How a Monk Became a Money Manager - Episode 139

In today's episode I talk with Doug Lynam, who shares his amazing journey from being a monk to becoming a money expert. Doug opens up about how he went from giving up everything to learning the true value of money and how it can be used to help others. We chat about the struggles he faced, the lessons he learned, and how he now teaches people to live with purpose while also being smart with their finances.

About our guest:
Doug Lynam, a former Marine and Benedictine monk, is now a finance expert blending ethics with wealth. A bestselling author and speaker, he helps people align money with purpose.

https://www.douglynam.com/

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TRANSCRIPT:

Naseema: [00:00:00] Doug Lynam, a former Marine and Benedictine Monk is now a finance expert, blending Ethics with Wealth, a bestselling author and speaker. He helps people align money with purpose.

All right. My financially intentional people. I'm so honored to have Doug Line joining us, and he has a very interesting story on how he became this personal finance savant. And I'll let him tell you, but, a monk. I've never interviewed a monk, so this is my first time interviewing a monk.

But just interested to know, like your backstory from being in the military to the space that you're in right now. Welcome, Doug to the podcast.

Doug Lynam: Thanks Aima. It's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.

Yeah, I've Got

great content. I was listening to your shows before the great, great stuff. So

Naseema: Thank you.

Doug Lynam: Yeah. Talking about a wild backstory, my resume, it kinda of looks like it was a rollercoaster designed [00:01:00] by Salvador Dolly on a sugar high.

I think, it's kinda all the map really. But I, I grew up in not Chicago, in a fairly affluent family, but money got weaponized. When my parents divorced, they used it as a, put their kids in the middle sometimes, and it gave me a really negative view of money and wealth in a lot of ways.

And my brothers and I, we all rebelled in different ways. I eventually became a monk for 20 years took a vile of poverty to try to get away from the world of money materialism forever. And I have a twin brother who ran off and became a homesteader. Another brother who went and became joined a grunge band.

So we all took vows of poverty in our own weird ways, trying

to, basically thumb it, our parents doing the teenage rebellious stuff in different, forms. But I first after the Marine Corps, I went to Officer Candidate school with the Marines and I trained with them and graduated at the top of my class and then I thought that was gonna be my career.

And and then I started doing a little more homework on the history of the Vietnam War and all things and politics of it, and thought, yeah, we'll never do something stupid like Vietnam again. But I wasn't quite sure. So I had this nagging gut feeling. Intuition said, maybe this isn't the right career path for me, [00:02:00] which was wise.

I would've ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I'm kind

of glad I missed that bullet, dodged that bullet. But I also kinda realized that there was some unresolved anger issues I had in me and, that in high explosives were probably a bad combination. So I probably should look for a different career path than, killing people for a living.

Although I love the Marines and I respect them and I got a lot of great stuff out of it. But I then went looking for another path, like what would give me the same structure and the discipline and the camaraderie, the esprit de corps, all the things I liked about the Marines, but maybe without the killing part.

So I. Had a bit of a spiritual awakening and then decided to go become a monk. So I turned my commission down and immediately went and joined a monastery Benedictine, where I served for 20 years. Thought that would be a great way to escape money and materialism forever, and a great way to really annoy my parents and, find God and all the things.

There was a real spiritual quest going on there at the time, but in an ironic. Twist of fate. About three years after I got to the monastery, the community went bankrupt because we all hated dealing with money. Like it was a thing, it was a taboo. Like I, I went there to get away from [00:03:00] it and so did everybody else.

And it turns out that, you can't escape it. Even in a monastery, you've gotta pay the bills. There's leaky roofs, there's all these things. Any rate. Jumped in and for whatever reason, decided I was gonna be the one who's gonna solve that problem. But the good news is the bar was set so low I couldn't do a worse job than what was already done before.

So even though I was financially illiterate, like most people, my parents didn't talk about money. And talking about sex was easy to talk about money in my house by far. It was just the taboo thing. Even though, we had some, and my mom was a CPA and my dad was an executive, all these things, but we couldn't have honest conversations about it.

Any rate. Yeah, I was financially literate. Went to a bookstore, grabbed every book off the shelf I could find on personal finance, and then took me a couple years to dig through all that and really learn the ins and outs of just the basics of, how to get this community back on a solid footing.

So did that, and then I started, I was in a teaching order, so at the time I was the head of the mathematics department at a prestigious private school. And so I thought we should be teach finance to kids. So I did that and taught. Econ and [00:04:00] personal finances elective is fun. And fast forward a few, about a decade into that, and I, one day opened up the school retirement plan for a class project to show the kids how it worked.

