Birju: Good evening. My name is Birju. I'm feeling that we started our circle with silence. I'm also feeling very grateful for our gracious hosts. The image I'm seeing right now is of an Indian rickshaw where you look in there and say, "How did they fit 12 people in that thing?" Beautiful space here. Not surprising, of course, given the topic of money and transformation. In fact, there was so much interest that there's a large waiting list of people that wanted to take part in this conversation, so it's actually being live streamed as well.

The conversation is something that we think of as a first step. As far as today is concerned, what we'd like to invite is something that is more of a personal relationship with money, something that is intimate, personal and perhaps even vulnerable. We'll start with a few friends who have been embodying these questions for a very long time to help seed the conversation and then go around as a group, one by one, share our reflections. To add some context on friends who are seeding the conversation -- first, we'll have Jerry Jacob Needleman who is author, a philosopher, a professor, too many titles. He's written a couple dozen books on the inner life including one called "Money and the Meaning of Life." I'm feeling so blessed to have him here. We'll also have Min Xuan Lee who is been asking these questions from the perspective of a social entrepreneur, followed by Mark Finser who has been embedding these questions into the organizations that deal with the intersection of money and value, and then we'll have Barbara Sargent, who has not only been embodying these questions, but also helping dozens of organizations into the inquiry.

To illustrate a bit about my own edge, I'll share a personal story. A few years ago, I was working at a company, I was pulled in for my year-end review, and my boss who is part of an investment firm said, "Well, I'd love to reward you for the good performance of this year, so what would you like?" It was an open-ended question and open dialogue so I appreciated that. I'm sure there's a certain kind of answer that was expected, and the answer that I was sitting with was, "I want to shift my story, and I want to offer a way to shift the relationship as a result." What I asked for was a moment of silence before our company meetings.

He was quite incredulous upon hearing this. I think he actually laughed in one of those nervous laughs like, "I don't know." [Laughs] Eventually, he came back and said, "Okay, let's try it out." We started with this minute of silence, and over the course of years, the kind of relationship, the kind of non-financial wealth that was created was radically different as a result of this process. I think what it invited out of me was faith. You always hear, "A bird in the hand in better than two in the bush," but not in this case. Practicing faith first seem to have a huge impact, so that's the kind of reflection that we'd love to invite as we go around. I'd love to get us started with Jerry.

Jerry: Thank you. I feel I'm uniquely qualified to share since I don't really understand this question of money -- which is why I wrote a whole book about it. I'm a philosopher or a professor of philosophy, and that means I've made my life, my career, trying to contemplate and penetrate what I have come to call -- the great questions of the heart. Questions that are, in a way, ultimate and that define us as people, as human beings. Questions that are not answerable to science or even by many of the religions that we go to. Questions such as, "Who am I? What am I? Why do we suffer? What can we know? Why is there evil?"

I've come to the sense that the we human beings have two fundamental turns forces within us. One is to function well and honorably in this world, this life, this material world -- spending, materiality, family, success, health, community. Another current, another aspect of ourselves, another part of our human nature is our quest for what we call inner faith transformation or transcendence or openness to a higher reality within us and the universe. These two natures define us. And we're here on earth to come to a balance between the two, each on its proper role. That's where meaning comes in. The meaning of our life seems to be, putting it very briefly, is when we can stand in between those two fundamentally, seemingly contradictory, elements of our human nature, and allow them to be balanced in some way such that the lower, outward, and external forces serves the inner and the higher, into a third reality where a human beings is full. That was inquiry that I considered to be ultimate in my books, my teachings as a professor, and in my personal life.

I'd like to tell a couple stories to illustrate my search for that transformation, across the great spiritual teachings of the world, and my exploration of what's possible for a human being.

When I started in the university, and started studying philosophy, not really understanding what it was although having tasted it when I was young, and I came back to my family in the first year of college. I was from a standard Jewish family, not very religious, but very traditional, which meant that I was obliged to become a doctor, metaphysically and socially. [Laughs] Although I loved science and biology, I had to risk telling my parents, especially my father, that I've decided to become a professor of philosophy. Neither of my parents went to college, but my father -- a very strong physical man -- heard and his eyes went slightly crossed. He wanted to know what a philosopher does for a living, and I told him we tried to contemplate the ultimate questions of why we're here on earth, what our life is for, does God exist. And his eyes got closer and closer. He said, "Can't you do that and also be a banker?" [Laughs]

My mother, later on, when I got my PhD at the university, and there was a party for a Dr. Needleman, she called out to the crowd, "Oh, he's not the kind of the doctor that does anybody any good." She was a very loving person, by the way. But at this party, everybody was startled and then everybody laughed. I didn't laugh, but I loved her anyway.

Now I like to skip to something that is very intimate -- and maybe it's Mr. Buddha there, but somehow I find myself become trusting in this environment.

Money in our modern world, I still fundamentally believe, is the principle of technology for organizing our outer life, our life in the world. And it's a mystery, or rather it is startling, that no one has really helped many of us to understand the actual role of money in the search for transformation for contact with God, whatever language you want to refer to the divine.

That gave a definite orientation toward my own spiritual practice, which meant that I would try to start observing how I actually am with money before I started to try to be different with it, or before I lost myself in trying to change my way with dealing with money. I came from a family where my father and his parents were tremendously frightened about money, and concerned about money, having come over from Russia, the Ukraine, and being here in this world and terrified themselves. They were devoted to the functioning in a way that every penny counted and there was fear about money in my father's bones. I grew up surrounded by that fear. When I told them that I was becoming a philosopher, and every time I would come back and talk about philosophy, and finally, and especially when I became a professor of philosophy, I came home very proud of myself and wanted to show them I've written a book about philosophy and various things, and his response was almost always: "How much do you earn?"

It shook me. I didn't really want to say anything else.

I was still discovering meaning, opening ideas, facing dogma questions, and great ideas from ancient men, ancient traditions in the East and West, but no matter what I would do and no matter how well my career went, every time I came back home, my father's first question was, "How much do you earn?"

It really annoyed the hell out of me, and it hurt me. Time went on, lots of time, almost 50 years or more, and he was lonely, living alone with severe diabetes. My mother had died, he had finally gone to an elder care home, and his illness was getting bad. Around the age of 87, he was in the hospital, and my brother and I went to visit him. The doctors told us, "Looks like we're going to have to amputate." He had been through so much. My brother and I talked to each other, we went outside for a long time, and we decided it's unbearable for him to have to face this. We were going to let him, have to let him, go because he was very, very weak.

You can see why this is rather intimate.

