The Yoga of True Wealth is No Big Kept Secret – PS 78
Episode Introduction
My guest is Francis Bitterly. Fran leads a wealth management team as a Managing Director, Wealth Advisor, Sr. Portfolio Management Director, and Certified Financial Planner®. He is in based in Red Bank, New Jersey. He has been recognized five times by Barron’s Magazine as one of the nation’s top financial advisors.
In this show you hear Fran speak with great passion about his spiritual practice. It's also the subject of his book The Yoga of True Wealth: Wisdom from a Heart of Wall Street (2017) Koehler Books.
Episode Background
For the past 32 years while Fran has been growing his financial practice helping his clients make wise and informed decisions about their money, enabling them to achieve what is most important to them, he has been deepening his own true wealth and growing what is important to him.
The yoga of true wealth is an inner journey, contrasting with all the external trappings of success. It’s a knowing that sets us free to live with full awareness and make choices that connect with our true being so we can be at one with love and peace and each other.
The Yoga of True Wealth
One of the things I value about Fran's book, The Yoga of True Wealth is its smorgasbord of spiritual teachings that come from diverse wisdom and spiritual traditions. While the quotes and teachings come from different traditions, they are united in their message. Humanity all over the world and throughout all ages are faced with both suffering and joy. Most of us experience at some point in our lives a yearning, an emptiness, a gap that wants to be filled. We yearn for peace and love – and when we awaken to that truth, we find the way to the yoga of true wealth.
Growth comes from Struggle
Fran shares some of his personal story on the show and goes into greater detail more deeply in his book. His personal sorrows and struggles began before the age of 4 when his mother died. As a teenager, he found his taste for alcohol addictive. During those teenage years, he describes the agony of not being true to himself as the dark night of the soul. He knew his behaviors were not who he really was at that time.
Out of those struggles, he became a deep seeker. At a young age, he developed a conscious awareness that he was able to access much later in life when he most needed it. The lessons from his mother when she was in great pain and dying offered a love that remains constant through his life. She lived from the heart. Without his knowing at the time, she taught him deep metaphysical truths that he has come to appreciate as he learned his lessons in life and deepened his experience with Spirit.
Spiritual Awakening
The beginning of Fran’s spiritual journey came from his childhood faith, Christianity and his mother’s influence and her strong faith. Today, he describes himself as a mystical Christian – a lover of Jesus and open to many truths.
Even with his strong Christian faith, Fran remained a seeker. He began to read and learn about the wisdom traditions and other spiritual faiths from many teachers, alive and dead. He deepened his understandings and appreciations for Buddhism and the many branches of Hinduism, for Sufism and he read the literature of philosophers and poets through the ages.
Positivity Practices to Find the Yoga of True Wealth
If the spiritual quest is to find unity – yoga – be at one with God and at peace with oneself and others, it’s a journey that takes effort to move out of your mind into your heart. You move from ego consciousness and its associated chatter of the mind to the stillness of the heart. It is an inner journey, that liberates you from all the outer trappings of success.
Fran outlines seven practices help people take that inner journey, and I suggest they are akin to positivity strategies. Fran agrees that all the practices are about building momentum for goodness that comes from living with virtues to help overcome and eradicate vices. Each of these practices take years of work, and the benefits are cumulative. To learn more about each one, listen to Fran’s explanations.
The 7 Practices to Deepen the Spiritual Journey
Bringing the Yoga of True Wealth to Financial Clients
Fran talks about how he lives out his faith in his relationship with his clients. He remains at the top of his game – which is imparting the best advice (wisdom) to his clients. He advises his clients in accordance with his highest values of care and empathy. He knows that that positivity is the way to bring people to higher experiences, yet we get caught up in the negative and attached to our own stories that magnify the less important matters in the bigger scheme of life.
What matters to Fran is being with love and peace. His book is a means to share his faith and associated wisdom.
Stay Connected with Fran
Fran's website: Yoga of True Wealth
Books and Links to Resources
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The Yoga of True Wealth: Wisdom From a Heart on Wall Street
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