Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Be Less Anxious And Awkward About Money | Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

A candid conversation about money: How much is enough? How to find real security?Sebene Selassie, an author and meditation teacher. She writes the popular newsletter Ancestors to Elements and her first book is called, You Belong. Jeff Warren is also an author and meditation teacher. He writes the popular Substack newsletter Home Base and is the coauthor, along with me, of a book called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. And he is the co-host of the mind/bod adventure pod.This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better series. We talk about:How much is enough The illusion of security The importance of being able to talk to your friends about this stuffThe power of identifying your own money story, in other words, finding the point of origination for your own neuroses on the subjectRelated Episodes:Do Life BetterHow to Avoid the Toilet Vortex of Anxiety | Sebene Selassie and Jeff WarrenHow to Stay Calm No Matter What’s Happening | Sebene Selassie and Jeff WarrenMeditation Party: The “Sh*t Is Fertilizer” Edition | Sebene Selassie & Jeff WarrenMeditation Party with Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren: Psychedelics, ADHD, Waking Up From Distraction, and Singing Without Being Self-ConsciousMeditation Party: Magic, Mystery, Intuition, Tattoos, and Non-Efforting | Sebene Selassie and Jeff WarrenSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/meditation-party-892Additional Resources:Register for Meditation Party at Omega, October 24 - 26, 2025Allison Strickland’s GoFundMeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. We're diving into one of the great taboos today. We're hugging the third rail. We're going to have a candid conversation about money. People get real weird about this subject, myself included, if I'm honest.

It brings up so much awkwardness and anxiety, but it doesn't have to. Today, I'm gonna talk to two of my favorite meditation teachers about our own money hangups, where they come from, and how to deal with them. Just to say, these teachers are not only close personal friends, but we also do business together. So we have a history of having to deal with money issues.

In this conversation, we talk about how much is enough, the illusion of security, the importance of being able to talk to your friends about this stuff, and the power of identifying your own money story. In other words, finding the point of origination for your own neuroses around money. My guests are Sabine Selassie,

who is an author and meditation teacher. She writes the popular sub-stack newsletter, Ancestors to Elements, and her first book is called You Belong. Jeff Warren is also an author and meditation teacher. He writes the popular Substack newsletter, Home Base, and is the co-author, along with me, of a book called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and he is the co-host of the Mind Bod AdventurePod. Also heads up, Jeff, Seb and I co-host a retreat every year called Meditation Party.

Tickets just went on sale for the next one, which is coming up in October at Omega, which is north of New York City. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Today's episode is part of our special month-long series, which we're calling Do Life Better. It's a New Year's series. This week, we're talking about money.

If you missed my conversation on Monday about the science and psychology of improving your personal finances, go check that out. We'll get started with Sebena and Jeff right after this. Real quick before we get into the show, turbulent times out there if you're following the news. So we are gonna be launching a special series of live sessions on danharris.com daily at 3 p.m. Eastern during the week of the presidential inauguration.

It's a reconvening of what I sometimes call the renegade sangha. We'll also have some special guests including CNN's Van Jones and the bestselling author Sharon McMahon who will share their strategies for staying sane in turbulent times. This all starts on Sunday, January 19th. As I like to say, the world is insane, but you don't have to be. Click over to danharris.com and you'll get all the details. The Happier Meditation app has introduced a new course

called Even Now Love, a prescription for connection led by the renowned teacher Joseph Goldstein. This timely course offers practical tools to pause, breathe and reconnect, even when it feels impossible in a turbulent world. With fresh perspectives on relationships and self-compassion practices that actually work, it's a powerful way to approach the new year with love.

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And when I'm on the road, like in a hotel, I'll often use the Peloton app on my phone to do a high intensity interval training class. I love those. So long way of saying I'm a huge fan of Peloton. Find your push, find your power with Peloton at onepeloton.ca. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpenn. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore

the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're looking at the life of the most famous queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Her death is seemingly more well known than her life, but her journey from the daughter of the Austrian emperor to becoming the most hated woman in France is just as fascinating. So we're going to look at the ways

in which her story was distorted during the French Revolution and dig deeper into her real experiences in a troubled, difficult time. Marie Antoinette is one of the most well-recognised but least well-understood names in history. And we'll talk about how her death led to the way that she was spoken about in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Follow Legacy now from wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on WunderBee+. Sabine Selassie, Jeff Warren, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having us back, Dan. Good to be here. Always great to have my party people with me. Sab, let me just start with you. To say the least, to state the obvious, money is an uncomfortable topic for most people. What kinds of caveats and disclaimers should we issue before launching into this conversation? Oof. So many, but maybe just to be simple about it, that we're speaking from our own experience,

which is limited by who we are and where we come from. Money brings up so many issues for people. We all have particular money stories based on where we're from, how we were raised, our own family backgrounds with wealth and income, but then societally. And we ourselves, the three of us are positioned in a particular way as far as money goes in terms of how we make a living now. We are not working class people anymore, if we ever were. And that's a caveat that really should be named.

We make our living in very strange way, peddling meditation and sitting around doing nothing and getting paid for that. So. Who knew it was a job? Thank God. So yeah, you know, I think to be really honest and also caring in this conversation, that goes for the audience listening when you're doing this internal conversation with yourselves, but also for the three of us as we do this publicly. Jeff, anything to add on that score?

My important caveat is I'm here primarily for comic relief. Getting me to come out and talk about money is like getting a caveman to come out and talk about, I don't know, like nanotechnology. I like to lick my money. Anyway. Meaning this is not a thing you've thought about much or not a thing you've had in your life, meaning you've never had money? No, I would say it's more like I'm just highly neurotic about it.

And I've been determined to learn almost nothing about creating better habits. I mean, I have learned some things. Any fun, just to be totally honest about it. I don't think I've ever talked about money in public, but I do not feel like any kind of expert. Not only do I know nothing about business from that point of view, but from a purely personal growth development point of view, I'm barely further along the learning curve around how to deal with money than I was 20 years ago, although there have been some steps.

