Circle this Thursday May 8th, 2008 - Topic: Your relationship with money

We have a Voluntary Simplicity Circle this coming Thursday May 8th, 2008 - 7 to 9 pm,
28 East 35th Street (between Park and Madison Ave. - red door, ring the bell for the gallery)

Topic for this month's circle: Your relationship with money

We are going to talk about the thing no one wants to talk about: our relationship with money. As we have tossed the idea back and forth, I realize that we may need to just bring to the circle the issue related to money that is most important to each of us. Since we haven’t talked about money for a while, I think we need to brainstorm about it in a general way to see where we are at and then pick out topics that we want to go further in depth on at another meeting in the future.

Here are some things that came us to get us started thinking:

How do we earn our money, invest our money, save our money, (not) spend our money, donate our money in a way that coincides with our voluntary simplicity goals? Who do you inherit your spending habits from? How do we make money real?

In Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL), Dominguez and Robin define money as “something we choose to trade our life energy for. Our life energy is our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us. When we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money.”

From YMOYL: Step 4: Three Questions That Will Transform Your Life
1. Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction and value in proportion to life energy (money) spent?
2. Is this expenditure of life energy (money) in alignment with my values and life purpose?
3. How might this expenditure change if I didn't have to work for a living?

In thinking about what we do to earn money – the concept of “Right livelihood” is based around the Buddhist concept of harmlessness, and essentially states that practitioners ought not to engage in trades or occupations which, either directly or indirectly, result in harm to other living beings or systems. Right livelihood can also be defined as “the ideal of finding a way for your true work or vocation to be your paid work as well” (this is how Dominguez and Robin define it, though they don’t particularly advocate for it)

I will bring some resources. Please bring anything interesting that you want to share.

Kirsten