Have you ever worried about money?
Then this HeartStart call is for you!

Join us for a special HeartStart to your week call
Monday, December 17th, from 5:00-6:00pm PT.

Free Conference Call
Conference Dial-in Number: (605) 990-0700
Participant Access Code: 992522#

As I sat down to write this, I made myself a cup of green tea. The bag had a little message attached to the tag: "Your greatness is not what you have, it's what you give." And the most important thing that we give, on a moment to moment basis, is who we are being: the order or disorder of our energy field as it radiates from our hearts. This is completely independant of our bank statements- unless we react emotionally to our bank statements, and then who we are becomes of a function of what we have. But it is possible to be free of that matrix, with the power of the heart.

Recently I was leaving on a business trip and had a lot to get done in a very short period of time. Normally, I do not like to make large deposits into ATM machines, because I don't trust them. But in this case, I had no choice because the bank closed before I could get there and I was leaving the next day. So, feeling uneasy, I deposited a month's salary into my account through the ATM, and trundled on my way. The business trip led me to stay for a few days at HeartMath, on the "campus" out in the woods where my mentors and the creators of HeartMath live. The only place my cell phone had reception was outside under a giant redwood. On the fourth or fifth night, in subzero temperatures, I stood under the redwood shivering, calling the bank to make sure my deposit had gone through. It hadn't! For an hour or more I was relayed from one customer service representative in India to another, all of whom said there was nothing they could do about the fact that an entire month's worth of my wages had dissappeared into thin air! I was desperate. Panicked. Justified in my judgment of stupid ATM machines and our depersonalized banking system. And in a flair of righteous anger, I flung my fist out into the night sky as a punch at powerlessness, only to realize that it was directed straight at my mentor's house! I started to laugh. Here I was, pushing violence towards the person I most loved and respected, all over a mesely couple of thousand dollars! The absurdity of it woke me up. I immediately called my agression back using a tool that we teach in the Beginner HeartMath Webinar called Quick Coherence, and reinvested it as love towards my mentor. We don't realize it, but our real investments in life are our attention and our emotional energy, as much or more than where we put our money.

Well, when I made the shift to radiating love towards my mentor, something remarkable happened. I got an idea. You see, when we experience stressful emotions like mistrust, judgment, frustration, and fear, the higher centers of the brain that perceive things clearly, problem solve, and come up with creative ideas, shut down. Then the fight or flight, prey predator brain kicks in (or in my case in this story punches in!). No time to think- just gotta survive! Fast! By shifting my emotions to love for my mentor, I shifted over 1400 physiological responses in my body, starting with creating a more ordered rhythm in my heart measurable at least eight feet away from me. If I had been under an MRI in that moment, a doctor would have seen the higher perceptual centers of my brain literally open up and flood with blood flow and activity. That opening led to a new thought, "Maybe I deposited the money into a different account by accident." Sure enough, because I had been mistrustful when I made the deposit, my brain was already shut down. I had put the money into my savings account rather than my business checking account without realizing it. It was there all along. And so it is with our lifestyle in the current developed world, as many of us live in a panic around money and resources most of the time, in spite of the fact that we are more abundant than any culture in history. Our perceptions are distorted by our stress. And a profound portal through that mess is the power of the heart.

Lynne Twist, a remarkable author, speaker, and international fundraiser who wrote a book called the "Soul of Money," talks about the fact that we have gone from being called "citizens" to being called "consumers." Where children once could identify plants and trees and animals, now surveyed first graders were able to identify 2,000 brand names and logos, but not even 10 trees! While homelessness is at an all time high, the fastest growing industry is public storage- we are building homes for our excess stuff before we are building homes for our brothers and sisters that have no place to live. This shift from identification with the values that we live to the value of our belongings as a measure of our worth is a reflection of what Lynne calls "The lies of scarcity." These lies tell us that more is better, that there is not enough to go around, that someone is going to be left out. Lynne suggests that when we let go of trying to get more of what we do not need, it frees up energy to nourish and appreciate what we already have. Then, just like stocks appreciate, what we appreciate increases in value and quantity. From an esoteric perspective, this is the heart at work in the quantum field. Appreciation brings order to the heart rhythm which radiates beyond us and causes a different relationship to the world around us, attracting the resources we need in an effortless way.

Higher Cognitive Function:

Most people associate money stress to basic needs and survival fears. And yet to resolve most money issues requires higher cognitive function, not lower brain stem fight or flight survival mechanisms. This is really key to resolving money stress. When you are looking at life through the tight focus lens of fight or flight survival, you are less likely to see the abundance of resources that really are at your disposal. From stressful inhibition of higher brain centers, you are also less likely to have access to your creativity to help you innovate solutions or create new sources of income. Fyera! coaching and HeartMath tools can reverse that stress trap for you, as they did for Greg in the story below.