So as long as people know that, then they're not going to look for me for any kind of wisdom about it. I think you're underselling the wisdom you can bring to the table. I'll just add a few other caveats and disclaimers before we jump in. One is that, as you have pointed out in our discussions leading up to this discussion, depending on what country you come from, depending on what kind of gender or pigmentation you identify with or have or whatever, that you're just going to have different views on this. And so we're not trying to speak for everybody.

And then finally, just to say personally, to say the really uncomfortable part, I think a lot of people, anybody who follows me on social media and gets a glimpse into my home recognizes that after 30 years as an anchorman, I am definitely not working class anymore and I don't want to pretend to represent everyone. And I have a ton of irrational neuroses around this thing nonetheless, which is interesting slash embarrassing. Okay, enough throat clearing. Seb, let me just start with you again. What are some of your issues personally around money?

Just to pick on something you just said about it being irrational. I don't think there's so much irrational as learned. I think we all have money stories. And so we have a relationship to money that's based on our experience of it. And so I definitely came with a lot of conditioning around money because of where I come from. I think this can be a familiar experience for some immigrants, especially earlier immigrants,

the earlier wave of immigrants from certain places that come as what's sometimes called as brain drain, like intellectuals or professional class people immigrating to the US or Canada or Europe and having a certain class back home, maybe an upper class, even though both my parents came from very poor backgrounds. My dad, through education, became part of, let's say, professional class or upper class, and then coming here and being thrust into a middle or lower class. So that's a common immigrant experience. There's also the immigrant experience of being very poor from where you come from and then

having more here, and then engaging in remittance to back home. So that's also something we experienced that we sent a lot of money back home. So even if we were earning a middle class or my parents were earning a middle class living here, so much money was sent back home that you're almost putting yourself in a lower class than what you would expect. So I think I had like a lot of confusion around money of like even where I was. It wasn't like England where you could just tell by someone's accent or neighborhood, you know, what class they fall into.

So I was going to schools with upper middle class, white kids, but then didn't have a quite a lot of money. On top of that, my dad was Marxist revolutionary guerrilla fighter and leader. And so I had a lot of conditioning around money and class and what was good and what was bad. So I think I developed sort of this very, again, confused relationship to money and a real distaste for money, this perception that money is the problem and money being the root of all evil and sort of dislike and a disdain for rich people as the problem.

And I've done a lot of work over the years to first recognize that and then start to really untangle what's going on there and my projections on money and maybe we'll get into sort of what we think money is and how it plays a role in our life. But I first had to sort of understand what my money story is, where it came from, and then start to really understand what I believed about money. So growing up with a Marxist dad as an immigrant

around kids who had more money than you, you ended up as a young adult with negative attitudes about money, a sense that it was inherently bad. Yeah, that's a great way to summarize it. And how exactly do you untangle it? Where are you now?

I untangled it through a lot of just awareness. You know, I would say I mentioned this in our discussion for this call that I had to do a lot of work around money actually running Dharma centers, running Buddhist centers. So I was on the board of multiple Buddhist centers for a long time. And I also ran a Buddhist center, I was executive director of one. And I came from nonprofit management before that. So I was working mostly in youth programs. So I was also constantly fundraising for many years.

And so I had a relationship with like, what is money? How do we relate to money? And Jeff held up a book that I gave him, The Soul of Money by Lynn Twist, which is a fantastic book. And I learned so much from her actually doing a workshop with her at some point on my journey. And part of it was just having to deal with money a lot, having to ask for money, having to ask for money, having

to ask for money for poor people. And then having to deal with money in the context of Dharma organizations where it's very different relationship to money, where this thing called dana or generosity, where a lot of the teachings are offered, not as a fee for service, but donation, and then people are invited to give money to support the teachers and or the teachers. And so it had like that whole process. I had to shift my understanding in relationship to money because it wasn't as clear cut and there had to be a lot of internal work around money for me to be able to explain that to

people and have them understand it. So I guess to say there are a lot of steps along the way. It wasn't sort of one thing, but I definitely think that my professional reality of fundraising, working in nonprofits, working with poor people, seeing how money can help or not help a situation, started to shift my relationship to money. Maybe I can talk about where I'm at with it after we talk a little bit more. You want to hear us get neurotic before we start saying anything constructive? Fair enough.

I think that's probably a good plan. It's interesting, Jeff, you said before that you were really neurotic about this. And the three of us, we're not only friends, but we also are in business together. We talk about money. We do these meditation party retreats together and there are money issues that come up as part of that.

That's just one aspect and there are others. And in those conversations, I always feel like the stammering mess in the two of you always seem really grounded and fine. So I'm a little surprised, but compassionate nonetheless. To hear you say that you've got some baggage around this. Yeah, actually I have gotten a lot better in a lot of ways. There are certain things I don't get as freaked out about

around money anymore, or as I'm more comfortable with, but then there are still, I think it's true what Seb says that the stories of how that happened when you're young around money end up having this real influence. And they can be connected really to big time, the issues of self-worth and things like that. And I think that the issues of self-worth around and money have been a big theme for me

that I've done a lot of work around and I've looked a lot at, and I'm still in process with it. So my background is my mom came from very small town, working class, Canada, and still has a thing where she just doesn't feel comfortable around money, around the culture of rich people.

Not that we grew up in that, but we grew up kind of like, because my dad made money as a business guy, so we were like upper middle class. But she always felt like uncomfortable in that scene. So my parents were very much like scripting and saving. They worked really hard to get themselves to where they were. So there was a kind of intensity around money at home, around always having to be saving and always having to have that mindset,

kind of almost like depression-era mindset. And so it made me have, like a bunch of threads came in. Like I began to have a kind of a verse around thinking and talking about money. I always felt kind of uncomfortable around people with money and being in a kind of wealthy scene. And then I had my own stuff around just from childhood things of not feeling good enough.