As I was about to leave to go back, as he was in the hospital bed in pain, I whispered in his ear, something I have never been able to say: "I love you, Dad." I never have been able to say that to him.

He looked at me very quietly and said, "How much do you earn?"

I was so shaken by that. I couldn't believe it. I kissed him and I left.

As I was going back home, I realized that was his way of loving. All the posture he had for expressing love was around money; that was part of his life, and it washed everything clean.

Now I tell that story, which I've never told in public before, but I tell it today because I wanted to raise a deeper question. When we are faced with uncertainty, we can respond in two ways -- one as problems to be solved, and the other as questions to be lived. We sometimes short circuit that great distinction, that our problem requires our functions, our thinking, our physical actions, our organizational ability, our emotional sensitivity, but a question is something that draws us inward, that we need to draw us inward, and open to our truth of ourselves, true impressions of ourselves so that eventually the questions become mysteries.

A mystery is an unknown that attracts another energy into us if we can live with it. There's a deeper mystery with money, that centers around our fundamental human nature. It has to do with desire, in this world and culture. Money was a particular system here in the Western world, especially America, which was created largely by men and women, by certain men, to find some problem and to solve that problem. In Europe, for example, the concern was murder and warfare and brutal life.

Many wondered if there was something that can counter what they call "passions", the attachments and craziness -- and ego, really -- that they understood was causing the wars. And they created a system that involved wealth, money, possessions, status ... what they called "interests" as opposed to "passions". The passions were destroying people. Was there something in human nature, without trying to make everybody into a saint, that could counter the force of the passions? There was the "interests", which became what we call capitalism. This capitalism was originated to make those forces counter the destructive passions.

[Is there another, better way, to counter the passions?] I'm opening a question, that I hope contributes to our circle, and also because it certainly need an answer.

Birju: We can just take a breath before we move on. Thank you. I like to turn over to Min then Mark and Barbara who can share different perspectives on this question for a few minutes each.

Min: Hi, everyone. I'm really humbled to be here because I'm seeing all the others and people who have gone ahead on the path, and it's a reminder that no matter how far along the path we are on, money is still a mystery, and money is still a work in progress. I get very inspired by kids, kids have fantastic relationship to money. The story about a father who asked his little kid, "It's mom's birthday, what should I buy for her?" More often than not the kid was like, "If you love someone, just play with her." Very, very simple, but somehow as we grow up, there's something that society does to us, we get socialized into this world, and this topic means so much to me personally because today, one in five young people are diagnosed with depression, and they attribute money to the biggest source of stress in their lives, not sleeping, overworking, consumption, keeping up. I come from Singapore, and it's a place with wealth, but if you look below the surface, there's a lot of burnout, there's a lot of insecurity.

We did a recent research study with young people, and it's a financial health check that we gave. We put in this new scale, and there's a scale to measure emotions, and "How do you feel when you use money?" We collated the results, a few things popped up, and across the personas, the one emotion that came up across income level across how you spend your money was discontent, everybody. The top 1/3, it was, "How do I stay at the top?", the middle was "How do I compete to be at the top?", and then the bottom was "How do I even hope to compete with the middle?", like across it is just discontent. When we look into a nuance of all the other emotions, we found that very much to Jerry, the profound wisdom you shared about the two natures that how we use our money is actually our way of us acting out, that in a struggle that we have not resolved, and I see that in my own healing. With spending, it's sometimes tied to loneliness, where hoarding is tied to lack of inner security, money avoidance is tied to fear, workaholism is tied to escaping everything, and all these inner struggles that manifest through money.

I think that brings me back to my own personal practice, to bring back to a personal, which is I've been thinking a lot about how the deepest problem is that everybody seems like they're okay, everybody is coping well, no one's talking about it. The space is all sacred because, I think, our generation needs a new story. The personal practice is I've been growing up with a friend for 20 years and we have never been able to talk about money. Can I meet her in the eye and offer a space of non-judgement so that she can be vulnerable? The moment I did that, for the first time in 20 years, she told me that she's on therapy, I never knew. For practice, how do I open that space for just everyone I know? I think the second thing is also I was thinking about the little boy, we have that healthy relationship to money when we can trust every fall, every stumble, we have our parents behind us. My own personal edge is, "Do I have the courage to trust that when I stumble, there's something out there?" We turn to laws of nature. In this monetized world, we actually need the truth to need other people. Now, I'll pass, thank you.

Mark Finser: I have a favor to ask you, could you hold my mic for me? I have a benign tremor and it makes me very self conscious. Really wonderful to be here with all of you ... Got it, oh that's good ... Already the stories are already so full that one could just focus on those. I'm reminded of today is Fathers' Day and there has been some weedings of fathers already in the stories and I'm incredible grateful to my father who was the inspiration really of the organization that I have found called RSF Social Finance. Our parents' stories really play themselves out in our lives as well. Mine is where my father really had a lot of ambivalence around money, and so he throughout his career, he would make money and then he would stop making money, and do what he really wanted to do, and then things would get ... My experience as a child, things would get sold, houses would get sold, and cars would get sold, and start sharing with other people and sharing cars, and sharing washing machines, and then there was another phase where he would then go back to work and do something that maybe he didn't want to do, and then so that up and down cycle, and to watch how that's played, it's about around my own issues around security.

The journey around working with a whole theme of how to transform the way the world works with money is really been a lifelong journey, and again I feel like I'm just at the beginning, after 31 years of being part of RSF Social Finance, and its beginnings when I was 24, and there's so many stories I could share like others, how they brought their money through RSF. RSF, as some of you know, really has tried to be a different kind of a bank, so in some ways I would have loved to have told your father, Jacob, yes, you can be a philosopher and a banker, a different kind of banker, but it really is a different kind of banker. It's not what we normally think on our relationship to Wall Street, and really that's been the journey. Ultimately trying to look at the qualities of money and really see the difference within money itself, the qualities of money that show up around buying and selling, qualities that show up around lending and borrowing, and the qualities that show up around giving and receiving, and how each one of them have the opportunity to give us the opportunity actually to bring those two forces that Jacob described, in some ways in harmony with each other.

There's just glimmers that each of us can experience in our lives where those qualities can actually form themselves and really enhance what, in my view, is our main mission in life, human mission in life which is to continue to grow the capacity for love, and that can actually show itself in all those qualities. I've seen it, not only externally and the work that I've been involved, but I've also seen it in my own life. I would say the more recent journey in the last eight years has been around care-giving for my wife who was diagnosed with dementia eight years ago. One of the first manifestations of her dementia was that she somehow felt that we didn't have any money anymore, and so she would go wherever she went and would take things. She would just take things in stores or wherever she was, and that was even before the diagnosis. It was one of the qualities that was hard for, not only me, but for my children who were teenagers at the time to see.

