It’s up! I finally finished my audition tape for Oprah’s new OWN network — I’m proposing a talk show based on my book, Heal the Money. If you would be so kind as to vote for me, I would much appreciate it. I did my best to encapsulate the essence of the book into three minutes . I’d love to hear any comments or thoughts you have on it! Go here to view and vote!

You can vote as often as you like until July 3. Watch below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tmioTjobxU

As the financial tornadoes continue, thousands are feeling the wrenching shock of an unexpected income loss. No matter how confident you are in your abilities, a forced drop in financial flow can wreak emotional havoc. Doubts and worries you thought you’d long gotten rid of can suddenly take over the microphone in your head and blast fears and insecurities 24/7.

Who controls the internal megaphone?

Just when you most need your self-esteem, it evaporates.

I know as well as anyone that it’s a near Herculean effort at times to cobble together some self-esteem when you’re broke. Why this is so is a long and winding story, but in a nutshell it comes down to pegging our self-esteem to the wrong yardstick. Most of us have been relying heavily on the capricious voice of ego for our self esteem and ego has chosen money as a primary tool of torture. It’s going to take some dedicated inner work to get money out of ego’s grip and to peg our self esteem to the right source.

But the good news is you can wrestle back control of the microphone in your head and start broadcasting correct information. Follow these five steps to start disconnecting your self esteem from your ego, and tune into your real inner worth.

Step 1. Honor your own feelings
No one likes being ignored. To purposefully ignore someone communicates disdain and dismissal — not very pleasant feedback to receive. Being ignored challenges our very existence and sense of worth. In response, we often clamor to be heard.

When we ignore our emotions, they get the same message. They take it personally. Keep slamming the door in their face and they only get louder and louder. The result: stress, illnesses and drama. Tension around emotions comes in great measure from the effort it takes to ignore and suppress what we deem unacceptable.

How much are you judging, resisting or ignoring your own feelings around being broke?

Listening to your own feelings with compassion and acceptance is one of the biggest gifts you can give to yourself. Frustration, fear, feeling out of control, betrayal, anger, hurt, feeling trapped, insignificant and powerless, feeling unloved — these are all feelings common to the experience of being broke. It’s perfectly understandable, and perfectly acceptable, if you have any of these feelings.

Allow them up into your awareness. Let them exist. Bear witness to them. Acknowledge them. When you do, a deep aspect of you feels heard and accepted.

The trick to learn is that you can bear witness to these feelings without feeding them, without having them consume you, throw you into depression, or dictate your actions. Emotions by their nature are in flux. You do need to acknowledge they exist, but you do not need to identify with them. You do not need to construct a story from them that you tell all your friends and repeat over and over. You do not need to hold onto them — this is a key distinction.

Step 2. Let the feelings go
Once you’ve listened to your own feelings — heard yourself out, so to speak — you can let them go. You can do this from a place of being the observer of your feelings, rather than as an involved participant. Simply “hearing” the emotions in itself will begin to shift things. You might imagine yourself being an audience for the play of your emotions, for instance.

Tie your emotions with a bow and send them on their way

When I was first getting accustomed to letting go of my emotions, I imagined each emotion, each upset, being a small gift I gave to the universe — in a little box with a bow. It helped immensely in being able to let them go.

Let them go because you are not your emotions. They pass, they change — you still exist. As you practice letting them go — and it definitely takes practice — you can let them go more and more quickly. You can become a master of this.

Sometimes, the emotions we’re looping on are looping because they’re masking deeper feelings that we’ve decided are more scary or unacceptable, or that make us feel more vulnerable. Anger will commonly mask hurt, for example. Admitting you feel hurt feels more vulnerable than being angry. Letting one emotion go — the anger — can release the other — the hurt — so that it too can go and the whole issue can heal.

Once your anxiety-provoking emotions have exited, give yourself acceptance and approval. It may feel awkward at first — the voice of ego in your head will tell you it’s a stupid thing to do. Do it anyway — give yourself your own approval. With passionate enthusiasm.

