Why Money? Why Enough? Why Brazil?

An actual friend unsubscribed from my e-list today, and I don’t blame her. Right now I’m sending out more emails about my upcoming classes than I think is kind to anyone’s inbox – but it’s the best way I have to tell fans and friends about what I am teaching. Today I want to tell you why the flurry – and assure you it’ll settle down.

Money: Joe Dominguez (who was both practical and prescient) saw over 20 years ago our current economic crashing about. We wrote and promoted Your Money or Your Life to help the maximum number of people to eliminate debt, live within their means, save and get creative about meeting their non material needs non materially. The first edition reached a million people. We’re hoping the 2008 update reaches the next. My free classes next week are all to introduce the Your Money or Your Life approach and practices to as many people as possible.

Enough: You actually can’t achieve the amazing results with the Your Money or Your Life program if you can’t identify your “enough point” – that place of maximum happiness beyond which more isn’t better, it’s clutter. It turns out that the same strategies for identifying your money and stuff “enough point” work for food, time, commitments, committees, emails, striving and stress. As we shift from a preference from more to a preference for enough, we will learn to live well together within the means of the earth. And this is my hope and goal and intention and dream.

If this has enticed you, click here to sign up for my Fall class: Money, Happiness & Enough: the Whole Enchilada

Brazil: Happiness is my third area of education. Happiness is a result of having enough. Of experiencing contentment. Of knowing your life actions are aligned with your life goals. Ever since I first walked off a plane in Brazil (2001) I’ve known that something else is going on there and it had to do with an ease and sensuality from head to toe. I was so aware that I had a head with something hanging off it to walk me around and keep it going. I was all mind and hands – will and doing. Brazil was heart and soul. And still is.

I’ve been there 5 times now. I’m ever more Brazilian in my own heart and soul. Even activism feels happy there, full of laughter and dancing and good fun. I want you to feel it and thus to reorient your own efforts to change something – yourself, the world – around happiness rather than striving. You’ll stick with it and enjoy it and be less of a pill to those around you. And I think happiness is a more appealing horizon than mere “frugality” or even simplicity. It’s how life is once you let go of the products based notion of the good life.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for my current barrage of emails and if you aren’t part of the list, you’ll click the link at top and join in. And I hope you sign up for the classes. I really do!