The author of The Energy of Money; A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment (Wellspring/Ballantine, 2000), Nemeth is also a former associate professor of clinical psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and an associate clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at California State University, Davis. Her newest book, Mastering Life’s Energies: Simple Steps to a Luminous Life at Work and Play (New World Library, 2008), expands the insights from The Energy of Money, applying them to the whole of life. Here, Nemeth talks about the current financial crisis, the messages we convey by how we handle our personal finances, and the ways in which money is a fire-breathing dragon for all of us.

RD: What do you notice people do in their relationship with money that ties them up or uses up their energy?

MN: I use the metaphor of the Hero’s Journey. The hero starts out on a path toward a vision. Immediately, the hero is confronted with some sort of an obstacle; in mythology it’s a dragon of some sort. For many people, their own particular version of a fire-breathing dragon is money.

In the myths, the hero neither runs from the dragon or slays it, but turns and faces the dragon and says, “What are the lessons that you have to teach me?” The minute the question is asked, that which was a dragon becomes an ally.

And so it is with a lot of things, especially our relationship with money, because money is material. It’s not a thought. It’s not an attitude. It’s congealed energy, as author Joseph Campbell says. It’s your life’s energy in tangible form. Either you’re conscious about it, or you’re not. Either you have balanced your checkbook to the penny, or you haven’t. Your relationship with money is really just a microcosm, a small frame picture. How you do money contains information about how you act in other areas of your life.

RD: Can you give us an example?

MN: I’ll give you a couple. A woman decided she was willing to wake up about her relationship with money, so she balanced her checkbook to the penny. I teach that the greatest power you have on your hero’s journey is the power to be willing to wake up. You see that everything has the possibility to give you spiritual insight.

After balancing her checkbook to the penny, she said, “Going through my ledger was like looking at my autobiography. Where did I spend my money? But even more importantly, I started asking myself the question, what if my daughter and granddaughter were to somehow find this checkbook ledger 20 years from now, what would it say to them about my priorities in life? What meant most to me? I was kind of taken aback by how many times I write checks for things, which when I look back on them years later, I either can’t remember precisely what I purchased, or it’s gathering dust somewhere, or it’s meaningless. It’s not promoting a dream I might have.” She looked at where she wasted her physical energy too, where she wasted time and creativity, and it set her on her path.

Now, granted, the lessons that money teaches us are very mundane, and those of us who are spiritual would like to think of ourselves as being above mundane things. But certainly you know that our best lessons come from the simple things that happen around us if we’re willing to wake up.

Here’s another example of why it’s important to look at where you’re spending money and where you’re leaking it. There was a woman who decided to track every penny she spent for a month. After 30 days, she discovered that every day, she spent about $7 for cappuccinos and croissants at work and for snacks. And $7 per day times 200 days per year was $1,400 a year that she was spending on this stuff.

She said “I haven’t had a vacation in five years because I said I don’t have the money. But I saw that I was leaking it.” And she ended up doing something quite brilliant. She bought herself coffee and croissants on Mondays and Thursdays. This is not about depriving yourself; if you deprive yourself in life, you’ll just go on a money diet, and then binge after a while, and buy and buy and buy. And the other three days a week she saved that money in a vacation account. At the end of a few months, she had enough money to take a Club Med vacation. That began her on her hero’s journey regarding money.

RD: If someone is intrigued by the idea of seeing their lives through the lens of money and unleashing energy that was bound up in their money worries, where would you suggest they start?

MN: I would begin by looking at all your unfinished money business. Balance your checkbook to the penny. There was one woman who was the head of a multi-million dollar organization who said, “I handle millions of dollars a year, but I could sooner fly to the moon than balance my own checkbook to the penny.” It’s like a fire-breathing dragon. People would rather talk about their sex lives, their health, almost anything other than about how much money they have.

If you don’t like to balance your checkbook, find someone who does. Invite them over for dinner.

