There should be a reason why there are many people who expect that any type of spiritual or energy healing services as well as educational activities that offer metaphysical insights directed towards improving the quality of life should be free of charge. Perhaps it is because many people still have a negative attitude towards money and consider them to be the root of all evil. Is it even possible to somehow resolve the everlasting conflict between spirituality and money in order to explain the issue of payment for spiritual healing and/or metaphysical insights?

Oxford dictionary defines money as “A current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes”. There is no information that explains what is that we are exchanging. If we take into account that we are living not just in the material world and that there is an energy-informational world out there, then we can define money as symbols of the return on your personal energy investment into society. This way of defining money can help us describe what is that we are actually exchanging.

Money represents the energy that you have effectively invested in the life of society through your own work and was able to get back the return on your energy investment. Those symbols of energy give you an opportunity to enter energy exchange process with others. Seeing what money stand for on the energy level gives a chance to better explain relationships between spirituality and money.

If you look at the relationships of money and spirituality throughout the history, you will see many cases when spiritual ideas were abused in order to justify gaining money for personal needs. Unfortunately, there are many examples even today. You can still find spiritual teachers who pervert the true meaning of money and urge others to sacrifice their own symbols of energy in the name of false beliefs. There are also those who turn money into their personal religion and begin worship material wealth. When someone brings spirituality or material wealth to an absolute he or she creates a belief system that can be used to manipulate others. The key to understanding the relationships of spirituality and material wealth is the balance between the two.

Those who are tilted towards spirituality in most cases reject everything money related (many times subconsciously) and expect others to sacrifice their symbols of energy in the name of “spirituality” as well. Those who are stuck in the material perception of the world, expect others to do everything for them in exchange for their money, even when it concerns the evolution of their own Spirit. However, nobody can walk the road of your own spiritual evolution for you. Those who tilt their boat of life too much towards the side of either spirituality or money end up going in circles instead of moving upwards on a spiral of their Spirit’s evolution.

The true job description for any spiritual teacher or coach is to possess the qualities that can serve as the benchmark for others. Their goal is to show others what spiritual world actually is through their own example or in other words through the vibration that their brain can create. That is the skill that can be acquired and many people choose to evolve their perception of the world through training their brain and heart in order to become spiritual teachers (sometimes it can take even more than one life). They don’t have to be holy or be without a sin. Spiritual teachers are just offering their perspective on how to evolve spiritually.

Freedom of one person is sacred, thus no one can force you to believe in anything or follow someone. You always make your own choice to allow something to happen or not. There could be times when you find that methods or ideas of a certain spiritual system resonate with you. You could even experience results after conducting suggested techniques in practice. If that happens, then it just makes sense to exchange energy symbols for the information that you have received. Information is the same as energy but with the higher frequency. If you decide not to enter a fair energy exchange process with a spiritual system through the symbols, then there could be certain consequences for the state of your energy-informational bodies on the higher levels of consciousness in the future.

In other words, the balance of fair energy exchange will be kept no matter what you do. It all comes to whether you are willingly participating in your own spiritual evolution while enjoying life and keeping the balance in the energy exchange process, or you are forced to do so by outside circumstances or even problems with your physical body.

It is much easier to recognize energy exchange process if we take spiritual or energy healing practices. In the process of a spiritual healing session, the healer provides a service. Even though it is impossible (at least for most people) to see what the healer is actually doing with energy, positive results usually don’t take too long to be observed (that is if the healing session was conducted correctly and safety measures were followed, this topic will be covered in other articles). Spiritual or energy healer invested his or her energy and time in order to learn the skills that can heal the energy state of others. Thus, it makes perfect sense that a spiritual or energy healer should receive symbols of energy that the client was able to acquire from his or her own energy investment into society.

What happens if someone does not have those symbols and wants the personal attention of a spiritual healer or a teacher? Well, we are living during the informational age right now and a lot of basic information can be found free of charge. In order to start any type of healing, one has to first start within. The same principle works if you decide to get fit physically. There is no need to hire personal fitness trainer right away. You can always start with basics. All you need is a floor and your will to get your physical body in shape to do things like push-ups, sit-ups, plank, etc. When you want more advanced training you can go to the nearest fitness center and sign up. If you want the attention of a personal coach then you can also find one and offer the symbols of energy in exchange for his or her expertise.