Yet as she became more and more like a child, and today is even more like a child, you realize that there actually has been a journey there for her and for the family because after all, a child also takes those things and loves to give because she also loves to give. The most amazing game that our children loved was giving and receiving, giving, giving and then receiving, giving and receiving, and that was her. It's not like she kept them or necessarily even hoarded things, she would just pass them along. Now she lives in a place of complete gift, and for me, the journey has been around the question of security, of giving her the sense of security, but also recognizing that her transcendence into another form of consciousness because I clearly have watched her evolve to another place where it is absolutely pure love.

Her language went first, she hasn't spoken in four years. One of the last things that she would say before she could no longer talk at all was, "Feel my love." It's one of the last things that she would say. I must say, I can't tell you how many times today I say that to her now. Not only do I say that to her now, but I also say, "I feel your love." Even though she hasn't spoken, there's something that transcends and transmits between us. Maybe I'm a little full of it because I'm home this weekend which is the first one in a long time so I'm full-on caregiver again this weekend, and so again such a tremendous gift. The last thing that personally our marriage since this, which is just a miracle, absolutely a miracle around money, which is it's like her condition has manifested an abundance of love coming towards us, the two of us. I am just surrounded by love by so many who bring their love towards the two of us. Maybe it's because she's in another dimension, and she brings it, she's helping to manifest it. It's also helped in relationship to my practical work. We have the material life that we have to work in, and there's lot of expenses.

The clients that have shown up that I'm able to work with around these are themes around money, but my only requirement has been that, that there be a commitment for one year, but I don't set a fee. I don't set a number. I don't say, "This is what it's going to cost you to work with me." They have to come up with a number, sometimes we'll meditate together on it, but they have to come up with a number. At the end of the day, it's felt more and more like a gift like what is happening is a transmission of gift, and not only that, it's like paying it forward. Those who have just signed up with me this year said the usual thing, "How much do you charge?", and all those kinds of things, got blown away and very angry at first that there isn't some number that they can either negotiate, or that they can at least know that there's something fixed, but that's not the way. I feel like I can work right now because of the journey I'm on with my wife, so I say, "Well, actually the work that I'm going to do with you that's been paid for already, that's been taken care of."

The main question for you to think about is, "How would you like to contribute so that others can benefit maybe down the road?", and that tends to be a little bit of crack of opening for them to realize that maybe there is another way. It's made me realize that actually more and more of our services could really be done that way, and for me, it's been something that has happened because of this mutual service that's been happening in connection with journey with care-giving, and with the work in partnership with my wife. Thank you.

Barbara: I'm going to speak about when I was growing up with my family, we lived comfortably but we didn't have an over amount of money. Unbeknownst to me or the years, or when I was 22, actually a small amount of money came to me from my family's business, and then over the years it just grew, I wasn't prepared for it. My father said, "Just put it in the bank and forget about it, it's trouble. Just forget about it." I did that but by the time I was mid 30s or so, it really was bothering me. I just started asking questions of myself, and I had some very close friends who helped me, and eventually I decided to ... Actually it was a meditation retreat I was on in which this train came plowing through me, and it said, "Just start a foundation." This is exactly the opposite of any message I would ever get from within my family, "it's just trouble, it's exposure, endless requests," all kinds of things, but something in me just wanted to do something different to what the conditioning was, and it really was really on my edge. I still have such a hard time with exposure.

Anyway I eventually founded Kalliopeia Foundation. The mission of Kalliopeia is to support the evolution of communities and cultures that honor the unity of the heart of life's diversity. When I was thinking about it, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to start a foundation. What should it be about?" I looked back and thought, if only in the greater culture that I was part of, and in my community, and in my family, what's sacred had been held in a way that somehow spoke to me? Maybe I wouldn't have gotten into all the different kinds of trouble that I got into, and maybe I would've held on to inner messages that I was getting all along that I ignored. I wanted the foundation to be about our spiritual center, all of us. I wanted it somehow to begin to use the language of spirituality within the foundation so that maybe it would be picked, or maybe it would just add to the collective consciousness in some way. It was really uncomfortable and always to do this, to start the foundation, to be the person who was starting the foundation, to use that language and all those things.

Anyway now it's like, I don't know, maybe 17 years later, it's an established foundation, and it's making a contribution. From this perspective now, I can say, I still have ... I just am a personality who's born with all kinds of difficulties around money and issues around money. I have to leave the things about the personality to decide, and speak to how wonderful it feels, maybe call it my soul or whatever. I was born into a situation that grew into this abundance of money, and then I took the step and some part of me is happy that that money is all the way behind me in some bank. I feel like it just is so important. Even though it still brings me issues, there's just joy that it is doing what it's doing, and that it's contributing to such an evening like this where we're talking about this, and be part of the beautiful stories that have been shared, and the questions that are being asked. Not comfortable, but I'm so glad it's coming out of me in this way, so that's the short of it.

Birju: Thank you, Barbara. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Min. Thank you, Jerry. We like to go around now and the question we're sitting with is, "What is the practice that you have with money that allows you to experience your own boundary of comfort?" Thank you.

Rose: I sat in a good place, I guess. My name is Rose Feerick. The answer that comes to mind today is I have a practice of trying to simplify my own lifestyle, and I live in a ... My children are in school in a community that is an extremely wealthy community, so the practice is to really remember who I am, and what my own relationship with money particularly as a spiritual practice, which is how I see it, as I'm inside of a culture that is oriented incredibly differently, so that's the practice, to remember myself in my relationship with money.

Krupa: Hi, I'm Krupa, and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that spoken. Professor Needleman, I'm a graduate student in philosophy. Everything you said resonated really well with me especially because I also come from a family that, I think, it was just because they immigrated here to, and so there's a special relationship with money in terms of showing care through money oftentimes, but also a responsibility. I struggle with that, but I hope I can continue to do philosophy, and be more comfortable with my experiences with money.

Thuy: Hi, my name is Twee. I also grew up in a childhood with mixed messages of money. We came from very little, and very religious Catholic, so there was the message of money being the root of all evil and not bringing you happiness, but at the same time you got to make as much money as you can, so I'm really confused. I was really confused about money, so I too figured out those things on my own. I think, at one point, I decided went through this spiritual belief that, "Oh yeah, money is the root of all evil and all that." I realized I want to really experience that. I want to really have a lot of money, and know that it doesn't bring me happiness like really experience the emptiness of being rich, but I wasn't very good at that. I went through a lot of different iterations of my relationship with money.

