Spirituality and Money DO Mix!

In this episode host Dr. Jami Carlacio speaks with Casey Arrillaga — clinical social worker, chemical dependency counselor, author, and long-time person-in-recovery — about the often-ignored intersection of spirituality and money. Casey shares his personal journey from ambivalence and debt to applying spiritual principles (and 12‑step recovery tools) to his finances. He recounts early life contradictions about money, runaway credit‑card debt, financial enabling in marriage, multiple moves and job changes, and the moment of radical surrender when he agreed to turn his financial will over to his Higher Power. Casey explains what “turning money over” practically meant for him (asking for guidance rather than expecting miracles), how recovery principles helped him pay off debt, and how over time that surrender shifted from fear-avoidance to moving toward peace and blessing. The conversation closes with a tease for part two — bringing spirituality into business — and a musical clip tied to the episode’s theme: “I’m on your side.”

Key Takeaways

• Spirituality and money can and should be discussed together — they’re not mutually exclusive.
• Early messages about money are often mixed (e.g., abundance vs. judgment), which creates lifelong ambivalence and shame around finances.
• Addiction, avoidance, and financial mismanagement often co-occur; tools that help with addiction (honesty, inventory, sponsorship, step work) can be applied to finances.
• “Turning your finances over to a Higher Power” doesn’t mean God writes your checks — it means seeking guidance and asking, “What is the next right step?” rather than trying to control every outcome.
• Radical surrender can be terrifying: fear that the Higher Power’s plan won’t match one’s personal ambitions is a real barrier to spiritual financial work.
• Practical recovery-based financial tactics work: prioritizing and attacking high-interest debt, making minimums on others, and applying the “snowball/avalanche” method helped Casey become debt‑free.
• Even after debt is paid, financial serenity may still be missing — true peace requires ongoing spiritual practice and daily guidance, not just solvency.
• Spiritual guidance functions as a daily compass: small, actionable prompts (the “next right step”) are more useful than seeing the whole road ahead.
• Over time, spiritual practice shifts motivation from avoiding pain/consequences to moving toward blessing, peace, and lasting recovery.
• Integrating spirituality into business practices is the next phase of Casey’s story — applying the same principles to earning and running a business (to be continued in part two).

Episode Notes

• Guest: Casey Arrillaga — author and clinician; host of Addiction and the Family podcast. (See caseyauthor.com for more.)
• This episode is the first of a two-part conversation; part two will explore applying spirituality directly to business and entrepreneur

Transcript

Casey: [00:00:00] Basically what the implication is, you're not living up to it, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. . You're not living up to it. You're not there yet. So I'm on a drive. So when it came time to where I finally called that sponsor Arnold, God bless him, he's dead now, but he was a, he worked with me for over 20 years and saw me through a lot ups and downs, and he was the guy who every time I brought up money would say, well, you know, we can apply recovery and there's a program for that and all this kind of stuff.

So I finally called him and said, okay, how do we do this? But when it came time to turn my finances over to that higher power who had saved my life and transformed it beautifully, magically, there was a part of me that still said, well, hold on a second. I'm not sure about that. Because what if that brings down my self-justification, my proving that I'm finally gonna be a success?

What if my higher power doesn't have that kind of success in mind? So it was really scary. So I actually made a commitment 'cause I knew myself well enough to say like, okay, I [00:01:00] need to make a commitment here. And so my commitment to my higher power was, I will follow your will around money, wherever it leads, and if that means I end up homeless under a bridge and my family hates me, I will do that as long as that is your will.

Jami: Welcome to the podcast, emotional Intelligence, your Greatest Asset and Key to Success. I'm your host, Dr. Jami Carlacio, coming to you from the Greater New Haven, Connecticut area. As an emotional intelligence or EQ coach, I'm committed to helping people develop both emotional intelligence and mental fitness.

That is, you'll come to regard problems as situations that help you learn and grow. EQ is a way of being and doing in the world that enables you to develop and sustain a positive relationship with yourself and others at home, at work, and everywhere [00:02:00] in between. Please subscribe to this podcast and tap the like button so more people can enjoy the benefits of eq.

And now here's the show.

Jami: Hello and welcome everybody to the podcast Emotional Intelligence, your Greatest asset and Key to Success. I am very, very happy to be here with you. It's been a minute since I dropped a podcast episode and I am here with a wonderful, very interesting person named Casey Arrillaga. And he and I met online and we had so many things in common, including addiction, spirituality, and.

