I really want that right now, not just around the ever-present health care financing issue, but around everything else that’s dominating the news today, like how hard it is for many of us to make a living right now. Like how many people we know are stuck in painful jobs they hate but don’t dare leave. Or for those of us who are entrepreneurs, where the next clients are coming from in a time when so many are still cutting back.

Healthcare financing and all our other money or work issues could benefit from some individual and collective deep breaths.

Won’t you breathe with me right now? Just take one breath, then another, and feel your energy rising. As you breathe, listen to the silence. Trust that you’ve got something worth saying, starting with yourself, so make that commitment to hear yourself.

Listen more than speak to yourself. Listen past your own assumptions and beliefs and pet projects into the stillness of your own heart. And when you are ready, share what’s true for you with another.

One thing I know for sure is that whenever two or more of us come together long enough to really see each other, to really listen to each other, we are wiser. Confusion becomes clarity. Enmity becomes dialogue, then collaboration. Money wasted, lives harmed turned into money used well for the best of human and earthly life.

It’s not easy to find money or work wisdom in a noisy, divisive world.

Even in my quiet office with candles burning, it’s hard to put aside all sorts of ideas and assumptions so I can be present to a deeper Presence. Even with years of practice in hearing what really matters most to others and myself around spirit, work and money, it’s hard to hear the one thing I need to hear right here, right now.

The wisdom I find in the silence calls me down from my high horse and holds a mirror to truths I’d rather evade. It calls me to say or do things I’d not otherwise dream or dare, things that risk ridicule or failure or even scarier, a hope and awe that make me tremble

And so, being human, I often run from the silence, and I bet you do, too.That’s why it always helps to have companions on the journey of dealing with what matters, whether on the mundane or spiritual level.

The world is filled with tips and resources for finding wisdom for money, work and other spiritual or mundane issues.

As a kid, I loved watching my mother and her best friend share everything from recipes to laughs to prayers to tips on sewing and how to handle us kids. As a business plan writer and teacher, I love sharing resources and ideas for how to turn a dream into thriving reality. As a writer and speaker in the field of spirit and work, I’m passionate about sharing tips and resources from all the world’s faiths for all types of work.

Here are some favorites you may try:

Go to the place where you feel most attuned to your wisdom source. For most people that’s the bathroom (no.1 according to a survey of business executives, especially the shower), a place of worship (not necessarily your own religion) or nature. If you can’t actually go to your wisdom place, go there virtually. (www.workwithmeaningandjoy.com/ww_-_retreat.pdf)

If you are under time pressure or are uncomfortable with meditation, run or do whatever else that helps you get your body, mind and spirit into a non-competitive zone. Many lawyers I know find that answers that eluded them during hard thinking come easily on the run.

Work off your anger or frustration safely, like our grandparents did while chopping wood or beating rugs over the clothesline. Some friends and I one had a great time working off some political fury by smashing yard-sale chipped pottery against a concrete wall. By the time we had carefully swept up the shards, we had a lot more energy that we could focus positively.

Tomorrow, by request, some tips from writers and speakers about how to get your most meaningful points across in a noisy, crowded world.

As always, many blessings. And come back again real soon,
Pat McHenry Sullivan

If integrity were considered exciting or sexy in our culture, it would get at least as much attention as a minor celebrity’s latest wardrobe malfunction or love life.

We’d dream about a culture where honesty and fair dealings are the norm. We’d share tips and resources for living and working with integrity at least as freely as we now share recipes or movie recommendations. But since integrity is not now considered sexy enough to be discussed often, you may not know the richness of its full definition: Wholeness. True to self and on the level with others. Resonance between your deepest values and actions. Connection with and compassion for others, including the natural world. Not knowing the full meaning of integrity, you may not know how much easier and beneficial it is to live and work with integrity than without it.

Integrity: the spiritual gift that makes work and money dealings richer and simpler

When you practice integrity, you activate powerful gifts that are coded in your DNA, like compassion, creativity, discernment, the urge to serve yourself and others, and your drive to meaning and purpose.  Here are some examples of what can happen when you slow down and get quiet enough to hear and heed your own voice of integrity:

When you’re stressed about money or work, integrity helps you see more clearly your real challenges versus projections from your ego or fears. You reinforce your faith that, “whatever happens, I will get through this.” Your creativity blossoms. You find allies and resources to help you meet your problems more gracefully.

