We believe that everyone in our society has a lot of conditioning about money. Learning to see this conditioning in ourselves is very important if we are to make any changes to our personal and societal relationships with money, and to the money system itself.

Our society places an incredible amount of importance on money, and yet none of us are taught anything about it in school. Most of our parents teach us very little about money, yet we absorb lots of their beliefs and our society’s beliefs about it throughout our childhood. Many of us learned to think of it as mysterious, or to fear it as something evil. Many of us were taught that there is never enough money, or that money determines our worth as adults.

Another example of a belief that a lot of us have is that we can give money to stores, companies and corporations, but we should not charge our friends or pay our friends for a service well done. If we pay our friends, the money probably stays in the community. If we pay a corporation, it is likely the money does not stay in the community, and yet we have been conditioned to believe money should not be exchanged between friends for a good quality service.

We believe that the lack of transparency in our society makes our relationship to money very dysfunctional. Most of us have been conditioned to believe that there are many circumstances in which it is not okay to talk about money. Many companies consider it a problem to ask how much money a co-worker makes. Many people consider it rude to ask how much money a neighbor makes. Some spouses don’t even know how much money their life partner makes. When people do find out what someone else makes, they often get upset.

What if everyone knew how much money everyone else made? Then would it be possible that everyone would have to get paid for the actual value of the work they did? Maybe it would prevent favoritism where someone gets paid more money for doing lower quality work. If it were listed on a product how much money went into marketing, and how little went into resources and labor, maybe consumers would choose differently how to spend money. If everyone knew how much money it took to run a particular business versus how much profit was made, then maybe our idea of what is “expensive” or “inexpensive” would be quite different from what it is now. What if unseen costs (i.e. environmental impacts) and invisible sources of revenue (i.e. subsidies) were also fully transparent to everyone? Then we could decide as a society which ones we agreed with and which ones we did not. These are just a few examples. Some of the nuances of this topic will be discussed in the Society-Connect section of this website.

We believe money is just an agreement, nothing more. We believe that without complete honesty and transparency, any system using money is dysfunctional. When Dr. Pam Halton used to run a healing and education center in Williston, Vermont, some people thought NSA (Network Spinal Analysis) was expensive at $45 a visit. Was it? After they saw the changes possible in their bodies in only a few weeks, sometimes in only one visit, most of them no longer thought it was expensive. One of them got out of a wheelchair; he had previously been told by his MDs his only option was back surgery. Another client was able to go back to mountain biking, withstand bad crashes, and then just get up, brush himself off, and walk away, instead of having months of recovery as he had had in the past from similar crashes. His body had learned to adapt again, as it was designed to by nature. Some of them could get organ and/or sensory function back, which they had not had for a long time. Almost all of them could get ranges of motion back which they had not had in decades, and almost everyone had better function in ways they had not even necessarily expected was possible.

People’s ideas about value differ a lot. One client’s husband told her a good mattress was too expensive, yet he bought a $1500 pinball machine. Another client had an ex-husband who would not buy a magnetic sleep system for his autistic son, which had been proven to work specifically on his son on multiple occasions. Meanwhile, he did spend several thousand dollars on his new wife’s kitchen counters. The boy’s mother and two of her friends ended up paying for the sleep system; two out of the three women were lower income (see LH’s story). Dr. Pam has worked with women who, despite having trouble walking, would spend exorbitant amounts of money on lipstick, nail polish, and/or wine, while saying they didn’t have time or money to take care of themselves. Notice, it’s all about what we value and what we’ve been conditioned to value by our families, friends, and society.

Few people compare the price of alternative healthcare methods to the actual cost of allopathic care, which is often hundreds of dollars per visit (hundreds of dollars for just a Tylenol pill if you go to the emergency room). Allopathic medicine is highly subsidized by our healthcare system, causing people to mistakenly think it’s less expensive than it really is. The unregulated and excessive costs of allopathic healthcare in the US have been a major contributing factor to our economic problems, both as individuals and as a society. Lee Iacocca, the retired chairman of Chrysler, said, "It is a well-known fact that the US automobile industry spends more per car on health care than on steel." A Harvard research study from March 2013 found that it would take only one illness to bankrupt all but the top socioeconomic tier of American families, even if they had medical insurance. Health insurance does not cover the most effective treatments for chronic conditions, does not heal the whole person, and/or does not prevent the cause of the problem. People have been trying hard to change this for decades and so far there has only been limited success. Allopathic medicine has important life-saving functions when used properly, but there are a lot of problems with the current system. (The Healthcare system is discussed in detail in Society-Connect.)