Don't have a dog? Borrow your neighbor's

Step 3. Do something you love
Feed that approval you’ve just given yourself by setting regularly scheduled times to do something you love to do. People often scramble when they feel broke, putting a huge amount of pressure on themselves to find the next job, search for the next opening, submit their resume, go to the next networking opportunity. Doing something can feel empowering, but often the activities take on an anxiety-state panic. The panic is counter-productive.

Defuse the panic by doing something you love. You don’t need to spend money to do something wonderful. Walk your dog — just make sure to leave your cell phone and iPod at home. (If you don’t have a dog, borrow a neighbor’s .) Go for a walk in a beautiful part of your town. If you can get out in nature, even better. Surf, hike, bike. Just clear your schedule and do it.

Notice the beauty around you

When you’re out there, take time to stop and simply look at what is beautiful: a delicate bloom, a towering tree, a lone cloud, a breaking wave. Don’t pick the flower, simply appreciate it. Look as an artist might look — carefully, patiently, intently. This exercise shifts your focus away from the voice in your head, toward beauty and into the present moment, which is a most powerful combination. Magic can happen.

Step 4. Dedicate time to pursue your dreams
People in the panic mode of feeling broke often jettison their dreams. They talk themselves into doing only “practical” things and force out any wild notions of being successful doing what they really love to do. Consequently, they often find themselves becoming more and more depressed, complaining, and despairing.

The reason for the depression here is simple — your soul doesn’t like being ignored either. Money is our current favorite “excuse” for not pursuing our soul’s designs for our lifetime. Perhaps our souls are collectively stamping their feet to be heard, and the money is slipping away until we listen to them.

Giving dedicated energy to your dreams allows your soul to feel heard and energizes everything else you do.

Devote a block of several hours in the morning — before you do anything else — to pursuing your true preference. What do you really want to do? What brings a smile to your face when you think of being able to do it full time? What would you do if you didn’t need to worry about “making money”? Pursue or research that dream first, before doing any “practical” tasks.

Do this for two or three weeks, as a routine, and see how your energy and stress level improves and how many things have simply fallen into place with your “practical” life.

This is a contest between ego and soul. It’s soul’s time to win, but ego is going to put up a fight.

Step 5. Appreciate what you already have
Sometimes when we’re down, we can get lost in it. By spending all our energy focused on what we don’t have, soon there’s no room in our head to even notice what we do have. Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve acknowledged the value of friends and family who truly support you? Giving love to others is a sure-fire way of finding the road out of the blues.

Send an email to your good friends telling them how they’ve helped you and how glad you are that they’re in your life.

I did this on the spur of the moment recently after a good friend passed away unexpectedly — it was suddenly urgent for me to tell all my friends, especially those I hadn’t been in touch with in a while, how much they meant to me. I was amazed by all the sincere good wishes and thanks that these friends sent back to me. I realized I helped many people that day and inspired several friends to reconnect with their own lost friends — and I felt wonderful for days.

By doing this simple thing, you are giving people what they really want — what everyone really wants — acknowledgment and love.

Create a flowing fountain of worth

If you take these steps, you will soon realize an important truth: “feeling like a million” has nothing at all to do with money.

People who are broke often assume that their problems can be solved with money or that it must feel great to be a millionaire. The truth is, because of its current ties to ego, money often simply masks existing ongoing problems and can even exacerbate them.

Listening to your emotions, letting go of them once they’re acknowledged, putting time into your dreams and what you love, and appreciating what you already have will connect you to what makes you most alive. Ultimately, feeling most alive and accepting and appreciating yourself is the source of true self-worth, and this kind of self-esteem does not go up and down with economic tides. It is an endless fountain that can sustain you through all challenges.

