Mindfulness and Money
What is the relationship between mindfulness and money? Has someone just made it up?
How can mindfulness be a way to improve your finances?
Is mindfulness not a somewhat esoteric practice to calm the mind? While the pursuit of money is the cause of so much mental turmoil.
It seems like a rather strange connection. Surely, the two exist in different spheres.
Using mindfulness to divert our minds from one of the central sources of stress in the modern world would surely be the sensible thing to do.
But mindfulness is increasingly seen as a way to improve your finances.
What are the connections? Are they real? Or just a recent and passing fad?
The Link is Real
This is clearly an important issue if we wish to consider the role of mindfulness in trading.
After all, by far the most important objective of trading, and possibly the only objective that really matters, is to make money.
This issue is discussed in the eBook that accompanies the 15 Day Introductory Course on Mindfulness for Traders.
If you have not already signed up for the course you should do so now.
It’s totally free with absolutely no commitment and it will introduce you to putting mindfulness into practice.
The connection between mindfulness and money is also discussed in some detail in a recent article in The New Yorker magazine.
This shows that putting mindfulness and money in the same sentence is no passing fad.
In fact, quite the opposite is the case and there is in fact a ‘long marriage of mindfulness and money’.
Linking Mindfulness and Money
There has been plenty of anecdotal references to the increasing use of mindfulness meditation by leading trading firms. A number of more extensive studies have also begun to appear.
Well known teachers in the self-help industry have not been slow to move into this space with what are sure to be quite lucrative offerings.
Celebrity endorsements often accompany these. Such seldom hurt sales.
But there have been plenty of self-help fads that have come and gone. Not before providers have taken their profits of course.
And we all know that today’s celebrity is tomorrow’s has-been.
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The interesting thing about The New Yorker article is that it shows that the impetus towards using mindfulness to improve your performance in a money making activity is not the result of the activities of these providers.
What is different is that the links between mindfulness and money have been noticed and developed by the other side of bargain. In other words by those looking to make money from trading, not sell self-help courses.
It might be asked why it has taken so long for financial industry, which is renowned for its innovation and constant search for anything that will give and edge, to recognise the potential of mindfulness.
Or maybe it has been long known but only recently formalised and named.
It’s Not a Recent Development
Linking mindfulness with making money is not a case of this year’s fad.
In fact, using practices such as meditation that have their foundations in Eastern spiritualism as a way to improve performance in money making activities has been going on for over a century.
So, using meditation to improve financial returns is not the latest add-on or shiny new thing. It’s pretty much as old as technical analysis.
And nobody is about to make a solid case that technical analysis has no place in trading.
An important point is to see that using mindfulness in trading is not a case of tapping into some previously lost ancient wisdom or using an eastern spiritual practice in an inappropriate manner for an inappropriate end.
Instead it is a very modern, western adaptation of ancient knowledge.
And in this adaptation the whole idea is fundamentally changed. So changed that it more closely resembles modern psychology than ancient religion.
The theological underpinnings are gone along with much of the spiritualistic covering.
It is based on a modern world view with modern goals and objectives.
There is no conflict in using mindfulness to make money.
Now, it’s Over to You
The New Yorker article should put to bed any arguments that using mindfulness to improve your performance in trading is an inappropriate use of a technique and skill that is best left to those who want to escape the modern world.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mindfulness is a modern practice, albeit founded on ancient practices.
It is of the modern world and designed to assist people to navigate and prosper in this modern world.
Above all mindfulness practice is pragmatic and adaptable.
Given this foundation it is up to each trader to develop these skills and use them to achieve their trading objectives.
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