. In fact, sometimes with massive amounts of money, a lot of these billionaire families, the amount of money just sort of exacerbates or exaggerates the already existing dysfunctions, it doesn’t make it go away. Now, of course, we all would like more money than we have now. We all want to grow our businesses, we all want to be successful. I’m not arguing with that. But I am pointing out that it doesn’t necessarily resolve everything to just get more, because there’s kind of a wound. Most people have some sort of a core wound, or they think they do in their relationship with money. So let me just say, that I looked deeply at this because I’ve been fundraising all my life, not raising capital, the way many of you are for your business, but fundraising for the many, many, many causes that I’ve been involved in, in my whole life. And when you fundraise when you’re asking people to give money from their heart, about something their—they care about, that they’re engaged in, or that you would like them to be engaged in, you sometimes get in very intimate conversations, very heartfelt conversations where people share their, some of the harsh realities around their own life, particularly around money.
And I’ve discovered that, that the source of this suffering that we all personalize so much is in the money culture. It’s in the money culture, rather than in us and then we personalize it, that the money culture is designed to be so dysfunctional, so upsetting that it’s in the culture itself, the anxiety, the worry, the upset, is in the culture, and then we personalize it with our own story. And I say that to sort of relieve some of the pressure that we have in our relationship with money. Some of the personal, private “Oh, it’s my fault. I shoplifted in seventh grade, or I, I was so nasty during divorce, I turned into some sort of a monster.” Those kinds of things that we make ourselves so wrong for just make the whole thing worse. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t behave well in your divorce. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shoplift in seventh grade. But I’m saying that this cultural set this consumer culture is commercial culture really does make us a little pathological in our relationship with money, because we’ve made money, the be all end all. You know, Buddha said, this wonderful thing, the source of all suffering is a lie, the source of all suffering is a lie. And I’m going to say briefly, the real source, I think of the suffering our relationship with money, is the lies the culture tells us about money that we support that we’ve agreed to, that we bought into. And there’s a lot of them. The first is that we’ve made money more important than human life. I mean, the culture has not you, not me, but the culture has, and we go along with it, people will cut down an entire rain forest, this is something I work on, for money. And that’s cutting down the future. We will pollute a river for money. We will not talk to a mother or father or sister or brother over an inheritance over money. That says the relationship is not as important as the money. When we cut down a rain forest from money that says the money is more important than human life. Money is more important than the natural world, we’ve made money more important than God or spirit in the culture, not you and I but in the culture in which we live.
So we are lying in our relationship with money as a culture, we’re telling lies that we know are true, you and I both know money is not more important than human life. But we assign money its importance, we assign money, it’s power. If I showed you a foreign currency, I’ll say I like to use the country Zambia because very few people have been there. If I showed you the currency from that Zambia, which is orange and kind of beautiful and very large, it wouldn’t have any power over you, unless I told you, it was worth $100,000. And then something would happen in your body. When you look at that orange piece of paper. Before that it was an orange piece of paper with designs on it. After that, it gives you a charge when you looked at it. And I say that’s us, assigning money, all this power, not just financial power. Emotional power, psychological power, spiritual power. Where does this come from this craziness that we’ve made money so important? And when women do that it’s really, really a problem, because we know better, we know so much better. So the primary lie I think the culture tells about money is a lie. That’s so deep, so unconscious, we don’t even know we’re telling it. And that is the lie of scarcity, the lie of scarcity. We don’t think things are scarce. We as a culture, think from a lens of scarcity. We look out from the lens of scarcity. And what we see is there’s not enough time, there’s not enough money. There’s not enough hours in the day, there’s not enough good men, there’s That’s true. Men are wonderful, but men over 40 there’s not enough of this, there’s not enough that I didn’t get enough sleep I didn’t get I didn’t get on enough weekend, I don’t have enough Tuesdays, I don’t know have enough hours in the day, I don’t have enough hours in the night. We live in a mindset, there’s not enough. It’s not enough. I’m not enough, we don’t have enough, there’s not enough, it’s not enough, I’m not enough. And then we keep filling in the blank. We don’t have enough capital, we don’t have enough market share. We don’t have enough this. We don’t have enough that. Now I just want to say I worked on hunger and poverty for most of my life. And I know there are people in places that do not have enough. And I know you and I in many cases do not have enough. That’s the point of SheEO. To get more capital in there into the hands of women. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about an unconscious, unexamined mindset, a lens that we look through, that has us look out in the world and think there’s not enough of literally anything, and it starts to become a kind of deficit relationship with ourselves. So it’s not just there’s not enough time I didn’t get enough sleep. I didn’t answer enough emails, I don’t have enough education. I don’t have enough market share. It’s not only that, it’s the it’s not enough. I’m not enough. There’s not enough siren song that’s everywhere. So embedded in everything, that it becomes a way of seeing the world. And then it starts to get into who you are. And it starts to be I am not enough a deficit relationship with yourself.
So that’s the first toxic myth in the three lies of scarcity. It’s not enough, there’s not enough to go around. And we really believe that there’s not enough, we really believe there’s not enough to go around and someone somewhere is always going to be left out. That second half of the sentence, there’s not enough and someone somewhere is always going to be left out. That is an excuse or justification for accumulating way more than you need in this culture, stuff, things, everything, in a way that is making sure that you and yours have way more than you need. Because if there’s not enough to go around, you want to make sure you and yours are not left out. And that creates a separation in our society, the myth of scarcity creates a mindset of separation. I have to take care of me and mine, even maybe if it’s at the expense of someone, I’ll help them later when I have way more than I need. But if we believe that there’s not enough to go around, the lie of scarcity, and someone somewhere is always going to be left out, then it justifies almost legitimates accumulating way more than you need. And you could say that’s the source of our environmental crisis.
