It Just Gets Recycled
— Ram Dass In 1975 when I was manic, a man named Jai found me dancing on the beach in Santa Monica. For some reason I don't remember, he drew a symbol in the sand and said, "All the money belongs to God. It just gets recycled." When I met Jai, I was 21. That year brought a crash course in inner exploration called insanity. It was a wild ride, and I took it again a year later. Some people might think that my past experience with insanity makes me forever unreliable, but I disagree. I believe that it actually makes me more credible, because I've walked both sides of the line, and I have no delusions about how fragile that line is. In the blink of an eye, your personality can turn inside out, you can lose your ability to keep your act together, and you can forget how to find your way home — both literally and figuratively. It's the same with money. Because I've lost everything more than once, I know that the line between have and have not is as fragile with money as it is with sanity. It doesn't matter how much money you have or how much insurance you carry. You can't protect yourself against financial loss if it's time for you to lose everything. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that you should stop taking care of yourself financially, give up hope, and walk in front of a truck. I'm no fatalist. Instead, I'm suggesting that each of us comes here to learn unique lessons, and in order to learn those lessons, everyone's curriculum must be equally unique. I'll give you a personal example. Since my life purpose is to liberate my heart, I doubt if it would be very helpful for me to have an easy curriculum this time around. If the world were a cushy place for me, I'd probably be so busy amusing myself that I wouldn't be motivated to think about getting free. On the other hand, it's extremely helpful to have a challenging life if my soul wants me to learn that there is no security on the physical plane — and that my only security lies in my relationship with God. In other words, there's nothing like chronic pain, life-threatening illness, insanity, financial loss, and other assorted earthly delights to help me remember where to keep my focus. With regard to money, it's been helpful to experience periods of great loss and need, because this has furthered my lessons in trust, humility, and compassion. Although I'm back in private practice now, doing telephone consultation work, there was a time when I had to call it quits. In 1997, after several years of cutting back on my hours to see if I could keep working despite debilitated health, I finally had to stop for a while. At that point, I closed my practice and spent the next 15 months in a horrendous battle with Social Security, trying to win disability benefits that I'd paid into for 25 years, and which I then needed to survive. In the end, I gave up the fight because I was getting sicker dealing with their exhausting and abusive bureaucratic nonsense. Ultimately, I realized that the gift of that battle was all the heart liberation work that came from overcoming my shame about "being a burden" financially. During those 15 months, my humility deepened and my compassion for myself and others increased a thousandfold. I also got lots of lessons in trust because I had no income, I couldn't get Social Security benefits, and my family was unable to help me. Thus, I had to find some other way to survive. This was no small task, because although I live like a monk, health problems make my body very expensive to maintain. Fortunately, close friends offered loans and occasional monetary gifts, but of course, their assistance was no replacement for regular income. In daily prayers, I repeatedly asked to be shown a way to serve, support myself, and still care for my struggling body. At the time, I usually prayed lying down, due to chronic pain and exhaustion. One night, flat on my back in deep meditation, I received the answer to my question: My spiritual teachers asked me to start a prayer service called Rent-A-Monk, and they wanted me to request donations in exchange for my efforts. Let me tell you, this put me into a tizzy. I knew that many highly evolved people insist that money should never be mixed with spiritual work, as if this somehow taints the work. Yet there I was, all other financial options exhausted, being asked by my spiritual teachers to accept money in exchange for prayers. My spiritual teachers were well aware that their Rent-A-Monk directive would wreak havoc with my beliefs about money. That was the plan! I must confess, when they first told me about Rent-A-Monk, I thought it was a brilliant idea. After all, I'd been doing spiritual work for thirty years, and I was good at it. Besides, it was very practical: What else could I do flat on my back, alone at home? Despite the fact that my deepest self was peaceful with the idea of Rent-A-Monk, there was still that pesky little thing called the ego. When I realized that I would actually have to go public with the most sacred part of my nature, I quickly discovered that I wasn't as liberated as I thought. Two years after founding Rent-A-Monk in 1998, I'm still working through layers of stuff around it. For one thing, it would take a book to describe all the