It can’t buy hapiness and has been called the root of all evil.
But it does have a soul and understanding that soul
just might make your life a lot easier.
By Jean West Rudnicki
“People have a fearful, upsetting, confused
relationship with money,” says Lynne Twist, author
of The Soul of Money, professional fundraiser, and
co-founder of Pachamama Alliance, an organization
dedicated to preserving the rainforest.
For more than 20 years Twist raised money for The
Hunger Project, a humanitarian effort whose goal is
to eliminate world hunger. Her work placed her in
intimate conversations about money with people at
all economic levels – from global billionaires to people
living in the most extreme, resource-poor conditions.
Her “ministry” – Twist believes fundraising is sacred
and holy work – provided her unique insights into a
multitude of cultures and the varied ways money is
viewed and handled, including societies which have
lived richly for centuries without it. She came to
know much about money and how we relate to it.
Twist was not available for a live interview, as
she has set up residence in Ecuador to be nearer
the indigenous Achuar peoples and the rainforest.
Instead, I was provided a tape of a session she held
with CPAs, financial planners and attorneys, and I
was immediately captivated by the sense of presence
she projected, her sincerity, and the wisdom wrapped
in her words.
 Money, she says, is an area of great suffering for
most people, and that is true even for people with a
lot of it. “We live in a monetized, commercial culture
that for many people in many ways has become a
tyranny.” She contends it is a cultural dysfunction, a cultural upset.
This suffering, she believes, can be attributed in part to the fact
that we receive literally thousands and thousands of messages each day
telling us we’re not pretty enough, thin enough, or young enough until
we purchase something that makes us whole and complete. “That type
of consumer culture creates a relationship – if you don’t have money
to buy more of this or more of that, then you’re really going to be in
trouble.”
The truth is, as a culture, we tell lies about money, she contends.
We tell the lie of scarcity along with its three toxic myths.
The First Toxic Myth
The first myth is, there is not enough to go around. Twist is quick
to point out that what she is talking about is an unexamined belief
system, adding, “I am not naïve. I know there are people on this planet
and places that don’t have enough. I’m not talking about that. I’m
talking about an unexamined mind-set, a paradigm, a way of seeing
the world that has a way of making us think there’s just not enough, in
an unconscious way.”
Our whole day is framed in a there’s-not-enough type of mentality.
For example, she explains, the first thing many of us say when we
wake is, “Oh, no. I didn’t get enough sleep.” The second thought as
we begin dressing is, “Oh, no. I don’t have enough time.” The I-don’thave-
enough litany continues through the day. In fact, many of our
meetings, lunches and discussions center around talk of what we don’t
have enough of. It is a kind of unconscious conversation that runs
through our day, until at the end of it we fall into bed proclaiming, “I
didn’t get enough done.”
Fueled by this type of belief system, people feel compelled toaccumulate as much as they can to keep themselves as far away as
possible from being someone who’s going to get left out. No matter how
much we have, it’s not enough. “I’ve worked with global billionaires,
and they think they don’t have enough – if you can conceive of that,”
she says, dismayed.
This belief system also gives us permission to do things we don’t
naturally feel inclined to do, she adds. In fact, many of us go about
“making a dying” or “making a killing.” Individuals making a dying are
doing something that they really hate, that they don’t want to do, that
has nothing to do with who they are, but who feel they’ve got to do it
to earn enough money to keep things going. She believes most people
on the planet are in this position.
Then there are those making a killing. These individuals are doing
something that they know is destructive to someone, somewhere.
They are either doing damage to the environment, to other species,
or marginalizing some huge sector of the world’s population – but it’s
legitimate to do because you’ve got to make a living.
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