Explore The Underside
As we come into the new year, it is a natural time to reassess our finances and our relationship with wealth. The goal is to review our investment choices and outcomes from a place of calm inquiry and curiosity. A financial inventory can go hand-in-hand with a spiritual inventory, a gentle prodding into what feels aligned and true.
As part of an annual cycle, this is an exercise that provides a framework for reflection and helps illuminate the uncomfortable elements of anxiety and attachment. Money is deeply intertwined with ego and self-worth, and a new year’s review and reckoning is a healthy exercise that can help re-balance your inner portfolio.
Yet the opportunity to explore the underside of our attachments is always there, often showing up in surprising and inconvenient ways.
A few months ago, my car was stolen from my driveway in the middle of the night. The person who stole the car actually camped out in my side yard and waited for us to go to sleep before breaking in, taking the keys to the car, and driving off with it before we woke.
I think there are two ways to look at anything that happens in life. You can either look at it through the lens of victimhood or simply remain curious and aware. It’s a test. It is all a test. Ah, ok universe. An unexpected challenge.
Where are your attachments? Will you revert to fear? Will you cast judgment on the thief?
Will you ask yourself, “why me?”
Instead, I remained curious and asked the question, “Why not me?” The ensuing weeks were a steady invitation from the universe to test where my attachments truly lie. There is a persistent underlying fear inside most of us related to loss.
Loss of money, loss of loved ones, loss of life. Otherwise known as anxiety, it is that buzzing underlying discomfort that something is just… wrong. That discomfort is a driver of evolution. I am still attached, to all kinds of things. But I know that the work is to investigate and untangle and question the attachments. Each and every single one of them.
Inside each attachment lies the opposite energy, which is freedom.
My car was finally found by the police, illegally parked somewhere in the city. What I loved most about the entire experience is that the person who stole the car didn’t bother taking off the plates, and so he was driving around Miami in my car for a few weeks with plates that say “Let Love.”
I have had this “vanity plate” for over fifteen years — the phrase reminds me that when I want to push, I can allow. When I want to manipulate, I can permit. When I want to control, I can be cool. Plus, when I cut people off in Miami traffic it helps them to be a little less pissed off. Maybe.
But not all tests are so easy to pass. I have had much harder lessons in the past year that have brought to the forefront my fears around money and my deeper attachments. In a year of extreme market volatility and a crypto meltdown, many of us have faced hard lessons and much harder tests.
What if we Let Love become the bottom line?
Navigating through ego while building wealth is a constant journey and it’s one I undertake with reverence and in ceremony with seekers, founders, and investors at every level. Together, we blend consciousness with capital and potential
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.