Most recently, in my acupuncture practice, still that donation shift where people pay what they can because they think, also as the result of my upbringing, I've always had an affinity with population of people and wanting to help, and that has also has just been really interesting to me to watch other people's relationship with money that it's actually very uncomfortable for people to figure out what they can pay. To keep this short, my practice with money is to remind myself that we believe that money brings us something, it's means. A lot of times what we think it brings, we actually can have right now. We think we need it to bring love, or security, or whatever it is through all these different channels. When I remind myself of that then I look for what, I think, money can bring and I realize that so much, we don't need money. Thank you.

Evan: My name is Evan. Briefly, one thing that I try to is just to be engaged in this conversation and these questions quite frequently as it relates to myself. Something a bit more personal, maybe about two years ago I started having a physical injury with my arms, it made it very difficult to use computers. I still have it but it's not quite as bad as it was. Especially back then I took six months off from computers and I couldn't really use iPhones, iPads, all these different things, and so it's very frightening. It called into question ... It is very frightening, it called into my ability to work, to be productive, to make a living in the traditional computer based society that we're in. A lot of my notions with myself and my identity started to tear down to a certain extent. You start questioning what does life look like if you're not able to use computers, if you're not able to engage in the traditional corporate ways or business ways or whatever it is, the ways that I viewed myself and my future.

There was a lot of stress in my life, but not only about money, but also this identity, and then I just stepped into a different perspective of that. With that aspect of having it fall down and break down, and stepping into a new space around identity, and stepping to a new place of partly that it'll be okay either way, that I'll be supported and all, either get through the injury, or I'll figure out a different way to support myself, or create a different identity outside of something that I have previously thought of myself. Still on that process now, it's certainly not resolved, and I'm moving forward in a place of uncertainty and still fear around it, but having that resolution, having that dissolution and that movement was helpful because it helped me reframe my relationship to money, and to just identity and purpose, and the way that I'm living my life.

Guri: Hi, my name is Guri. I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but for some reason, I always knew that love was more important to me than money. I started working when I was 17, so I went through this fear. To me, as a woman, money meant independence, it meant choice, it meant being able to have more freedom in life. In 1999, though, we started a non-profit organization, Service Space, where, for some reason, we decided one of our three core principles would be that we would not fundraise. That was just perfect. As an organization, I can see how so many years later, 15 years later, we're in such a different place, and we function so differently, and we attract very different people because of that one principle. There were so many times that people wanted us to really actively fundraise, do grants and such. I remember I was always very clear that that would bring in a kind of messiness, that would take away from our motivation to serve.

Organizationally, it always made a lot of sense, but personally, it was flipped for me. In 2005, Nipun and I went on a walking pilgrimage in India where we lived on less than a dollar a day between the two of us. It was an experiment in trust. I went from this, "I earn my own money and I'm this self-made person" to now, trusting the universe for my every meal. The fact that we walked for three months, and we were taken care of it ... it really shattered my whole belief system that it's really even stupid to think I had done all of it up to that point. It really shatters that. As long as you continue to add value to the world, the world somehow meets to take care of you. For me, that was a huge lesson in simplicity. I also went through a phase where I almost had an aversion to money which also, I think, is a little bit negative because you can go to this other extreme.

I grew up with this idea of building a good career, making money, and creating security. But now, it comes in, it goes out. It has its own nature. You're not consumed with it. There are much bigger questions to ask in life, and questions around money are just a bookmark on the side. I think that it has found its right place.

Audrey: Hi, my name is Audrey. There are a lot of moments that come to mind on this topic. What I was reminded of is a moment a few years ago when I was in India, a bunch of us spent a day with a family in the slums. We all got together, and we were paired up with a vegetable seller, a janitor, a rickshaw driver, a street sweeper, and we were literally hosted by them, in their homes. I was paired up with the vegetable seller, and she took us ... She didn't even wanted to take us to her home, she took us to her brother's home. We were there, she was showing us pictures and different things, and her daughters were preparing the meals. I tried to help but I messed it up more, so then we went in the living room and we're just talking.

She just looks me in the eye, she just says, "How much money do you make?" In that moment, my heart stopped because here I am, in the slums, in this woman's home who's feeding me dinner, and offering so much love, and showing me pictures of all different things, and just so open heartedly giving everything she has and more than what she has, and I thought, "How do I even tell her?" At that point, all these thoughts in my mind came out, "Well, I have to do the math to covert dollars to rupees." I was like, "Oh, I really don't know. Hold on, let me think about it." I was trying to do the math, and I don't even think I gave her a straight answer. I just went around it a little bit or thought tried to make it get lost in translation, but that moment, really stuck with me because I remembered thinking that, "How did I become so complicated? When did all these walls start to go up?"

If I was a child, that would be such an easy thing to answer or even at what point did this happen to my mind? I was just like I want to live with that kind of transparency where I can tell her how much I'm making, not have all this complication around it. When Birju asked, "What practice do you have around money now?" I think, lately or most recently, I've been trying to think about when I spend money, what am I spending it for when I'm gone like when I'm not here anymore? What am I spending it on that something that will last beyond me? Even it's just food, am I sharing it with somebody? Yeah, different things like that.

Nipun: Hi, my name is Nipun. I'm really enjoying the stories, I'll pass.

Bhoutik: Hi, everyone. My name is Bhoutik. I'm really grateful for this dialogue because, primarily, because I just started my first paying job, and a lot of these questions have been coming up which has ruffled a lot of feathers without any answers. Thank you for sharing your stories and wisdom.

Pam: Thank you. My name is Pam. I'm also grateful to be in the circle with people asking these questions. Practices, I grew up with a really messed relationship to money. I grew up in La Hoya, California. My father was a public servant, so we didn't have very much money but we were surrounded by people who had a lot of money. What I saw was, a family that, both sides of my parents' families, all of our extended family from Nebraska, were working their way up to be able to live where they were living, and so there was such a focus on money, and yet the people I was around, their lives were really messed up with the money. I made a connection to money being evil, and money being what messes people's lives up. I've been playing with that throughout my life and my practices.

I love what you said, is so true in my practices that there's problems to be solved, and there's questions to be lived. For me, when it gets to money, that's part of the problems to be solved, and so I have to get to a detachment, my practice is getting to a detachment around money that causes me go into the deeper questions around it because that gets me out of the, "it's not bad and it's not good." It's simply something that we use to move through this life that's based on relationships, and it's based on what really matters, and what are the deeper questions. For me, the practice, is getting back to the questions, and being able to detach from the thing of money, and getting to the place of what's real wealth.

