Full article below. Also published on Medium with other writing.
I hope you enjoy, ponder, and ask bigger questions of your work and your life!
Release
to set free from restraint, confinement, or servitude
to relieve from something that confines, burdens, or oppresses
(Dictionary.com)
What does it mean to release? What does it really mean to set something free or relieve a person from burdens or confines in financial realms?
What is needed to cross the chasm of release? When I ask these questions, I often reflect upon the story of a woman who had sought my services because she wanted to pay down debt, increase savings, and leave her job to move overseas.
Simple enough? Right?
On the surface, this cookie-cutter-desire appears to be solvable — with calculations. Digging deeper, calculations were only a piece of the solution.
A middle-age woman, olive complexion, with bright eyes connected with me to begin her journey into all things money and meaning because she desperately wanted to move overseas.
She’d been in and out of budget software packages and had created multiple spreadsheets that cluttered her laptop like seashells on the shore. Abandoned and updated spreadsheets were littered among her desktop in various versions. Version five was opened when we met, creating a stark visual highlighting the number of times a new document had been created, ignored, and restarted.
She clung tightly to her spreadsheets, hoping they would give her financial answers and permission to move on in her life.
Her name is Lila — we’ll call her that. She represents many people who step into the waters of finance and money to figure out how to cultivate a solid financial path with trail markers for future decisions.
I began thinking about release because I have witnessed the promise that intricate spreadsheets and fine-tuned financial calculations will move people from constraint to freedom.
It makes sense. You work with the numbers to understand the numbers.
Right?
The age-old advice is rinsed and repeated:
- Save $X amount for retirement
- Build an emergency fund
- Pay down debt
Deal with your dollars and cents and this will create a path of freedom.
But will it?
I was trained to believe that the grips of money, the internal forces that keep people bound, would ease up by counting and guiding the numbers.
If people have a monthly expense number, a debt paydown number, a savings number, and a retirement number, their life would be clear. Oh yes, add in a catchup number for all those years where life didn’t go as planned — yes, ALL those years.
After this work, we were supposedly in the no worries zone where people feel free.
Right?
What I experienced was the exact opposite. People often shut down before they calculated; they didn’t come back to the work; didn’t finish the spreadsheet(s); or, they finished the spreadsheet — multiple times and hyper-focused on all the numbers. Neither process — calculations or no calculations — felt freeing or releasing. The process felt constraining.
Was there another process or innovative method — in addition to calculating — that would help people feel free of constraint?
What if guiding the numbers was helpful to a point, but then that point needed a different angle with significant life decisions.
Decisions like:
- changing jobs
- cultivating a new life path
- moving (cities or jobs or both)
- digging into age-hold financial habits
- exploring and shifting generational beliefs
I began noticing the edges where too much calculation seemed to make things worse. The edges became ledges with big chasms and wide abysses to cross. The chasms were hard to navigate with a plan or a too-tightly-held financial map. Mental contortions of imagination and vision made the chasm feel bigger. On these ledges, people tightened with overwhelming anxiety — more calculations weren’t the answer, but neither was no calculations. There was a place in between that needed more guardrails for support.
I began calling this place the chasm of release because it helped me visualize a whole different realm in the financial journey. The image of this realm is a pregnant woman — about to give birth — with nothing else to do, but breathe, move, live, moan, and be-in-the-process. Nothing else to do? Yeah, right! Except to traverse possibly the hardest chasm in the journey— release.
In the chasm of release the work changes.
It is no longer about more calculations, instead it is about being with the internal stuff that arises in the transition — anxiety, trauma, life stories, bodily sensations, and habits. The process is about breathing through the tightening fear or pushing into the new normal that comes right before the release. A helpful word cousin to release is surrender.
Surrender
cease resistance to an enemy or opponent and submit to their authority
(Dictionary.com)
During my sessions with Lila, I kept thinking about all the ways she was strong. All the ways she was already free, unburdened, and pulsing with hope, instead of what confined her. I asked about her life so that I could hear about her experiences of release and constraint.
We infused hope into the constraining energy she felt to activate forward motion in our sessions.
In these moments, we employed the Art of Money Jiu-Jitsu.
Money Jiu-Jitsu is a wonderful method to help people release from their internal constraints. It is based on the fundamentals of Jiu-Jitsu.
When an opponent is coming at you, you soften, bend, flex and feel into the energy to shift it back into your opponent.
“Jū” can be translated to mean “gentle, soft, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding”. “Jutsu” can be translated to mean “art” or “technique” and represents manipulating the opponent’s force against themselves rather than confronting it with one’s own force.
(Wikipedia)
We didn’t physically move together — in our sessions — but we did move the energy in our sessions with each word, vision, and calculation. We worked with constraining energy — or the ‘energy of Lila’s internal opponent’ — to stay in the process.
In Lila’s past financial story, she began tracking and calculating everything to escape the hard stories of her youth. Therefore, we deployed the opposite energy to bend with her internal forces by experimenting with a process where the numbers were considered a different way — away from the spreadsheet.
“Just talk,” I told her.
“Tell me what you experienced with money in your life.”
She knew her numbers — that was not her issue. In fact, she knew the numbers too well. Our conversation infused the spirit of imagination and vision into her process by lifting the numbers off her spreadsheet into a different realm of conversation. Out of boxes on a page into idea bubbles and shapes that had a chance to morph, change, bend, and grow.
With Money Jiu-Jitsu, we flexed with the constricted energy of hyper-calculation. We used innovative ways to bend the opposing energy which moved the numbers and fostered new perspectives.
We made room for vision and hope by seeing the numbers alongside the stories in her life.
Digging deeper, Lila and I focused on where the hyper-calculation was birthed in her life. What were the origin stories of hyper-calculation? We began to be with her stories of anxiety and survival. She told me of the pay-check-to-pay-check existence that cycled through her young life and then continued with a devastating divorce. She told me of stories she never, ever wanted to repeat.
She also told me about how money had made it all better.
But, had it?
Yes, in some ways, it had.
She was right.
But we met at a new intersection — with her upcoming move.
A new chasm of release.
We continued — with Money Jiu-Jitsu — to use opposing energy to shift, dream, bend, and reimagine her financials. When her anxiety spiked, we paused, breathed through the moment to see what was behind the energy. Where was it housed in her body? Where was she afraid?
Across time, she notified her job of her upcoming move. She stayed engaged with her numbers and her life! We kept working out her plan, bit-by-bit until she birthed her long-term vision of living and working overseas.
By working with the numbers in this way, we increased her awareness of the internal forces that kept her stuck — in her international move — but, also in many areas in her life. She saw those forces as an invitation to flex and move, not to be stopped and paralyzed.
Lila learned that she could move and flex in other ways too. She added yoga into her life which increased overall life movement. Her body and her numbers felt more freedom, more flowy, and more flexible. The spreadsheet calculations were still an intricate part of her life process, but it wasn’t the only way she made decisions for her future.
She felt less confined and less burdened! She had released.
Sometimes you don’t feel the weight of something you’ve been carrying until you feel the weight of its release.
(author unknown)
