To build the financial future you want, where do you begin? Not with your bank account, your paycheck, or 401(k)—the best place to start is to look within. As successful wealth advisors and dedicated spiritual practitioners, Spencer Sherman and Brent Kessel have discovered that if we disarm the charged emotions and distorted expectations we have about money, the path to prosperity becomes a surprisingly easy journey.

With The Money and Spirit Workshop, they present a powerful six-session training program for transforming your financial life—to increase your wealth, support your highest goals, and turn money into a lifelong ally.

The Money and Spirit Online Workshop

What is your relationship with money? Do you have enough of it? Do you get pleasure and satisfaction from earning it, spending it, and saving it? Do you feel generous with it? Do you handle it mindfully and thoughtfully? Do you feel you are investing it wisely and consciously? Are your values reflected in how you spend it, invest it, save it, share it, and gift it? |  Do you discuss money easily and confidently with your intimate partner, family, friends, colleagues, and clients? Do you relate to money in ways that are aligned with your spiritual intentions and values? Do you feel you are the equal of those who have more or less money than you? Do you feel competent to handle your finances skillfully? |  These are some of the questions you will have the opportunity to investigate in this course.

Welcome to The Money and Spirit Workshop

Money, Spirit, and Childhood

We highly recommend that you do the course with another person. We call this person your “money ally.” They can be your partner, sibling, friend, parent, coworker, or even a relative stranger. The support you will get and the opportunity to share your insights with one another will be invaluable to your progress. Choose someone who is reliable, and who can help you speak openly about money and navigate your money-life with greater honesty and integrity. You may wish to choose someone who can continue to be your ally even after the course ends. In this way, you can continue to offer each other support and guidance. |  We strongly recommend that you listen to the audio files and videos in conjunction with typing your answers in the spaces provided and recording your insights in a money-life journal (if you need more space than we have included in this workbook). Writing and journaling are key to increasing your awareness about your relationship to money in order to produce the largest money breakthroughs during the course. |  We also encourage you to listen to the recordings and do all the exercises at a time when you can give the course your full attention. In order to reverse conditioning that has been in place for decades, we recommend that you actively listen to and participate in the exercises to the fullest extent possible. |  We’ve also included downloadable inspiration cards that you can print, keep in your wallet, and use to bring a new level of mindfulness to your money life. These cards contain pointers, practices, and reminders to help you transform your relationship to money.

About The Money and Spirit Workshop

Money lives in us. We are conditioned to think about it and react to it in predictable yet often unconscious and unproductive ways. For right now, put aside what you think your relationship with money is. In this session we will explore the important ways we experience money unconsciously. |  In addition to understanding how we relate to money currently, we will explore where our money patterning comes from. We will look at our childhood Money Messages, and we will investigate the kinds of money lessons and values we learned from our parents and extended family. In this way we can understand the past, which will inform the present, and help us to chart a new money course. As we become conscious of the messages we received, we will have a choice to either continue living by them or chose new values and words to live by.

Course Overview

Let’s begin with a simple practice to help you understand your relationship to money. What follows are the “money words” we shared in the audio. We suggest that you listen to the audio first, and note the body sensations and emotions that arise as you hear each word. You can write your responses to each word in the spaces that follow. You might want to do this exercise now, and then again in six months after you have completed the workshop, noting the changes in your reflexive relationship to your financial life. | Some of the sensations and emotions that may come up will be uncomfortable; try to sit with and even welcome them rather than run away from them. They are ultimately the key to changing your relationship with money. The sensations and emotions you experience as you hear these words are the blocks to your financial freedom and prosperity, but they are also the doorway to a new way of thinking about and interacting with the power of money. By healing limiting beliefs you have about your money-life, you will be able to live with a new sense of ease and fullness in your financial life—on your own terms. | Here are some body sensations you might feel: tight, hot, cold, fast heart rate, rigid, flaccid, relaxed. | Here’s a short list of emotional states that you might feel: worry, fear, joy, sadness, anger, frustration, motivation, energy, anxiety.

Money Words

The Money Breath

Recall some of the favorite money aphorisms or pieces of wisdom that your parents and grandparents delivered with seemingly benign purpose. What did they tend to say repeatedly about money or their relationship to money? When you are feeling money stress or worry, what messages from your family seem to surface? Is it actually those beliefs that are the source of your stress or worry? | For example, whenever I (Spencer) take a day off to go to the beach or do something that can’t be measured in dollars, I hear my father’s voice say, “Money is the only thing that will give you security.” Often when I’m shopping, I hear my mother’s voice say, “We can’t afford it,” and then I hear the opposite voice of my maternal grandfather say, “Just go for it anyway.” Many of us hear these competing voices; no wonder we’re so confused about money. | Write down the first unproductive Money Messages that come to mind when you think about each of the following family members as well as your cultural upbringing. (An “unproductive” message is one that has not worked for you as an adult.) If you did not have a relationship with someone listed, leave it blank. (If there are other significant caregivers who influenced your relationship to money, feel free to substitute them.)

Money and Childhood

Your Childhood Money-Initiation Moments were times when you went through a strong emotional experience around money. The feeling–states generated by these experiences can be profoundly positive or negative, and it’s often the negative ones that lead to our distorted money habits. | Some examples of Childhood Money-Initiation Moments include seeing parents fight about money, having to move homes or schools for financial reasons, realizing your family had more or less money than others, feeling burdened or confused by how to manage money, enjoying the first time you could buy something for yourself, losing your first job, or watching your savings grow above $100 for the first time.

Childhood and Your Money Initiation

The key to not being hooked by our childhood Money Messages is the ability to unlink them from the feelings from which these messages are protecting us, such as fear. Doing so is possible, but it’s important to understand what’s happening neurologically when we feel a strong emotion like fear. Once we understand what’s happening when we react, it may be easier to change our relationship to the emotions that come up around money.

The Money and Spirit Online Workshop

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