Because most alternative healthcare is not funded by health insurance, many practitioners give away lots of free or reduced price care in order to help more people. Dr. Pam’s office was an example of this. She helped many people who felt they couldn’t afford chiropractic care. The office was unique in that at least half of the time and emphasis was put on empowering people by teaching them self-healing tools, while only half the emphasis was on services they couldn’t do themselves. Yet Dr. Pam’s own patterns of not wanting to charge a lot of money, keep up with the accounting, and figure out how to hire a skilled bookkeeper resulted in the office not having enough money to stay open when she got sick (See story of Dr. Pam’s surgery). Notice how dysfunction around money exists on multiple levels, all of them interconnected. A chiropractor tries to make healing more accessible by offering scholarships or free care. Some people are conditioned to see their own health as secondary to other expenses. A practitioner offers discounted care. There is less money to run the office. There is inadequate money to pay employees a good wage. An emergency happens. The office closes. People lose access to the care that was helping them, including those who really needed and valued it. An office being in a health insurance network would not have solved this situation in the current paradigm (including Obamacare and the healthcare system prior to Obamacare). See Medical Bankruptcies & Health Insurance to find out why.

We might ask why it is so hard to change the healthcare system. Why is it so hard to change the energy system, the educational system, the food system, or the political system? If we follow the money trail, it becomes clear that certain people and corporations are benefitting from the status quo. In our current system, only a few people get maximum profit, while other parts of the system are bankrupted and many people struggle to get their basic needs met. A system based on scarcity ensures that many people will never have enough. We believe that improving our money system and improving the transparency of information are the keys to affecting change in all other parts of the system (see the Economic and Information/Data parts of Society-Connect for more detail.)

This AwarenessConnections.Org website is an attempt to respond to and help the society we all live in. We are creating this website to empower all people to gain awareness of the dysfunctional societal patterns with respect to mind, body, relationships, finances, and more. We will attempt to make the things on this website as free as possible. Because of that, some people may make the mistake of not valuing the tools and advice here. Most of us have been conditioned to believe only expensive things are valuable; everything else is seen as “too good to be true”. (See Skepticism.) We believe we can all lead happier, more functional, more productive lives if we gain awareness and take action to change these systems. It is our belief that all people deserve to lead healthy, fulfilling lives, and we want to support everyone to do this, as well as to attract the resources to continue building this website of free tools for the public. Any healthy system must have a flow of energy, and we trust that the results people get will keep enough donation money flowing through the ACO (AwarenessConnections.Org) website to allow it to keep expanding and helping even more people.

In taking on this project, we have had to examine our culture’s definitions of useful work and worthwhile pastimes. Notice if it is true that most of us are more at ease about giving labor to a typical employer or what society traditionally calls a job than we are to volunteer or collaborate with friends or neighbors for a project. The former is often considered “work” or a “real job” and is therefore deemed important while the latter might often be considered something we can only do if we have extra time. As several of us have put many hours into this ACO Project because we thought it was an important and useful contribution to the world, some friends and family members kept asking what we were going to do for “real work” or when were we going to get a “real job”, meaning a job working for an established company, organization, or work for our family or household. Notice if this is an example of some societal conditioning at play. What exactly is a “real job”?

Is it possible that doing a project that is likely to have large benefits to the public in our own country and perhaps the world might be more important than many traditional jobs? Is it possible that it might be important enough to sacrifice some time with our family households to do it? Is it possible that it might actually lead to a more substantial “real job” that pays us monetarily and also fulfills us emotionally far more than a typical job working for someone else could do? What if we could also help to create more fulfilling work environments for others and start participating in a new economic system? What if the goal of our economy was to provide maximum health and benefit to all parts of the system rather than the accumulation of personal wealth and possessions? We believe that an economy based on scarcity can never really increase the happiness of anyone, including the people who are currently profiting from that system.

As we believe transparency is of the utmost importance, we will attempt to be completely open about the donations that we receive and our expenses. From January through October of 2014, more than six key people and several other smaller players have volunteered more than 1400 people-hours to bring this ACO Project to the public so far, not including the many hours of data gathering and brainstorming which had occurred over several prior years. Other members of the team contributed to those ACO Project designers/creators by housing, feeding, and/or giving health care or other resources to them so that they could dedicate their energy where it was needed. This allowed the ACO Project designers/creators to be more free of rents, mortgages, and some other bills than they could have been otherwise. We have found that when we follow intuitive guidance, we can give a lot away and yet begin to create a team that supports each other to our mutual benefit even though we are not just a single nuclear family, nor a company in the traditional sense.

We deeply value the work we have all done and continue to do on this project and we hope people will also find it to be of some value, regardless of how much they are able or willing to contribute. To see all the ways to give back , many of them not involving money, see the Care & Share section.

See these links to learn more:
What is “cheap”, “affordable”, and “expensive”?
Should Health Insurance Cover All Types of Healing?
Netherlands politicians enact healthcare reform at possible expense to their own political careers
Economic, Information/Data, Healthcare, and other sections of Society-Connect