I remember one woman, a fairly well-known minister, who said “But I don’t want to balance my checkbook to the penny.” I said, “Pretend you were a shepherd, and a master had come and given you 30 sheep to tend. When the master comes back in a month and asks ‘How are my sheep?’ you say, ‘Well, there’s a lamb over in the wash; I think it broke its leg, I’m not sure. I think we have a ewe, a couple of them up in the hills. Look, let’s say we have 28 to 30 sheep more or less.’ How predisposed would this master be to giving you anymore sheep?”

In this story, you are the master, and you are the shepherd. And you will systematically hold yourself back from going on to the next level of creativity and consciousness when it comes to money until you have learned to handle the smallest amount. If you want a million dollars or one hundred thousand dollars, first be totally conscious with one dollar. And then you will work your way to a million dollars.

RD: Why is it so important to balance it to the penny?

MN: Because life requires of us a level of precision and focus, to reach our goals and dreams. When we master precision and focus with this simple exercise it will prepare us for precision and focus in using the energy of money in our lives. I’ll tell you, there’s something that occurs when what you say you have and what the bank says you have are identical.

Incidentally you can’t have the same learning if you close an account, then open a new one. Because your current level of consciousness with money will create the same imbalance within the next few months. It always happens.

RD: I’m sure balancing your checkbook is analogous to other things that we do with our energy and with money. Why is it people don’t balance their checkbook and are so phobic about it?

MN: I think it’s confronting our own mortality. We like to have big dreams, and we get hyped up on our dreams and our visions. But when we have to deal with stuff in the material world, like exactly how much of this energy do you have, exactly how many days old are you, what have you done with your life, it sometimes scares us. Once again, it’s a wake up call.

RD: So what we’ve accomplished, our track record, scares us?

MN: It scares us because it if I know how much money I have, I cannot be vague. It’s harder to be impulsive in my spending. It’s harder to waste money.

RD: Doesn’t that translate into I won’t get what I want?

MN: Well, I won’t get what I think I want. There’s a cycle I talk about in The Energy of Money. It’s the deprivation/spending/justification cycle. It cuts into the conviction “I want what I want, I want it now and I deserve it.” In our culture, we have this “you deserve” stuff. “You’ve been a good little boy. You’ve been a good little girl. You deserve a break today.”

People who are successful with money see that there’s no such thing as deserving or not deserving. Either you have $100 to buy the jacket or you don’t. But in our culture, we’ve been taught that whether or not we have the money, if we deserve it, we should put it on a credit card. But in order for me to deserve an expensive meal at the end of the week, I have to work hard and build up a deprivation, or I don’t get to deserve anything.

RD: How do you build up a deprivation?

MN: I’ll work 10 to 12 hours a day. I won’t get enough sleep. I won’t have any recreation. Maybe I won’t spend any money at all. So on Friday, I go out, buy a pricey meal, and pay for it with a credit card, because I deserve a treat. But I’m using money energy that I don’t have, so I’m building up an energy deficit.

The next day I got to the mall and buy something else because I deserve it. On Monday, two things happen: I have to work harder to make up for the money that I “debted” last week; and I have to get myself into this driven behavior so I can build up another deprivation for the next weekend.

We live from deprivation to deprivation. In that model, there’s no enjoyment. Even if I’m eating a fancy meal, if I’ve built up that deprivation, I’m too tired to enjoy it.

RD: So life, then, becomes a pursuit of deprivation, with brief interludes of reward.

MN: To change our patterns, we have to be willing to say “yes” to everything that’s on your hero’s path, to learn from everything. It is the life we lead when we are willing to get our lessons sooner rather than later. For me, it took losing $35,000 on an unsecured promissory note before I finally woke up. Success is not about accomplishing everything at once; success is doing what you said you would do with ease. With success, it’s not the size of your promise that’s as important as the consistency of your results over time. It’s about taking the first step, and creating forward movement.

RD: Have you met anyone who says they have enough money?

