It's Not About the Money

If you, like me, have struggled with integrating your spirituality with your economics, your self-awareness with your bank balance, and all the rest of the challenges that go with showing up consciously around money in our often frenetic lives, Brent Kessel, “financial planner by day, yogi by dawn,” is your friend. And, his book, It’s Not About the Money, is a great-read.

It’s Not About the Money is all about pointing us to the spiritual path within our relationship to money—helping us master this part of our life to help us live in integrity with our highest ideals. As Brent wrote the book, he traveled around the world, interviewing such spiritual and investment luminaries as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Harold Kushner, David Whyte, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harry Markowitz, Vanguard Funds founder John Bogle, Ram Dass, and Joseph Goldstein. (You’ll find many of their quotes in the sidebar throughout this Note.)

It’s a remarkably transformative book—the myriad of exercises Brent shares brought me to tears several times—as I re-lived powerful episodes around money from my childhood and witnessed how these experiences have affected me throughout my adult life. AND how I can now use this awareness to better understand my financial archetypes and create a more conscious life around money. Powerful stuff.

If you’re feeling it, get the book to dive deeply into Brent’s brilliant process of discovering your Core Story that’s running your show and which of his eight archetypes show up in your life—from “The Guardian,” “The Pleasure Seeker,” “The Idealist,” and “The Saver” to “The Star,” “The Innocent,” “The Caretaker,” and “The Empire Builder.”

It’s quite remarkable to see which of these archetypes shows up when and how. And, as I said, what you can do about it. So, let’s sit down in quiet meditation as we explore some of Brent’s many Big Ideas and see just what the yogi/financial planner has to say about achieving spiritual and financial abundance!