Heart Rhythms:

Does your relationship to money look like this (incoherent rhythm) or like this (coherent rhythm)?

Here is the bottom line. Which one of these lines took more ink? But which one went further across your screen? Imagine that the ink is your money. How would you want to use it? This is bottom line business from the heart. Money is energy. So is emotion. If you are using your emotionally energy inefficiently (as in the top line), what good does it do to have more money? Using resources efficiently, being able to go far with little, allows you to do even more with more. And that takes heart intelligence and emotional coherence. The biggest financial drain is not lack of money, but stress about money, whether you have some or you don�t. I have worked with millionaires who have more financial problems than paupers. The most valuable commodity you have is your own energy, and when you stress about money you piss your energy down the drain. People get busy doing their financial accounting, but what about their own energy accounting? It is your vitality, after all, that gives you the ability to earn and invest and grow your financial vitality anyway. Without energy, even if you have money, you cannot enjoy the money you have. Fyera! workshops and coaching can teach you how to manage your emotions and energy reserves. Drop through the trap door of constantly wanting more into the Fyera! of having what you really want and more- in a heartbeat!

Money and the Immune, Endocrine, and Nervous Systems:

It is a real tragedy of our times to meet people who have slaved through years of hard and stressful labor in order to save for and enjoy retirement, only to have their bodies and minds give way on them when their jubilation years finally arrive. A high percentage of retirees die within the first two years of retiring. Many others suffer dementia, or immune crashes. Why? People pay attention to putting money into their IRAs and 410ks, but what about their vitality bank accounts? You can measure your vital reserves with Sanesco testing, which can actually show you how much energy you have left in your neurotransmitter and hormonal bank accounts. High levels of cortisol and low DHEA spell too much spending in your adrenal checking account, and not enough put away into hormonal savings- ie premature aging. With Fyera! coaching, the Em Wave, HeartMath tools, and Sanesco supplements, you can actually replenish your vital reserves and learn to use your inner and outer resources with maximum efficiency. With the right tools, you can have enough energy in your later years to continue attracting wealth and the real riches of life long after your retirement is spent!

Client Testimonial:

I had a teenage daughter preparing for college entrance. My wife has a severe illness, and would soon be in need of a kidney transplant. My work was not sustaining the financial needs or goals we had. And so I started sports gambling. It was moderate at first. I was following someone on the internet who seemed to know how to pick the games. And, unfortunately, it worked in the beginning. I made small amounts of money, which seduced me to play more. And more. I took that and ran with it, and ran right into a brick wall. I thought I was getting an edge, but I really wasn�t. As I started to lose money, I would gamble to try to win it back, and lose even more.

By the time I was done, I had lost our entire life savings, the money I had saved for our income taxes, advances I had taken from the office that I was not entitled to, and stacked advances on credit cards to boot. To win money back, I started making bigger and bigger bets, escalating the stakes, betting sometimes $10 or $20 or $30 thousand dollars a day. I knew my gambling had failed completely right before my wife�s kidney transplant, when I ran out of money. I lost all that I could lose. And my tout, my gambling consultant, let me keep betting on his credit. During the NCAA basketball tournament, I was up by $200,000.00 but my tout would not let me quit. I had won everything back, but I had given him my power and it was his money we were betting with, so I was powerless to make him stop. He kept going, with terrible consequences. In the space of a couple days, we lost it all over again. I was utterly devastated as I went into surgery to donate one of my kidneys to my wife.

At that point, I stopped gambling, but I didn�t stop hiding the truth. Worse than the financial mess I created was the fact that I had hidden it from everyone. No one knew. I thought I couldn�t tell my wife, because she was already under so much stress with her transplant. In the terror that people would find out, and the self disgust that prevented me from seeing any way out of my prison, I was alienated and isolated from the very people I loved the most- my wife, my business partners, my daughter. I was completely boxed in.

To say I was depressed is an understatement. I did not sleep at all for months. All I could do was pace and think, but it was ineffective thinking. I could not concentrate at work. Everywhere I went, my mind was somewhere else. It felt like everything was crumbling around me. I thought we would have to sell the house. I was terrified my wife would leave me if she knew. So I left her instead, but not telling her the truth and living in limbo with worry and numb depression. All of that was going on while I myself was trying to heal from the transplant surgery too. It was bad.

My heart knew what I had to do, but I wouldn�t do it. I had to come clean. I had to face the demons, deal with my internal betrayer. God is with you, your heart is with you, but do you always trust that? I did not. I knew what the right thing to do was, but I kept convincing myself not to do it. I was trapped by the fear of the fear. I was so afraid of the outcome I could not act, even though my heart and conscience knew what was right.