Feeling like a million is an inside job. That is true whether you’re a billionaire or broke, and you can choose to have that strength no matter how much money happens to be in your wallet at that moment. You can give yourself acknowledgement and love at any minute of the day — and ultimately, when it comes down to it, this is what we’ve been looking for all along.

These videos capture particular pulses of this economic crisis, from one real face of homelessness, to a Great Depression cooking class, to a hilarious bit from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show about why we should think twice, or a billion times, before listening to CNBC’s financial advice.

Arlyn Royce Was Here #10

One young woman’s quiet, personal, matter-of-fact — and therefore delicately touching — recounting and tour of the streets in Hollywood where she slept in her car — homeless for 5 months straight from April through September 2008.

Great Depression Cooking with Clara: Peppers & Eggs

This charming 93-year-old cook and great grandmother, Clara, recounts her childhood during the Great Depression as she prepares meals from the era.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IjNV3lZkQ

And because laughter is good for you … The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: CNBC Gives Financial Advice

CNBC’s Rick Santelli is angry that those loser homeowners are going to get bailed out.
“Ah, if I’d only followed CNBC’s advice,” says Stewart, “I’d have a million dollars today — provided I started with a hundred million dollars.”

Thanks, but the battle has moved on.

For all the surrounding fanfare, the stimulus package and housing plan brought forward last week and stirringly trumpeted by President Obama last night, have arrived on the battlefield with a truckload of supplies long after the battle has spread to the surrounding hillsides. Thanks, but we needed these things a long while ago — we’re talking years ago. The number of casualties these bandages can help now is far less than the number of wounded to come.

Most importantly, the supplies in the truck do almost nothing at all to stop the real cause of all the bloodshed.

Congress has devised this plan from conventional party agendas — investment and tax-cuts — guided by conventional banking insiders being very careful not to point out who’s really been mowing down the bystanders. The reason it won’t work is because it doesn’t address the rot at the foundation of the financial system.

Many different fingers have been pointing to the lack of regulation, or the micro-managing of interest rates, or the sub-prime loan debacle, or the hedge fund orgy, or the lack of a real free-market. But the real cause is much more basic: fraud — wide-scale, systemic fraud.

Fraud exists far beyond the level of Bernie Madoff, everywhere. The system collapsing in front of us was revolving around lies all up and down the system: fraudulent loans, fraudulent rating systems, fraudulent balance sheets, corrupt regulatory bodies, fraudulent investing instruments, topped off by corrupted government guidelines and oversight.

Fraud exists even in the vision — generated for public consumption — of what money is, what debt is, what banks do, what a deposit is, what credit is, the integrity of where money goes, who gets it and who doesn’t and why.

Insolvency, fraud and off balance sheet mumbo-jumbo

Despite Obama’s insistence in his address to Congress, the issue at heart is not the need to jump-start lending. We are already drowning in unpayable levels of debt. The very concept of “credit” and “debt” and the fraudulent terms by which they now exist need to be completely redrawn.

The debt problem at the heart of the mess is an outgrowth of the far more fundamental issue of fraud.

Here’s just one tiny example: Citigroup sent out letters to customers in California last March warning clients that their adjustable rate mortgages were likely about to go up, so clients should lock down a better deal now and buy a new fixed rate mortgage. But Citigroup lied. These particular clients’ ARM rates were about to go down. The threat didn’t exist. This is fraud, people. Citigroup was taking advantage of people who didn’t have their mortgage numbers and an actuary at their fingertips.

That kind of misrepresentation is just one small instance of widespread financial industry disingenuousness.

The first “bailout” served essentially as a massive giveaway doled out in bonuses to top executives or horded in desperation. These banks never had any intention of lending out the taxpayer money to “save the economy.” I wouldn’t doubt Paulson knew it. Nor would I doubt that banks are refusing to tell anyone where the bailout money went because they’re not eager for the public to discover just how much of the billions went directly into pockets.

