Investing with Intention: A Guide to Conscious Capital with Sylvia Benito
Where Money and Spiritual Awakening Meet, According To A
CFA Charterholder and CIO
What exactly lies at the intersection of capital and consciousness? The marriage of the two seems paradoxical—money is often excluded from spirituality because capitalism is popularly perceived as the antithesis of awakening and as a force that empowers consumption in excess. But we’re doing ourselves a great disservice by approaching capital’s potential from only this angle. What lives beyond the common preconception of capitalism is the power to serve your higher purpose with consciousness and clarity.
What Is Conscious Capital?
Conscious capital goes beyond the sole pursuit of financial profit and emphasizes a holistic approach that takes into account the well-being of individuals, communities and the planet. It encourages businesses and individuals to operate with a higher purpose, beyond solely profit generation. This approach recognizes the interconnectedness of all beings and seeks to create a positive impact on both a personal and global scale.
When we tap into our consciousness, we begin to realize that everything—including money—is energy. Money happens to be an energy that’s fraught with conflict in our society. But the more we work to remove that conflict and recognize capital as a powerful force for good, the more we can align it with our spiritual purpose and invite abundance in all forms into our lives.
Integrating Money and Consciousness
My ability to integrate money and consciousness didn’t come naturally. In my twenties, I was more interested in mysticism and spirituality than anything remotely related to financial matters. I followed the path of personal awakening and was immersed in the study of non-dualism, spending time with spiritual teachers and exploring the depths of my own consciousness. I regarded money as separate, almost incompatible, with my spiritual journey.
As I deepened my practice, I began questioning whether it was possible to bridge the gap between spirituality and finance. After living in South America and India to pursue conscious awakening, I returned to the U.S. and entered the financial sector, initially working as a financial advisor and later obtaining my CFA charter. This marked the beginning of my journey into the world of finance and conscious investing.
Delving deeper into financial management, I began to recognize the need for a different paradigm—one that went beyond the conventional fear-based and scarcity-driven approach to money. Instead of shying away from money because of my preconceptions, I embarked on a personal experiment to discover what would happen if I approached money with a sense of emptiness and neutrality, rather than that friction that it’s all-too associated with.
Investing, I realized, could and should be leveraged as a means of infusing one's consciousness into financial decisions and actively contributing to holistic abundance. In other words: money has a seat at the table of consciousness with every other kind of energetic medium.
Investing with Intention: Spreading Energy into the Worlds
When we invest capital, we’re not just making a financial transaction—we are transacting with energy. What we're really doing is planting the seeds of our own energy in the soil. The more you can connect how you're spreading those seeds, the more you can align your capital with your intrinsic purpose. Ask yourself: What is your life purpose? What is the energetic imprint that you want to put on the capital?
As you practice connecting your capital to your purpose, it becomes possible to infuse with your consciousness and invest in the way that's the deepest reflection of your heart. It’s a very different kind of investment paradigm, and it’s a far cry from what is typical in the modern financial landscape. But it’s worth pursuing, not only because it can offer deep-rooted personal enlightenment, but yield better business results in the long term.
Scaling a business, for example, is another medium through which entrepreneurs invest in what matters to them. Growing a business from the ground up requires energy in all forms, including capital, and you can approach it in one of two ways.
You can scramble to hire your team, build up your board of directors and blast the internet with messaging barely before there’s been time to proofread it. Or, you can take it slow and really make sure what you’re cultivating is aligned with your purpose. Rather than being driven solely by external pressures or market demands, consciousness in investing allows for aligning the growth strategy with the overall vision and values of the company.
Investing with intention and integrating money and consciousness are transformative journeys that challenge conventional perceptions and open up new possibilities for personal and spiritual growth. Money is not the enemy and shouldn’t be treated as such. By recognizing money as energy and consciously working to remove the conflict associated with it, we can unlock its potential to serve our spiritual purpose and invite abundance into our lives.
Sylvia Benito is a portfolio manager with 20 years of experience in managing family office investments. She has worked in various capacities in wealth management, from hedge fund analyst to CIO for family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals, managing $1B in assets.
She is also an indigenously trained shaman. Sylvia connects consciousness to capital by bridging the traditional world of investing to the alignment, awareness, and transformative purpose of wealth.
With fluency in the languages of money and energy, Sylvia is a sought-after international speaker with an extraordinarily rare range of mastery.