Aaron: Peace and blessings, greetings. I'm Aaron Ableman. It's a real honor to be with you all. I was reflecting on my story which I think is so much ingrained, and guides a lot of my practices. I was actually born in Michael Douglas's basement, believe it or not, the actor. My father was gardening for him, my mother was cooking for him. They always vowed to have a home birth, and this just happened to be where they were living at the time. They had actually answered a random ad in the newspaper, and it was the Douglas family, of all things. When I was a month old, we moved north of Montecito which is the richest, or it was at the time, "the wealthiest county in the country" to Goleta, which is everything that Santa Barbara county and Montecito, that area, is the working class, where all the targets, and smart bomb factories, and all the craziness of working class people, in a very strange place of such incredible wealth where Oprah lives all the way to the Campacinos that I grew up with.

My father is a farm worker. I was raised on this farm which was very much a symbol for me in relationship with the working class view that my parents held. Looking at the world through this very dynamic lens, and every single conversation at dinner time was always about, what justice movement, and who was shot down the street, and who's homeless, and who needs to come and eat at our table. It was this constant, almost obsession, with how to serve, and how to speak to the suffering of the world, which is really my mother's heart coming from just this deep place of love.

The one other thing I wanted to share coming back to money is when I was about eight years old, my mother said, "We're taking a trip to Nicaragua." She's a public healthcare nurse and cook, and she was doing her work. The one thing I was so amazed by ... First of all, I said, "Where is Nicaragua? Is that by Los Angeles?" We ended up in this really strange land, and over the course of the three months that we're there, we shared and we slept on a military cot. Every sunrise, we traveled through the banana plantations across this war zone, and visited this orphanage. I was always so amazed by how much spirit and love was shared, and how much community and giving there was on behalf of the people that "have nothing" and that really translated to me across culture and language. I think that's really how I lived my life in the best of my North Star, is really to live from a place of service, and love for fellow humanity, and this amazing planet that we live on. Thank you.

Kozo: Hi, my name is Kozo, and I'll pass the buck.

Anuj: Hello, my name is Anuj. I'm feeling very blessed to be here with all of you. A monk once told me that the higher the level of consciousness and awareness we can bring about ourselves, the richer we get, the wealthier we get. The pursuit of happiness may be is more than money, and I'm happy to explore that here with you all. Thank you.

Tapan: Thanks. Yeah, my name is Tapan. When I came in here and sat down, I sat down on my wallet. My wallet is really thick because I have a lot of money, and so I was really uncomfortable, I was sitting like this. I took it out and I put it next to me, and somehow it's more uncomfortable to have it here because I think I'll forget it, or someone will see me holding it, and they're like, "I really want his wallet." I'm somehow more nervous to have it here, I think that really represents my dichotomous relationship with money. You know what they say, "More money, more problems." I really have a hard time with money because I feel like ... My basic practice with money is to spend as little as possible because I feel like if I spend a lot of money then I'll money, and if I need money then that means people can start telling me what to do because they know I need money, right? I have to work for somebody and do all these things. Right now I'm in this web of people telling me what to do, and that makes me really nervous.

My father also wanted to be a doctor, I didn't. I have this narrative in my brain, "I'm not a doctor, and so I better save all my money. What's going to happen? It's going to be horrible." I really have that narrative in me, but I think, I feel that's coming out of a place of fear, and not like the trust that Guri was talking about. I feel like it is a limitation, but I don't know how to engage in a way that doesn't give away my freedom, and my agency, and my ability to say no to things I don't want to do, I don't know, that's the trouble I have with money.

CJ: Hi, I'm CJ. Like most people here, I try to be a conscious consumer, and I think about where things come from when I purchase, and I barter with my friends. I try to live as simply as possible, but still be creative. I've noticed definitely hard, there's a lot you can't do without money. There were times when I couldn't even make friends, I've moved to a new city, and I wouldn't have enough money to go out, and so I wouldn't get to make friends. I wouldn't have enough money to sometimes take a bus, or I couldn't afford a car, I couldn't drive to the event, so I would sit home alone, and that was interesting time. The thing with money is that I cannot, when we talk about systems, I cannot spend a dollar without thinking about the system it's part of in this global pyramid scheme we're in. I can't make any purchase at all even to a friend without thinking of this thing that I'm part of, and that we're all part of, now this whole world almost is part of. Systems are caused by patterns, patterns are caused by beliefs.

I'm so grateful, thank you for writing that in your book because your book actually was the missing piece I was looking for to figure out why I was so upset about money. I've been to these spiritual classes like, "All your needs can just manifest, you deserve $300 an hour." Everyone can't make $300 an hour, and actually we don't especially not in this pyramid scheme situation. For me, it is living into the question and getting to be around people like you who are living into it. Me too, I'm starting a website, Common Cents, to live into these questions too, and hopefully the beliefs, and thankfully we're trying to have these dialogues. Why do we believe that equality is okay? Why do we believe that Team America deserves to have the world's resources? With these questions, I think that you have to be part of everything, for me. Thank you.

Lynn: Hi, my name is Lynn. Boy, what a complex and deep subject. My own personal practice that I'd like to share is that I did to come to a place in my life where I realized that it was probably going to be a pattern that I would have more money than I needed, and so I sat with that and decided that I would regularly give money away. The immediate result of that was I wanted to control the money that I had to give. The next learning was when I just gave from love and intuitively, that I was not supposed to be like the god of that money. I was responsible to get rid of it, and so that's my own personal practice.

Just something else I want to share tonight, I have a personal interest in furthering the implementation of the gift economy, and one of the thoughts that I had tonight was when I give a gift, for me, it's a such an act of the creative force when I give a gift, just how to have more of that in the gift economy. Just the last little thought that I had was, with you sharing, the words that came to mind were worth and then worthy, especially when we put the word, net, in front of worth, there should be no connection there. Thank you.

David: Hi, everyone. I'm David. This such an amazing conversation, I'm loving it so much. I guess I would start by saying I've been a lover of money since a very early age. Michael Douglas was actually quite an inspiration to me, him in the movie Wall Street. I became an investment banker, I didn't know what they did, but I knew they made money, and that was important to me. At 33, I quit, and became more of a philosopher, I guess, and I did a lot of searching. I feel like one of the practices that feels really important to me is asking the question, "What is money anyway?" What is this thing that we're talking about? What does it mean? What does it represent how well do I understand its role in the world, and what I can it for because it's an amazing invention really. It's incredible when you think about what we are able to create with money, and of course, it also is amazing how it enables accumulation and I could go on and on.