Even now, the nation’s largest banks are hiding their trillions in toxic “assets” off their balance sheets as they aim to shakedown the government for more taxpayer money.

Fraud at this level has been the way of financial business. As Mish Shedlock points out, it is never practical to tell the truth.

It’s NEVER “practical” for the Fed, the SEC, Banks, CEOs in general, the FDIC, Congress, the Treasury Department, or the President to tell the truth.

This is what it all boils down to: Somehow it’s never “practical” to stop a drunken credit-financed orgy, yet when the party ends, it’s never “practical” to discuss the consequences.

In this case, the credit orgy lasted so long, and there were so many players, that the most important truth right now that needs open, honest discussion is that the entire US Banking System Is Insolvent.

Congress's terra incognita: investigate financial fraud

Mish and others have been pointing out for months that many (probably most, possibly all but a handful) high-profile banks are dead banks walking — zombie banks being defibrillated into seeming aliveness solely by expected infusions of public money.

To deal with this fraud monster — and Congress soon will be forced to — they’ll need to travel into governing terra incognita, those uncharted waters where pirates and sea monsters lurk.

To have a hope of reaching the far-off land of recovery, Congress — or an appointed, verifiably independent body (or an unanticipated act of God) — will need to root out the fraud at the highest levels of the banking, finance and regulatory industries. That exercise no doubt will lead to uncovering the fraud within their own parties and their own supposed ideologies.

Here be dragons

Here be dragons indeed.

Congress will venture into these waters only when compelled by the reality of the conventional plan’s futility, combined with the utter insistence of the American people — along with, perhaps, the force majeure of international catastrophe.

This stimulus plan, however, was a necessary step — if only to demonstrate that the standard playbook needs to be thrown out the window. Mish and Minyanville continue:

The government’s strategy is to buy time. It always is. Time allows it to slowly drain wealth from the poor/middle class and re-distribute it to the rich who own the financial system.

The Fed, the SEC, and the Treasury department are all jumping through hoops attempting to disguise this fact, but their collective panic to bail out the wealthy at the expense of the poor tells the truth, even as they find it “impractical” to do so.

Real stimulus idea: Replace lies with truth

The people of the planet are done being abused. That we’ve put up with financial abuse for this long speaks volumes about the patience of our souls. But we insist: no more. We are about to throw out the system that looks solely to profit from us and to create one that truly serves us.

Truth needs to replace lies in every nook and cranny. Nothing less will work at this juncture. The consciousness of the planet, of humankind, insists. I suspect Obama gets this, even as he needs to navigate murky, treacherous waters. His energy is calling out the right direction, though the specifics needed aren’t yet in the plan.

Giant ray of hope

As the transition to integrity takes place, there is a great deal of anxiety and fear. The suffering is certainly real. I know as well as anyone that it is very difficult in today’s world to face a loss of money and not have it affect one’s sense of safety, identity and capability.

Experiencing the loss of a home — and all the judgment, powerlessness and self-blame that can come along with that event — can be devastating. The lifestyle we construct around us can come to represent everything we stand for, everything we are. To be forced to give it up threatens our very sense of self.

Unexpected treasure under the receding tide of money.

But there is a great ray of hope here amidst the crumbling pylons. For at the bottom of the ocean — as the tide of money recedes — is where we can find the real gold.

The real gold is a sense of ourselves that is truly independent of money.

For a very long time, most people have been strongly identified with money (or lack thereof) for their sense of safety and self worth (or lack thereof). This external yardstick is being revealed more and more to be not only a very poor measuring device but also an unreliable safety tool. Now we have the opportunity to choose a better one.

We have the opportunity to find the enduring gold within: an inner connection to the intrinsic value of our humanity, our lifeforce, our being.

We are seeing the truth that money, indeed anything external, is temporary. It is a poor and arbitrary measure of real worth.

When natural disaster strikes — the recent fires in Australia come to mind — those affected often say to interviewers that they are just happy to be alive. The disaster has made them realize the greater value of their lives, rather than their possessions. Everyone pitches in, everyone helps each other.

