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Meditation, Mindfulness and Money: 4 ways to channel mindfulness into your money

Financial Planning Dentist

If you’re looking for some broader answers to the ‘universal question’ I’m not your guy and this is not that article. But I will say that after years of thinking the transcendental was not for me, I’ve changed. If it was real, here and now, I would investigate it for legitimacy. If it was ethereal and spiritual it was for guru’s, theologians, monks and priests. But that has changed for me. I now see mindfulness as a tool that has a very real way of actualizing my intentions, and meditation is the gateway to getting in touch with that. 

The deliberate focusing of your mind is no more than coaching it to react in a particular way. Drawing from techniques that are metaphysical (more controllable) and shaping the physical (less controllable). So, to cut through the chaos of daily life, and getting your mind thinking about money, or more broadly wealth is no more difficult than coaching it to think more deeply about your family, career, or your other passions. 

Visualize your financial goals

Players and coaches have for decades now taught visualization as a method for success. Mindfulness allows the player to be mentally prepared for a situation, before they are called on to act in that moment. To see their options and take advantage of opportunity by running through a situation and potential variables. This speeds up decision making ability and allows people to react faster and with a better sense of how a decision reflects the hope of a game plan. They do this to focus the mind on their desired outcome, before the situation arises.

Visualization can similarly help you premeditate the outcome you’re seeking for you and your family’s financial future. It is rarely a lack of opportunity that hinders success, but a failure of recognizing that opportunity in the moment it exposes itself. Having coached your mind to see and react to risk and opportunity is something that you mind can be coached into understanding before the opportunity presents itself.

Get real about your finances

By taking time to reflect and gain comfortability with your financial situation you can become more intimate and realistic with your expectations. By carving out time to reflect on your situation, the calmness of the moment can help you define more achievable outcomes. This is not to say you shouldn’t expect an extravagant life, but to help you control the resources at your disposal and become capable of mastering the decision making process in front of you. 

Through meditation you can calm down otherwise erratic parts of life and focus your mind with greater intention. You can isolate the parts about your financial life that bring you joy and contentment and ready your mind to make decisions that have often been the result of emotion or reaction. Deliberately bringing your mind into focus brings clarity to the more important aspects of your life.

Mindfulness about your past

Meditation can be used to deliberately shape the way you react to a situation. Using mindfulness it can also be used to relive and relearn from events in your past. Taking time to re-feel how a situation in your past affected your present is a way of coaching your mind to learn from those events. By using the emotions which drive so much of our decision making and combining that with the more deliberative parts of the brain, you can combine the events of your past into the reactions you hope are part of your present. 

Imagine if you isolate a single event from your past that shaped your current relationship with money. Reflecting through meditation the events that have caused your current understanding of your financial situation and the history you associate with the subject. You can then reimagine the events and outcome from your past. Learn from that very visceral event, and reshape how you would have rather reacted.

The goal is not to relive financial missteps that you cannot get back, but to coach your emotional reptilian brain to cede the lead to your primate and more deliberative brain. By reflecting on the emotional drivers in a meditative process you can recognize the leading indicators events and avoid them in your current situation.

Discover your money beliefs though mindfulness

By channeling meditation time towards your money habits you can have a more complete and intimate relationship with money. Meditation helps you uncover the person you want to be in life, to shape and imagine how that person thinks and reacts to help define what that person’s intentions about money are. We all hold certain money beliefs, usually as a reaction to our emotions with money and lifestyle. One you begin spending even small amounts of time focusing your mind on money and your relationship with it, you’ll find the beliefs you have about money change. Channeling a deliberate intention into your beliefs will develop more positive money reactions, and those reactions will evolve in habits. This process enshrines the positive money outcomes you desire, into tactical decisions you can control.

For many this transformation can happen in the way they save which is one of the leading indicators to financial success. They can transform the way they think and transform the way cash flows through their household flow from “income – spend = save” to “income – save = spend.” This shift in the belief that saving is more pressing then spending is not the natural state for most people, until they gain that more intimate and purposeful mindset around the value of saving.

Conclusion

Becoming more purposeful with your actions and ultimately your money begins with mindfulness. This mindfulness can be the result of focused meditation on the subject. Reshaping to the way you feel about and react to investment situations, market performance, and risk. Finding time to be deliberative about money allows you to cultivate your reaction to your money and better develop the fiscal life you want.  

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