And so when it came time for me to go out in the world, and not when I was working, getting a job, because early on when I just had jobs, that was fine. You're doing an exchange, although I had challenges with that too, related to my ADHD. But once I came out, started to do meditation teaching, it's a lot about being comfortable saying that you'll have

inherent worth in that and you're asking people for money. It's like what she was saying about the Dharma scene. I found that really hard. I remember the first time I offered meditation classes like 15 years ago, I did it for free the first time. And then I had a night, a meditation night where I always did it for free. I worked my ass off putting everything together, but I literally would not even charge like $2 for people to come in. I wouldn't even did for free. I worked my ass off putting everything together, but I literally would not even charge like $2 for people to come in. I wouldn't even ask for donations. And it was a big thing for me to finally offer

the very first teaching where I actually asked for a tiny little bit of money. And I think it's really connected to your worth. So that's been the thing for me to begin to see, okay, actually there are some things to learn about this. And I'm being kind of very erotic about this. And if I wanna be able to support other people, then I need to be able to be supportive myself.

It's very reasonable. But getting to the stage where I can begin to talk about that and ask for what I need has been a process. And I'm still, I mean, Sevena will tell you, she still writes me about this, that there's an imbalance, you know? I remember Sevena saying one time, I love this, that she does these different online courses

and that she has a sliding scale, as do I for a lot of my offerings. And that in that sliding scale, there is no option to not offer something. That even at the, like, even if it's just like five cents or a dollar, because I mean, I mean, this is the last thing I really stated to me, because it's an energy exchange, there has to be a sense in which you're in exchange and that's part of the agreement. And that if you don't have that is to create a kind of imbalance. And that really landed with me.

Do you want to say something about that, Sabine? Because that was super helpful when you laid that out for me. Yeah, I always have options for pay what you can, but paying something is really important. Or offering something. Online it doesn't work that way, but if it were in person, maybe it's somebody that volunteers in some way to support the space. Probably too late for me to rethink this, but I have given away well over a thousand,

maybe multiples, free subscriptions to danharris.com. So I probably should have said, give me a nickel. But Jeff, just to get back to you, you talked a lot about this kind of, the self-worth issue as it relates to money, which I think will be not uncommon for people listening. Do you have a sense of where your lack of self-worth comes from? Are you comfortable talking about that? Um, yeah, I think it comes from, I was a challenging kid.

So I got a lot of messages that how I was was problematic. And I internalized those. And I think lots of people get a similar message. And some have more resiliency or find their own ways to counter that narrative. But when I was young, I kind of really took it in without realizing I took it in. And I wouldn't have known that that was the case for myself. Even in my 20s, it was only later I started to realize that this is kind of really in

a basic way and the dynamics of how I am. Even like say around, there's like a part of me that wants to be liked. Like I tip a lot because I think I'm generous, but also because I think there's a part of me there that feels like I want to be liked. In other words, the flip side is I'm worried that I wouldn't be if I don't do the right thing. And if I don't, that was the thing, you know,

you grow up this conditionality. If I am this way and this way, I will be liked, I will be loved, I will be accepted. But if I'm this way, I won't be. So you begin to strategize how to get through your life and money is definitely part of that. Like how you, the way you spend it, the way you use it to support others. And I think that not being good enough is actually part of a larger scarcity principle that people have around just lack in general. Like don't have enough time, didn't get enough sleep, don't have enough money, don't have enough this, don't have enough that.

It just, I think, your own insecurities play into that bigger story of the insecurity of the culture. So it's then affected how much money I think I needed to make to support my family and all of these things. Yeah, that's really interesting to think about. And listening to you talk, Jeff, your description of what it was like at home for you with these parents who, you know, had some money,

but also had a kind of depression era mentality and were constantly saving and there was like intensity around this. That sounds very similar to the way I came up. You know, my parents were doctors, but both of them had come from very much not wealthy families. And when in my youth, we really did not have much money.

We were not poor by any stretch, but we were solidly middle class, if not a little bit below. And it was exacerbated by the fact that we lived around a lot of wealthy people. And that created this sort of comparing mind that we'll talk about. The other thing that fed into my money attitudes were a couple other things. One was, I think my story is very American. You know, Jeff, you grew up in Canada, Seb, you grew up here and also had an immigrant experience. For me, I have immigrants like every American does in my lineage, but I grew up watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Maybe young people listening to the show don't remember that show, but it was basically the precursor

to MTV Cribs, where you would go into the homes of wealthy people. And I just had this idea that my parents were chumps because they were doctors. They actually went on to become quite successful, but they weren't when I was in junior high and high school. And I was just like not going to live the way they were. I was not going to scrimp and save and be intense around money. Another memory is they took me and my brother to France when we were like 10 or something like that. Maybe he was eight and we very rarely traveled for the sake of travel alone.

So they were academic physicians. They would often get invited to give talks on their research and they would use that as a way to afford the travel for the sake of travel alone. So they were academic physicians. They would often get invited to give talks on their research. And they would use that as a way to afford the travel for the family. Not always, but often. And so that was what we did when we went to Europe. And we were in Paris and the people who were paying for our travel put us up at a very fancy hotel,

the Hotel Regina. I remember to this day, I actually took my son back there recently because we were in Paris. And it lives in my mind is incredibly opulent and actually having been there recently, it is quite a luxurious hotel. And I remember walking in there and thinking, yeah, this is how I'm going to do it. This is how I'm going to live. Not like my parents who like drove what I consider to be shitty cars.

And they were super careful about turning the heat on in the winter. We would wear down parkas in the winter in Massachusetts, which was uncomfortable. And so it really gave me this idea that if you're having to scrimp and save, something is off. I do not want to do that. And I guess the only other thing I'd say that I learned recently is that I always knew that my great-grandfather had taken his own life, but I didn't really know why. And this is my father's grandfather. He was an immigrant from Russia, Jewish guy, came to this country, not super hospitable to Jews at that time and in the early 1900s, and just was a hustler, a con man really, and got busted. He was a crooked bail bondsman and got busted doing that.

There are articles about this that my former executive assistant Amy, shout out to Amy Breckner-Ritch, found. And you can read the articles about this guy, my great grandfather. And he ended up putting his head in the oven in the family home and his family discovered him. And I know his blood is running through my veins and his mental energy is running through my mind. So that's why this is such an uncomfortable topic for me because on the one hand, it's obvious that I am well off. On the other hand, this causes me so much anxiety. And so just trying to be open about that mixture.