Many are losing their homes and livelihoods now due to an economic tsunami. While the disaster is man-made, its magnitude is sweeping a good many honorable people away in the surging undertow. The broader truth here is certainly the same: there is far greater value in the lives being lived than in the possessions lost.

It is wise to take definitive steps to honor your life in this moment of time. Can you let go of judgments and expectations for this moment and simply get in touch with your sense of being alive and honor it? Can you extend this honoring to others?

We are each struggling from one moment to the next to make this shift to an internal yardstick. Extend compassion — to yourself and to others. As we glimpse the gold within, we’ll see that each of us, in fact, is valuable beyond measure.

This time of bailout frenzy and bank failures has indeed been a time of constant terror whip-up. My friend writes:

Hi Suzanne, what do you think of what’s going on? I am anxious and full of fear, and can’t watch the news anymore. Where can I go to get other points of view? There must be something positive to concentrate on while everyone seems to be in panic?

Indeed, this time of terror production is a precious moment to stare one’s ego plainly in the face. This is the gift in the darkness.

The fanning of fear, of doom, these are the weapons of ego, and ego is the dark side. Ego is the shadow. Ego is the part of us we have let run this world.

Egoic consciousness is breaking apart before our eyes as the Berlin Wall fell before our eyes 20 years ago — in astonishing swiftness. The egoic consciousness that dreamt up these financial structures that we’ve been enduring in the first place, let alone actually foisted them on the world is taking its last frantic breaths.

Ego has held most tightly to money and will not let its death grip go without a fight. This is the reason for the injection of fear coursing through the nation.

But before we go any further, some of you may be curious, what do I mean by “ego”? The way I think about it, ego is the aspect of you — of each of us — that works to put you above or below another person or group. It is the judging, condemning, or boastful, superior voice within. As Eckhart Tolle describes it, ego is the complete attachment to form. I understand “form” as the external, the physical (the house you live in or the car you drive) or the conceptual (the beliefs you hold about yourself and the world) that are interpreted positively or negatively by the mind. When one is attached to form, there is no separation between one’s identity and the external form or belief — you are your car, you are your beliefs.

Money, more than any other form, has been completely dominated by ego energy for countless generations. The end of this road is what is being revealed now: an unregulated, unrestrained frenzy of greed, of avarice, of recklessness, of irresponsibility, of lack of compassion, of blindness and deafness — of madness.

“Enough!” The call of Barack Obama touches the exact stand so many are intuitively reaching.

This “enough” is the voice of our knowing self. This is the voice of the observer of ego, the part of us who cannot stomach what we see. The part of us who cannot live with ourselves this way anymore.

With that “enough,” we have begun to give voice to the consciousness that is grounded in compassion and fairness and community and higher vision. We have called an end to the madness of ego and we have put our foot down: Enough!

Ego is not used to being denied.

Ego, after all, has been running amok for generations. “Who are you,” it booms menacingly, “to say no to me?!” (I hear Darth Vader’s or James Earle Jones’ voice here.) “Don’t you know what will happen to you and your children? You and they will be swept off the face of the earth if you don’t give me what I want! Give me what I want and we will rule the universe as we were meant to!”

Enough! No!

“Then cower in fear as I unleash all the energy of destruction on the planet! Ignore me and it will be Financial Doom of Colossal Proportions!!!”

Standing Up to Abuse

The egoic consciousness is relentlessly abusive. No matter what the circumstances, what choice is made, what achievements, what breakthroughs, what path is taken, the energy of ego will never let up. It is constantly dissatisfied, constantly berating. Even $700 billion, $750 billion, $800 billion would not be enough. There is no amount that would be enough.

The thing to understand about ego is that it is programmed as a lack creator. By its nature, it is never satisfied. It is like trying to fill a black hole. The task is impossible.