And it was a train wreck. It was an absolute nightmare. Like everything, you don't want no fiduciary oversight, fees were high funds, performance was low, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I went looking for another company to do a better job of it, and I couldn't find one. I felt like. Most of the major corporations serving schools and nonprofits are, not doing an adequate job, particularly on the fiduciary duty front.

They don't wanna take it on. I launched my own investment advisory firm from inside a monastery to solve this problem, which was another kind of absolutely insane idea. And fortunately, I wasn't on my own for too long. I, I then joined a larger firm here in Santa Fe called Long Through Asset Management.

They took me under their wing and were very kind to me. And at that point I realized through the wheels were coming off the monastic thing for, it's a whole other story. But eventually I did leave the monastery to go become a full-time investment advisor. I was managing a portfolio of about a quarter billion in assets [00:05:00] and did a lot of cool things.

A lot of things I'm really proud of in that career. And then the really bizarre stroke of luck, this is just one of those weird synchronicities, is right when I launched my business, the New York Times did a six month expose on the problem of teacher retirement plans across the country,

like a different full full page spread.

and I reached out to them on Facebook and said, Hey, I love these articles and. Here's what I'm doing to try to solve this pain point. And they got excited and did a big story on me. They hit the front page of the business section of the New York Times. I got a two book deal from Harper Collins, blah, blah, blah.

And now here I am with two books and I'm now a speaker, coach, author, all the things.

Naseema: Wow. So that was a.

Doug Lynam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Naseema: Ask a really basic question because I don't know the answer to this, but what what does being a monk entail?

Doug Lynam: A lot of work. It's busy. 'Cause there's you're running a whole community. And a lot of the monks were older and had a lot of health issues. So there was a lot of caretaking involved. Then there's just the daily. [00:06:00] Practice of, monastic services and prayers, and then you got a full-time job on top of that, teaching a full course load.

So it's busy. Ironically, I have more time for contemplation now than I did I think when I was a monk, because I have more control over my time. It's just so many needs coming at you from all different angles. So it was good though. I mean, had its ups and downs, let's put it that way.

Naseema: And it's interesting that you talk about you did that to run away from the money things. It blows my mind that your mom was a CPA. Talking about money was taboo. Like I don't understand how that worked in that household. Like

Doug Lynam: it didn't.

Naseema: I'm just like, okay, she deals with money all the time.

But it just goes to show you that people think that financial professionals are like money experts and they're expert at what they do with money. But personal finance is something that's totally different. And I like to tell people that because I think that there's a lot of shame.

Around money because people think that they're supposed to know money on this, really, really high [00:07:00] level, like down to a CPA level. But even though people don't understand it

Doug Lynam: Yeah.

Naseema: in a way, I'm just saying that to bring up a point and to normalize the fact that personal finance is not something that is innate is something that you learn and it's something that you have to, really pursue outside of a professional degree in finance and all those things. 'cause those things don't make you good with your personal money. Just to normalize the fact that it's hard.

Doug Lynam: It is hard. Everybody struggles.

Naseema: can

be hard,

yeah. If you don't talk about it especially so trying to normalize those conversations and being like, listen, these people didn't, didn't have it figured out either.

So we can start from a level playing field,

Doug Lynam: yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of generational trauma around money too. So my parents had what, what I call money monsters. That's what I'm writing about. My new book is called Taming Your Money Monster.

Nine Nine Paths to Money Mastery with the Enneagram, which is a cool personality system which we can get into or not.

And. What I realized is my [00:08:00] parents, they grew up in very poor immigrant families, and so they had all this money anxiety, and so they were very, maybe tightfisted about it and closed mouthed about it 'cause of all the anxiety that they had. They were really running on the corporate, hamster wheel a little bit, trying to be successful.

And they did a good job of that. And they deserve all the praise kudos for that. And did many things wonderfully well. But when it came to money there was the shame and there was this one parent playing the one off the other they both played poor.

If I'd asked my, my mom for something, she'd be like go ask your dad. He's got all the money. And you ask your dad, he's I gave your mom all the child support alimony. She's got all my money. Go ask her. And you're kinda like meanwhile they. Living in nice houses, taking advance vacations.

And I'm like where the money's going somewhere but it's not going to us, so what's the deal? And I, I don't think they wanted the transparency 'cause they didn't want to show anyone else to see what the real cards on the table were.