Anyway, I said a lot there. Any response to not only what I said, but what you guys said or any further reflections before we turn to something a little bit more constructive? First of all, I think this is very constructive and points back to what you started with in calling your money anxieties or worrisome relationship to money as irrational. And it's not irrational, it's conditioned. And you just laid out a lot of that conditioning for us. And it's really important for us to understand what our money stories are,

because each of us are personal money stories and we're living in a larger context that has like bananas money stories, really toxic cultural stuff. And, you know, Lynn Twist, again, she talks about them as these myths about money, that there's not enough, like there's this scarcity

that we all feel, like this panic, that's really based in our fear of survival and security. And then that more is better. Yeah. Right, so we're conditioned, we get all of these comparisons and all these ideas about how much we need. So not only do we think there's not enough,

but then we're like, but more, you know? And then the third one I think is really powerful that she talks about, which is that we can't change these things. That this is the truth of our culture and that it's not changeable. And I really, you all know Robert Caro, the famous presidential biographer, he talks about power and he said something that's always stuck with me that, you know, in studying all these great powerful guys that he thought about the axiom that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And he said that power can corrupt, but it's not the only thing it does. That power is kind of a neutral force. It just means the ability to influence. But the only thing power always does is power reveals. And I feel that that's true about money too. Like money is this resource. It has the power to influence and to affect things in our lives.

It's not inherently bad, but it reveals a lot about our conditioning. And we have a lot of conditioning and especially these conditionings that lead us into the scarcity or greed mindset can really affect like how we are with money in the world. So yeah, writ on a larger scale, it's chaos. Yeah. Yeah. Money is basically the current of money moving through your life is the current of survival. That is kind of what it is for a lot of people. And all your issues around survival come up around it.

That's why I like the reframe around what I was saying before about the exchange. It's almost like this exchange of energy that is out there in the world, and of which money is a part. But really the movement is sort of like energy and wealth. Wealth, meaning what wealth you have, what capacity you have, in all the ways that wealth is true. And there's this healthy way to look at it,

is just like that is there's a constant exchange between people, between elements, and that if you could see it in this larger way, it would be so much less neurotic. But instead we're in this tight contracted way around the littleness of just the money and the balance in the bank account. From that, all of our behaviors roll out, you know? Yeah. And of course, we're speaking personally as people who are not in survival mode, even

if sometimes our nervous systems act like they are around money. And so not to dismiss the influence of power or money or any kind of resources in our lives and the negative consequences they can have. The chaos includes a lot of injustice and really messed up distributions of wealth and money. But yeah, we can only really speak to the personal because we're not money experts and this isn't our job. And Jeff talks about the benefits of talking openly

with your friends about money, how to practice non-attachment. and I will talk about some Josephisms, meaning expressions from Joseph Goldstein that have helped me personally. On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant, Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX, the latest season of Business Wars, explores how

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You can download the Happier Meditation app and check out Even Now Love today. You said before, Seb, and I agree with you, that our money hangups are not irrational. They're conditioned. They're based on the pre-existing conditions of our lives and the lives of our forebears, not to mention the larger culture. How does, and this may be an obvious question, but I just want to hear your answer to it, and I'm asking on behalf of the listener, how does doing the work that we just did, saying aloud or saying to yourself what your personal money story is,

how does that help you get to a saner position vis-a-vis money? Well, again, you know, this is speaking from the place of not basic survival, let's say. Because that's the only pace I can speak from. I've never feared for housing or food or clothing. And so that's a very different reality. Again, speaking from my place of going through my money stories from some relative stability around money as a resource.

I think that knowing our money stories starts to reveal the false narratives that are at play around scarcity and how much is enough. I can have a certain amount of money in my bank account and still fear that I'm somehow not going to make it. Meanwhile, again, I've never been homeless. I've never gone hungry. So exploring our money stories for ourselves,

we start to see the narratives that are running them. So these things that can feel like irrational, false narratives that are running our lives and making us feel like our ideas about money are irrational. I think when we start to explore our conditioning around money, then we can start to see that, you know, this is coming from some old idea I have that's conditioned by, yes, my parents or the larger culture, or my grandfather or great-grandfather, and start to untangle what's true and what's not.

Like, what is enough? Am I really at some kind of danger of not having enough? Or is this some old tendency, old pattern that's just playing out because I haven't examined it, I haven't uprooted it. And would you say Seb, for you, that that is necessary and sufficient or necessary but not sufficient? Meaning, would you say awareness is the first step and then we need some practices for making sure that when we're in a money conversation we don't let our old conditioning come roaring back? Or is the awareness enough to kind of do it? For me, it's like with everything, that there's a garden that continues to need tending,

like the weeds can come. And, you know, like the conversations we've had have been, I mean, Dan, you were saying you're neurotic in those conversations with us, but those conversations are helpful for me too. To be honest about money with friends, a generation ago, or maybe not even, that wasn't very common. People didn't talk about money with each other. It was a very hush-hush

kind of thing. And now, you know, with a lot of my friends, we know how much we make, you know, how much we have or don't have. And I have friends of fair, varying difference of including us in this conversation. But I have some friends who were born extremely wealthy or married to an incredible amount of wealth, and some friends who really live paycheck to paycheck. And so how do we have those conversations and conversations of care? I have one friend actually recently lost her mom

and she was just kind of did not inherit any money, maybe inherited debt. And I encouraged her to do a GoFundMe, which she ended up doing. And she raised enough money to kind of carry her through until she could start working again. She was taking care of her mom over many months while she was ill. And we can't necessarily solve each other's problems with money, but we can support each other in our, with our attitude and relationship to money, but also how we're dealing with money. And as someone who's had money raised for me

multiple times, it's a vulnerable place to be. And it's a really beautiful thing to be able to help others and to allow yourself to be helped around money. Yeah. Just to clarify, Seb, your experiences around your past health scares where your friends would kick in money because you were unable to work and dealing with cancer. Jeff, anything to add at this point?