Money. And so I said, Hey Casey, we need to do a podcast on spirituality and money. And he said, yeah, let's do it. And so here we are.

Casey: Absolutely. I'm so glad to be here and thank you so much for inviting me.

Jami: Yes. Thank you so much. So let me just tell our listeners and viewers about you, because I think they deserve to know a little bit about this very interesting, uh, array of [00:03:00] things, first of all.

So, Casey is a clinical social worker and a chemical dependency counselor who has lived with and around addiction all of his life. Sounds familiar. He is now a therapist specializing in family counseling and addiction, and he is the author of the books, realistic Hope, the Family Survival Guide, facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions, the Children's Trilogy.

Based on his book, mommy's Getting Sober and Spirituality For People Who Hate Spirituality, which I just love the title, so I know it's gotta be a great book.

Casey: Thank you.

Jami: And he is also, yes, he's also the host of the podcast, addiction and the Family. And, uh, he recorded me, we did an episode together, so I will put a link to that in the show notes.

And he gives presentations on working with families around addiction, at online and in-person conferences all throughout the United States and in his work. He shares the [00:04:00] knowledge that he has gained from conducting hundreds of family workshops and working with thousands of family members. And he also weaves in his own story of recovery, both as an individual and as a family member.

And for more information, you can find out about Casey by going to casey author.com. And again, all of that will be in the show notes. So again, thank you for coming on.

Casey: Oh, thanks again for having me. It's an absolute blast. And uh, yeah. You're a fun person to talk to. It was great having you on Addiction and the Family, and now it's great to be able to show up on your show here. Be able to talk some more about some of this stuff.

Jami: Yeah, so just quick background. Casey and I met in a 12 step program and we got to talking and actually I said, can I have your phone number? I wanna talk to you because there was something about you. Right from the get go that I just identified and said, that's a person that I wanna meet.

That's a person I wanna get to know. That's a person who has something that I [00:05:00] want. And that that thing that you have that I noticed before you said probably 10 words was recovery. And it wasn't just about recovery, though. There was some other kind of thing going on. And so when you and I talked. We discovered that one of the common denominators in our recovery is spirituality.

And then as we started talking about spirituality, we started talking about how money can be complicated and how, how you can actually use the words, money and spirituality in the same sentence, and it not be an oxymoron, in other words, not be a contradiction in terms. So maybe I'll just kick off the discussion with that.

Casey: Absolutely. Thank you so much. A great lead in. So yeah, I grew up in a way where there was sort of spirituality and there was the real world and never were the two really gonna mix. I didn't really see any examples of spirituality being applied to life. [00:06:00] It was just a thing where you put on a cute little clip on tie and a little jacket, and we went to church and then we went somewhere to eat, which was my favorite part.

And then we went home and it didn't come up again until the following Sunday. And I think my parents were doing the absolute best they could with what they knew how. And I think they had this kind of idea that this was part of raising children, right. But it wasn't something that they talked about, at least not in front of us, or that they applied to daily life.

And so I didn't think of spirituality as something that would apply to money. Mm-hmm. Now, as I moved forward in the world, I had a lot of inner conflict around money and the idea of it, I was born into a lower middle, the lower middle class American family. Um, and then due to issues of addiction within that family, I was adopted out of that family and.

Grew up with my adoptive family in a very affluent area, but my parents had not grown up in an affluent way themselves. My mom was a farm girl from Canada. My dad was [00:07:00] musician's kid from San Francisco. They met and they did really well economically compared to what they had been raised in. And so I think again, they were.

Sort of had this idea of the American dream and abundance that meant lots of food in the fridge. We could go out to eat, we could do things, you know? Mm-hmm. There was money around, and yet I grew up in this area where there were other people that had a lot more money, and so even in this very affluent area, you could still kind of see who was stacked up against who, money wise.

So I grew up with this set of kind of conflicting values around it. Like, is money bad? Is money good? Mm-hmm. Are people rated by money? Oh no, that's hypocrisy. We shouldn't do that. There was just sort of conflicting messages, partly from the society around me, but also within me. So as I moved forward into adulthood myself, uh, I was very ambivalent about, very ambivalent about money.