Naseema: I think that's super common and thank you for bringing up like the money, trauma and the family, the, the generational trauma around money. 'cause that's super important and I think that. [00:09:00] If you don't necessarily understand those things, it's hard to fix your own money story. And I am interested in talking about the Enneagrams because I know that there are nine of them, and I know that they all like it.

It's like a personality type. But in understanding that. First of all, like understanding the backstory, then understanding how you show up is gonna determine, your relationship with money. So I'm very interested in talking about that. I still wanna ask you a couple things though about your back.

Story. So you were at this monastery, it went bankrupt, and you knew nothing about money. How did you get to the point where you were able to take them out of that situ or get them out? That situation?

Doug Lynam: One step at a time. It's just open the bills. Start with a stack of bills. Sort 'em, get the budget software out. Start getting the budget, start figuring out income and expenses and what's your cash flow? And just basic questions that, , needed a lot more clarity that we didn't have what really can we afford right now?

And what can't we [00:10:00] afford? And one of the problems and, I saw in the monastery was this sense that we're doing good work. We're serving people. We're, in our minds, we're doing God's work, whatever you wanna call that. And so there was this sort of almost entitlement, a little bit like, what we're doing good work, so everything should be fine.

The money should just come. And it's yeah, no, it doesn't. That's not how the game works, right? You gotta, then there's this guilt I think about we overextended ourselves, helping other people. Sometimes it's okay, if someone comes in need, you feel like it's your obligation to help.

And then it's but it's not in the budget. Oh, it'll work out. We'll figure it out later. And then it doesn't work. Sat down to figure it out. So among other issues that was some of the money monsters that were plaguing us, but ultimately I think it was a real, what I would call it, an avoidant attitude around money in general.

So put people into two at least. So we'll get to the Enneagram in a minute, as you mentioned, there's nine kind of archetypes of personality and we'll get into that. But of layered on top of that, what I'm calling the attachment theory of money. Which is identical to the attachment theory of relationships for those who are familiar with it.

But basically what it says is that there's two unhealthy ways we can manifest. [00:11:00] We have struggles with our finances. One is being overly anxious about it or being avoidant around it. And then that can manifest in different areas of our financial life and what I call the four pillars of finance, which I'm sure you are intuitive to you, which would be earning right, saving.

Investing and giving. So you gotta master all four areas of your financial earning, saving, investing, giving. So I know a lot of people are anxious earners. They make a lot, but they're avoiding savers. They don't save anything. Or they

might be squirreling money away for any day, but they don't get the investing.

Or they get the investing, but they don't get the giving. They never use their money as a tool for love and service. So it's like helping people get through all those different roadblocks and then knowing how those roadblocks are gonna show up according to your personality type, which is really, really helpful.

Naseema: That's so interesting. And I, it is kind of like, okay, you're in this institution. You're supposed to have all this faith and like the spirituality and all of that kind of stuff, but it's like faith is all work,

Doug Lynam: right.

Naseema: And it's just [00:12:00] yeah. But it is like counterintuitive, like we're doing God's work.

We should always be provided for. Yeah, but what does that look like?

Doug Lynam: Yeah.

Naseema: It's so interesting. Yeah.

Doug Lynam: yeah, you don't get to abdicate your responsibility. It

doesn't work that way. God, God's not gonna work. God's not gonna work a miracle to solve a problem that you have the power to fix. There's a, there's a personal responsibility element that has to take, has to be kept in check.

Naseema: And so just to clarify, how did you end up in the schools?

Doug Lynam: Oh the community, the whole teaching order was.

We, we all taught

Naseema: Okay. So that was your full-time job on top of all your duties that you had to do in the monastery and taking care of everybody and making sure that everything was running correctly and everybody was healthy. You were also a full-time teacher and then you decided to teach about personal finance, and then you discovered the horrendous.

4 0 3 B system, which I'm all too familiar with. Like I said, I'm a nurse, but [00:13:00] we also have a 4 0 3 B, which we actually have a, pretty good one considering I know the nightmares behi behind 4 0 3 Bs. And you just barely touched on it, but like one of the biggest things is they don't have any oversight to traditionally.

It's usually some guy that knows the principal and they come in, they, they sit in the cafeteria and they sign these teachers up. For these plans that have really high fees, they're typically front loaded, which means that the people get their money off the top before you make any money off of your investment.