Well, I mean, I was just thinking about, essentially thinking about neurodiversity. Not only do we come from different circumstances in terms of our backgrounds and class and all those things, but we also have different kinds of minds. And there are certain problems I've had around money that are very much specific to being ADHD, where it's been hard to find jobs, it's been hard to keep jobs because of my cargo style. And I've had a great job that I've then impulsively left

and later been like, what was I thinking? I'd been so overwhelmed and scrambled in my life. I couldn't find enough money and couldn't figure out how to get organized to get jobs. And that has also been part of the story. And part of the learning there is seeing how you are as a person in the world, and then figuring out how to organize the structures of your life so that they can support you money among them.

And that's been a very long journey for me to figure out how I can support myself and my family based on the way I actually am. And I'm lucky enough that I've got to this place where I can, but I didn't for many many many years, because it was just such a huge learning curve. We're all starting from different places, have different challenges in front of us. And there's this, the more you can learn about yourself and how you're wired, as well as learning about your money stories, the easier time you'll have of it. Otherwise, you just get thrown around.

Sam, let me just go back to something you talked about before, which has come up repeatedly. It's this concept of enoughness, or I think to put it in the negative, which is more prevalent, which is not enoughness, insufficiency, lack, the scarcity mindset. What if anything do you do or would you recommend in terms of practices on this score? I mean, I've done so many things around this and some of it has been just really basic psychological work around what money is, you know, and understanding it as this energy.

It was interesting listening to both of you talk about your childhoods and that kind of tightness with money, which we didn't have a lot of money, but we were just like cavalier with it, especially my mom. And there wasn't a tightness. It was just sort of like spending anywhere and giving a lot of way. There's a lot of generosity in Ethiopian culture. Like, God forbid you told my mom that you liked anything that she was wearing or had. She would like give it to you. I mean, that's, and that's very common in Arab culture, I find it, and other African cultures. It's common to just have this very generous reciprocity, so that the generosity is going both ways. And so to be in a culture where there is this

prevailing tightness, and then to constantly always be giving away is, it's not a very wise way to be with your money. So some of it for me was also learning to see where my generosity was coming from. Was it true giving? Was it performative? Was it sort of people pleasing? And then to see where my spending came from. Was it like because I wanted to get a hit from chopping or from having more to kind of make myself feel better about other lacks that

I felt in my life. And so it's that continual checking of like how I'm being with money, how I'm relating to it. There's a period with my ex-husband where we were really tight for money because of my continuing illnesses, because he was new to this country and building his career here. And we did this thing where this was still back when we wrote checks for everything, where we would write on the memo line of the check, money is love. And for us, that was sort of a statement that we came up with to just recognize that this was like an exchange of care. You know, whether it was for paying our rent or for some treatment protocol that I needed outside

of my health insurance or that there was some kind of expression of care or love that was being instead of this tightness of like, I have to pay for this thing, this thing, we don't have enough. And just that act of doing that for, you know, for a few years actually, really started to shift something for me. Every time I was writing a checkout and would write that sort of, okay, this is, you know, for a few years actually, really started to shift something for me. Every time I was writing a checkout and would write that, sort of, okay, this is, you know, this is something that I'm doing for myself and made me more sort of conscious and mindful about how it was relating to money. So there are so many practices and again, to do them in community. So being in the nonprofit world and doing money work as part of staff development or organizational development,

we would tell our money stories. I remember one board retreat for New York Insight Meditation Center was a whole weekend retreat and we spent a good part of it on money. Just looking at what kind of money stories we were each bringing to the organization, that the organization held itself. This issue is around like Donna

being this pure generosity model, being some pure form and, you know, an unsullied version of money, which was a lot of projections unto itself. So yeah, and again, it's ongoing. It's not like I'm done now. Yeah, I love what Seven A was just saying there. And it actually reminded me of an insight that I had that was very meaningful, that really unlocked something for me. And that was not long after we had our first son, Sarah and I, we were really, really overwhelmed. It was COVID times. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of support. And we basically were like, okay, I think we need to try to find someone who could help

us part time. And my mom was really down on us for this. And she was like, you should be able to do it all yourself. And her view of money was that she did everything herself. My mom worked such a hard worker. She raised three kids and kept the whole house going and had a job as a librarian. And she was just like, and that you should never be in need to ask for help or spend it on that. And so I had a lot of shame that we first did that. So I had never having this conversation with

a friend of mine who grew up in the West Indies. And she just laughed at me. She was like, this is so different than how she was from how people think about money. She's like, if you have any money, then the whole philosophy there is that you spend it on support and help because that's how you spread the money around. That's what kind of it is to have this larger community and family that you don't just hold it in here and that you are generous with it. When she grew up and she grew up with I guess a family that had Resources they had all kinds of different people who come by and like a gardener would help out And so this person would help out it now

I admit I'm lucky that I had enough to be able to hire a nanny for twice a week But having that like reframe for me is like oh This is just part of what it is to be in exchange with lots of people like That I can be less tight about it and less worried about it and this is I can let it go that way so that I'm getting this Support back. That's how I'm gonna need to do it Actually, that's how we're gonna need to do it in our little neurodivergent family is we're gonna have to really see it as one big Ecosystem here and where everyone's got different kind of specialty roles Because the idea that everything can happen in this one frontal lobe and it's gonna do all the jobs,

not gonna happen. So that really unlocked for me. It's like, okay, I can be less uptight about that. And then just more trusting too of just the general, there's gonna be times when there's more of it and times when there's less of it. And I can just have a much bigger picture around the ebb and flow and impermanence of money.

And since we've had that, it's been a better culture at our house, certainly around money and around just feeling like you're totally at sea. You brought up impermanence, Jeff. And since we're having this conversation among meditators here and many of us deeply influenced by Buddhism and the Dharma, there's all of this talk of non-attachment, easier said than done.

