by Laurie Wagner | Nov 18, 2014 | Blog
Today’s blog post comes to you from an island of burrs, rough edges, tangled mats of hair, and seaweed clumps. Seriously, I wish I’d strung those words together myself, but I was just as glad to find them in a book called Writing Open the Mind, by Andy Couturier. Like Andy, I am in the business of those burrs, those rough edges, tangled mats of hair and seaweed clumps. As a writer, I am interested in dark parts, those tucked away moments, not entirely pretty, sometimes hard to look at. My mentor, Deena Metzger, says that poetry is beauty and ugliness side by side. I’m down with that kind of poetry, on the page and off – which means I’m also willing to live a more tangled, less perfect life where the pieces don’t always match and the burrs and rough edges show. Driving around town the other day, I realized that I had been working something over in my mind for weeks without being conscious of it. I was trying to come up with some pithy statement about my marriage to offer my friends and family when I saw them at Thanksgiving the following week. “Aren’t you and Mark divorced?” I imagined them asking. “But you’re living together, right? What’s up with that?” For weeks I’d been trying to come up with an assortment of answers that might satisfy the curious, and which would explain my colorful, paint outside the lines life. “Oh, you know us,” I’d laugh, “we’re shape shifters.” Or maybe something more serious, “Well, he needed a place to stay for a while and...
by Laurie Wagner | Nov 1, 2014 | Blog
I wanted to interview Bari Tessler Linden because I’m so intrigued with the work she does around money. As an artist and businessperson I know how difficult it can be to put price tags on my work and my time, to keep track of my dollars and to make financial goals. Ultimately, just becoming conscious of money as it impacts my life is huge. Bari is such a lovely, straightforward, generous woman — I wanted you to know her too. Bari, we know and love you as someone who does conscious money work. But before that, I know you trained as a somatic psychotherapist and a dancer. That seems like a big change! How did you get into doing this deep money work? Well, I first want to clarify that I am a Financial Therapist: I help folks un-shame around their relationship to money. We create safe, compassionate spaces to talk about money with their spouse, muster the courage to look at their numbers and choose a bookkeeping system, and clarify their values and dreams, so money can support them. But, you’re right: this was a big leap for me, personally and professionally. Back in my full-on, African dancing, authentic movement, somatic psychotherapist days, I never imagined that one day, I would be leading a year-long money school called The Art of Money! In fact, I had ZERO relationship to money, back then. In my amazing graduate program at Naropa University, we studied every topic under the sun (and beyond the sun): food, body, intimacy, sexuality, sensuality, God, and on and on … but they completely left out...
