9 Principles for Financial Freedom

29 Jun 9 Principles for Financial Freedom

Now that Your Money or Your Life 2018 has been launched, now that there are nearly 60K books in stores and warehouses, now that this platform is humming and the Facebook community is growing and I’ve mingled with hundreds of FIers at conferences and retreats, it’s time to tell the truth.

Your Money or Your Life is not really about money. It’s about Life. It’s about liberating your mind and heart, not just your hours and days.

The promise of early retirement is so alluring! For many it’s like the Holy Grail. It’s like crossing a great mountain range and discovering Shangri-la in a hidden valley. Yet FI can’t just be about the money. It’s like saying that food is just the molecules or that a symphony is just the notes. There is no sweetness in spreadsheets. There is no lasting pleasure in merely quitting.

Financial independence isn’t just hitting your number. Along the way it is all about who you are, what makes you happy, what difference you want to make for having passed through this world.

We talk about keeping track of every penny that comes into and out of your life not as an obsessive practice, but as a spiritual practice. It’s a meditation. Going inward, you watch every breath as it comes into and goes out of your nose. In transforming your relationship with money you attend to every monetary exchange. This attention slows you down. It makes you aware that you are spending money when you are spending money. It’s a pause that helps you ask yourself: Do i really want it? Need it? Do I already have it? Will I really use it? The practice alone leads you to that feeling of just rightness about everything you own, everything you buy, everything you release.

When I’ve taught the Your Money or Your Life program, I’ve never taught just the steps. Others are very good at that, but I teach the inner dimension of the steps. I teach them as a surprising path for self knowledge.

Here are the 9 principles I elaborate in the programs I taught, and that I will teach again to those people who truly want to share the multi-dimensional transformational approach to the material world embodied in Your Money or Your Life.

9 Principles for Financial Freedom

Purpose – what is my life about?

Passion – what drives me, compels me, allures me, arouses me. Where’s the energy?

Pleasure – what is happiness? What makes me happy? Really

Pattern – what does how I invest myself tell me about myself?

Presence – awareness in the moment of what’s going on. Grace in the midst of infinite daily choices.

Proportion – – keeping all elements in right relationship one to another. Allowing your life to right size in the context of time. Mastering boundary.

Play – making and remaking “the rules”: how else can I do this? Where else might I find it? Who else can help? What else can it be?

Power – that which comes from living at enough, being the one in your life who chooses and acts and takes responsibility.

Peace – contentment, satisfaction, at ease, no striving, nothing needs to change for me to be happy

Over the next months I will unpack these 9 principles with examples and further opportunities for self discovery. For now, contemplate them as you might your breath as it flows into and out of your nose. What is my purpose? What motivates me? When have I been truly happy? What does how I spend my time reveal about who I am? Am I here and now or somewhere else as I go through my daily life? Are the parts of my life in harmony, that Goldilocks sweetness of “not too much, not too little, just enough” of work and play and love and leisure? Am I creating or imitating in my life? Where am I holding back from my full participation? And ultimately, am I at peace with myself and the world?

These are very big questions. The wonderful thing about the tools in Your Money or Your Life is that they turn your attention to such big ideas in your small daily acts of managing your money!

If you feel called to these questions as the inner dimension of Your Money or Your Life, comment here or in the Your Money or Your Life Facebook Group. Eventually I will invite a cohort of FI colleagues to work with me to bring the fullness of this work to many many more people, for the transformation of our personal lives and the healing of our world.