Money & Wisdom: 4 Stances

Dana, Charity, Stewardship, & Generosity

Sep 20, 2025

I don't have any answers to the whole money-and-mystics thing. I'm working with some others on the question of funding the evolution of consciousness, but we're not gonna pretend there's any kind of easy or systematic approach there.

In fact, I increasingly believe that any systematic approach here is not only impossible, but undesirable. Those approaches would be out of keeping with what wants to grow here. It's like feeding tuna steaks to a bunny rabbit — a mismatch in modes of nourishment.

So much comes down to what drives actions — the stance, the energetics, the will and motivation underlying it all. If the stance that your livelihood comes from is one of transaction, control, contraction, impersonality, obligation... something shuts down. There's inflammation in the channels of the world-soul, its blood vessels constrict around you.

I'm very much at the beginning of this inquiry — less than a week ago, I realized that I need to change my relationship to money and how it interacts with my writing and teaching — but from where I'm standing now, it looks like there are four stances that feel good to me. Everything starts with the stance, both for how resources are given and how they're received. The four stances I want to consider right now are Dana, Charity, Stewardship, and Generosity.

Dana

You can read some actual Buddhists on the concept of dana if you're interested — here, I'll be using the term as a marker for my own understanding of its energetic stance.

It starts from a realization that nothing is permanent or fixed, everything is in constant change. The time, money, and resources I find myself with aren't mine in any meaningful way, at this level. They've simply landed with me for the moment.

From this space of truly letting go, I'm free to listen. I can listen, not to my own insecurities, my own fear of lack, my own pride in having so much, the voices of my parents or teachers or bosses — I can listen to the money, the world, the situation around me. From that open, unattached listening, I'm free to hear how the money wants to move, how my time and energy want to move. And I'm free to be surprised by that.

Recently, I listened to someone talk and I got an intrusive thought: "oh, $1,000 of mine is actually yours." Which was absurd. I do not have a thousand dollars to be throwing around at intuitive pings.

And yet.

From the dana stance, it's clear that I don't actually have a thousand dollars at all. There's simply a thousand dollars that at some point wanted to move into my care. And now, apparently, they want to move into someone else's care. Which is scary for me, but sometimes I just have to listen.

How strange. How freeing. How gorgeously, terrifyingly spacious. None of this is mine. None of this is yours. Where does it want to be?

Charity/Agape

The King James Version of the Bible translated the word agápē as "charity." It feels important to me to decouple "charity" from what feels like a patronizing and hierarchical connotation, where one person sends money downward in some way to help someone. This usage of the word "charity" misses the mark.

Agápē is a concept many have written on, and you can read their descriptions elsewhere. I'll once again be using this word to point at an energetic stance — a stance of open, enduring, spacious love. A love that doesn't grasp or pull or require anything, but that simply is.

If dana is a neutral stance (let go of constrictions and let things move where they will), then charity is what happens when you release those same constrictions, then allow agápē to move your resources.

In other words: you let go of your money and let love move it.

When you feel love for someone, it moves you. It moves words from your mouth, moves your body to hold them, moves your ambitions toward their wellbeing alongside your own... love moves everything in your life, if you let it.

When we feel love for someone's work, their teachings, their way of being — for an organization or mission or project — there's much less of a tendency to let love move our resources. In order to move into the money question, we back out a little bit from the heart, towards the mind. What makes sense to give? What can I afford? Fear and scarcity move in. Some psychological habit moves in — some flavor of never being a sucker, never paying more than you must, never giving up more than They can make you.

But we can keep returning to love. Let love move you, let love open you, let love tell you what wants to move. And let it move.

Stewardship

This feels like an important stance to me: when something or someone crosses our path, comes into our care, enters our hearts, steps into our lives — if we receive from it, we have a duty to give to it. This isn't some transactional rule, just a natural energetic flow.

There was a friendship of mine that got damaged last year. I was pretty sure we'd never talk again. The two of us discussed it, and we felt that the friendship was something special that held a lot of benefit for both of us and for the world — so we decided to spend time together and repair it. That's stewardship. We sensed the value the friendship gave us, and we decided to value it in return.