I feel like as I came to know myself a little bit better, I came to realize that fundamental to who I was, there's a sense of lack, I guess, is a good word, something missing. I don't think there's anything that has more promise of filling that hole than money does. If I think about anything that I love like ice cream, and I do binge eat ice cream to make myself feel better, eventually I've had enough, eventually it makes me sick. There's something about money that represents this unlimited possibility to fill all of the things that are missing with me.

I feel like that, that has been part of my practice is understanding myself more and understanding my relationship to money. I was talking with ... I'm going to use his words, Andrew Harvey, because I like to think of money as a vector, it's really just an energetic carrier for whatever it is that we give to it, and as Joseph Campbell says, "It's a storehouse of energy." If I could summarize my practice with money with that, I feel like everybody is talking about this to an extent, just to let our way that we release money into the world be an emanation of the energy of our heart. Thank you.

Arathi: Hi, everyone. I'm Arathi. Really, really loving the stories. Thank you all for being here. I'll pass.

German: Hello, my name is German. Thank you to Service Space for this wonderful opportunity to be here, and to listen to all of you talk and share, and for shaking my world in so many different ways. This subject, it is so incredibly deep, and it can be incredibly troubling too. I really appreciate your way of referring to, or pondering upon it, in such a caring, and vulnerable, and profound way. Thank you for the vulnerability of your stories, it's very touching, and in that way, very moving, and very inviting to look at my own, what I have to share about money.

One story that came up for me, and I just remembered, after many years of not remembering it, it was that my father when I was probably 12, at some point I didn't want to go to school anymore. He knew that he needed or wanted me to be successful in life, so his way of coercing or inviting me to be not a failure in life was he came one night with a sack with something in it that I didn't really know what it was, it was about this size. He just put it in the bench, we had a bench in the entrance of the house, I looked at it and I didn't know. A couple of hours later, he asked, "Do you know what's in the sack?" I said, "No." "Well, there's a shoe shining box with a little stool. If you don't want to go to school, you're going to work for it.

That made me feel very, very vulnerable and very scared of that point like I felt that my options were very reduced at that time, and I really needed to do what the only one option for me in that moment, I would survive almost, but then with time, I've realized if he couldn't transmit a more enlightened way of seeing and understanding these earning money, and attracting money, and making money, is because probably he didn't have that opportunity, or he was never thought that either. How could he transmit to me something that he was just sharing through his Catholic upbringing and his own sense of lack because he was a doctor.

He studied as much as he could, and he was never really successful as making money the way he wanted like some of his friends who are referred to others as really successful because they had a lot of money. We never really experienced that, but we never really lacked anything. I guess that's, in a nutshell, I'm amazed how and incredibly emotional and powerful this conversation through money which is apparently something so superficial, and thought and believed to be so superficial, which is like going right into the core of who we are, our families, our culture, where we come from, and I find that very valuable.

Sriram: Thank you. My name is Sri. I never had that conversation with my father because I became a doctor. I joined the university maybe six or seven years ago, and the first orientation was by the chair of medicine, and he said, "Fame or fortune, pick what you're going to bring to the university." My time at the university was splitting time between some of the poorest parts of our planet and San Francisco. My first six months as a faculty member, I was taking care of fairly wealthy patients and I took care of a very, very wealthy CEO that was dying of cancer. The other six months, I was in rural Burundi and Rwanda, and so at that time, it was the poorest country on the planet. Over the course of five or six months, I saw probably 12 or 14 kids die of malnutrition. You start to connect the dots of they are dying for essentially poverty, lack of money.

Working alongside colleagues, at that time when I was in Burundi, there was about 50 physicians in the public sector, and they were getting paid $150 a month, and they went on strike. There was so much need, and they wanted to increase their salary to $220 per month. I was a new 29-year-old, 30-year-old medical graduate, and I was probably making a hundred times more than any of them, and it just felt like the Matrix. In terms of the way everything was flipped upside down where these health professionals were taking care of the most important and the people that were suffering the most on the planet, and they were getting compensated the very least. I was working as a colleague alongside of them was getting paid quite a bit more. I think that complicated the deep co-modification of help in the United States allowed me to straddle these two worlds.

At the same time, I think, I remember taking care of my last couple of days in East Africa, taking care of a woman, who in her scarf, had all her possessions in the world, and she was dying. Right before I left, she passed, and then the very next week, I was taking care of this very wealthy CEO, and he was also dying. There was a tremendous amount of anxiety, and on some level, there was how you lived was how you died. The amount of grace that you have in life, no matter how much money you have, could be to very different ways of dying. At the same time, there's still this tension between how to make sense of doing what feels like much more important work in some parts of the world, and being alongside colleagues that are struggling, and doing very important work at the same time. I think still have that tension of how to make sense of that, and how to balance that.

Kara: Good evening, everyone. My name is Kara. I thank you all for this collective, priceless experience.

Mark: I'm Mark. A friend had an idea back in the early '70s to take inter-city kids down the river. We were doing it and only wealthy people would go, so I had the privilege of joining him, and we got donated old boats, and we started taking people down the river, and it turns out somehow the stranger in a strange land had one planted a seed, so we had a peanut can behind the seat of our red truck, so anytime we got money, we put it in, and time we needed it, we took it out. Many years later, I told my wife, she agreed and that's why I sort of lived with money. Guri, there's something that you said, there's some part of me that, I sense, the more I was drawn to serving, somehow even if it looked impossible, resources enough to come by kept covering things. The other end of the spectrum, I lived relatively low in the financial front, and I feel like I am one of the richest humans on the planet with friends all around the world, and anyway, on many levels, I feel extremely rich.

I'll just say too I am in deep gratitude for this conversation but it feels like our collective humanity, we've been seduced by this thing of money, and it's become the biggest buildings or the bank buildings, and the biggest religion of the world. Now we're getting to learn what sacred, and we get to learn how to convert this flow of this resource to serve the future, not just serve the old, fearful, antiquated ways so we get to grow past. Thank you.

Richard: I'm Richard. Thank you, everybody, it's very touching.