Rather than basing spending or investment decisions on ego wants or merely the recommendation of others, integrity calls you to do due diligence by obeying the first rule of law (never assume; instead, check your “facts”) with a Zen perspective (empty your mind and be open to wisdom from all sources).

When you see embezzlement, cheating or other wrongdoing, integrity reminds you how we all depend on the integrity of others for our comfort, health and safety. You see clearly your equivalent of white lines on mountain-top roads that guide travelers safely through fogs without crashing into each other or falling off the mountain. Your spiritual “white lines” help guide yourself and others through ethical fogs.

Integrity encourages you to confront people you perceive as wrongdoers with compassion and respect. It helps you gain the courage to speak the good news of hope and new opportunities, which is often more scary. Rather than brand and dismiss others as snitches or wishful thinkers, you support their right to be heard, without retaliation. Then you thoughtfully discern the truth as you best see it and act accordingly.

With each act of integrity, you grow stronger, and you help build a culture of integrity. That helps all of us to spend our energy and money for what matters, not waste it on what fails to satisfy or even harms.

What’s your vision of a work and money culture based in integrity? My dad, who helped send an embezzling college president to jail, often said it would have been a blessing if someone had simply said when the wrongdoing was very small, “No, Dr. Meadows, you can’t do that.” There could have then been no emotional or financial harm to students, faculty, whistleblowers, and taxpayers who had to pay for several trials and incarceration. The president could have made amends for only a small transgression, then kept exercising his true leadership gifts, and retire to enjoy his grandchildren and other pleasures.

Imagine the benefits to all of us if people close to Bernie Madoff had said long ago, “Bernie, you can’t do this!” Or if more people, like Harry Markopolos, had done the simple due diligence that in 1999 revealed that Madoff’s promised investment returns were fraudulent? If the SEC and others had listened to people like Markopolos rather than dismiss him?

My vision of a culture of integrity includes this: when I buy anything, what’s advertised is what’s actually offered. I can trust that my food is safe, that the list of drug benefits and side effects are as honest and complete as the company and FDA can make them, and that the politicians for whom I vote are on true and on the level.

Do you have an integrity vision you’d like to share? Maybe with some tips for how to create a culture of integrity? If so, click on “comments” at the bottom right of this post.

As always, many blessings for your work and all your life. Pat McHenry Sullivan

Now that we finally have cable and decent streaming capability on our computers, my husband and I have become faithful to the late night fake news shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. We’ve also maintained our loyalty to Bill Moyers on PBS, whose prophetic guests are not always amusing.

The big difference between prophetic comedians and the people we usually think of as prophets is that we’re more likely to listen when we get to laugh first.

When we invite comedians into our living rooms, we accept the truth that when we laugh at the craziness, illusions and pretenses of the powerful and celebrated, we might also be confronting our own truths. With Stewart and Colbert, we also meet authors and thought leaders that get lost in much of the mainstream’s media obsession with the latest shiny (tawdry?) thing or its dependence on press releases from the powerful.

Were it not for Stephen Colbert’s fake news show, I might never have heard about Leymah Gbowee, a perfect role model for how spirit in action can benefit the lives and economy of a huge community.

Gbowee was once just another war-weary Liberian single mother. Then she had a crazy dream that led her to organize the country’s “market women,” some of whom had originally helped run guns that fueled a war among various warlords and against ruthless and corrupt Liberian president Charles Taylor. Armed only with quiet courage and white tee-shirts, this Christian and Muslim group of market women grew so large that they eventually helped topple Taylor and banish him from Liberia.

Now Taylor is on trial in The Hague at a U.N.-backed court for his alleged war crimes against Sierra Leone, and Liberia’s new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa.  Liberia is in the process of rebuilding a country where years of war had left 1/3 of the people homeless. Now “market woman” is a term of honor, and a major job of the new president is to help market women build better lives

Even for stories about work with meaning and purpose, it always helps get the story out if it has a sexy angle.

Naturally, in interviewing Ms. Gbowee, comedian Colbert started with the sexy bits, and how one of Gbowee’s major strategies was to organize a sex strike.

Colbert: You shut down the playground for Liberian men, you might say. .. How did you get other women to join in on this?

Gbowee: Desperation. … I had no idea about that Greek play ["Lysistrata" by Aristophanes, first performed in 411 B.C.] … But we had just gotten to the point where we were really fed up and we thought our men folk were not really serious about ending the conflict … So we needed to find a way to get to them and we thought that was one of the best ways.