They don't have a lot of options, and then they lock you into these things where, especially if you don't. Understand it's hard to get your money out of them. Those are the inherent problems around 4 0 3 Bs and 4 0 3 Bs and 4 0 1 Ks. A lot of people think that they're similar, but they have a lot less regulation around 4 0 3 Bs because, they are typically in schools or in institutions where.

People are just like, oh, like they should be [00:14:00] working in good faith, but they're really not so yeah, there's a lot of issues there. And I'm glad you discovered it. So you went from not knowing anything to having a, teach yourself about finances to help this monastery run to now looking at these books for the financial plans for these teachers, and you're just like.

This is wild.

Doug Lynam: Yes,

Wild. And the annuities, and they push in all these annuity products that people don't need. It's just, it's terrible.

Naseema: Oh yeah. But annuities are great things, right? Because you get a fixed income at the

Doug Lynam: Oh,

but compared to what, right?

Naseema: But it's just things that if you don't know, you don't know, and you're a teacher, you're going to work and you're thinking that, you're investing, a lot of times you don't have any option. They do mandatory investing for teachers. And so you're just like, okay, I'll just do what they tell me to do and put your head down and just, and hope for the best.

But it's scary out there.

Doug Lynam: Yep.

Yep. It is. [00:15:00] It's very, very predatory in my opinion.

Naseema: Yeah. And since then, since were you able to, when you started your own kind of firm, did you take over handling the financial, the the retirement plans for that school and do, is that what you guys primarily focus on?

Doug Lynam: I, I primarily focus on that, and then I also branched out into individual wealth management,

which actually is a lot more lucrative. better way to make your living, to be honest with you. But I do both

Naseema: Yeah, I know that the climate has changed a lot around 4 0 3 Bs. Like now they have to offer like an index fund option, but I'm not sure, from when you started what other milestones you've seen or whatever changes you've seen implement, like in that space.

Doug Lynam: Not a ton. Not a ton. It's still a mess. And in schools and. Hospitals, everybody needs to know that the real problem is getting fiduciary oversight. Who's, got their eye on the ball to make sure that this thing is being run for the best interest of the employees.

And without that strong oversight, then becomes, [00:16:00] inevitably starts being run in the benefit of the plan sponsor, whoever's administering the plan. And that's where things get really dicey.

Naseema: Yeah, and it's just what options do people have? Once they figure out. That their 4 0 3 B is trash. What can they do?

Doug Lynam: That's a hard question. That's a big question. It depends

on your organization. You can talk to your business manager, the other problem is, is that when you, when you start bringing these problems up, then it's who's the, everyone starts like who's the blame?

And then. People don't wanna take responsibility for it. You get pushback from administration saying, 'cause they feel like they're in the hot seat and , it can get politically very charged very quickly. So you have to tread lightly and be forceful about it, but also be like, Hey, this would, benefit you two and me, and wouldn't it be better?

And, without getting into the, oh, you guys are screwing this up terribly, that just doesn't go well.

Naseema: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you were able to come into that space and actually help them. And I love that it helped you transition into now what you're doing full time and [00:17:00] also just the opportunities. And I also often tell people like. Opportunities never come to you the way that you think that they will.

Like how did, like you really went into this monastery thinking that you were gonna disappear from the world and kind of be able to just be in service and not have to think about it. And then just you taking that one step of being like, okay, somebody's gotta run the books and then doing all of these things led you.

To these opportunities to, have this now wealth management firm plus be featured in the New York Times and be able to be a published author and all those kind of things. I think it's incredible. But it also is like a testament of, just doing those one, the doing the little things like the my friend.

Jordan, he wrote a book about purpose. It's like the small P things. The small P things are things that add up to those big P like everybody always searches for this big purpose in life, and they think [00:18:00] it's like this big leap, but it's about those small, those aggregation of marginal gains. It's another way to say it, of those things that lead up to.

You really finding your purpose in life, and I think it's amazing what you're doing right now, and when you outline like all the steps that you got there, it was just like, it was you just taking these little actions to improve just your life and the life of people around you, and you were able to make such an incredible impact.

So I applaud you, but also just to give people an example. That it's not about these big actions that really move the meter. It's really about those small things that you do, but then you look up and you've made such an incredible impact. Yeah. Yeah. So I love that. Let's talk about your book.

Let's have, talk about the taming the money monsters. Where did that come from and talk about all the enneagrams and all of

that

Doug Lynam: Yeah.

that's a deep dive. Let's just jump into part I,

me give you a, give you a taste. Is all I can really do here. [00:19:00] But but essentially my first book is called From Monk to Money Manager, and that's a subtitle, is a former Monk's Financial Guide to Becoming a Little Bit Wealthy and Why That's Okay.

