Living With Money Course

First, you will meet 8 unique participants from varied cultures, countries, and experiences.

Our participants were honest and willing to share their deepest fears and most painful experiences about money, relating, and life. While we’re aware we can never know the full extent and story of anyone’s suffering, the following summaries offer the situations people bring to this program. You may find one of them is similar to yours, and track how the participant holding this story about money grows in insight during the course of the workshop:

• A middle-aged man who grew up in a middle-class white family has found meaningful work, but wants a higher salary and thinks of running his own business or finding another means of income. Has thoughts about partner’s capacity to pay for things like traveling together. Didn’t like his father’s earning track and his father’s beliefs about safety, career, and money. Looks at his siblings’ choices, comparing them to his. Considers corporations, the financial system, and institutions, and distaste for them at various times.
• A single mother in the UK from a lower-income white family struggles with anger and scarcity, constantly feeling as if she’s barely making ends meet, feeling unsupported and abandoned, and unsure about what direction to go with money. Her confidence with money is low. She helps others and doesn’t receive financial support for what she does.
• A married woman of international background who has one parent from Ethiopia and the other from Poland, who lives in Switzerland, does not work full time. She has thoughts like “I should have a good paying work” and “I need to be more successful”. She’s unsettled with receiving support from her husband.
• A man who grew up in Guatemala in a very religious missionary family now lives in the US married with fully grown independent children. He constantly notices anxiety about money. His wife is unemployed temporarily and has battled cancer. He shares thoughts, like so many of us have had religiously raised or not, that beliefs about money have been very confusing when it comes to spirituality, those who are rich, those who are poor, and the “evils” assumed about people and money.
• A single middle-aged woman from the mid-west/south who has never been married, has no children, and recently spent 3 years taking care of her father until he died, laments at her situation at having a limited amount to live on left (inherited from her father) and uncertainty about what to do next. She once was very successful as a make-up artist, and yet is nervous about stepping out into the world again–and at the same time curious.
• A married woman with two children from a white family who was trained as a nurse has recently gotten a part-time job as a nurse again after many years of being a stay-at-home mom while her husband worked as a doctor. She is ready to expand further into the world but concerned about disrupting the status quo.
• A Mexican woman with a very good but very demanding career navigates life with family, a boyfriend, being independent, and wanting more. She notices childhood stories about others with more money, advice given by relatives, a habit of over-spending, and her desire to be generous.
• A French mother of a 3-year-old who lives with her partner has paused her art career to care for her little son. She remembers a successful life in Indonesia doing her art, and being around wealthy patrons. She expresses concerns about remaining independent, guaranteeing safety for the future and her child’s future, and how much is enough.

It does not fully matter what the ‘story’ is behind someone’s life. We discover there are no new thoughts. And, how dear to notice we are not alone, we understand the conditioning of all the people and stories rising here. It is so good to come together in this process of inquiring and seeing our lives in new, fresh ways when it comes to money.