Mm-hmm. And so when I was in college and I met somebody as a musician, I was looking for a singer and, uh, found a [00:08:00] singer and we started working and recording together, and then we'd talk afterwards and things just kind of sparked and we fell in together pretty quickly. I would look back now and say we're, we were two young sex and love addicts in love, but we had no idea.

So that just meant we got engaged really quickly and we threw our fortunes together and we were walking around the college campus one day. Mm-hmm. Knowing we were planning to get married and all this stuff, and they had one of those card tables set up with credit card applications.

Jami: Oh geez.

Casey: Which is a great deal at college because credit card companies know that if a college kid gets a credit card, they'll get in over their head and their parents will bail 'em out.

So it's a pretty safe bet. Mm-hmm. You know, if you're in college, you probably have some kind of means is the thought. Somebody's probably helping you out. So if you get in trouble, someone else will bail you out and you'll probably get in trouble 'cause you're a brand new young adult. And my wife looked at it and said.

Why don't we apply for a credit card right now? Because if we apply for it now we're college kids and we fit that profile. And if [00:09:00] we wait until after we're married, then we're young married people, they're gonna look at our income and not our parents' income and they won't give us a credit card.

Jami: Oh, lordy, lordy. Wow.

Casey: And I knew, I mean, she, very savvy woman. I knew practically nothing about this. And again, very ambivalent about money. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Okay. If you say so. Hey, you're the woman I love you. Wanna sign up for credit card? Sign up for credit card. No problem. Um. Credit cards became a regular feature of our life.

Mm-hmm. They were our pet insurance, they were our health insurance. They were our car repair insurance. They were also how we went to go out to eat all the time. And we ate out so much that we ran up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Oh. And again, we're musicians, so we bought a lot of musical gear, you know?

Mm-hmm. And so I, at the time, really because of that ambivalence, try to just tune money out. It wasn't something that I particularly like to think about. So my wife held the purse strings. She was very [00:10:00] clear that she was gonna run the finances. She's instinctively fantastic at math. You can just look at sums of numbers and they totally make sense to her in a way that have never happened for me.

And she also had a little bit of a control issue around money, so she was like, I'll run the finances. You stay outta the way. So when I went to her saying like, Hey, I wanna get this new microphone to make you sound really good, or I wanna get this piece of musical grid, it's gonna make us sound really good.

You know, you go like, well, ham ha, we talk about I Play or something. She go like, okay, yeah, we should probably get that. And of course we went on the credit card. So credit card companies worth financing, all kinds of aspects of our life.

Jami: Oh yeah.

Casey: It just became a regular feature and I would say, well boy, we'll never get to the point where we put groceries on the credit card.

Jami: Right.

Casey: You know, first we won't go out to eat on the credit card and then we did. Then we won't put groceries on the credit card. But then we did and it was like a progressive illness over time, you know, just more and more stuff would go on the credit card. We would live on credit. [00:11:00] One point we refinanced our house, paid off the credit cards, and I said, I'm only signing for up for this as long as we don't run the credit cards back up again.

But of course we did tens of thousands of dollars of debt paid off and then built back, back up again. And it finally got to a point where, um, I went back to school as a music major. I decided I'm gonna be a music professor. This is many years later. And my wife started a business at the same time using a home equity line of credit Now.

I read after the fact that two things you're never supposed to use a home equity line of credit for is going to school or opening a business, but we were doing both at the same time and it just started to pile up and I was just, Hey, you know, I have no idea how this is ever gonna get paid off. Like no clue.

Now, in the meantime, I had gotten into recovery around other issues, right? Sex and love addiction. Then I figure I need to stop drinking alcohol. So I stopped drinking alcohol and you know, joining various programs and I [00:12:00] had sponsorship in those programs. And one of my sponsors and friends, listeners that aren't familiar with that says, be like a mentor.

Somebody farther down the path, he would say, anytime I brought up money, he'd say, well, you know, you can use recovery for that too. I would say, yeah, sure, whatever. And then I would move on to the conversation. Sometimes I'd get slightly annoyed, but I, you know, he was a great guy. He'd help save my life. So I would, you know, nod and like, oh, okay, yeah, if you say so, but, mm-hmm.

I didn't really wanna connect with it very much. So we finally got to the point with home equity line of credit, where we were paying the monthly payments on the line of credit, using money from the line of credit.

Jami: Oh, ouch. Yeah. So you were all you were just almost upside down.

Casey: We were, I was, I would jokingly now say I was a one-man Ponzi scheme.

