Coming from many years of meditation as well as corporate work, I find it very satisfying when I can create an article that ties spirituality with business or practical aspects of daily life. It gives people outside of the spiritual community a real sense of how meditative practices of various kinds are not just some woo woo ideas out there for hippies, but practical tools to improve one’s daily reality and in this case a tool to help you reduce your living expenses too.
At the same time, it’s also reminder for those ‘hippie’ types (nothing against hippies, let’s be clear!), to ground whatever mystical experiences they have into the mundane and integrate them to build healthier, more effective habits in all areas of life, including their financial situation.
So today I want to explore a particular connection between lifestyle, meditation and living expenses.
Let’s tackle meditation first. What are we trying to do when we’re meditating or engaging in any practice akin? What are we fundamentally pursuing?
In essence, consciousness growth. For those who are not familiar with the practice, consciousness may sound extremely ephemeral and hard to grasp intellectually. Unfortunately, it cannot be fully comprehended intellectually, but only experientially, so I’m going to use similar terms to describe our pursuit.
Consciousness growth you may also be referred to as increased self-awareness, which translates also into healthier choices for yourself. Establishing a saner relationship with the present moment, a healthier set of responses to the stimuli of the environment, a more accurate and direct perception of reality, less clouded by one’s own biases, and all sorts of neurotic thinking that the discursive mind brings about.
Getting deeper into this would require a whole other article, but for the time being, just try to let the above definitions sink in.
So how do meditation and living expenses go hand in hand?
First of all, when you are more self-aware, when you entertain a better relationship with the present moment and have a more accurate perception of reality, you’re likely to make better decisions in any field, including money management.
Most importantly you’re more likely to drop a lot of toxic habits, addictions and compulsions which turn out to be very expensive in your life. Ultimately, you are driven to design a whole lifestyle that reflects your level of consciousness and your personal finances are naturally improved.
Understand that how rich you are, is always a ratio between the income you have and the money you need to spend to support your current lifestyle. While everyone legitimately pursues a higher paycheck, don’t forget that your needs are at the denominator of this ratio and if they decrease, your relative wealth multiplies as a result.
Understand that how rich you are, is always a ratio between the income you have and the money you need to spend to support your current lifestyle
Let’s get into the how. Seriously, how will meditating and becoming more conscious make my living expenses go down? How can meditation and money be correlated in my life?
Here’s a laundry list of all the ways in which your currently low level of consciousness is costing you money. Essentially if you only raise your consciousness level, some of these behavioral patterns will be naturally stripped away and your living expenses will automatically go down:
You have addictions
That’s the most obvious one. The more unconscious you are the more you’re likely to have an addictive personality. Addictions are much subtler than what you may think and these days there’s endless opportunities for addictions: drugs, gambling, sex, social media, videogames, porn, shopping, approval – even love – and the list goes on. Addictions usually cost you a lot of money
You pay collateral costs of your addictions
Addictions are detrimental to your health and your health has medical costs, but mostly they deprive you of your productivity, which ends up costing you a lot more. Other costs are in terms of damage to your relationships, divorce, social isolation and the list goes on. Most importantly there is also an opportunity cost to all the personal development work you’re missing out on, because of your addictive behaviours and the time they suck from you. Any unresolved addiction – even a mild one – is going to present the bill at some point and the bill is not metaphorical, it has real dollars on it
Bad choices under influence
Now that we’ve got the big ones out of the way, let’s say that you’re not flat out addicted, but still display occasional addictive-like behavioral patterns, which can lead to bad choices.
For example, if you like to go out and get drunk every other Friday, it might seem like a normal routine to you, but usually your financial choices when you’re intoxicated at 3AM tend not to be the smartest. Nobody comes out of a strip club richer (at least as a customer), from a casino wealthier (at least not consistently), or from a nightclub with more money on their credit card, or has ever received compounded interests from those two Sambuca shots ordered at 4 AM.