MN: I’ll tell you what kind of people say they have enough money. They’re people who are so actively engaged in bringing forth their ideas and vision, and using all the energy that’s around them so wisely, that they are content with the energy, the money, they have.

RD: Are they likely to be making under $50,000 as opposed to, say, making over $100,000?

MN: It doesn’t matter. I’ve met millionaires who are worried that they don’t have enough money. I’ve met people who earn $25,000 to $30,000 a year who say that they have enough money.

I once went to lunch with a millionaire who, at the end of lunch, took all the sugar packets from the sugar bowl so he wouldn’t have to buy sugar on the way home. That’s not living a life. If he’s doing that with packets of sugar, in what way is he doing that with love? With creativity? With a sense of generosity of spirit?

Here’s another money attitude that has broad implications. I ask people “Are you charging enough for your services?” People who are in private practice, like massage therapists, rarely charge what they think they’re worth. I found that when I finally got someone to agree to charge what they were worth, they were scared shitless, because it meant they would have to guarantee their work.

It’s like saying, “I’m going to charge you $75 for this massage, but it’s going to be a damn good massage.” The minute your tush is on the line with a guarantee like that, you see, you can’t hide out anymore. People would say “I’ve been hiding out by charging less. If I charge 50 percent of what I’m worth, that gives me a fudge factor. I don’t have to deliver 100 percent on my promise.” When people started getting that distinction, their practices blossomed.

RD: Once you start putting these principles into action, how does one keep going, without falling into old patterns or having one’s monkey mind reassert itself?

MN: You use the energy of support. Get together with two or three friends, and support one another in taking action. My first book, You and Money, took 3 1/2 months to write, because I had a group of friends supporting me in it. One of them would call me at 7:30 in the morning and say, “Are you sitting at your computer?” I’d say “yes. And they’d say “How many pages are you going to write today?” Now, I had a promise, Ravi, that I was only going to write three pages a day. Five pages bought me nothing for tomorrow. Some days it took an hour and a half; sometimes it took six hours.

One morning, I clearly remember my friend’s call: “Maria, are you sitting in front of your computer?” “Yes.” “How many pages?” “Dammit, I can’t do it!” My monkey mind had reasserted itself. “I wasn’t meant to be an author! I don’t have anything new to say! No one will be interested!” The person listened to me, and then said “I hear you, Maria, and how many pages are you going to write today?” They were aligned with my dream, and wouldn’t go into collusion with my monkey mind.

That’s why we need each other. It’s hard to do it alone. Well, three pages a day times 30 days is 90 pages, times 3 1/2 months is a book. And it was people supporting me in the face of my monkey-mind that did it.

RD: How would you advise people to react to the current economic uncertainty?

MN: I counsel people to recognize that cycles are just that: cycles. When you are in the middle of a cycle, it seems like it’s going to be interminable. The monkey mind is always chattering at us with the direst predictions.

People who are going to do well through this crisis are people who are willing to use clarity, focus, needs and grace. Those are very pragmatic principles.

“Clarity” is about becoming clear about what is important to you. What has real meaning? What is superfluous?

“Focus” means learning how to focus all of my energy where it will do the best good. During down economic times, people discover skills they didn’t know they had.

“Needs” means not biting off more than you can chew. We set huge goals for ourselves, or we try to do too much at once. For example, people may want to track every penny they spend for a couple of weeks to see where they’re leaking money. If you do that, don’t try to do too much else regarding your relationship with money. Practice taking small actions in the direction of your goal.

If you’ve just lost your job, don’t think about sending out twenty resumes tomorrow. Send out two today, two tomorrow, two the next day, two the day after that, and after about 10 or 12 days, you will have sent out 20 resumes. Don’t do too much or get over tired. When you get over tired, you begin to make bad money decisions that are informed by your emotions at the moment, and not according to a logical strategy or plan.

And finally, “grace” is a very interesting concept. Grace is the capacity to find something to appreciate in the moment, something small, a time with your family, going to a movie, planting flowers in your garden. Appreciating a small pleasure in the moment gives us a sense that all will be well, in the midst of crisis and change.