It is also important to keep in mind is that some spiritual teachers or healers work on the energy-informational level and at first, it could be hard to see material proof that they are actually doing something. Yet, they are still using their acquired skills, talents and experience to share their insights and heal. That is pretty much the same as any of us doing work. Each of us at one point in life decided to follow hopefully own inner urge or passion to obtain certain skills in order to have a quality life in the future. Some are predisposed to skills that can provide tangible results others have a calling towards intangible. If both are met somewhere in the middle and exchange the surplus of energy they have acquired through realizing their potential, then it helps to keep the spiritual and material world in balance as well as helps each other evolve.

So should spiritual healing and/or metaphysical insights have a price tag or should it be totally free is only for you to decide. At the end of the day, it is not about what you can selflessly give in order to be more spiritual or what you can take to have more money. It is about what level of conscious awareness you can reach and keep living on that frequency while being in harmony with laws of society and the Universe. And when you reach that state of balance, make sure to share your experience with others.

P.S. here is an excerpt from a book by Drunvalo Melchizedek (“The Spirit of Maat”, Vol. 1 N12). Throughout his life, he went through more than 70 teachers and initiations. He is also an author of the book: “The Ancient Secrets of the Flower of Life”.

How Can You Charge for Spiritual Teachings?
I am about to share with you my own experiences of charging for spiritual teaching. This sharing is my gift, on a practical level, to those of you who are teaching spiritual information now, or especially to you who are about to teach. If you are a seeker, perhaps this will help you to understand the precarious balance that spiritual teachers must find if they are to remain in integrity with what they charge you to come to their classes.

How I Began Teaching
Almost twenty years ago, I was asked by my guides to teach what had been taught to me in the twelve years prior to that. I didn’t know, during the whole twelve years of my training, that I was going to be asked to do this. So the request came as a surprise.

The request also came as a shock. So much so that at first I said no. I didn’t want to make my life public. I was thinking only of myself. But over a period of about two weeks, my guides made clear to me the Spiritual Law that says, When you receive a spiritual gift, it cannot be kept only for yourself. It must be shared with others. When I saw the truth of what they were saying to me, I reluctantly agreed to teach what I had learned.
As I set out to prepare to teach a class on the Mer-Ka-Ba meditation of ascension and Sacred Geometry — the sacred shapes and proportions that generate the Creation within which we live — I encountered an ordinary and everyday problem: Was I to charge money for this spiritual knowledge, or was it to be given away for free?
This was a question that had never entered my mind until that moment. I really didn’t know what to do.

Spiritual Traditions Differ
My first thought, because I went to Catholic schools when I was growing up, was that the teachings must be given freely. Many Christians believe that because Jesus gave away his teachings, so should spiritual teachers today.
But during the past twelve years my guides had been sending me all over the world learning from different sources, and the spiritual teachers and traditions I had encountered all put forth different ideas about charging for spiritual knowledge.

For several of the twelve years, for example, I was a Sufi, and the Sufi tradition says the exact opposite of the Christian tradition. I was taught by the Sufis never to give away spiritual knowledge. The Sufi teachers I studied with believed that there must be an exchange. It didn’t have to be money, but there had to be an exchange, or the student would miss the lesson.

From these two opposite poles, I began to contemplate what to do.

What Would Jesus Do?
Then I thought of Jesus. If he were alive today, could he preach in the same way that he did 2000 years ago? And I saw immediately that the answer was no. To begin with, gathering thousands or even hundreds of people together in cities nowadays is illegal. If he tried it, Jesus would be arrested immediately and fined. And if he continued to do it, they would put him in prison. To gather people legally, he would have to hire managers to obtain licenses for assembling, or rent the venues within cities, which is very expensive. If he traveled outside of the country that he lived in, he would have to have passports and airline tickets.

In other words, if Jesus had performed his ministry under 21st-century conditions, he would have been faced with the same ”money” problems that all spiritual teachers are faced with today. So, for simple, practical reasons, spiritual teachers must charge something or find someone who will pay the expenses for them. Either way, the expenses are a fact of life.