Colbert: How did you word it?

Gbowee: We just said “no sex.” No sex until the conflict ends. .. So, even if you were not a fighter, if you had a friend who was a fighter, you had to stand up to him as a man [and tell him] “put the guns down, no sex until the war ends.”

Put together the Colbert Report segment with Bill Moyers’ show on Gbowee and you’ve got a powerful role model for dealing with everything from gang warfare to economic and healthcare reform … or even reclaiming the soul of the media.

“Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” the award-winning film about Gbowee and others who created the market women movement, will be shown on PBS some time in 2010. In the meantime, here are some things you can do:

• Watch the Colbert and Moyers clips with Ms. Gbowee and catch her contagious spirit.
• Foster your spirit by praying for guidance on how you can best put it to work.
• Find a screening of the film or arrange one for your group.
• Have fun with friends proposing your own “sex strike” or other creative strategies to local, national or world problems.
• Look for groups in your own area, like Life Skills for Peace, which is impacting youth in gang-ridden areas of Richmond, CA.  Help those groups and/or create one of your own.

Remember Viktor Frankl’s words from yesterday’s post: if we were immortal, we put off following our calls to make the world a better place. But we are very mortal, and we are designed to care.

Many blessings as always, Pat McHenry Sullivan

You may never have taken formal, witnessed poverty vows as my husband John did at the age of 19 while he was in a Roman Catholic religious order, but it’s highly likely that you’ve taken some vows of poverty, intentional or otherwise.

Religious poverty vows are prayed over, even blessed. They aren’t a commitment to being homeless, starving or dressing in rags. They are a vow to simplicity, and an everyday willingness not to be attached to money or the things it could buy. The intent is to free members of any concerns about earning, saving or investing money (unless they are taking on financial roles on behalf of the community) so they are free to focus fully on spiritual life.

What a contrast religious vows are to the get-rich quick, greedy or otherwise definitely non-spiritual vows that drive so many novels, movies, and financial strategy! Often such vows lead to spiritual, emotional and/or financial impoverishment, as definitely was the case with many players in the subprime mortgage meltdown and other disasters.

My favorite example is Scarlett O’Hara, the self-centered heroine of Gone with the Wind, who during the Civil War became responsible for the survival of her family, home and even three former slaves, plus her rival and rival’s baby. After learning that the Yankees (or as they say where I grew up, damnyankees) have either destroyed or stolen anything edible except some dried-up turnips, Scarlet raises her fist in the air and pronounces, “As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again . . . not me or any of my kin.”

Now that could be a noble vow, but Scarlett adds the commitment to do whatever she deems necessary, including lie, cheat, steal or kill. Though she does become wealthy, she can’t really enjoy it due to the unintentional spiritual and emotional poverty vows which were a by-product of both conscious and unconscious faults like fear, greed, and spite.

Here’s how Scarlett’s unintentional poverty vows might be expressed: I insist on having what I think I want, no matter who is hurt in the process, including my own heart. I will base my business and spending decisions not just on sound business or financial information, but also on such desires as making others pea-green with envy; keeping myself from realizing how much I really love Rhett, not Ashley; and running from the fears that have caused nightmares since I was a child and a lot of grief ever since.

It’s not easy undoing poverty vows. Undoing poverty vows after years in a committed religious order may require years of learning how to make a living, and perhaps becoming totally re-trained. After all, there aren’t a whole lot of job descriptions calling for people who are adept at contemplation and fluent in Latin or Gregorian chant!

Undoing unintentional poverty vows can be even harder. Therapy and coaching can help uncover them; so can reflection on what’s not working around money in your life and considering, “What might I have been thinking when I developed this unfruitful way of dealing with money?”

Here are some unconscious poverty vows to consider:

• I vow not to learn about money and how to handle it well.
• I base my financial decisions on shame, fear, or ___________.
• I choose to base my financial and business planning on hopes and dreams that I have not carefully considered.
• I choose to trust blindly without giving my financial or business dealings the careful consideration I owe myself and others. (The legal term is “due diligence.”)

What about you? Do any of the above vows sound familiar?

And what’s your true abundance vow when you turn around your poverty vows, either conscious or unintentional, then look into your soul for guidance?