A materialistic worldview
This is a huge one. The lower you are in the consciousness scale the more you’re likely to buy into the materialistic and consumeristic worldview that our society promotes. And that’s actually predictable, because you are so disconnected from spirit and the inner dimension of life, that all that’s visible to you is only objects. Objects and stuff.
Once you raise your consciousness, you may still enjoy the goods this life offers, but you’re capable of leading a much more minimalistic lifestyle. Which gives you the freedom to cut down your expenses anytime you want or need to. You appreciate everything, but need nothing.
As long as you’re so materialistic though, you’re blindly deluded into thinking that you need this or that thing and will always crave for one object after the other (or particular experience after another). As a materialist, you also define your personal value through brands and objects. The living expenses of a materialist, needless to say, tend to be high.
Playing the social game too much
Another massive one. The most unconscious individuals out there are constantly preoccupied with impressing other people and this comes with a price tag. It requires buying expensive clothes, attending parties, events, networking, taking taxis, ordering expensive shit you don’t need, running around to be part of the social scene, signing up for exclusive clubs and associations. It gets very busy and pretty much for nothing.
If you’re unconscious enough you might even be drawn to a career that requires this lifestyle, so now – while thinking you’re killing it – you’ve successfully painted yourself in a corner where there’s no room left for real personal development work! Good job, you’ve effectively cut yourself off from your only saving grace.
If you ever stop this stupidity and start some serious commitment to become more conscious you will get to see the absurdity of all this running around, chasing your own tail, playing a silly status game in the social matrix. And that’s when you’ll finally begin to enjoy just sitting on your cushion in meditation and being at home by yourself. Being at peace and content with it. Needless to say, this will save you a lot of money.
You can still have a social life, which hopefully you can start to develop around more conscious and well-developed people and activities. But right now, you’re running around wasting way too much time in social groups, in the most useless possible ways, instead of working on yourself. Realize that most of the money you spend is related –in various forms – to other people, impressing other people and playing the social game.
You don’t sleep well
The lower your level of consciousness, the more you’re likely to struggle with this, although it’s not a perfect correlation. But as we’ve seen, at the lowest levels you’re more likely to have addictive patterns, be deficient in healthy habits and most importantly to be very far from realizing your life purpose and aligning to it. These factors, the last being very important, all contribute to an underlying sense of anxiety and discomfort that you usually carry into the bedroom.
Also, the more people experience this sense of misalignment in their own life, the more they subconsciously begin to fear the moment when they go to sleep. Because it’s precisely when they’re left with no choice but becoming self-aware! That’s where all the Neflix binging, drinking oneself to sleep, hanging out and playing games to exhaustion, come from.
And science tells us that when we are sleep deprived, we’re also more likely to make reckless financial decisions.
You lack focus and have your priorities upside down
This works two ways. On the one hand, lack of focus due to an untrained mind results in poor strategies. On the other hand, precisely because you aren’t sufficiently self-aware, you’re pursuing things that don’t truly matter to your authentic self at the expense of those that do matter. And you’re investing your money accordingly, thereby wasting a good chunk of it in growing areas of your life that don’t have any real substance and setting yourself up to spend extra money in an attempt to rectify your mistakes and fix your life later on (if you’re lucky enough to wake up at some point)
These are just some of the ways in which your being unconscious is harming you financially. Of course, the crux of being unconscious is that by definition, you are not aware of being unconscious!
That’s why we say that meditation can save you money. And it can save you, altogether.
Meditation can help you reduce your living expenses, by shedding light on your own ignorance and prompting you to create a more adaptive lifestyle. Because if you’re seriously willing to surrender to the practice (on and off the cushion) and to the ideal of constant growth, you’ll naturally give up a lot of your bad habits, social programming, and re-align to your true essence; those negative habits will simply melt away like snow, once illuminated by the light of your own consciousness for a sufficient period of time. And then the feeling of having more than you need will become just a natural consequence.
Also published on Medium.