Any thoughts on how we can practice non-attachment as it pertains to money? Well, this is the big picture that contemplative practice is hopefully moving you towards. This understanding that there's a way to feel secure that is deeper than just the conditions that are happening around you, whether those conditions are financial, emotional, whatever they are. This is the reason that I

practice. Yes, there's all the ways in which I get small insights in the day to day. Absolutely, that I see ways in which I'm acting neurotic, that I can show up better for people in my life, for sure. But this basic thing of knowing that my life is changing, and I will die, and the variables are out of my control, but is there somewhere in my experience right now that I can arrive in despite all of that? For me, it's space, or the feeling of being, or some part of it is being an animal body,

the fact of the body itself, like putting my attention there, the longer I've meditated, the more I've found those things to be available. And then I'm in a much more centered place to make decisions about money, to make decisions about anything. And honestly, I don't think there's anything more profound that a human being can do than that, that in terms of centering yourself and your life and finding a way, and that's not saying at all that there are intensities of conditions that need to be addressed. Of course they are, and there are disparities and absolutely. But to be able to find in the moment something that is, to find the safety in the moment, no, whether

it's through radical acceptance of the changiness of the moment or a connection of something that feels unchanging to you in the moment, that is the direction. And every deep practice is pointing you that way. So that's why I have my daily practice. Just to say that back to you, Jeff, I think what you're saying is so much, I'll speak personally here, so much of my stuff around money is this search for safety, security, which is pretty elusive

and may not be even attainable. And there is actually in contemplative practice in meditation, whether it's on the cushion or off, this capacity to like just gently drill into the present moment, into what's happening in your body in a way that isn't going to quote unquote solve the problems, but can calm you down so that you can approach those problems in a saner way because you've gotten a sense that actually no security is an illusion.

The only real security is being able to tune into what's happening right now. Yeah, totally. But I would put it as, so this is the thing. Different people experience this more, this deeper end of practice in different ways. What you're ultimately moving towards is a sense of being okay, I feel like, independent of conditions. And some people find that through a radical acceptance of the insecurity of conditions, that the true acceptance that things are constantly changing

and that there's a kind of wisdom and insecurity, and that ends up being a thing that makes them that they can rest in, in a way, without grasping. But another person might describe it as, there's just a continual increasing sense of space, no matter what situation you're in, that you can trust the space will be there, or a ground will be there.

And that ends up being a kind of stability in changing conditions. So you find it in different ways, but it's in the moment. It's not looking for it anywhere else. It's in the moment right here. If you, the more you commit to understanding the moment. It's not looking for it anywhere else. It's in the moment right here. The more you commit to understanding the moment, the more I think it's possible to find this capacity to be with all moments with more sanity and presence. That's what I'm trying to articulate, perhaps not as easy as I might. I'm curious how somebody

would describe it. We have many conversations about this, don't we? I love the way you put it. This freedom that's not based on the external conditions and Money for many people is this search becomes a search for clinging to some sense of security or certainty and It can't be that I mean the only thing we're certain of is that we're going to die I mean, the only thing we're certain of is that we're going to die. It's the only certainty we have.

And yet so many people are trying to protect themselves from that with money. So it becomes this like false bubble wrap that we place around us with just a lot of stuff that doesn't bring that sense of security. It doesn't mean that we don't have stuff or that we don't relate to money, but yes, as you said, finding that sureness, that deeper inner sense of security, not in the outside, but on the inside. Totally. And when death shows up, I'm going to throw my stuff at death.

I'm going to be like, oh yeah, take this. I'm going to throw all my iPads at him. I'm going to throw, I mean, I'm imagining it to him with a size and tall skinny dude. I'm going to throw a couch at him and be like, yeah, we bought this $2,000 mattress once more. You're feeling flush. See if you can get me through this. Well, I bring up death, not to be morbid, although I think about it a lot, being someone with stage four cancer, that this idea of you can't take it with you, you know, how much is enough?

I mean, we see outrageous amounts of wealth in this country now, in this world, and it's obscene, really. And we will always have differences of resources. That's just the nature of being human. So it's not to condemn money or condemn wealth, but I think that question is a question for ourselves. And this is a great question in the collective and in community of like, what is enough?

Yes. Yeah. A couple of things to say. Yeah, the Buddha himself didn't, even though he was an itinerant monk and not making any money, but he did hang out with wealthy merchants and kings and stuff like that, so he wasn't vilifying money. Yeah, and he asked them for money. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

And then just to pick up on a few other points you made there, this contemplation that Joseph Goldstein, my friend and long-time meditation teacher, a person you guys are both familiar with, has actually asked me, you know, as a practice to really contemplate that, what is enough? You really make that a little co-on, a little riddle, something that you puzzle over for a while. I think it's a great actionable piece of advice for listeners. And then another Josephism that's coming to mind, and this wings back to some of the stuff

you guys were saying a few minutes ago, He often says, don't waste your suffering. Whatever is troubling you, that is an alarm bell. That's something that you can wake up and investigate mindfully. And so money is a portal to a lot of meaning. This dirty subject that we don't want to talk about is actually a gateway to some real self-discovery or even discovery of the lack of self. Yeah, look at all the things we've sort of touched on, like all the classic Dharma hits, you know, greed and clinging

and aversion and impermanence and, you know, it's all there. It's there with anything, but money is just like such an outsize expression of that in this culture. Just a few other things that really helped me in this regard with my, I won't say irrational, my conditioned neuroses around money and safety and security. One of them comes not from the Dharma, but from Stoicism. In Stoicism, there's this idea of the premeditation of evils. I think it's premeditatio malorum, I think, is the Latin or something like that.

But sometimes I will just picture in my mind like, all right, Dan, you're freaking out. Okay, let's bring to mind, what's the worst case scenario? Let's play it all the way up. Even if I don't like the picture, I'm always alive and everybody's alive. And I recognize that that may not be true for everybody. But for me, when I play it all the way out, I don't like it, but I can deal with it.

