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Senior Correspondent

You get up early and rub the sleep out of your eyes. You get your motor going with a superb cup of coffee and head out to work. Over the next bunch of hours, you’ll trade your knowledge, time and effort for money, based on a formal or informal contract with someone.

Or you’ll take that cup of coffee to your computer and check what sales came in overnight while you slept … as the result of work you put in building an online business, creating products and attracting willing customers. Again, an exchange of knowledge, time and effort for money.

Or maybe you take a break from your latest adventure and check in with your trusted money manager to know how your investment portfolio’s doing. Even that passive income — which maybe isn’t the result of knowledge, time and effort today — IS the result of those things done some time in the past.

However you generate an income, short of inheriting it, that money came as an exchange for energy you expended. (And even as an inheritance, it’s the result of someone else’s effort, gifted to you.) As such, money is a “carrier” of energy itself.

Okay, so now that energy goes into a bank as a deposit. To make life simpler, there are numbers assigned to it, called dollars, so it’s easier to keep track of. Those numbers also make it easier to move that energy forward, whether as a source of income to the retailer who sells you those organic veggies, or the chiropractor who takes the pain out of your lower back or the bank that exchanges it for a small piece of ownership of your house.

Nowhere along the line does the energy acquire any unusual controlling power or take on characteristics of evil. It’s neither friend, nor foe.

That energy is simply something that flows from one place to another, transferred as the result of the knowledge, time and effort expended by one or another party to the exchange.

So can you see why the psychological burden we assign to money is so misplaced? Do you understand why the power we give it is so baseless? Can you feel how neutral money can actually be … as nothing other than the energy that flows forth to thank the next person along its path for the knowledge, time and effort that went into whatever you purchase with it?

Time to lighten up. Time to stop blaming money for whatever isn’t perfect in your life. Time to look at the highest and best use of your knowledge, time and effort. Time to allow the energy to flow … without creating false obstacles.

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