And so in there I actually laid out the Money Monsters. I had 15 of 'em. They were loose and it was actually. The funnest part of the book in a lot of ways for me to write. But then I realized that they actually all mapped perfectly onto the Enneagram. At one

point I was like, wait, this fits and it took some jiggling and then I realized there were some holes in my system and I found a few more money monsters that I hadn't thought of before and realized so basically, let me just give you the, the quick loadout on the Enneagram.

And slow me down if I go too deep. But essentially your personality's got a bunch of parts to it, right? So you've got your nature, which is your DNA, and that's your gene expression. That's pretty fixed. But then you've got this nurture component of your personality, and the Enneagram helps explain a portion of the nurture part of your personality.

So it's, what it does is it explains how your ego defense is developed in childhood to help protect you from the biggest threats that you faced in your childhood [00:20:00] environment. And so gram type typically comes in, from zero to seven is when it gets settled in.

But the way to think about it like this is if you imagine when you're born you've got a physical umbilical cord that connects you to your caregivers, but you have a physical umbilical that's cut right when you're born, but then you have a psychological umbilical cord that.

Connects you to your caregivers. It allows them to do most of the driving of your ego, as a mom and as a nurse. But that ego of codependence the child has to individuate and differentiate and separate. It's personality. And so the only way for that psychological umbilical cord to be cut is by negative emotions.

Because the positive ones will reinforce the connection and usually the negative emotions come in the form of the nose. We get don't touch the hot stove, don't kick the dog, don't bite your sister. And, and usually there has to be some negative force behind it. And what we know from the neuroscience, and this is from the work of a guy named ep, is that in mammals, there's really just three main negative emotions in the circuitry and the limbic system of the brain and all of our other negative emotions are running off of that circuitry. And the three emotions are [00:21:00] gonna be anger, sadness, which is also shame 'cause they, sadness, shame, they're, interchange.

And then fear. So your Enneagram type was like, which of those three negative emotions did you get more of? Did you expose more to in your childhood? So that gives us, we call these three quadrants or basically take a pie chart and break it up into three pie slices and you've got three quadrants of the Enneagram, and then you can break those three quadrants into three subtypes.

And so you basically have. To take that pain and you have three ways you could process it. So let's just say we were, let's just talk about the sadness, shame triad, because that's where I fall into. And so you can take that sadness and you can either, externalize it, which is like having a food fight with the world and how you think people perceive you.

You can internalize it and that's teach you how you perceive yourself or you can have both. And there's, so there's three negative emotions and three ways to process them internally, externally, or both. And that gives us the nine archetypes on the Enneagram. And that's why there's nine there. And, they've got lots of nuances like

you [00:22:00] have to think of the agram, like a fractal. It has all this depth to it, and we're just playing at the top surface of it. So sometimes people have a hard time typing themselves. 'cause they're just looking at the top layer of it. And it gets very deep, very quickly.

But I'll explain just one type mind, which is called the type three. The nickname for them is often the, the achiever. I give them card. Metaphor is I call the three, the race car because we're always racing towards the next goal, the finish line, but we're often leaving our authentic selves in the dust.

And so what it means for a type three , is that we have this internalized shame about how we, so we feel ashamed about how we perceive ourselves. We have this externalized shame about how we think others perceive us. And that creates for each of the nine types a unique unconscious fear, like your greatest unconscious fear that your ego defense are trying to outrun.

Your whole life. And so for three, the greatest fear that we have is being worthless. So we have this sort of sense of lack of self-worth that we're always trying to assuage through external validation. So it's look at me, look at me, look at me. Let me start the company. Let me write the book.

Let me write a run the [00:23:00] marathon. But we're so busy basically trying to people please the people around us, we're, we lose sense of our authentic selves. Look, we're busy mass changing, wearing all these personas to, get the accolades, but then you get the accolades for the persona, not for your real self.

So it , doesn't really satisfy you at the end of the day, so you just end up running on a hamster wheel. Chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing. And so for the money monsters, for the for type three. There's two, I call them the barrier and the binger. So , the money avoidant type three we call the barrier mean there's so much shame and anxiety around their finances and they're equating your net worth with your self worth.

And it, triggers so much pain that you just want to. Bury your head in the sand like an O, you just don't wanna look at it. So you get this really avoidant, don't wanna open my bills, don't wanna do my taxes. And that was certainly been me for much of my life and how I entered the monastery.