Shamik: Hi, I'm Shamik. Thanks very much for all these amazing stories. I, like this gentleman here, this investment banker gentleman, I also started off doing some very extreme banking jobs, and I just felt too much of a conflict, I felt very uncomfortable. At the same time, I was thinking, the whole time, about all these ultimate questions and philosophical questions, and try to figure out what money was. I was overtaken by a very large vision for a very large novel. I just act on mystical faith, I went into a metaphorical cave for the next half a dozen years, and really just wrote by enlarge, and just really simplified my life, and lived an extreme experience, and certainly a struggle, mostly because of the psychological isolation while I was doing that.

The topic of the book was actually this discussion, it's actually the relationship between money and real wealth, which is also interesting, sort of America story when America was founded, and even before 400 years ago when the Puritans came, money was supposed to be a signal of real wealth, of how loving you are, it's an interesting, fascinating topic. Last year, like Professor Needleman said, "Try to achieve the balance of coming out of the cave, and try to create platforms and tools where I can continue this dialogue with the real world, with other people." These things I've been thinking of writing about, so that's what I'm trying to do now is function in the world, live, enjoy while continuing this transcending journey. Thanks.

Joel: My name is Joel. Two practices that I hold are to listen and to let go. I'll continue practicing listening for a little bit.

Michael: You knew I wasn't going to pass, Birju. My thank you, everyone. My name is Michael as you heard. I grew up having a serious dilemma, psychological dilemma, around this issue. On one hand, I had an enormous desire to get money, I think it's known as greed. Incidentally Twee, I hate to do this, but I used to be a classics professor, so I have to do this, if you don't mind. The Bible doesn't actually say that money is the root of all evil, it says, "the root of all evil is greed," radix malorum est cupiditas, and I think that's useful for us to know. On the one hand, I had this enormous, okay, greed, if you will, to get money and do wonderful things with it. On the other hand, I absolutely no ability to earn it. Try telling your Jewish father that you just dropped out medical school, which I had to do.

I've been through various amazing adventures which would take too long. I came to the realization that in order to get over this dilemma, I had to break through the belief that I was a material being, so that led me to practice of meditation, which I'm not very good at, and it's taken me decades and decades, but by golly, I did crack that belief a little bit, and that makes me a lot more comfortable in having the minimum amount of money that I have. Along with that practice, this is going to really knock your socks off, Mark, because you're not wearing any, those of you who know me will absolutely not surprised to hear that I'm now going to reference Gandhi. In addition to doing this spiritual practice myself, I also studied a person who actually achieved simplicity which I have been striving unsuccessfully to achieve.

Okay, so Gandhi and economics in 39 seconds, I think I can do this. There are two principles that he developed that we can use that really opens up the mystery of his economic system. One is we are now experiencing an economy of wants. I can make you want something, I can get you to buy it, and it doesn't matter to me whether you need it or not. We have to degrade our relationship, and I have to make you worse in order for me to succeed, and that system is death, that simply cannot be sustained. We need to shift it to an economy of needs where we all will satisfy our legitimate needs in cooperation with one another, that's the first of the 39-second principles of Gandhi. The other one is trusteeship, the idea that rather than owning money, I'll use it, and if there's more than I need, I'll pass it on for somebody else. If there's less than I need, I take steps to get what I need, so that's what I wanted to share with you all in my gratitude for the high level of this conversation and your friendship.

Anne-Marie: Hi, my name is Anne-Marie. I'm really grateful for all the really beautiful and rich stories. I'm happy to continue listening. Thank you.

Prasad: Hi, my name is Prasad. My practice has been recognizing that money is just a belief, and I experimented with it all my life, from being a physicist, to a marketing manager in Apple, to a philosopher, and a teacher. I have been doing it, but I decided somewhere along, I want to do it as a balance between my contribution to the world and making money. I found that I could manifest anything I wanted to. I could get as much money as I wanted to, and I didn't see much of a problem regarding whether, let's say, a money is good or bad by itself, didn't mean anything. I could give in any form I want, and I could get in any form I want, and I didn't have any moral dilemma regarding that aspect of it. I feel sometimes we make more of a problem than what it is. The key is not to hold on to it, as long as I don't have an attachment to it, I feel we can make as much money or we could give it away, that has been my experience and I'm continuing to experiment with it.

Dmitra: Hi, my name is Dmitra, and it's good to be here with you all. I think, for me, money is a study and a mystery, that, and my time. I seem to value my time more than I do money, but lately what I've noticed about my use of money is that I'm still fearful about it, there's a lot of fear in me that comes from my conditioning. What I intend to see myself doing is have learned to lived on very little, but the little that I live off of is very good quality or high quality like my nutrition, and the things that I choose to buy and spend. Because I'm a social worker, and I see what happens to people when they don't have enough money at the end of their lives, I have practiced of putting away 30% of what I make for the end of my life for my search, enough money to have to be in communities to search of truth, and to be able to travel. The other third of my money goes to taxes. Yes, it's still a study for me. Thank you.

Stephanie: Hi, everybody. My name is Stephanie. Thank you very much for this conversation. I am blessed with a lot of energy, and I get to spend a lot of time doing a lot of interesting things. The work that I get paid to do, because the system is set up that I actually can't work for them for free, is a preschool in a Montessori school, and so I'm very honored to be able to do that with these kids. It brings me a lot of joy to see money in a three to six-year-old classroom. If a student comes in with a nickel in their pocket, and it's like this that has texture where it's just another object in the room, but it's an object without the kind of value that we place in it. I hear children say, "Oh, I have one of those too at home." That brings me a lot of joy and it reminds me of the story of Sri Ramakrishna when he's sitting by the banks of the river with money in one hand and rocks in the other, he's looking at both of them, and decides to throw both of them into the river, but then he changes his mind, that they should go and get it because he doesn't want to offend the goddess of money.

The way that I try to include not getting paid with money is maybe to offer French lessons for some of the children that I work with via trade. We can talk about this funny story with the parents, but eventually by the end of the year, one parent is offering me eggs from her chickens, and it's wonderful but she's giving me six every week, and that's more eggs I can have in a week, and even more than my dog would like to have. I was able to tell her, "I really like the eggs but I don't need six of them, I think maybe half of that I could use." We got closer because then she said, "I'm very happy then if you would like three, and then if you'd like more, if you were having guests then just ask." It just felt like there was this relationship there that wasn't as deep before, but that we came to understand each other through this exchange of our needs in a very open conversation about it.

Leah: Hi, my name is Leah. When Birju asked the question, my first response was my relationship with money is so messy and confusing to me that I want to hold the question of what is a practice because I don't know that I really have a practice except to be confused, I practice that, but I will share a practice of a friend of mine. Recently I was hanging out with her, and she had this book of a hundred stickers, and when I was saying goodbye, she took one of the stickers, and she put it on my shirt. Her mom came in the room and she said, "Oh my God, that's her favorite sticker." Thank you.

