When Finances Are Tight and the Path Feels Right
Cuando las finanzas están ajustadas y el camino se siente correcto
A student in the middle of a career transition, facing real financial pressure, asks whether practices like generating feelings of wealth contradict the path of surrender and awakening.
When Finances Are Tight and the Path Feels Right
A student in the middle of a career transition, facing real financial pressure, asks whether practices like generating feelings of wealth contradict the path of surrender and awakening.
I'm going through a really strange time right now. I'm transitioning careers, and this path I'm on feels right, feels aligned. I'm doing everything I can, including letting go and being open, to help nurture this new direction. But finances are incredibly tight. I've only gone through this once before in my life, where I genuinely didn't know how I was going to pay rent or my credit card the next month. I don't usually live like this. I'm usually responsible, saving, planning. But I've gone all in on this.
I've been trying to surrender, to allow, to trust, to listen to the signs and approach it from a higher-minded place. But I'm concerned about money now. My question is: am I cheating on this nondual path by doing something like Joe Dispenza meditations, trying to generate a feeling of wealth inside me? Is that counter to these teachings? Because I know a lot of this is about surrender, about trusting that we're the one being and it's going to take care of you. How does all of that fit together, and do you have any advice?
When we talk about things of the world, what we might call the human journey, there's a lot of room for error in our conversation. The more practical the advice, the more room there is for error. And when it comes to the non-practical, there's the challenge of putting into words something that can't be put into words, so there's room for misinterpretation and miscommunication. That's a kind of disclaimer for this type of conversation.
I know you're not specifically asking about purely practical things, but your question is a mix between practical life navigation and this work.
Surrender is not something you can do
The base of it is the surrender I talk about. I should say, I can't generalize these teachings. I don't fully know what others teach; I only know what I interpret. So I can't ever fully know where someone else's teaching is coming from. Joe Dispenza, for example, I like, but the surrender I talk about is something you can't do. It's not something you can practice. Any pointing that says "you have to surrender" or "practice surrendering" or "do this thing called surrender," I don't think that's possible.
What I talk about, the aspect that belongs to awakening, is a realization. That's all it is. And what does that mean? It means something you can suddenly see which you weren't seeing, but which was right in front of you. It's not finding something that wasn't there, something you discover because you've searched somewhere else and it appeared where it wasn't. It's always here. In a sense, there's nothing you can do to get there because you're already there.
There is, however, something you can do to see how you're not seeing that it's already here. That's what I propose these conversations for. There are a million other explorations, but they're all about seeing what's already right in front of you. And it's not even in front of you. It's what you are.
Ideas about where you're heading
Then there's the journey itself. You're transitioning careers, you've taken risks, and there are challenges. Without knowing you personally, it's just natural that there will be ideas about what you're moving toward or what you'll get if you go this way or that way. You're talking about an internal wealth, and you're referencing Joe Dispenza. I'm not familiar enough with his work to be surgical about his approach. In general, the little bit I know about him, I've liked, but it's very different from what I talk about. It might be more practical, or more valuable in the practical domain. It's not entirely unrelated. He is talking about aspects of waking up.
This is more of a clarification and a big disclaimer than a direct answer to your question. What's coming up for you from what I've said? Does anything resonate, or not? Maybe we can start from there.
What I'm hearing is that any choices, actions, or meditations I take are not really the point of the path of awakening. It's not about the activity; it's about seeing the space that's holding the activity. So you don't get too concerned about the activity portion, and you can perhaps do both at the same time.
Waking up and growing up
I can clarify that further, because I often separate this approach into two dimensions: waking up and growing up. They're related, they're inseparable. You can't fully grow up without waking up, and it's very rare to wake up without some growing up. But ultimately, it's all about the growing up. In a sense, it is about all the decisions that are happening. It is about life. That's all it's really about.
But if we focus only on that, then the thing that makes freedom possible, the thing that allows living in the most expansive way, gets overlooked. That's why I often focus so much on the core of waking up: it's already here. It can be realized, it can be recognized, and it's something so obvious once that happens. But because of its nature, it will be overlooked over and over again. It will be looked for in the life, in the choosing, in the experiencing, in the tomorrow, in the world of the mind.
Yet if all I talk about is that, it's also misleading, because it really is about life. It is about living in the most beautiful, loving, expansive way. In a sense, I love questions like yours, this mix between life and choices and this work. That's where the richest aspect of this work lives. But it's also the trickiest to work through.