The first reality that I was faced with was the undeniable fact that if I was going to gather a hundred people together under one roof, I would have to pay for the space. I didn’t have any money myself, so how was I going to pay for this venue? It became excruciating clear that I had to charge something, or I couldn’t even begin to teach.
The more I realized the costs of putting on a seminar — phone bills, mailing costs, electronic and audiovisual equipment, PA systems, plane tickets to various locations, and on and on — it became absolutely clear that it was going to cost money to teach, whether I liked it or not.

Further, if a spiritual teacher is to devote his or her entire life to teaching, as I was being asked to do, there has to be enough money left over to pay life’s simple necessities — rent, food, etc. And so taking all of these concepts into consideration, I realized that what was important in today’s world was that the exchange the Sufi’s talked about had to be ”fair.”

There are spiritual organizations that require you to give everything you own over to them before they will teach you, and some which require such high prices that only a few people could ever pay for their spiritual knowledge. One, which I will not identify, asked of students that they pay over $100,000 for the information. These are examples of the extreme, and in my mind they are wrong. They are not fair.

Giving It Away
Then, as I actually began to teach, I discovered that no matter what price you put on the class or seminar you are teaching, for some people it will be too much. There are people who are so poor — especially in foreign countries — that any reasonable price whatsoever is impossible for them.

My first solution to this was to allow free classes for those who could not pay for them. And that was when I began to experience directly the reason for the Sufi understanding that you must never give away spiritual knowledge. I truly hadn’t known why the Sufis believed this idea, but the answer now unfolded right before my eyes.

Class after class, as I gave out free tuition to those who said they could not otherwise attend, I experienced that it was these people — the ones who were allowed in for free — who never understood what was being taught. I even discovered that if another person paid for someone’s class, there was the same problem. The free students were almost always the ones who showed up late and left in the middle. They were the ones who would fall asleep or talk throughout the class. And, even more important, they were the ones who didn’t actually practice the meditation after the class was over. The Sufi’s reasons for never giving away spiritual knowledge for free were glaringly apparent.

A Fair Exchange.
So what was the answer? I decided that the exchange was all-important. If students received the teaching for free, it would have no meaning to them, but the exchange didn’t have to be money. Instead of money, they could give time and energy. In so doing, they would engage their desire to learn, and it would have meaning to them.

So I told those who said they could not pay that if they would volunteer their time to one of the major charities, such as Red Cross — enough time, based on ten dollars per hour, to pay for the workshop — then they could attend for free. I asked for a letter from the charity to verify their time. I still do this today. And what is truly fascinating is that only about one person out of fifty actually takes me up on this offer! Even though they are not working and could easily give their time, it turns out that almost all of those who ask to come to my workshops without paying are not doing it out of deep spiritual desire, but simply because they want to get “something for nothing”.

How Beliefs Affect Your Results
Another side of the equation of paying for spiritual knowledge is that whatever we believe to be true around money affects the outcome. When I first began to teach, I decided that what was fair was $222 for three days. I could barely pay for all the expenses, but that amount seemed fair to me.

However, my secretary, who arranged the classes and actually talked to the potential students, thought that this amount was outrageously high. Even though she could see on the books that we were actually losing money, she still believed the workshop was too expensive. And so, every time someone called in to register for a class, her beliefs would transfer to the person signing up. Inevitably, they would ask for a payment plan. I ended up with hundreds of people making payments, which was slowly sending us into bankruptcy.

Then my secretary moved to another state, and I replaced her with a woman who believed the opposite of her predecessor. She believed that what I was charging was entirely too little. So she talked me into raising the amount to $333. And, because she thought this amount was fair, from the time she arrived not one single person felt as though they needed to have a payment plan. Not even one!

This story shows clearly that what you believe affects the outcome — even with money (incidentally, this is equally true if you have a healing practice — it doesn’t just apply to teaching).

Financial Success Is Important
Today, after almost twenty years of experience around the subject of paying for spiritual knowledge, I believe more than ever that there needs to be an exchange. It needs to be fair, but not charging for spiritual teaching doesn’t work, not for the teacher, and not for the student.

And what you personally believe around money will affect the outcome. Your beliefs about money will ultimately determine whether or not you succeed financially.

And succeeding financially is important, because until you do, you will be limited in your ability to share with others the spiritual teachings that God has given to you.”