I realized several months ago that when I didn't value my energy, I lost it. If I spent my days lying around, watching tv, staring at the walls, then I'd have no life force available for writing, exercise, relationships, any of the good stuff. When I decided to steward my energy consciously, to value my life force and listen to what it wanted from me, it returned in full force.

That's the simple magic of stewardship. Something of value has been placed with you — you can value it and receive value from it, or you can not value it and watch it fade out of your life. The first flickers are often a gift, a bit of grace. But to build a real relationship with something, you have to steward it well. You have to see its worth and act worthily.

I have a huge amount to say on this, but every time I start it gets intense and forceful and I feel like I'm not firm enough in that force to hold it well. Give me some time, I'll get to it.

For now, I'll just point at a little sketch in that direction:

There are very few communities around that steward their wisdom-keepers well. Everyone is very down to say "your work changed my life" or "you've had a huge impact on me," but very few make any effort to return life-changing or impactful value to that person, group, or tradition.

If wisdom has been put in your path and has impacted your life — you are now a steward of that wisdom and the ways that it wants to move into the world. You can take up that stewardship or not. It can take many forms, money is only a small part of it here. But if someone has impacted your life, and you want that impact to grow (not just for yourself, but others), it's best to act like it.

Generosity

In this stance, I like that the root of the word is the same as generate. That's what it feels like to me, a big enthusiastic generator of energy towards something that lights you up. It might feel like love, it might feel like duty, it might just feel like raw life force, but one way or another generosity tends to feel like a vast, open excitement to do whatever you can.

I often feel surges of generosity towards my friends. In my case, this sometimes comes up as money or gifts, but more often in terms of time, care, support, or attention. I want to listen to my friends' check-ins when they're sorting through a big week, trying to voice to themselves what has shifted. I want to guide them through a city they're unfamiliar with when they have to run a stressful errand. I want to carry their heavy luggage, take over their morning chores, pick up some extra slack so they have time to sleep in, to take an important call, to cry and scream and pull themselves back together.

You might feel surges like this towards friends, family, teachers, traditions, books... no matter where it shows up, the key is once again to just let that generosity move you. Just like in dana you listen to what wants to move, and in charity you let love move it, in generosity you let enthusiasm move what it wants to move, up to and including your time, money, energy, and resources. You follow the life energy where it wants to go, and you let it carry what it wants to carry there.

In each of these stances, it's not about how much money moves, or when, or from where, to whom. It's about changing the soul-habits around money. Money is, by nature and almost exclusively, something that invites a stance of transaction, contract, constriction, fear, pride, and insecurity. Those stances just don't work well with wisdom and dharma, for a variety of reasons.

I have no idea what the solution is to any of this, many far brighter people than me have taken a crack at the problem of funding the evolution of consciousness. But for me, in my life, right here right now, still humming with the realization that I have to change my livelihood to align more closely with my values — these stances are going to be my starting point. Cultivating them in myself, encouraging them in others, and seeing where they take us.

I kinda wanna paywall this article; I would find that absurdly hilarious.

But instead, while you're here, if you feel moved by dana, charity, stewardship, and/or generosity, there's a few places I can offer for you to channel it:

Support me with a gift, a patreon subscription, or a paid subscription here on substack. You can also pick up my Somatic Resonance and Imaginal Journeying courses, and my book, We're Here to Renew the Sacred.
Support Rosa Lewis, who I just spent a month on retreat with, and whose talk on dana sparked the realizations behind this article. You can read her books here (she just put out a new one and it’s great).
Support Tasshin, he's out there working hard and spreading love, curiosity, and empowerment. He also wrote some books, you can buy them and read them and everything.
Contact me (River@RiverKenna.com) about a project a few of us are working on, finding the highest-leverage ways of using resources to support conscious transformation. (The most impactful option we've found so far is funding advanced trainings for dedicated practitioners who otherwise couldn't afford them.)