We really do have a choice. No one forces you to do anything. Just because you know what the right thing is, it doesn�t stop you from doing the wrong thing, nor does it stop you from avoiding doing the right thing. Even if you know what�s right, it takes the power to listen and act on what you know. That�s the power that the HeartMath tools and Fyera! gave me.

Sheva, my coach from Fyera!, gave me tools to listen to my heart and to speak my truth in spite of fear. When I finally came clean with my wife and my business partners, the release of energy from relief afforded me tremendous opportunities I never could have seen in my depression. Aligning with my heart opened so many new doorways. When my energy was so tied up in fear, avoidance, hiding, and insecurity, I did not have the attention to see solutions and opportunities to my financial stress that had actually been right under my nose all along.

It was not that my partners and my wife were pleased or even kind about what I had done once I told them. Of course they were upset. But I was back in integrity with myself. And that gave me, thanks to HeartMath, a tremendous amount of power to heal those relationships I had betrayed as well as to innovate solutions that have put my family, my business, and me in better positions than ever before. The difference is, I am not measuring those positions by external financial statements, but instead by the quality of emotion and vitality I have within myself and get to share with others. I am happier than ever before. I make friends in elevators, and on the golf course, where I used to be quiet, reserved, held back. I am rich in spirit, and the irony is that material riches seem to be following suit, not with effort, but with true care for those around me and the joy that care brings.

Before working with Sheva, I had convinced myself that getting rich would solve my stress. �If only we had more money,� I kept telling myself. Then, when I lost all our money, winning the money back was what I was convinced would be the solution to our stressors. �If only I hadn�t lost our money,� I kept telling myself. Now I know money does not solve things, but attitude does. As long as I was trying to solve things with money, I was putting the power outside of me. I was still trying to do it with something external- not from my heart. The tools Sheva gave me handed me back the reigns, and now I don�t go up and down with my financial gains and drains.

I am so grateful for the power of the heart, and the power of the HeartMath tools and Fyera! to access it.

G.M.

Financial Consultant

Money is a resource.
It is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.

If you have money stress, you are not alone!

E. Thomas Garman, a professor of personal finance employee education in the College of Human Resources and Education at Virginia Tech, has conducted extensive research in the areas of personal finance and worker productivity.

Some statistics from Garman�s research include the following:

• more than 1/3 of America�s workforce report that money worries sometimes hamper job performance
• 34 percent of workers rate their financial stress as high to extreme
• 54 percent of workers worry about how much they owe
• 53 percent of workers report dissatisfaction with their personal financial situation

Recommended Reading

• Transforming Stress
• Transforming Anxiety
• Overcoming Emotional Chaos

Signs and Symptoms of Money Stress:

You worry about bills

You find money managing you, instead of you managing money

You have arguments with others over money

You are irritated by the price of things you want or need

You worry about your financial future, or not having enough in your retirement

You stew over not having enough to buy the things you want for you or your loved ones

You find yourself snapping when people want you to pay for something

You feel your relationships are compromised by worry about who is paying for what

You feel social tension at your inability to keep up with the perceived lifestyle of those around you

You compare yourself to others, in terms of lifestyle or financial status

You think about money a lot, to the point of being distracted in conversations or tasks you need to attend to by thoughts about money

You are disappointed in yourself, or feel you have not met certain financial goals by the time you had hoped or intended

Your sense of esteem, well being and inner balance are measured by the balance in your bank account (this is a particular sign of money stress if you read that and thought that it was normal to feel that way!)

You find yourself exhilarated by or addicted to gambling or day trading, and your emotions ride the same trends as the stock exchange

You are reckless with money and racking up debt that you do not know how you will pay back

You give no thought to money, to the point of going without what you need, or ignoring bills that are due

EXERCISE

APPRECIATION: Being the Source of Value

It is not an accident that when stocks increase in value, it is said that they �appreciate.� Appreciation of anything is a literal increase in value. First and foremost, when you find yourself going into money stress, pause to appreciate something instead. Your appreciation will open the higher centers of your brain to allow you to see things you might have missed otherwise, be they opportunities, answers, or abundance in disguise. The real value of money is value itself, and your values come from what you value. What is it about money that matters to you? In other words, what matters to you most in life? Make a list of your values, the things in life that matter to you and that you appreciate. Look to where you can bring more of those values into the world. When you become the source of value, the value of money comes to you. That is math of the heart. Feeling great cannot help but appreciate! Fyera!

January HeartMath Workshop Dates

Beginner Webinar - 4 Tuesdays Starting Jan 8th

Intermediate Webinar - 4 Wednesdays Starting Jan 9th

Advanced Webinar - 4 Thursdays Starting Jan 10th

Where the Rubber Meets the Road - 4 Fridays Starting Jan 11th

All Day Beginner Workshop - Saturday Jan 19th

All Day Intermediate Workshop - Sunday Jan 20th