“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” – Meister Eckhart
Few thinkers bridge the gap between spirituality and practicality as powerfully as Meister Eckhart. A 13th-century Dominican mystic and theologian, Eckhart’s insights into inner freedom and divine presence read today like a guidebook for conscious living — and for Holistic Wealth Planners, a manual for authentic service.
Though born into a world of hierarchy and dogma, Eckhart dared to teach that each person carries the spark of divinity within. His message was revolutionary: spiritual authority lies not in the church, but in consciousness itself.
1. Wealth as Inner Sufficiency
Eckhart taught that attachment is the root of suffering. “He who would be serene and pure needs to be empty of all things,” he wrote — not to reject material life, but to disidentify from it.
For Holistic Wealth Planners, this challenges the traditional view of wealth as accumulation. True prosperity is not measured in possessions, but in sufficiency — the state of enough.
When planners help clients detach from comparison, status, and fear of scarcity, they’re not just managing finances; they’re guiding a spiritual shift from possession to presence.
2. The God Within — Ending Intermediation
Eckhart insisted that divine truth is accessible to all, without priest or intermediary. “The seed of God is in us,” he said, “just as a pear seed grows into a pear tree.”
This parallels the Holistic Wealth ethos: empower the individual to plan their own life, not depend on financial intermediaries.
In both cases, the work is about returning sovereignty — whether over money, meaning, or destiny. The planner becomes not a gatekeeper, but a midwife of awakening — drawing out what is already within the client.
3. Action Through Detachment
Eckhart’s idea of Gelassenheit — spiritual letting-be — calls for full engagement in life without clinging to results.
For planners, this means working diligently yet non-anxiously; offering guidance without attachment to the client’s choices; serving with love, not control.
This detachment transforms the planner’s role from salesperson to servant leader — doing one’s work for the joy of right action, not for external validation or commission.
4. Breaking the Idols of False Success
Eckhart warned that even good deeds can become idols if done for egoic reasons. Similarly, financial advice can turn manipulative when driven by profit rather than purpose.
Holistic Wealth Planning demands a continual clearing of inner motives. Am I serving to help, or to gain? Am I listening, or persuading?
By confronting these inner idols, planners reclaim purity of intention — the hallmark of transparent, ethical practice.
5. Living from the Centre
“The outward work can never be great or even good,” said Eckhart, “unless the inward one is great and good.”
This is the heart of the Holistic Wealth approach: plan the life before the money.
Eckhart would call it “acting from the ground of being.” When planners help clients align financial decisions with values, purpose, and soul, they activate this same principle — moving from external goals to inner coherence.
6. Silence, Stillness, and the Source of Wisdom
Eckhart believed that the Divine speaks most clearly in silence. For planners, cultivating contemplative awareness — stillness before strategy — allows intuition and insight to guide decisions.
A Holistic Wealth Planner who listens deeply, both inwardly and outwardly, mirrors Eckhart’s teaching: “Be still and let God act and speak in thee.”
7. From Extraction to Empowerment
In Eckhart’s world, religious institutions often mediated access to God. In ours, financial institutions mediate access to wealth. Both create dependency.
The Holistic Wealth Planner’s task — much like Eckhart’s — is to return power to the individual: to replace extraction with empowerment, to help people experience divine and financial freedom directly.
🌿 Conclusion: The Mystic in the Marketplace
Eckhart taught that spirituality is not withdrawal from the world, but transformation within it. The marketplace, too, can become a monastery — if we bring consciousness to our work.
Holistic Wealth Planners are today’s contemplatives in action — guiding others toward wholeness, sufficiency, and purpose.
They are, in Eckhart’s words, “the just person who acts from the same light as God Himself.”
In embodying these principles, we rediscover what Eckhart knew seven centuries ago:
that the greatest wealth is to know the truth of who we are,
and to live — freely, compassionately, and consciously — from that knowing.
🌿 Next Steps
Reimagine your practice through the lens of Meister Eckhart.
Move beyond transactions to transformation.
Let your planning become a spiritual act — empowering others to live with purpose, sufficiency, and peace.
Join the movement redefining wealth as wholeness.
Academy of Life Planning 