shifts that have transpired in my beliefs about money and spiritual work. However, I'll tell you about a couple of these shifts. First of all, I've completely let go of the notion that it's wrong to mix money and spiritual work. The more I contemplated this idea, the more judgmental, hypocritical, and downright arrogant it seemed. In point of fact, cultures all over the world and across time have mixed money and spiritual work. In India, holy people wander the countryside begging for alms, and it's considered an honor to support them. In certain tribal cultures, people lay their entire riches at the feet of the shaman in exchange for spiritual healing. People in Western cultures may say that this kind of monetary exchange is okay as long as it's done as a donation, and not as a fee for service. However, I think that just sidesteps the issue. The truth is, work is work, money is money, and exchange of energy is exchange of energy. This means that if I perform a service, it shouldn't matter if I accept money, a loaf of bread, a piece of clothing, or a thank-you kiss in return. As long as we live in a culture that requires money to survive, there should be no judgment about me requesting money in exchange for my efforts. There's no question that money is assigned to services in arbitrary ways. These assignments of value may feel alternately wonderful, neutral, or unfair, depending on the circumstances. However, I refuse to make money wrong anymore, and it would be arrogant of me to say that my prayer work is necessarily more holy than any other kind of work. Work and compensation are complicated issues, and things aren't always as they seem. The bottom line is, you can't have it both ways. Either money is tainted (i.e., not holy) and therefore devalues every kind of work, or else money is an innocent form of valuation, and therefore can be used to honor any and all work. I'm not sure it's helpful — or even possible — to clearly draw a line between what is spiritual and what is not. For example, one of my colleagues insists that he does not accept money for his spiritual healing work, yet he does psychotherapy, he conducts workshops during which people undergo tremendous spiritual transformations, and he writes books that stimulate personal growth. He enjoys the privilege of a healthy income from these sources, yet he maintains that he only does spiritual healing work on a giveaway basis. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that healing of the spirit takes place during every aspect of his work. To say that it only happens during specifically designated healing sessions is folly. On the flip side, I believe that spiritual healing can happen in the most unlikely situations. Consider my partner, John Giovine. John is in the process of switching careers. He earned a master's degree in business psychology a few years ago, and he's currently pursuing postgraduate work in psychology. He's also had his own shop as a mechanic for the last twenty years. Because I've known John since 1983, I've had the opportunity to watch how he works with people. This may sound crazy, but I swear that some of his customers have car problems just so they can come and see John. Why? Because their spirits are uplifted by being with him for a few minutes. The smart ones even recognize this and tell him so! Have you ever read Dan Millman's book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior? John is like Socrates, the mechanic in that book. Does this mean he shouldn't charge for his services, since healing happens in his presence? Or does this mean it's okay for him to charge for his mechanical work, as long as everyone pretends like there's nothing else going on? And if there's nothing else going on, then why do so many wonderful people allow only John to work on their cars? It's not just because he's a master mechanic. The question is, What are you actually paying for when you buy anything from anyone? For all I know, the man who picks up our garbage is praying for us when he collects the bins from our driveway. The point is, spiritual healing work comes in many forms, and it deserves financial compensation as much as anything else. The garbage man does his trade, and I do mine. That's all. Each task is essential to the whole — and therefore whole-y! Personally, I will always do the majority of my spiritual work for free, because frankly, my whole life is my spiritual work, and besides, I pray for a lot of people as a giveaway. However, this doesn't mean that it's wrong for me to also accept payment for my prayer services. When I receive financial compensation for my efforts — whether it's for the sale of a book, an hour of personal consultation, a workshop, or a seven-week cycle of prayers — I'm just doing my part to keep the money moving. All the money belongs to God. It just gets recycled! Cat Saunders, Ph.D., is the author of Dr. Cat's Helping Handbook, which is available at bookstores or online at <http://www.drcat.org/>. Cat is also an ordained minister who makes certain aspects of her spiritual work available to others through Rent-A-Monk. For more information about Cat and her work, please visit <http://www.drcat.org/>. |
There isn't even one action or emotion that's holier than any other.