Money: a Transformative Agent!

Lynne Twist is the author of The Soul of Money: Reclaiming the Wealth of Our Inner Resources. She is also a successful fundraiser, futurist, and a founder of the Pachamama Alliance. The Soul of Money is an “…invitation to confront our challenges with money, our fears around money, our addiction and attachment to money, our remorse and regret and hurts around money, and to embrace all of it as an arena for personal growth, a wonderful place in which to work on our own transformation. In that engagement we give money its soul.” (pg. 20)
Here is a brief sample from the chapter titled Sufficiency: The Surprising Truth.

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.
…Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough. (pg. 74-5)

Sufficiency, as Lynn presents it, is a great frame for wild resiliency and for what I would call “beyond sustainability” thinking. Sustainability is a great goal; one we must shoot for if our children are to have a tomorrow. But it is not enough. It is too static in its imagery…
I believe what we are called to is, as Thomas Berry says, the reinvention of the human being. It is to move beyond a world view of insufficiency and fear into one of… how can a caterpillar describe a butterfly?
Lynn Twist helps us move into that vital vision of transformation, as does Thomas Berry in his writings. The Great Work: Our Way Into The Future, is a good introduction to his provocative thinking.

Nourishment of both the outer body and the inner spirit will be achieved in intimate association with each other or not at all…. (pg xi)
…We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation of the natural life systems of the planet. To achieve this attitude we must first make our children unfeeling in their relation with the natural world…
…only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin. (pgs. 15-16)

Lynn Twist views our relationship with money as a potentially trans-formative playground through which we can shift our own identification to oneness with the center of the universe. She reminds us that, “Fear is not the opposite of love. It is the absence of it.” Now that is wild wisdom!
For a good pod-cast interview with Lynn go to the Echo Chamber Project.
Lynn is also founder of The Soul of Money Institute whose work is based upon the following principles:
* Prosperity flows from sufficiency — the recognition of enough.
* Each individual makes a difference.
* What we appreciate appreciates.
* Collaboration generates prosperity.
* Our legacy is what we live – not what we leave.
* Gratefulness is the heart of generosity.
* Global citizenship is the natural outcome of an awakening consciousness.