The book Integrating Money and Meaning: Practices for a Heart-Centered Life includes numerous practices to help bring money out of the pigeonhole where we usually keep it and to integrate it into the larger, complex tapestry of our lives. Some of these practices are one-time exercises, while others are most helpful as ongoing elements of a regular discipline.
One of the most time-honored practices from that latter category is meditation. “Meditation” can mean different things to different people, but in general it’s just a way of learning to focus the mind through one or more regularly practiced techniques. There are numerous such techniques, including focusing your mind on your breath or a particular word or image, chanting, mindful awareness, or allowing your mind to be guided by another’s voice or music. Meditation has been around since ancient times, practiced by different groups and cultures to help people gain mental clarity, a sense of peace and calm, better physical and emotional health, and spiritual enlightenment in some religious traditions.
We highly recommend that people pursue a regular practice of meditation for the emotional, physical, and spiritual benefits it can bring. In our book Integrating Money and Meaning, we also recommend it as one of the practices for deepening your relationship with money and getting in touch with your “courageous vision.” You can read about this concept in Chapter 3 of the book.
On pages 105-109 of the book, we have written out the words to a guided meditation that can be used as part of an ongoing meditation practice, or as a one-time experiment. Either way, it might help ease someone into the lesser-explored interior spaces of the mind. Now we have created an audio version of that meditation by Maggie Kulyk, which you can access by clicking on the link below. We encourage you to practice this meditation when you have eight minutes of uninterrupted and non-distracted time. Remember to be open and nonjudgmental with yourself. You might be surprised at what visions emerge, what messages you hear, and what seeds begin to blossom.
