Dear Friend,
Sometimes life circles around and presents a door for you to walk through from a place and a time way back in your past. A door you may have walked through when you were much younger, with a whole lifetime of opportunity ahead of you.
A few months back, there was a little tap-tap-tap coming from one of those doors I walked through in my early 20’s…a door connected to Naropa University, where I graduated with my Master’s in Somatic Psychology (which forms the lovely and useful foundation for the money work I’ve done for the last 24 years.)
Someone from Naropa University reached out and asked if I’d like to give a talk as part of their 50th Anniversary series of presentations.
As you can imagine, I was thrilled to get an invite to go back to my alma mater and share my work with that community.
This school was a launch pad for my life’s work, so getting a chance to go back to where it all began and share some useful money tools with the students feels like such a treat.
My training at Naropa was exceptional and it gave me all the life and somatic skills I needed to be a thriving human, parent, and very good therapist.
When I finally finished my degree at Naropa, and soon after finishing a boatload of internship hours in the mental health field and hospice at the age of 28, I imagined the things I’d help people with as a therapist would be things like intimacy, sexuality, body, food, grief, and death.
But soon after I graduated from Naropa I started getting letters in the mail about my school loan that paid for my education. It was suddenly time to start paying the loan back. It was then that it hit me: there was a huge missing hole of learning in my graduate degree:
Life skills around money.
And I mean any skills from the practical to the emotional to the psychological.
It started to dawn on me that it wasn’t just Naropa that had this missing money education. None of the schools I went to, from kindergarten through graduate school, taught me anything at all about how to handle all the facets of the financial realm.
There were no teachings about money emotions and family money stories from anyone.
And once in my graduate program, there was no guidance around things like how to help couples therapy clients have compassionate money conversations when they’re fighting about money.
Nor were there any teachings about how to create a sustainable therapy practice, do the bookkeeping for my practice, and manage any aspect of the financial side of being a therapist.
Fresh out of finishing my internships, I started following my hunches…the little quiet voice inside me, nudging me towards this part of life everyone was ignoring: the psychological, emotional, and practical aspects of relating with money.
I learned how to do bookkeeping, create financial reports, and started offering bookkeeping services for other therapists and creatives.
Not long after, my mentor at the time, Tamara Slayton, nudged me a little further towards what would become my life’s work. She told me it was time for me to start sharing my money work methodology with the world.
It took me a bit to see what she saw, but I soon realized that I was already developing a unique approach to helping people create a healthier relationship with money. It was a blend of practical financial skills and somatic based psychotherapy.
I wove those things together and ended up creating this thing called “financial therapy,” which I’ve been teaching to people around the world ever since.
And now things are coming full circle with my upcoming talk on financial therapy at my alma mater!
I literally get to go back and give them an introduction to so many ideas and practices around money that I wish I’d learned about when I was going to school there some 30 years ago.
So, why am I telling you about this today? Well, because you can come and watch the talk I’ll give right on your laptop if you’d like to join us, and it won’t cost you a thing.
My free talk is happening this coming Tuesday, February 25th, at 6:00pm Mountain Time, and I would love for you to join me.
You can sign up to attend in-person or online right here.
The event is both live in Boulder, CO (on the Arapahoe campus) and on Zoom, so you can watch from anywhere in the world while wearing your PJ’s if you like.
Here are the details about the event from the Naropa website:
You can register for the live streaming of the event via the link below (or you can join us live if you live in the area!).
You can sign up to attend in-person or online right here.
I can’t wait to give back to the Naropa community and students with this talk, and if you can make it, I hope you get some good nuggets for your own journey of money healing.
With my support and dearest wishes,
P.S. Naropa is the first university to use my first book, The Art of Money: A Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness as a textbook in one of their personal finance courses. I have big dreams of getting this book used as a textbook in all the psychology programs around the US (as a start!) and I’m working on this with my publisher to make this happen.
If you have any connections with other universities that might want to teach a money psychology course with my book as one of the textbooks for the class, please reach out and let me know about them.
