The Yoga of Money

Yoga's ethical precepts teach us to tell the truth and do no harm, but few realize that these teachings can also help us to manage our money.

By Alan Reder

When, in the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush urged all Americans to buy more to fight terrorism, he was not just handing punch lines to David Letterman. Tortured logic aside, he was asking Americans to do something that few of us normally consider: Let values drive our financial behavior.

Unfortunately the shop-til-Osama-drops plan echoed the usual messages from our national leaders in other ways—its pitch for orgiastic consumerism and its blindness to environmental consequences, for starters. We're pushed from almost every corner of society to "get ahead"—in the careers we choose, the lifestyle we maintain, and the money we spend and invest. If we do those things within the bounds of the law and cut the occasional check to the United Way, we're assumed to have covered the values part, September 11 notwithstanding.

This notion leads to some unwitting discrepancies between our actions and intentions. Few Americans celebrate the devastation of individual lives, families, and local communities that occurs every time a corporation orders a mass layoff to bump up its stock price. But that didn't stop us from cheering as our 401Ks swelled fabulously in the late 1990s—helped in part, yes, by layoffs. Given a simple choice on a ballot, most people would vote against polluted water, sweatshop labor, and global warming. But all three problems enjoy landslide victories every day at the checkout stand in the form of non-organic food, cheap clothing, leaf blowers, and other ethically questionable but popular products.

What does all this have to do with yoga? More than you might think. Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, composed around 200 ce and still considered the most succinct statement of yoga philosophy ever written, describes yoga as a path with eight limbs, of which asana is only one. The first two limbs, the yamas (moral restraints) and niyamas (observances), together lay out a set of 10 valued principles that Patanjali and virtually every yoga master after him say are crucial to one's progress along the yogic path. Yes, money and possessions are only explicitly referred to in a few. But it doesn't take much of a stretch to imagine that Patanjali meant for the whole program to cover a yogi's fiscal dealings. He clearly intended his text to apply to a yogi's entire life—and what touches more parts of our life than the way we handle our finances?

Money Do's & Don'ts

Almost everyone, it seems, gets a little crazy about money. Even the wealthy sweat about having enough, notes Brent Kessel, a certified financial planner and president of Abacus Wealth Management, Inc., in Pacific Palisades, California. For instance, some of his richest clients worry that the next market plunge will take their pricey lifestyle down with it, he says. And that's exactly why Kessel, a longtime student of Ashtanga Yoga whose financial counseling is influenced by the Yoga Sutra, thinks money is an underrated spiritual tool. "It can become a bell of awakening in your spiritual practice just by watching how you react to it," he says. "Where am I holding tension in my body as I do this transaction, pay bills, watch my portfolio increasing or decreasing? All of these are just opportunities to be conscious. I think that's my primary passion in my work—to use it that way."

Writing nearly 2,000 years ago, Patanjali may not have envisioned Kessel's particular application, but he clearly had money and material possessions in mind when he laid down at least some of the yamas. Take aparigraha, which is commonly translated to mean "nongrasping," i.e., not being greedy. The challenge for yogis, of course, is to figure out what Patanjali meant by "need," because he didn't specify. He rendered the sutras in exceedingly spare prose—intentionally, we might assume, so yogis could fill in the details with insights from their own developing wisdom. But need takes on a much different connotation in 2003, in a world of diminishing natural wealth and stark divides between rich and poor, than it did in Patanjali's time.

For example, an environmentalist would be quick to note that even the ordinary American consumes at a voracious level the planet can't sustain—Americans make up 5 percent of the world's population but hog nearly a third of the Earth's natural resources. Marshall Glickman, author of The Mindful Money Guide: Creating Harmony Between Your Values and Finances (Ballantine Wellspring, 1999), feels that any conscientious yogi who understands the sustainability dilemma ideally should factor that into his lifestyle choices. "No matter what path a person is on, it's crucial to ask, 'Am I being aware of other people and having their interests at heart and not just being selfish?' " says Glickman, a dedicated meditator and former stockbroker.