But ego has no self awareness of this dysfunction, so it rains down fire and brimstone in desperate attempts to meet its current objectives.

We finally, collectively, stood up and said no to the abuse meted out by this abusive egoic financial system.

In essence, we — by our phone calls and rallies and protests — climbed on top of this virtual financial Berlin Wall — the division between the kleptocratic haves and the struggling have nots, between fraud and honesty, between cloaked dealings and transparency.

We climbed on top of this wall, triumphant — for a moment.

Today, however, Congress felt the pressure of the virtual guns trained on them and down from the wall-top they scurried.

Enough!

They fell for the age-old trick of ego. To make us cower, ego will bring up all the things we fear most. It will try to make us feel like the failures for not agreeing to its demands. You could easily hear the egoic refrain from those pushing this bailout: they blamed those who questioned the giveaway saying any delay would threaten financial collapse — of colossal proportions!!!

Fear around money is a long-conditioned thoughtform: “If I lose all my money, what do I have to show for my efforts in life? How will I survive? If all this is taken away, what am I? If all that I’ve done has come to nothing, why go on? All the dreams and hopes, are they to end? Am I really worthless now?”

For some, these fears are far more visceral than the fear of death itself. Fear of dying can be very abstract — fear of losing all your money is very real.

Return of the King

King of the Dead

There’s a scene that comes to mind from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King that is an apt metaphor. In the scene, Aragorn has to venture into the dark mountain from which no man has returned — the Path of the Dead — and face the Dead Army. This is our time. Everything we fear most, all the past conditioning that causes us to back away from what we need to do, is threatening us. We need to face the fears, face the buried skeletons — the Dead Army — and find our “king” within that is master over what we fear, master of our ego, and move forward.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpI8NtQvP9g

(scene begins at 1:46 into clip)

Our inner king, our awareness, our consciousness, is master over this onslaught of ego.

We are in the mountain. We need to dispatch our egoic consciousness.

How do we do that? The good news is it’s already happening. We would not have succeeded in stopping the first unlimited, unquestioned, unexamined bailout attempt if we hadn’t already collectively said “enough.”

First, know that we have all the power we need to change what needs to be changed, especially the abusive financial system in which we exist.

The world as it exists is not the world we deserve. Standing up for what we deserve is important, but to do this successfully, we will need to heal and undo generations of programming.

What we all deserve is freedom from abuse, of any kind, freedom from tyranny. The current money / debt system has become tyrannical, dictating virtually every aspect of our lives.

It is currently run by the collective energy of ego. As we become free of our own egos, as we loosen the desperate hold ego has on money in our own lives, the efforts of individuals will combine to move the nation forward. Soon, transparent, honest and fair financial structures will become apparent.

Each small step moves the nation to shed its egoic cloak and we will then be able to rise to our promise.

So take one step now to let go of your own fears.

Fear is almost always future oriented and is what the ego uses to put on the brakes. Ego cannot survive long in the present moment. Ask yourself, “In this moment, right now, what is the problem? Am I safe right now?” Often, the answer is “Yes, I’m safe at the moment, but what happens if…”  Stop. Stay in the present moment, in that experience of being safe, and let that feeling expand. Don’t follow the “but…”

Instead, just observe any other thoughts that come up as you might watch a stream pass by. They are just thoughts. Let them pass in front of you as easily as the stream, without resistance or judgment.

Aragorn leads the Dead Army

Certainly there are times when real crises occur. But fear is not a required emotion for responding to crises. Even in those times, one can be operating out of an energy that is simply observant and responsive, without fear, as Aragorn strode into the mountain.

Imagine what this financial crisis discussion would have been like without the fear and desperation. Would we have climbed off the wall and given up on reforms to help Main Street so quickly?

We are far from finished, however, with this restructuring. There will be more opportunities to bring down the wall.

More steps to help ease fears to come in my next blog: Defeating Saber-Toothed Financial Tigers