Does money have a soul?

Last week I re-watched a YouTube video from Lynne Twist with the title “the soul of money”. For those of you who don’t know her, Lynne Twist is a co-founder of The Pachamama Alliance, and founder of The Soul of Money Institute. She has dedicated herself to alleviating poverty and hunger and supporting social justice and environmental sustainability.

Lynne talks in a heartfelt way about her own learnings regarding money and what she tells us reminded me of Aesop’s fable of the goose and the golden egg. For those who don’t know the fable here is a summary: there was once a countryman who possessed the most wonderful goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg. The countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enough. Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the goose and cutting it open. But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious goose was dead. The moral of the story: those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have…

Lynne Twist provides a unique, intelligent and soul-centered look at how we can release the burden of having or not having money. Examining our attitudes toward money, how we earn it, spend it, invest it and give it away, can offer surprising insights into our lives, our values and the essence of prosperity. To quote her: “If you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t need it frees up oceans of energy to turn and pay attention to what you already have. When we share this, it expands our freedom and our creativity. What you appreciate, appreciates. What you focus on, is what increases”…
Food for thought?