Yoga, Tea, and Shame: A Journey Rooted in Humility
When I was in my twenties, I worked as a healer in South America. My life was rich in many ways, yet according to American standards, I was living well below the poverty line. I had two outfits, one pair of green suede boots, and a couple of pairs of yoga pants. I didn’t care about money; it was for other people to want and worry about it. I was interested in freedom, low overhead, and the ability to pick up and go anytime, anywhere. Other than my clothes and a massage table, I didn’t own much of anything, certainly not a car or a condo.
Maybe that is when I was most wealthy. True wealth is not wanting anything more than what you already have. That is the secret of abundance, and in those years my life was abundant. I lived in a city with a rich sense of interconnectedness and community, a place where Sunday meant drinking tea and eating pastry in the park with friends, a place where plans cost pennies. I was satisfied.
This rock-solid minimalism persevered throughout most of my twenties, until I started doing yoga, which is ironic. I began studying in a city studio owned by, and catering to, rich women. I didn’t choose it for the monied crowd; I chose it because it was supposed to be the best.
You would think that the spiritual mindset on the yoga mats would have filled the studio like incense, but money was the fragrance in the air, despite the constant burning of nag champa sticks.
At first, I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know how to recognize that the tiny beaded bracelets they all wore, which looked like farmers market finds, were actually a nouveau hippy status that cost more than I made in a week. I didn’t know that my clothes weren’t the right yoga clothes, or that my bag wasn’t the trending bag. I didn’t know that they placed each other in a social hierarchy and that I was a foreigner, someone who would never really belong.
I invited one of the women to come to my house for tea. When I gave her my address, she asked me three times to confirm the location because where I lived was far from the center of town. Her unfamiliarity with my neighborhood should have been a flag but I was still operating in this kind of innocence around the language of money and how rich people have a signifiers that help them place you on their rankings. My address wasn’t a rich one.
I will never forget her face when she saw my home. I was proud of where I lived. My boyfriend and I had remodeled it when we first relocated, painstakingly stripping old doors ourselves and repainting peeling ceilings. We built every shelf by hand and even created our own sectional couch by pouring cement as the base and hiring a seamstress to upholster foam cushions. Her reaction when she walked in the door was the first time I understood what it felt like to not belong. It’s not that she was obvious about it, but her face gave it all away; her pity for me, pity that I was proud of where I lived, and confirmation that I was not one of them.
She barely stayed for thirty minutes, whisked away by her driver no sooner than she had finished her single cup of tea. It was my first memory of feeling money shame, of feeling that somehow I was less than someone else because I had less money.
That day blew up the blessing of my prior life, that is, the ignorance. It was like being a toddler and realizing for the first time that you are supposed to be embarrassed when you are naked - I didn’t know I should be embarrassed to be poor.
There is worthlessness hiding inside most of us. It is a modern malaise, born of our separation from the divine, from nature, from ourselves. Often it lurks deeply enough inside that it is almost fully unconscious and quiet; sometimes it lives closer to the surface and runs narratives of hateful talk we can hear inside our own brain. That day, whatever latent self-hatred was in me made an unholy union with money. Instantly, I wanted some, wanted more.
I wanted money to be a salve on my shame. I wanted money to give me significance. I wanted to walk into the yoga studio and feel as powerful as these women were, to have the bracelets and the bags and the buttery yoga leggings in blush so I would never have to feel like I did that day.
“I am not good at math.
I don’t understand investing.
I don’t come from the kind of family that makes money.
I don’t have the network or the know-how.”
We all have unconscious scripts running in our minds, check and see what yours is. We have internal scripts based on our life experiences and our family of origin. And then there are the cultural scripts. Around women and money, the scripts are insidious and powerful.
Here’s the truth. There are many interwoven systems that have historically prevented women from having access to money, especially as independent, single women. We are paid less, stop getting raises ten years before men, take time off for children, and pay “pink taxes.” Pause for a moment and contemplate that it’s only been 50 years since women could get a loan or a credit card without a husband’s co-signature. It’s only been 50 years since we could have any control over our fertility, and therefore our working lives. A female college graduate in 1970 had only two established career paths - secretary or teacher, both understood to be temporary until she had children.
Who among us has a grandmother who worked outside of the home and generated wealth? Our generational legacy of independent female earning power and decision-making is just getting started.
It took me decades of work, both inner work and real work in the financial world, to finally release the sensations of shame and inferiority that awakened on that day a rich person stepped into my humble, beautiful, love-filled home. I had to overcome personal layers and cultural layers to find my footing in the world of high finance. I did, and I found the ladder and climbed it, learning new skills of negotiation, deal-making, and power moves along the way to a rarified level of success.
This journey began in humility and strives to remain rooted to that source. Here are some reminders for your own navigation.
1- Talk about money. Shadows love silence and money is taboo for exactly that reason. If we keep thinking it is taboo to talk about money - how we each make it, save it, spend it, invest it - our money beliefs can’t evolve. Explore, be curious, dialog, and challenge those scripts running in the background. Not about what you “deserve” but about what you are capable of.
2- Gratitude for your past mistakes. Missed opportunities, bad deals, disappointing returns, these sting. If we’re not careful, they add up to avoidance and negative reinforcement. Instead, write a full inventory of each financial mistake and let go of regret - write out the lesson or teaching in each one. If you can find the teaching or lesson in each misstep, it is no longer a source of regret, it is just another page in the curriculum of life meant to teach you. In fact, when you see how much you learned, it might even look like a very affordable lesson.
3- Figure out what is underneath your worst financial habits. Do you splurge, run up credit card debt, or lie about your money to your family? Are you unable to create and honestly face a monthly budget? Are you avoiding best practices like automatic saving transfers? Have you neglected to create or update your estate plan? When it comes to investments, do you get paralyzed by fear and miss opportunities? Instead of criticizing yourself, investigate what is underneath these habits. What are you actually looking for when you behave that way? Be gentle and find ways you can have compassion for your avoidance, your over-spending, and all of the habits you’d like to change.
A little-known fact about very wealthy families is that most will make and then lose their fortunes in three generations. The reason this happens is not what you might think it is. It is usually not due to poor investment decisions or planning strategies. It is because the later generations are born into wealth and do not have to work to earn it – and they are born into an identity attached to the idea of being rich. This attachment is deceptive and typically leads to unfortunate outcomes. The ego and power are very tricky to manage.
We know that wealth has a deep shadow side and often brings a corrosive element to everything it touches.
The simple, pure truth is that nobody is a better person or a more meaningful person because they have money. They are just a flawed human struggling with their ego and attachment, just like all of us. At every level of wealth, we are all out here making mistakes and learning lessons.
Now that I am older, I can look back and say that no matter how much my net worth swings up or down, no matter how volatile the market- this inner feeling of abundance and support doesn’t move a single bit because it is sourced from deep within.
I’ve made a lot of money, I generate it for myself and for other people on a scale that would rock the world of those women in that yoga studio, blowing past closets full of buttery leggings and branded bags.
But I promise that if you invite me over to tea, I will be immediately comfortable within your homemade cushions and will celebrate the immutable sensation of worth and belonging within us all.
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.
