Integrating Money and Meaning

While I believe spiritual practice will benefit anyone, this book assumes that readers have access to a basic level of privilege, in that they are able to sustain themselves with a roof over their heads, food, and clothing.

The wealthiest eighty-five people on the entire planet have more money than the poorest 3.5 billion people combined. It’s hard to even take in that statistic. Between 1979 and 2007, the wages of the top 1 percent of households in the United States rose ten times more than the bottom 90 percent.

Spiritual practice is a way of being in the world that contributes not just to personal peace and equanimity but also to community healing and health through love, compassion, and mercy. In fact, you can’t really have one without the other.

In other words, our ancestors’ experiences can affect our own brains and, therefore, our own experiences. Studies show that traumas experienced in one generation, such as the Jews during the Holocaust or children who have been abused, can show up as inherited psychological and behavioral tendencies in future generations, even if the specific memori

A 2015 study found that children raised in wealthy families turned out wealthy, whether they were biological children or adopted. Although this study didn’t try to pinpoint exactly what in the environment was creating this trend, they found it was not related entirely to wealth being passed on from one generation to the other.

we think we are—in other words, how we live inside the whale.

During the recession of 2007–09, for example, the average wealth of the top 1 percent dropped by 16 percent; meanwhile the wealth of the bottom 99 percent dropped 47 percent. The statistics go on and on and are startling.9

another achieve the American dream.

I began to feel a terrible tension between having too much money and not having enough, at the same time recognizing that none of the money was really mine to begin with. While my parents never said so outright, I could feel the strings.