The second toxic myth in the great lie scarcity is more is better, more, more, more, more, more. Now, as business women, I know you want more for your company, I know you want more capital, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the unconscious, unexamined mindset that has you and I buying another pair of jeans, because we think it looks—makes us look thinner when we already have six in our drawer. Or another pair of black pants, or acquiring more and more and more and more stuff that we don’t really need. Out of a mindset that more is better, more of anything is better. indiscriminate, indiscriminate mindset. It’s like the story of more is the story we live, and more is better is so pervasive, that we now have a huge environmental crisis, a huge waste crisis. You know, storage is one of the fastest growing industries in the whole world. And that doesn’t make sense. Why don’t we—why do we have to store something when we have houses in which we can put our things, and we have so much that we have to have a second place to store our stuff. When we have homeless people all over the world. We’re not building houses for them, we’re building houses for our stuff that we can’t fit in the houses we already have.
And the third toxic myth is: that’s just the way that it is. That’s just the way that it is, is the third toxic myth. First, there’s not enough, second, more is better. Third, that’s just the way that it is. Keeps the whole structure of thinking in place. So if you get caught in this, you start making inaccurate decisions that are inconsistent with your own humanity. When you get caught in the mindset of more. I’m going to recommend the antidote, the antidote is actually what I call the radical, surprising truth. And the radical surprising truth, rather than being abundance, is enough. Enough. Sufficiency. It’s an extraordinary thing to say to entrepreneurs. So let me say a little bit more about what I mean. The distinction of enough is not an amount of anything. The distinction of enough is the experience that the universe is meeting you with exactly what you need, when you need it. The distinction of sufficiency is the distinction that you are sufficient, that the universe loves you that you are enough exactly the way you are. And you can expand and express that by sharing yourself with other people and other expressions in the world. There’s a principle, I call it the principle of sufficiency. That is this: if you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, which is what we’re brainwashed to want more of, if you try to—if you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need. It frees up oceans of energy that is all tied up in that chase, to turn and pay attention to what you already have. When you pay attention to what you already have, when you nourish what you already have, and when you share what you already have, it expands. So let me say that again. When you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need which is what we’re brainwashed you want more of. It frees up oceans of energy. It’s all tied up in that chase. To turn, and pay attention to what you already have. When you nourish what you already have, when you love what you already have, when you make a difference with what you already have, and what you—when you share what you already have, it expands before your very eyes. It’s counterintuitive to the more is better mentality. And out of enough, overflows true abundance and prosperity. True abundance and prosperity does not in my view, come through the desperate doorway of more, that lends you to—leads you to lack, and then get more, and then leads you to lack again, over and over and over. But when you enter the portal, the context of enough, it overflows into natural abundance, natural prosperity, and all you want to do is give and serve and make a difference with your life, your company, your work. A shorter way to say all that that’s easier to remember is what you appreciate, appreciates. What you appreciate, appreciates. And this is really important for women. Because if we can really appreciate ourselves and each other, everything will appreciate around us.
I’m going to say one more thing to close. And that is a prophecy about this time in history. And I call this century, the Sophia Century. The century when women will take our rightful role in co-equal partnership with men, and the world will come into balance. The Sophia Century. And the Sophia Century has been prophesied by the Cherokee, by the people of the Amazon who I work with, and there’s a beautiful Baháʼí prophecy that says this. That in the, in this century, the 21st century, the bird of humanity, which has two wings, a male wing and a female wing. The bird of humanity will realize that it’s been flying for hundreds of years, with primarily one wing, the male wing, while the female wing and the bird of humanity has been truncated, not yet fully expressed, not yet fully confident, not yet fully expressing itself. So the male wing in all of us, by the way, has become overdeveloped, over muscular and has had to become violent to keep the bird of humanity afloat. And the bird of humanity has thus been flying in circles for hundreds of years with only one fully expressed wing. But in the 21st century, the Sophia Century, the female wing in all of us, of the bird of humanity, in men and women will fully express itself. And that will allow the male wing to relax. And the bird of humanity will for the first time in hundreds of years soar.
So I invite you to allow your male wing to relax a little bit, and fully express that female wing and who you are, and allow the world to see that the female wing is as important as the male wing. And without it, none of us can soar. And so that’s my, the prophecy that I love so much. And that really inspired me to see this as the Sophia Century. May we make it true, particularly 2021 to 2030. This is the critical decade. This is the decade when we will make our mark and make this century, the Sophia Century. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your work. Thank you for your boldness, thank you for being entrepreneurs, thank you for being women or people who know that the feminine is critical to the future of life. And thank you for listening to me for the last 20 minutes. It’s been a pleasure, a joy to be with you and thank you so much. And let’s have both of those wings fly so we can soar and have humanity totally transform business. Women, men, children, all of us soar. Thank you everybody.
Hannah Cree 19:38
This talk was recorded at the SheEO Summit March 2021 titled The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life, with Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, and SheEO Activator. Learn more about Lynne Twist at thesoulofmoney.org.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