And that's very helpful. And then the other thing is, and this is related, is I've been deeply influenced by the work of Christian Neff in the field of self-compassion and also Ethan Cross, who has done some related work in our ability to reprogram or counter program against our inner chatter, which is often negative and paranoid. Just developing the ability to talk to myself, not tell myself fantasy stories about how everything's gonna be fine, but more along the lines of the stoic thing of like,

yeah, everything may not be fine, and you'll do your best in whatever situation. And that's one definition of hope, which is I can't control what's gonna happen, but I know I can do my best, whatever happened. Coming up, we're gonna find out how my spiel on how I work with my condition neuroses landed for Sav and Jeff. We're also going to talk about certainty versus balance when it comes to money, the practice

of generosity. We'll answer a question from somebody in my Substack community. And I just want to give you a heads up, stay tuned after we say goodbye because there's one other point to talk about that we forgot to mention in the conversation itself. I said a lot there, but did any of that land for you guys? Yeah, all of it. All of it for me too. Yeah, it's really helpful.

And I think part of that for me has been that practice, you're sort of describing different practices has been generosity. And again, sort of understanding where my generosity is coming from, but also participating in it regularly. So tithing my income and really giving that a lot of thought and consideration of what I want to contribute to, what I have to share. And also for me, just making a case for, yes, there's the worst case scenario and there's also kind of the best case scenario.

Like I haven't been someone who's had, for various reasons, including illness, hasn't had kind of a stable life in a lot of ways of building a retirement fund or having generated much wealth. I have a good income now and I can take care of myself, but starting also to think about the future and without that clinging to scarcity also planning, right? And so there is that balance. And I think that sometimes we think we need certainty, but that's not possible, but we

may need balance around money and how we relate to it. What's the difference between certainty and balance? Well, certainty is this idea that we can protect ourselves from all inner and outer harm and that, you know, we can, if we have all the money, if we have sort of like this more is better and not enough, that that's somehow going to make us secure. We've gone through all the reasons why that's not true. But there can also be this like, oh, well, money doesn't matter, you know, and I'm just going to move along in sort of this itinerant Buddhist way that's not possible if you don't have the societal conditions that the monks and the nuns are going to be supported by

the community or, you know, whatever models of reciprocity that might exist. Like we're in a culture where we need to take care of ourselves. And so how do we move from this clinging to certainty to a balance of like, okay, what is it that I need and how do I plan? And those are things I've had to learn for myself because I wasn't taught that by my parents who had no clue. And my early conditioning wasn't really giving me a healthy relationship to money. I just thought it was bad.

And so, you know, I've had to later in life, you know, middle age start to think about, okay, well, what am I planning for and how do I do that? Yeah. I love what you're saying, Seb. And I like, I think like a principle for me that's been really huge and that's, is this principle of interconnectivity or interbeing or. That I think about that a lot. I think about, I had this friend, I still have this friend, Ellen Springer. She has this awesome consulting company called spring strategies. And she helped me through a hard period where I was, had no money and I

needed some rethinking around it. And she used to say, free money from its misery. Like free the money. Her thing was that money needs, it's like everything. It should be in constant motion and constant movement. It doesn't mean you're not going to save, but thinking about it as like pulling it in one place and not going anywhere, it's like, it gets stagnant. I often think of this in my life, like I don't have a great savings or very much savings. We don't own our house.

But I know that for me, the practice of being generous with my money, the practice of being generous with my connections, allowing people to be generous for me, the constant, this deliberate cultivation of more interconnectivity in my life, that is the thing that's going to support us. My family and I, as we get older, more than any money will. And I really have confidence in that. And so it helps me not be so tight around it. Not that I'm not going to do as a responsible parent and try to make sure that, you know, there's a certain amount of money for my kids' education.

But at the same time, I've gotten much more easygoing about what that wealth might look like and where it's going to come from. Because money wants to be free. It all wants to be free. It's like, let the little bunnies go! Ahhh! I love that. I love that so much.

And it brings it back to relationship, which is so important. As we're having this conversation, as we have conversations and more people start to really tackle this with that sense of like, yeah, let's free it. There's a thing on retreats, on meditation retreats called the Donna Talk, where at the end, you know, it's explained that people have paid for the retreat, but that only pays for sort of room and board, and the teachers receive their payment by the generosity of people

at the end of the retreat deciding how much they want to offer. And a lot of teachers hate giving them Donna talk. And I actually love it because it is this opportunity to, as you're saying, Jeff, like, you know, free the money, you know, pour money, we're like just projecting all this stuff on it. And it's hanging out there as a neutral force of power or influence, and we can do anything with it. We can relate to it in any way we want. And so, yeah, let's free ourselves to have a healthier, more open, more connected and generous relationship.

Do you say that in the, in the, by how do you tell me what you're, I'd love to hear, like, show me the enthusiasm. Yeah. I do. I say, you know, I say poor money, you know, I start out by saying poor money, because everybody kind of tenses up, the people, the students, the yogis are like doing calculations in their head,

like, well, there's, you know, a hundred people here, so if everybody came this much and then they divided between four teachers, like I'm saying I've done that, that's why I know what's going on in people's minds and, you know, to just like rest back and stop the calculating, stop them, is this enough? Is that too much?

Da-da-da, da-da-da, and really just feel into it. It becomes its own practice, right? So I'm hearing a couple of practical things that I just want to put my finger on. One is, and this goes right back to the time of the Buddha, generosity is a practice in non-attachment. If you can make the habit of being generous, obviously you want to do it responsibly, but if clinging and craving are a big part of the problem when it comes to money,

well, being generous is a very interesting antidote. And then... Can I add one thing there? That according to the teachings, the Buddha, every time he entered a new community, the first teaching he would give is generosity. So it wasn't mindfulness or the Four Noble Truths or Metta, it was generosity was always the first teaching. Yeah.

The other thing is, where are you being generous from? Because that matters. If you're generous from a desire to want to be liked or in some way like I'm just trying to manipulate the situation, that doesn't have the same effect. You can really be offered from a place of, well, whatever you want to call it, a full heart, not wanting anything in return.

Well said, both of you. And then the other thing that I heard that seems really, really practical in there is that I think we can stipulate that there is no security in a world characterized by impermanence. That's an illusion that creates a lot of suffering when we chase it. And given that we are going to look for security probably no matter what, maybe look in places that are slightly more fruitful. So the blind accumulation of money is probably going to be less satisfying than the building of a network of relationships that you can count on. I heard that from you specifically, Jeff.