Dharmanidhi Sarasvati, spiritual director and yoga teacher at Tantric College of America in Berkeley, California, agrees. He adds, however, that aparigraha should not be read to imply any kind of objective yardstick, considering yoga's focus on inner awareness. "The real need we have is whatever we need to sustain ourselves while still making a contribution to those we have dharmic obligations to—family, employees, and so forth," he says. "Anything that's accumulated beyond that is supposed to be distributed for the benefit of others. It's not supposed to be hoarded." That would still seem to leave lots of wiggle room, but as Glickman puts it, "I can't answer what 'appropriate need' is for you, but we have to look more closely at our own hearts and minds. I think we know when we're being hypocritical."

Financial planner George Kinder, cofounder (with colleague Dick Wagner) of the "life planning" movement in his profession, turns the entire idea of need on its head in his book The Seven Stages of Money Maturity (Dell, 1999) and in his practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Life planning means organizing a client's resources to support their deepest aspirations, as opposed to financial planning's usual focus on maximizing wealth and financial security. Kinder, whose seven stages in his book title are tied to yoga's seven chakras, begins his workday with clients by taking them through a self-inquiry process designed to uncover those aspirations. The process culminates with the question: If your doctor told you you only had 24 hours to live, what would you have missed?

"Ultimately people's aspirations are usually spiritual," says Kinder. "Most people talk about their family, relationship, creativity, social causes, or spirit." Once clients are staring at their bottom-line priorities, the real planning can then begin. For most people, Kinder has found, that means simplifying their everyday lives—such as cutting back on their normal workload and expenses so they can write the Great American Novel, spend more time with the children, or whatever else their "death sentence" revealed.

Besides aparigraha, the other yama that appears to refer directly to financial affairs is asteya, or nonstealing. Glickman looks at this principle in broader terms than the theft prohibited by law. He suggests that we ask ourselves how much of our lifestyle is based on exploitation: "Are the products we buy made fairly? The people we hire—do we treat them well? The people we work for—do we try to get the most we can from them for the least money?" But he also emphasizes asteya's inner dimension. "We tend to steal to try and get more because we're not satisfied with how things are at this moment," he notes.

Dharmanidhi points to asteya's more subtle aspects as well: "The esoteric principle behind asteya has to do with a kind of pride. The ancient teachings on this say that to think of yourself as really important is to steal your soul from God. That means that we're not surrendering ourselves to the larger view that we're this one consciousness. Once you separate yourself from the striving for this experience of oneness, then you're becoming self-absorbed and you're going to steal, either symbolically or literally."

He regards ahimsa, nonviolence or nonharming, in a similar vein: "The root of ahimsa is that any violence is caused by separation. As soon as I think that I'm independent and that what I do is not going to affect others, I've performed a violent act. We can never be perfect. I'll never know exactly how everything I'm consuming affects everyone along the chain, but I'll do the best I can, without becoming neurotic, to decrease the impact I have on others through consumption." Kessel feels that the external aspect of ahimsa also has a fiercely practical, internal side—namely, when we do violence to others or life itself, we suffer too. Classic example: the business executive whose relentless drive to succeed wrecks his marriage, family, and ultimately his financial life. Ahimsa, Kessel says, has to include self-love—a sort of personal non-aggression pact not to do things for short-term gain that will undermine us in the long run, emotionally or financially.

He also finds financial counsel in a place few yogis might think to look, the yama of brahmacharya. This term is usually taken to mean moderation and self-control in sex, but Kessel feels pretty sure Patanjali would expand it today to include another form of lascivious relationship: the one many of us have with money. He points out that the original thinking behind brahmacharya assumed a vital connection between spiritual and physical energy. To develop your full potential of the former, you have to conserve the latter, the yoga tradition teaches.

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