Barbara Wilder: Articles & Essays: Creating a Sacred Marketplace

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Creating a Sacred Marketplace
by Barbara Wilder - October 17, 2002

When we think about well-being, we think mostly of our health, but have you thought about your economic well-being? I’m sure you think about money concerns every day, but have you actually considered healing your money in the way you think about healing your body? This may sound a little crazy, especially in today’s economy. The media blasts at us day in and day out about the terrible economic trends. The stock market falls and the unemployment rolls rise. There seems to be little hope of returning to the halcyon days of the nineties when everything – stock markets, real estate, technology companies, et al – was escalating breathlessly. Now, suddenly, the bottom has fallen out, and millions of Americans are hanging on by their fingernails, wondering what happened.

The economy is a lot like the human body. We can be going along thinking everything is fine, and then boom, we find out we have a life threatening disease. Suddenly our world is turned upside down. We start to take stock. We begin to ask ourselves why we didn’t see this coming. And then we begin to remember subtle hints that we might have taken note of, if we’d had the presence of mind. We think about the nagging feeling we got when we ate bad food or skipped our workout. We think about the heartburn, neck pain, or stomachache we got every time we harbored hateful thoughts. In this same way people are beginning to remember the subtle feelings of unease that they felt during the high-rolling nineties. The one thing that causes disease in our body, our world, and our economy is lack of balance.

Health, peace, and prosperity are all the outcome of living a balanced life. But though many people are coming to understand the validity of this statement with regard to the first two – health and peace – the majority of people still believe money is something alien and apart. And that’s only natural. All of our lives we’ve heard the phrases, “Money is the root of all evil.” “Money is dirty.” “Money can’t buy you love.” and on and on. And though we can’t survive without money, most people consider money a necessary evil. But money itself isn’t evil. It is the consciousness with which we get it, spend it, and hoard it, that can be evil. Money is the energy that we human beings exchange for the purpose of surviving and thriving on earth. It is an essential part of human life, and without it we would not be able to share the goods and services that we all need to exist. But when this exchange of energy is out of balance the economy becomes diseased, and because money circulates through the planet touching everything and everyone, when it is out of balance and diseased, we are all affected.

Money has not always been considered outside the circle of life as it is today. We live in a society that has lost its connection to the Divine. We have given power to those who stand outside the moral boundaries. We have come to believe that those who have money are the best people. We find ourselves feeling small and worthless when we have less money than others.

We give the attention that human beings once gave to spiritual matters exclusively to material matters. Getting and spending money is our greatest concern. Consider for a moment your average day. How much of your day do you devote to your health (thinking about it, discussing it, exercising, shopping for healthy food? How much of your day do you devote to your family? How much of your day do you devote to your spiritual practice? And how much time do you devote to getting and spending money? If you are like the great majority of human beings, you spend at the very least 75% of your waking day getting and spending money. If you are like most people your family comes second, your health comes third, and your spiritual life comes last.

In the past when people lived closer to the earth, they felt a deep spiritual connection to it and the crops they grew and the livestock they raised. They knew that God was their support. They prayed for good weather and healthy crops, and when they went to market, they were very aware that it was God or Mother Earth who gave them the products that they sold. They gave thanks to the Divine for a good crop, a good harvest, and the good prices these brought. The land, the product, and the marketplace were all part of the sacred circle of life, without which no human could exist.

Our marketplace is that same marketplace, but we have forgotten that it’s sacred. We have lost our connection to the sacred circle of life, and if we even think of sacredness we consider it to exist outside of normal life. We have created a separation between our material lives and our spiritual lives and in so doing we have divided our life from spirit.

The ancient Hebrew culture celebrated a sacred marketplace, and it was in this sacred marketplace that people came together to exchange the energy that we call money for the purpose of living healthy, prosperous lives. In “The Kabbalah of Money” Rabbi Nilton Bonder quotes the Talmud, which says, “True wealth is abundance that does not create scarcity.” In a marketplace based on this principle everyone prospers. But to create this kind of marketplace we must be open to letting go of the fear/greed precepts on which our current economic system is based and receptive to the healing properties necessary to create a love-based economy.

We are on the cusp of a new era in human history. The old order is fighting desperately to maintain its domination, but it won’t win because its time has passed. A new balance is coming into human experience. To help facilitate the new alignment, we can begin to create a sacred marketplace – one based on love not fear – simply by changing the way we think. When enough of us have made this change in consciousness the human race will make a quantum leap that we can only just begin to imagine.

A simple way to begin to move into personal economic well-being while simultaneously becoming part of the critical mass needed to create a new world economy is to begin to think of money as love. To do this, simply think the thought “Money is love” each time you enter into a monetary transaction. Write it on your checks and credit card slips. Allow this simple phrase to become your teacher. It will, if you focus on it consistently. Let money is love become your mantra. If you do, every time you think or write money is love you will step out of the old paradigm of the fear/greed economy for just a few seconds. A small amount of the fear we all carry in our hearts about money and our own economic well-being will dissipate and transform into love. The more you write, think, and say money is love the more love will replace fear, and your economic well-being will become reflected in your bank account and in your daily life. Peace will replace anxiety, and prosperity will replace scarcity. And while you are in the process of changing your own thoughts about money from fear and greed to love and peace, you will begin to pass money imbued with the energy of love out into world’s economy. oney flows through the world like blood flows through the body. When the energy that is money is infused with fear, greed, and scarcity, as it is today, it flows throughout the world carrying these destructive properties and infecting all that it touches. Since money touches everyone, the people of the world, the communities they live in, and the land they live on are all polluted with the disease of fear, lack, greed, and anger. But if one by one, we as individuals begin to change the money that moves through our hands and our bank accounts into love, the money itself will become healed. And like a blood transfusion, we will begin to infuse the money flow of the planet with love, creating an economy of love not fear. Money is the blood of the planet. When we heal the money we will heal the world. In the process we will find personal peace and economic well-being.

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