101 Aligning Purpose, Resources and Spirit: An Exploration of Business, Wealth and Wellbeing • Matt Ludmer

Perspective changes everything.

We can approach the business and financial aspects of our practices a distasteful task that we’d prefer to delegate to someone else. Or we can take it as the opportunity it is to work through our shadow material around the issues of money, power, authority and integrity.

In this conversation we explore how wealth allows us to interact more fully with our world. How finances are just one aspect of a balanced and integral life. And how the relationships with community and ourselves are not separate from our relationship to money and purpose.

Impoverishment in any aspect of life will limit our capability to live fully in any other aspect of life.

Listen in to this conversation with a long time meditator, with a hearty ability to laugh, who leans on the wisdom of the DAO and the DOW.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

The importance of “Unintentional Friday”
The mindset of having the “right view”
Going from being a wage earner to an owner and owning the purpose of profit
Four purposes of profit
What got Matt to Wall Street
The mind can achieve goals, but it can also do a lot of other things
Play against good competition makes you better
What is the gift you’ve been given, that you want to give to the world, so you can get that which you’ve been hoping for?
What is it that people have said about you that is your great asset?
You need to have an ego, before you can transcend an ego
Integral theory and practice
All growth stops if our traumas have not been resolved
When you go to school you get a diploma, but you don’t really understand until you practice
The influence of J. Krishnamurti
Meditation as the process of releasing reference points
It’s important to both find…. and be, a mentor
Community is a great form of wealth that often goes unrecognized as wealth
Being able to expand our bandwidth
Allowing our capacity to arise
Importance of learning

Matt Ludmer

It seems that, for as long as I can remember, I have been searching for the best way to help myself and others lead successful, meaning-driven lives.

Before graduating high school, my dad gave me the books,Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peal, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I was lucky to find such motivation and inspiration at a young age, yet I still wondered what more was possible. So I continued my personal studies, exploring significant figures such as Emerson, Abraham Joshua Herschel, J. Krishnamurti, and others. Then, in my freshman year of college, I had the good fortune to learn meditation. I became a student of Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master. I also became a student of Jewish spirituality and Kabbalah.

This world of insight developed alongside my material life at Rutgers, where I majored in Economics. After graduating, I attended business school at the University of Chicago. In 1984, I graduated with an MBA in Finance, and was fortunate to be hired by Morgan Stanley to became one of the first five “home-grown” investment advisors. I ended up becoming a director, led a large successful team and, for a four- year stint, became the leading advisor at the merchant bank, Donaldson Lufkin and Jenrette.

Given the diverse interests in my life, I always wondered: How could all of this be aligned? How could my interests in finance, spirituality, psychology and personal development all come together? I also thought that others must surely wonder the same thing about their own lives. Part of the answer to this question came at age forty when I learned about Integral Theory. Summarizing hundreds of studies from Maslow to Jung to Gebser, Integral Theory provided me a map; a very powerful, transformative, and tangible tool for development. Growth, I realized, seems so much easier when one has a researched map of what may lie ahead. Compelled by a larger holistic vision of what growth and wealth truly meant, in 2013, I created Aligned Wealth and in 2016, the Aligned Center.