My favorite true abundance vow begins with gratitude for all the gifts I’ve gained from being married to a man who brought his financial challenges and gifts to our marriage. The challenges are nobody’s business but our own, but the gifts include these: Not once have I ever known John to act greedy or mean about money. Instead, his habit of simplicity helps pull me off my high horse and enjoy the moment more. He looks so carefully at any gift that in the process, I see more in the gift. His appreciation is so contagious that I seem to gain more in the giving than he gets in receiving it.

In creating a true abundance vow, I also had to deal with what I’ve learned from my own collection of often-contradictory unintentional poverty vows, like my childhood dreams of wowing everyone who had ever put me down with the huge emerald and flashy sports car I would someday have, mixed with a longtime habit of dreaming big, doing little. And then there are the usual suspects like shame or “I don’t really deserve it.”

Here’s my current true abundance vow. May it inspire you to create your own:

I vow to treat money as an exchange of energy that I use wisely, to the betterment of myself and others. I vow to live simply and richly, basing my financial decisions on a combination of in-the-world research, prayer, and a lot of careful discernment. In this journey of earning and using money more wisely, I give thanks for all the challenges and the beings on this earth who have helped me learn from them.

As always, I hope you enjoy this challenge.

Come back real soon with your thoughts and inspiration,
Pat McHenry Sullivan

The futility of panic as a financial strategy should be pretty obvious from the economic news since at least summer of 2008. Panic in the stock market breeds panic in the job market and the credit market and in the minds and hearts of the people everywhere, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

Through a body-based therapy called bioenergetics, I learned years ago how the body typically acts in panic. The chest collapses. Eyes close, and intuition or inner sight is shut down. Arms flail helplessly, leading to exhaustion. Or they dangle uselessly, putting out the message, “I am helpless. Someone must rescue me.”

Act with panic while swimming, and your odds of drowning increase. Plus, you make it very dangerous for someone to help you. When a society acts with panic to security threats (like real or feared terrorist attacks) or the current economic situation, the result can be a plethora of expensive (sometimes even deadly) acts based on wrong or insufficient information.

Denial of fear or emergencies doesn’t work, either. During many earlier times when I faced hard economic challenges, I discovered that it’s a lot easier to deal with a problem if I open my eyes and face it, and if I scream out my fear into a pillow instead of trying to whistle that fear away with a happy tune.

Fortunately, there are lots of great models for dealing effectively with emergencies without panic.

Ever been severely injured and suddenly you’re surrounded by compassionate, skilled people, all focused on helping you get through your emergency? Ever been stuck away from home due to a disaster like a fire or earthquake, and here comes a hastily organized emergency transportation system to get you home? Ever been very hungry or thirsty due to that disaster when here comes the Salvation Army with a ham sandwich, two cookies and some fruit punch?

History is full of great models for crisis response. In World War II, when the British navy was trapped in Dunkirk, ordinary citizens created a flotilla of boats large and small to bring the boys home safely. When England was bombed night after night, people in bomb shelters kept their spirits alive by staying truly English, like being fully present to each other over tea served in proper cups atop an oil drum, or a game of darts, or hanging out with each other atop uncomfortable-looking bunks.

If you got creative, what kind of calm response could you find to your financial emergencies? What wisdom might you discover for the economy we all share?

E.g., what’s your equivalent to emergency room triage?

What essential elements of your character and culture can inspirit you through an extended hard time?

What’s your equivalent of Dunkirk, and how are you called to help create financial stability for yourself and/or the larger community?

Here are some examples of how to turn panic into a calmer state that supports clear reflection and wise decisions:

• Affirm that no matter how dire the economic situation is right now, somehow, some time, you’ll get through it.
• Walk or swim to clear your head and energize your body, unleash at least a spark of creativity and confidence, and re-energize your whole being.
• Breathe and deal with whatever feelings emerge, especially grief about the loss of retirement funds or the camaraderie that used to exist with colleagues on the job you and/or they no longer have.
• Pray, not like the kid asking God or Obama or Congress to fix it for you, but in a way that engages you with your source (more about this in a future post).

Consider these thoughts as you repeat the original assignment (see About the Challenge at the top right of this page). As always, bless your journey of healing and growing your relationship with money. Here’s a blessing to use or edit:

Whatever challenge I face now, may I rediscover my gratitude in simply being alive. May I remember that I come from sturdy stock, and as a member of the human race, I am kin to many experts in turning challenges into opportunities. May all my eyes be open to how I can meet my needs at this time, while also serving others.

Come back real soon with your own insights and inspiration,
Pat McHenry Sullivan