Eri: Hello, my name is Eri. It's comforting to hear that money is as confusing to everybody, and it's confusing for me, I'm not alone being confused about money. The practice I've been trying do about money is just see that money is like an energy that flows through me, so that I can accept it and then I can let go. In principle, I understand, but in reality, it's really hard to get to that point that I can really see it as money being the energy. When my mentor told me that if you can see money as energy, it's like a liberation for me because I always thought about money being negative, something that I shouldn't want, that I shouldn't be greedy, or I shouldn't need, I should be happy with whatever I have and be okay.

Part of me was proud that I didn't need money, but then other parts of me had this money envy because my dad always wants more money. It's his way of showing love to buy things, and then whenever I talk with him, he asks, "What do you do? How much money do you make?" It's his language of love that I understand that, and so whenever he says that kind of thing like, "I'm waiting for you to buy me a Mercedes." Sometimes I'm like, "I don't know if I can ever do that." I feel that I'm trying to translate that word into a language of love in my head, but then in the meantime, parts of heart is broken at the same time. I always had this part of me wants to be comfortable with what I have while trying to balance this emotion that arise when I see what wealth is all about. I've been experimenting a lot, trying to see it as money being energy.

I just finished hosting this tour for a group of Japanese people, just featuring gift to the ecology that's happening including a lot of the work was at Service Space. We ran the whole entire tour as a gift. I saw how much it brought just by having this as a service towards me and then everybody is involved. Now I see this beauty in creating a relationship without the money, but then how can we do that with the money to to that I don't have to feel anxious about money. More things to ponder on as I keep considering thinking about, okay, money, energy, let it flow, let it flow, but it's continuous. Thank you.

Mary: Hi, my name is Mary. For many years I worked with the Waldorf School that had a tuition model where if a family could not pay the full tuition then there'd be a conversation with the family going over the school's needs and the family's needs, and coming to a tuition amount in consensus, and that was an inner practice for me and was successful. Right now I work with the grassroots initiative to connect children with nature. Two years ago, I decided not to seek funding so I could develop capacity because it was a very hurtful process of completing grant proposals, and logic models and all of that. Now I found enough the funding thing and so now seeking funding for a project that I would like to work on has brought up all those questions again. Thank you.

Sarah: My name is Sarah. I think when I was about ten, my family and I, we used to go to San Francisco a lot. We're in the city one time, and I have seen homeless people before, but we were at Ghirardelli Square and there was guy out there who's mentally ill, he had, I think, just pants on, he had no other possessions, nothing else. For whatever reason, that left me incredibly distraught, and I was in tears, sobbing. I remember we were in the Ghirardelli Sunday Ice Cream Store, and we were supposed to be eating ice cream, and I was just distraught over, "How could this be possible? How could I have what I have at home, in my bedroom, my toys, all these things, and there's nothing, I could see, that this man had?" It's funny because I grew up in a very Catholic family, and my aunts were this ... I was to go talk to our priest, to try and get an answer about how this is possible. Since that moment, I have struggled a lot with how simplistic my life needs to be.

I'm a social worker, so by day, I give a lot, or try to give a lot of myself to these things that are important, but I think money is this constant question in my mind about how much to give out, how much to put in retirement, and how to hold it because, I think, my desire is to not hold it because that does seem to require a level of faith in life that's exhilarating at times, and frightening, and interesting, but then there's practicalities, my father is endlessly discussing retirement with me, I don't know. Mostly I just want to say thank you because I've had these questions since I was young. It's very exciting for me to be in a room with people that are struggling with in some ways, and just have the opportunity listening to all of you, and receive from that, so I thank you.

Evelyn: Hi, my name is Evelyn. Let's see, so much you could say about those topics. I used to make a lot of money because I was a computer engineer. To make a really long story short, 2004, I survived the tsunami that hit a lot of countries, including India and Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand. After that, my life wasn't the same and I really didn't want to continue on that path. I was asking more existential questions like, what doesn't die? Who am I? More spiritual questions, and then it came to a point where I actually started struggling with money in which I hadn't experienced before. I guess before I was chasing money, and now it felt like I was avoiding money so it was like a sense of aversion but I didn't recognize it as that at that time. I've had some period of poverty, maybe three weeks where I lived in a car.

To make a long story short, I more recently decided to make it all part of a spiritual practice of surrendering to life in a sense of trust, I think it was Guri who said that, "You actually start having a sense of trust, things just work out." I had a long time associating like the only way you could make money in Silicon Valley is to be an engineer, be a developer. I still was carrying that story so strongly that I wasn't being open to new possibilities that were actually knocking on my door. I kept trying to get a job in tech again. One day I just finally realized that's not working, it's not even in my soul to do that.

I just volunteered to do something even though I wasn't going to get paid for it, but I had a lot of passion for it. After a couple of weeks, they started paying me even though I thought I was going to be a volunteer. I started realizing even if your intuition is leading you more and more into, or my intuition, we can trust some kind of instinct that is going to take care of us if we really surrender. Just to wrap this up, I just happened to be reading a book today called, "The Surrender Experiment" it's an amazing book. The last chapter I read, before I came here, I just realized this synchronicity was called community banking, it's a beautiful, beautiful book and has a beautiful chapter. I don't have time to go into it but I recommend it.

Gail: My name is Gail. I recall about two years ago, I guess, when there started being more beggars on the street of San Francisco, I was downtown in Union Square, a woman asked me for help, for money, and I gave her a dollar or something. I think I'm normally pretty defended against people, but for some reason, this woman gave me a great big smile and said, "God bless you.", and it went all the way in. I was standing there thinking, "I just got a blessing. Why isn't everybody down here doing this?" I thought about it, I felt that there was something important that I had been given. I started trying to, whenever there was an interaction with money, paying for something, or giving something to someone, to try to receive the person.

Birju: Hello. Two deep breaths. Thank you. We have time for just a couple of comments. I would love to invite is a question, which is, what have you heard here that has touched you? We don't have much space for it, so just a couple of comments, but I'd love to invite that.

German: The possibility of being vulnerable in public.

Unknown: I feel like money is about trying to get our needs met, and what you said about your wife touched me so deeply about, I feel like that's all of our need at the deepest level to just feel our love for one another.

Unknown: I'm just moved hearing all of our experiments with money and transformation being the topic, and all of our experiments with living and flow, and learning with something that's much more than the little world that we're told about everyday.