And it also has a purely physiological effect. There’s a part of your brain called the amygdala that’s responsible for the fight, flight or freeze emotion when you’re in crisis. It’s responsible for getting you out of the way of danger. But when our amygdala has become activated, we start imagining leaping tigers or charging elephants or crises that are not ever going to materialize. We begin to worry about them nonetheless. Mark Twain said, “I am an old man, and I’ve lived through many trials and tribulations, most of which never really happened.”

When your brain gets overheated you begin to look for tigers in every corner. When you stop and appreciate the small moments, your brain cools down. The minute your brain cools down, especially the amygdala, you start making choices that are reasonable and informed, not choices out of crisis.

RD: I have heard people talking about making sacrifices. What do you recommend for people who need to stop spending so much, but they don’t want to give anything up?

MN: Truly, tracking every penny you spend for 30 days is an eye opener, because you may be leaking money you don’t even know you’re leaking. If you were to handle that, you may have enough discretionary funds to do the stuff that you want to do.
The other approach is to look at what you truly need to maintain the quality of your life.

I’ll give you an example. I have a friend who likes to listen to book tapes. Prior to the economic crisis, he would buy book tapes at the book store. As a result of losing his job and needing to cut costs, he got a library card, and lo and behold the public library lends book tapes! Another one: I know a family who went out to dinner once a week, sometimes twice a week. Now they go out to Saturday lunches, where they spend less money. The idea is to decide what you really need for the quality of your life, and then look creatively at how to handle it.

For people whose financial security took a drastic turn, they need to know that within the next few years, things will bounce back. In the meantime, they need to look at short-term, creative solutions. I know people who are in retirement and have actually gotten jobs. One retired woman took in a student boarder to help pay for the mortgage.

RD: Do you think our resourcefulness during times of less will give us assets that make a difference after the recession is over?

MN: Absolutely! The American people are among the most resourceful on the planet. What does it take to come to America, to immigrate, to be the sons and daughters of immigrants, to grow up in a culture in which innovation and just plain old pluck and independence are prized? I think we have what it takes to weather this storm, and rediscover for ourselves what really is important. Truly, I see nothing but the best coming out of this. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy, because I think any transformation has moments of incredible discomfort.

It’s important that we’re all going through this together, because much of our financial structure was really based on a house of cards. It wasn’t just the housing market. It’s the investment market and the terribly complicated investment instruments that were created to leverage assets, sometimes 30 to 40 times. An unregulated balloon of hot air was created. I think everyone participated in it.

In many ways our financial riches haven’t brought us a quality of life commensurate with what we were spending, or commensurate with the resources we’ve been consuming. I personally think the American people are going to discover ways to enhance their lives while not spending as much. As a result of going through this I think we’re going to be better off, and our planet’s going to be better off, in the long run.

RD: Can you connect this to the Hero’s Journey?

MN: In the Hero’s Journey, the hero is awakened from a sleep, often by an event that shakes him or her to the core. It could be an economic downturn. It could be an order to go find the Holy Grail. It could be a longing to see something, you know, like Leo in The Matrix. There’s got to be something more than this. And so the hero steps out on his or her journey and immediately meets up with obstacles.

Now according to The Hero’s Journey, if you meet up with an obstacle and instead of trying to blast it away or run away from it, if you simply stay with it and look for “What is the gift here? What is this obstacle asking me to learn about?” the obstacle immediately becomes an ally. So as the hero comes against all kinds of obstacles, he begins to learn things and reach his goal, and then he asks the question, “How can I take what I have learned and bring it back to benefit my community?”

We’re all heroes on a journey. In the end, there’s always the question of “How can I use what I have learned to benefit the lives of others?” The minute we start asking that question, we’ve turned a corner.

Dr. Nemeth will be presenting a day-long seminar in Denver on May 9. For more details, go to www.academyforcoachingexcellence.com or call Unity Colorado at 303-758-5664.