And then the flip side would be anxious type three. I call them the binger. And they're so like, okay, now they want to use their. Their wealth to buy status symbols to gain social recognition, essentially. It's look at the fancy car I have. Look at the fancy watch I have, look at the bling.

I have to [00:24:00] prove to you that I'm valuable. And so then money becomes this. You get on this hamster wheel of consumption that can really decimate your finances if you're not careful. So that's a quick, understanding of one type and then we could go around and talk about others if you feel like it.

Naseema: No, I love that. Yeah, we could, we could talk about the other ones, but I kind of wanna dive in once you know that. What do you do with that information?

Doug Lynam: Yeah, that's hard. It's not

easy, right? It takes a lot of work, a lot of soul searching, a lot of introspection. But a lot of it, comes down, I think, to finding a spiritual practice that resonates with you. Whatever

that is, that helps you ground yourself in the sense of an eternal. So you can find that spiritual grounding in yourself so you feel that connection and find yourself worth intrinsically rather than extrinsically. That's for a three. That would be the thing that three needs to work on. And we all have a different thing that we all gotta do. And there's no type that's better than any other.

They all got their, their, their, their problem to deal with. How

Naseema: But how, how have you done that

personally?

Doug Lynam: that?

Um, [00:25:00] whew. A lot of contemplation. A lot of compassion. Like it takes a lot of self-compassion a lot of forgiveness. 'cause you have to forgive the wounds, what I call it your sacred wound. It's this, that thing that cut that psychological umbilical cord and you kinda need to dive into it.

And what really was helpful for me was doing a trauma time line of my childhood and okay, where were all the big wounds? Where were all the hurts? And where did money come into play? Like how did those things interweave and. In their lap. And how did I come up with this? Where did this sort of toxic misguided perception of wealth come from?

And so what's real and what's my projection on the money? What's the reality of it? And then what's all the unconscious programming I got that wasn't so helpful that I need to undo? And so it, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of journaling, it takes a lot therapy helps, get yourself a good therapist.

Those things all, mental health is key. So it's, whatever your mental hygiene program for you. My path isn't gonna be your path, but it's, about finding that ability to get that emotional clarity in me. It's just grounding in my heart and. Being more open and not so shut down [00:26:00] to and there's a real path.

So one of the things I'm really proud of the book is I've created an ego map for each of the nine types. So there's an actual steps by step path you can follow for your type to help you overcome these wounds and these traumas. And for a three, what it means is. First we have to embrace modesty, right?

We have to have a an accurate self-assessment of ourselves. 'cause , what threes tend to do is we either get stuck between, Hey, giddy, we get stuck between like narcissistic self aggrandizement and then nihilistic despair. Like we're pulled between these two poles a lot. And so it's okay, how do you see yourself accurately and not try to.

Put all these personas and facades up and then without pushing yourself down, it's not humility. Exactly. 'cause that triggers the internalized shame and you don't want to push yourself up, so you're inflating your ego to try to avoid the external. So it's like having that honest self-assessment and then being able to have living with.

With a little more for threes, what's really helpful is faith, but not in a doctrine or dog mode. I'm not talking having, it's about having the faith to take the masks off and [00:27:00] let your authentic self come through. So the bit most important spiritual practice for type three is authenticity, is really being able to be your authentic self and present yourself.

Correctly first so you're not lying to yourself and then you're not lying to others about, who am I? And then when you do that, then you get validated for your true essence, if you will. And then it relieves helps relieve that, sacred wound of shame that we're always battling.

'cause you're being validated for who you really are, not for the masks.

Naseema: Do you think that 20 years of being a monk helped you with working on your inner self,

Doug Lynam: Oh, yeah. It gave me all kinds of cool tools and tricks. So that was definitely helpful.

And yeah, any grounding practice, it's important to find out what works for

you.

And, we're all gonna have our different traditions and, .

Tricks and techniques, , but eventually it really comes down to contemplation, compassion. Action. That's really the kind of the three things you gotta keep in mind. , how do I use contemplation to really dig into this stuff and [00:28:00] see what's real? How do I have compassion for myself and for all the wounds that brought me here?

And forgiveness for oneself and others. And then how do you put that into action? Like how get down to, with the budget, getting in there with the spreadsheets, getting in there with your bills, and really putting right action in into place is really key.

Naseema: And how does your book help people find their own money Monsters.