Yeah, absolutely. That's 100% how I'm trying to live, trying, being the output of words. Before we go, we've been kind of dancing around a thing that, Seb, I think you very helpfully have named, but all of us have referenced it. You know, we've been kind of dancing around a thing that Seb, I think you very helpfully have named, but all of us have referenced it. You know, we've been trying to be, I'll speak for myself. I've been trying to be so careful, as I always am in money discussions, because I don't want to piss anybody off.

I don't want to alienate anybody and have them say, oh, this fucking rich guy, he doesn't understand shit. And so we're all kind of stepping really gingerly here and naming that, yeah, we're privileged or lucky or advantaged. And I think that's very helpful and worth doing. And I think maybe we should take a more forthright look at it in spirit. I'm going to read a message we got from a subscriber at danharris.com.

This is from Diane, who I think is one of the people we're trying not to alienate here. And she writes, I'm quite older and do not have financial security. It's a horrible place to be in, emotionally and physically draining. Can't believe I'm stating that publicly. Cringe. I very much look forward to your podcast addressing this real concern for so many of us with my three favorite people. Maybe we should talk again from our oft-named position of privilege about what we might say that

would be useful to somebody who has real pressing urgent financial concerns that are much more acute than anything that we're dealing with. Well, I'll just say that I don't feel there's any practical advice around money I could give Diane because I don't know her situation. I don't, that's not my area of expertise. But as someone who has experienced acute financial distress and fears, what Jeff was pointing to and I think we've been sort of talking about this whole time in terms of relationship is really important.

I mean, the fact that Diane is dating it publicly is a huge step. And there can be so much shame and fear around money. And that's where community and relationship is so important. You know, speaking earlier about the Ethiopian context and the reciprocity is also about support in times of hardship, not just generosity around things that you're naming that you like. And that interconnection is not replaceable by material resources. It is the ultimate resources Jeff was pointing to. And so that reaching out, whether it's to friends and family or to institutions or support groups or resources of

interconnection that exists around you. I think it's really important to have that as the foundation. Yeah, and then they're reaching into the self compassion, just the practice and it's somehow like having intense chronic pain, which I meet lots of people and people in like debilitating situations where they've got a major illness and this is it. It's gonna be there for the rest of their life.

The practice can be really supportive. A way to soothe yourself and calm yourself and come to center and see you can make clear decisions from that place. I mean, all the things we've been talking about, I don't think that it's super relevant there. That was well said. I agree. As I was listening to both of you talk there, I was remembering a personal story. As you both know, one of the hazards of our line of work is that anecdotes are gold. And you can't remember when you told what story to who.

And so I'm always, every time I say something personal on the show, I'm like, yeah, people have probably fucking heard me say this before, but I'm gonna say it again. Anyway, this story, because it involves you, Seb, for my 50th birthday, which was three and a half years ago, you gave me a painting that was done by one of your friends. And I really liked the painting, it hangs in my office.

And one day when I was sort of moving it around, I really like the painting, it hangs in my office. One day when I was moving it around, I saw in the back that it had a name. There's a name of this artwork as a name, and the name is My Open Heart Keeps Me Safe, which given my conditioning, made me, I found it a little barf-tastic the first time I heard about it. Like, oh my God, my open heart keeps me safe. What the hell does that mean?

I've really taken it on as a co-on over the years as somebody who's an anxious person and is always scanning the environment for threats. Am I okay? Do you like me? Am I okay? Am I okay? Do you, you know, a constant inner chatter of that variety.

And what I heard in both of your comments in different ways was a reflection of that piece of wisdom. Like your open heart, meaning, are you creating relationships? Are you open to asking for help? Are you helping other people? Are you not closed off, not contracted? Well, that actually is likely to keep you as safe as possible. And then second, you know, when you were talking about pain, Jeff, psychic or physical,

Second, you know, when you were talking about pain, Jeff, psychic or physical, counter-intuitively, often the route is to throw open the doors and experience it. Not always, but sometimes. Yeah, you have to be tight-rooted, you have to be careful about this, but often having an open heart in relationship to what's bothering you is the way to deal with it. So can I just say that that painting is made by my friend, Alison Strickland, who is the person who I mentioned who lost her mom, who now has the GoFundMe.

So she is actually an example of that in this, because she is opening her art to say I need help. And one time when I was asking for support and feeling all sorts of ways about it, a friend of mine, Susan, who's since passed away from breast cancer, said something that James Barres, another Dharma teacher, had told her that when you seek support, you're actually a field of merit. Oh, I love that. That you're giving other people the opportunity to build their own merit, to build their own goodness.

And so that gift is reciprocal actually. I'll put a link to Alison's GoFundMe in the show notes. If anybody wants to support Alison, I know I want to. So send me that link, Seb. I'll put it in the show notes and I will make sure that I get involved myself because she makes my office brighter every day. Well, I love you guys.

Thank you for doing this. Love you too. Love both of you. Thanks for this opportunity. And may there be more conversations about what's cringy. That reminds me Dan, can you give me five bucks? Always buddy, always. Always, buddy, always. Thanks again to Seb and Jeff.

After our conversation, Seb reached out to say that we had missed something crucial, gratitude. One journaling practice that Seb personally does is gratitude lists. For her, she says it creates a sense of not only enoughness, but also abundance. And I should say that there's a lot of science to suggest that gratitude lists can be really helpful. Also, if you're in the market for a journal,

my wife and I recently made a journal called Dump It Here, which is available in the shop over at danharris.com. While I'm being self-promotional, let me remind you that Jeff, Seb, and I co-host our annual retreat called Meditation Party at Omega, the Omega Institute, which is north of New York City. Tickets just went on sale for the next one, which is coming up in October.

I'll put a link in the show notes if you wanna come. I will also in the show notes put links to past episodes with Seb and Jeff, and a link to Alison Strickland's GoFundMe page. And I will put links to my conversations with Kristin Neff and James Baraz, both of whom came up in the course of today's episode. And I also want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show.

Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at PodPeople. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

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