Optimizing Your Financial Wellness Without Guilt or Shame

WHAT IS FINANCIAL WELLNESS? (3:14)

It’s important to define what financial wellness looks like for you. If you don’t take the time to do this you will use other people’s or society’s definitions of it. Using societies definitely of financial wellness or “success” rather than using our own definition leads to feelings of guilt and shame. 

Take time to sit in the feelings of what financial wellness means for you. Then have the courage to really know your numbers.

Jess’s Financial Wellness Journey

The journey to define this for myself came after the market crash of 2008. Before then I followed society’s definition of financial wellness and it almost killed me.

Prior to 2008, my definition of it looked like constantly striving for more. More money, higher job titles, bigger houses, more material things to justify the longer hours – because I deserved it, right? More degrees, more certifications. I liken it to Hungry Ghost Syndrome.

In Buddhism, the torment of intense desire that can never really be satisfied is depicted as the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. It’s the suffering that arises when due to unmet needs for love and safety, our desire becomes narrowed and fixated on substitute gratifications.

That was exactly what my life had become. Filled will self-pity and negative coping mechanisms such as drugs, alcohol, and bulimia.

In March of 2009, I decided to define what financial wellness looked like for me and walked away from my career designing and supporting trading systems for wall street to become an online mission-driven health and wellness entrepreneur.

For me, the very money-making activity needs to be tied to doing good. To lifting people up and improving the planet. Having the time and resources to do the things that fill up my soul. Doing well by doing good while having time freedom.

Amy’s Financial Wellness Journey

In 1999 I graduated from University of Texas in Austin and when graduated I knew I wanted to become a yoga teacher. I knew yoga made me feel some kind of way. To be in that room. To be sharing from that level.

And whatever I did to make money I wanted to feel like I felt when felt when I was in that yoga room.

And that to me is financial wellness

How we feel while doing something in order to make the make that we absolutely need in the world because money in the hand of good people creates amazing things.

For me, the very money-making activity needs to be tied to doing good. To lifting people up and improving the planet. Having the time and resources to do the things that fill up my soul. Doing well by doing good while having time freedom.