Doug Lynam: Oh just by telling you what they are, basically it's here you go. And it's like sitting in a cactus when most people read about 'em. It's oh my God, that's me. Oh, no, no, but you know it can bring a real level of clarity and self-awareness. When the light bulbs go on, that you're acting out these very predictable patterns and then the, and how that, those patterns are causing suffering for you and most importantly for the people around that you love.

And so how do you interrupt those patterns and, take what are the counter moves you need to make in order to overcome the emotional roadblocks you have to really building wealth and building this, the strong financial future that, that we all wanna have.

Naseema: I love that. I love [00:29:00] that. What is like the biggest lesson that you feel like you want people to take away from your book? Come away learning from your book?

Doug Lynam: I think that most of our money issues aren't really about money at all. They're really about trauma, like all this.

Naseema: Mm.

Doug Lynam: Then what is the trauma behind the unhealthy money decisions that you're making? And so when you get behind that, money is just a tool for action.

Money is the primary tool that we use to take action in the world. But it's really about having a right relationship with yourself so that then you can take that right action and are using, making prudent and yeah, prudent and wise financial decisions along the way. And not acting out of, fear or anger, resentment, or all these things, all the emotional triggers that come up around money that we then can spend our money in stupid ways basically am tells you where your blind spots are and once you see them, then you can, without someone holding up that mirror to see where those are, it's like , you're trapped inside your own ego. You can't see outside of [00:30:00] it unless someone bearers it back to you effectively. And so then you really realize how different. All of us are perceiving reality from we really have these unconscious drivers that we're not, we be experiencing a same situation, but we're filtering it through this lens of our personality. That sometimes is very helpful, but sometimes it distorts things in unhealthy ways and know what those are so that it isn't tripping you up in all areas of your life, but particularly in your finances.

Naseema: I was gonna talk about like now, like financial therapy and like dealing with financial trauma, I feel like has gained a lot of popularity

I think people are understanding that it's not just about. The tools, it's not just the budgeting because most people are just like what is the budget? What should the investment plan be like? I think people are really starting to understand you really have to heal those internal things that are going on, and so that's what I was really nodding in my head when you were talking about it's not about the money.

It's [00:31:00] really about you healing yourself first. And then, money is a tool that's gonna help in whatever you want, but in the meantime, if you don't heal those tools and you're dealing with your, you're, you're bringing all of those traumas into your money. So it's just gonna react to what's going on in your life.

Doug Lynam: You got it

Naseema: Yeah. I love that. I love that. And I I think the more people understand that, the more that they understand that. First of all, it takes a lot, it takes a lot of self discovery and understanding and forgiveness to really be efficient and effective with your money. And that if people can operate like that and don't think that they're failing, because once again they don't know how to budget is not that.

It's all those other things. That are at play, that are getting in the way for where you want to be financially. And I love that. I [00:32:00] wanna talk about like your other book and how you say just to be a little bit wealthy and that's okay. I understand that that hit me, but I wanna know like why you put that as like the subtitle of your book.

Doug Lynam: wanted people in both of my books, what I'm trying to help people do is have us, you know what, again, within whatever your tradition is, how do you bring the highest levels of spirituality into your financial life? Like, how do you bring those two worlds together so that, at odds and somehow at antithesis to each other?

And I had a lot of. Intellectual and emotional baggage around money that was trying to clear out about feeling guilty about wealth, or feeling like somehow only greedy people care about getting wealth. Having wealth, and that there's something inherently particularly this was true in the monastery, it was this sense of.

Money's inherently evil on some level. There's this, the line from, I think it's St. Paul says, the love of money is the root of all evil. And I, took that a little too much to heart. and when you dig into the [00:33:00] actual Greek, it's way more nuanced than the translation we get in English.

But the point being is that I misunderstood that for a long time and thought if loving money is inherently. Evil or bad, then what's the best way to respond to something that's negative or evil is to hate it is to hate money and hate that world and wanna push it away.

And it's no. I'm more in the Mark Twain camp now, where he said, humorously, he said, it's the lack of money that's the root of all evil. Or another way someone said money can't buy happiness, but poverty can't buy anything. It's like really are stuck if you don't get the finance figured out.

You're hamstringing yourself and the ability , to take action in the world and have a, a positive impact. And so how do you see wealth as a compliment to your spiritual practice and a compliment to living a good, wholesome, loving, compassionate life? And it's really the, so I was working out.

Throughout the book in various ways. This question of is, how do you learn to love money in a healthy way? What does that look [00:34:00] like? And why is it okay to be wealthy? And why is that fundamentally a good thing that we should be striving for? And again, if you put it to your spiritual practice and then you're using it as a tool for love and service in the world, then you supercharge Your motivation. It's I'm not doing this just for me. I'm doing it for the people I love. I'm doing it 'cause I can, I've got gifts to bring out in the world. And one of the biggest frustrations in the monastery is we had all this talent and we had all these gifts to give, but we didn't have the money to put it into action.

We couldn't. Have the larger impact that the world was calling us to, 'cause we didn't have the resources in our pocket to make it a reality. Helping people use that wealth, first of all, becoming financially literate, right? You talked about that earlier.

It's so important to understand that finance is a foreign language and you have to learn it. It takes someone, takes time, and then once you get financially literate, it's okay, now how am I using this? For the highest good for myself in the world around me, and that's kind of what I'm playing out here.

Naseema: I just wanna, I meant to ask you this earlier, but I think it's [00:35:00] interesting, like the kind of giving up of the wealth thing and the wealth is evil. Perspective, especially religiously or spiritually. But is it like a lot of the funding that monasteries get, through donations and from wealthy people, like giving,

Doug Lynam: A hundred percent.

Naseema: I was just wondering am I, am I imagining

that? So you can't give. Unless you have wealth. But if you have wealth, you're inherently evil.

Doug Lynam: Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. Makes no sense

whatsoever.

Naseema: Okay. I just, I was like, maybe I'm tripping in my understanding of

Doug Lynam: No, that, that, that was, that was the delusions going through my head or some of the things that I'll give you a story. So in the monastery, there was this one brother, talk about it in the book, I call him Brother Pius, and he was one of the brothers who refused to touch money or cash or credit cards or debit cards for years.

'cause he thought touching money was inherently polluting. There was something something fundamentally debasing about it. And I was like, all right how's that working [00:36:00] out? And what it ended up doing? What I saw in this one particular instance, at least for a while, was if we were to.

Entertain that somewhat diluted notion that touching money is gonna create some sort of a purity in in your soul. And by his refusing to touch it meant that other people had to touch it more often. So I gotta do all this work so you can avoid, it's really just a money monster is what it is and

then creating all the spiritual justification for why he doesn't wanna deal with money. And if you want to use your religious tools to do that, you can find those justifications, but that's not really what their intent is behind. I don't think that's the real meaning , of those scriptures.

So what I found is that if you reject money for the wrong reasons, it could strengthen your ego and give you, you get a spiritual ego around not touching money that's just as toxic as somebody who's the Gordon Geckos of the world of Wall Street, the power hungry money grabbers. It's like you're both acting out a money monster.

You're just doing it on different sides of the coin.

Naseema: Yeah, I think understanding that. It is the [00:37:00] key to saying, okay, we know that it's there. We know why it exists. Let's just use it for good. Use it for what can benefit us and what can benefit other people. And I think when we have that reframe and just understand

a lot of these things are just because of stories that we hear and what society is putting out to us, but they really don't make any sense. And when we can get to that point internally, we can really heal and be able to use money as a tool for the good that it can be used for.

I really, really love that. But this has been so amazing and I just wanna know how people can get in contact with you and to get your wonderful books.

Doug Lynam: Yeah, so you can go to my website, which is doug lyam.com. That's D-O-U-G-L-Y-N as in Nicholas, a m as in Michael. So doug ly.com. You can find all the resources there. My books are available from booksellers [00:38:00] everywhere, Amazon. It's getting five star reviews. The book I'm really pushing right now is Taming Your Money Monster.

Nine Paths to Money Mastery with the Enneagram, and I also do public speaking and coaching, so if anybody's interested in those things, I'm also available for that.

Naseema: I appreciate you and I appreciate your patience

Doug Lynam: Sure.

Naseema: From what I have going on over here, I can tell you are a monk. You just handling it like a g. So I appreciate you, but I love. Your work, and I can totally relate and I know that a lot of people need this. They need to hear like that. It's not. Because they are failing at these tools is because they need to understand fundamentally their money stories and how that's impacted them.

And then they can hit understanding those enneagrams, they can use that as a tool to get to where they need to get to internally to be able to use money the way that it's supposed to be used in their life. So I [00:39:00] really, really appreciate that.

Doug Lynam: You're welcome. It's great chatting with you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Naseema: Thank you so much and I appreciate you, Doug, and I hope that you have a good rest of your day.

Doug Lynam: Okay. Appreciate you too. Have a great one. Be well.

Naseema: Okay.

Doug Lynam: Bye-Bye Bye.

Hey there I’m Naseema

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