Mm-hmm. And so I looked around and I said, the only thing we're gonna be able to possibly do with this is we will, um, maybe we'll, we'll have to sell the house and move to another state. And this happened to be right around the time, this is in California now, right around the time [00:13:00] where the economy and the housing market was just tipping there.

Jami: Oh.

Casey: And so I looked, I would walk our dog around the neighborhood and I'd be like, oh wow. A couple other people are also signing their house. And then pretty soon, like four or five houses on each block were for sale. And then the entire blocks with a cul-de-sac were empty with for sale signs. And I remember going back to my wife and saying, we're either gonna get out now or never.

Like we need to lower our price. Like this is it. 'cause I know our whole financial house of cards is gonna collapse. And so we managed at the last minute. A little mini bidding war, including even the real estate agent. Everyone was suddenly into our house somehow, I think. 'cause we had solar panels and we were in the high desert where solar panels were a great thing to have.

And we managed to sell the house, scrape out with just enough money to set up shop in New Mexico, start all over again, buy a piece of land, build a little house up there, once again, said I'm never doing that again. But we lived upside down in New Mexico for about six years.[00:14:00] 

Jami: Wow.

Casey: And anytime I talk about money, 'cause I'd have to borrow money from relatives to pay the bills and then I'd pay them back and then I'd borrow it again and then pay them back and then borrow it again.

And then pay them back. Uh, so now we were treating family members like a revolving line of credit. We were, we were the musicians, right? We were the artists, we were the poor relations, all this kind of stuff. When we moved from there, 'cause I started working in the recovery field and I worked at a recovery center up there for about six years.

And then as sometimes happens in the industry, closed very suddenly, we had like four days' notice closing the place down.

Jami: Oh gosh.

Casey: Find a place to put all your clients. So I was part of the clinical team at that point, and so I'm like brand new, wet behind the ears. Ink is fresh on my degree, I'm. Just trying to make this thing happen.

And we get everyone somewhere and I'm like, there's tears are shed. And the clinical director said, come work for us down in Texas. And I thought [00:15:00] like, oh man, I don't, if I go to Texas, I heard bad things about Texas, California. California. In California, Texas does not have a good rep in the same way that in Texas, California does not have a good rep.

But in any case, we made the move, we moved down here. And a couple months, maybe three, four months after moving down here, my wife's still running the finances now. It's been 24 years and I've opened the checkbook up probably fewer than 10 times over 24 years. Back in the day when we had checkbooks. And so, um, one day I'm going through one of the many stacks of paper we have around the house looking for something, and I come across a bill.

It's like, honey, this bill hasn't been paid. You, you must have missed one. And then I found a second one and a third one, and my wife just said like, look, I can't even look at this stuff anymore. So 24 years into our marriage being completely financially enabled, I took over the finances and I called that same sponsor back and I said, okay, how do we do this?

How do we actually apply [00:16:00] spirituality to money? I didn't use those words. I just said, gimme some tips.

Jami: Yeah. Right.

Casey: But I've been in recovery for, uh, you know, 10 plus years. At that point, I knew what we were really talking about. Mm-hmm. It's like, how do we invite these recovery principles into this area of my life where I never thought they'd fit?

Jami: Right.

Casey: And now it started my journey.

Jami: Yeah. I wanna stop you for a second because you said so many things there and I wanted to maybe just back up. One thing. One thing that I think happens is, you know, we talked about how oftentimes spirituality and money are not even in the same sentence, same paragraph, same page, same book.

And the other thing is, and you know, going to church on Sunday was like a separate thing you did, and it never really figured into how you thought about yourself in relationship to the world to other people. But when it comes to spirituality and money, [00:17:00] or even just thinking about money. You know, you mentioned like hands off.

I don't know how, I guess the bills are just getting paid or, you know, we have a credit card, that must mean we can afford it, or, I don't know. My wife does the books. I don't do the books. You know, there's so many different ways in which you were either vague or just completely oblivious to what was going on and on some level.

I think a lot of people would like to not have to know what was really going on, and so then you get into a 12 step program and someone says there's a spiritual solution to this. That must have been a real shock on some level, even if you do have recovery in other programs that are spiritually based.

Did you ever wonder like how in the world can money and spirituality even be in the same paragraph, sentence? Next to each other in the sentence.

Casey: I guess what I would say is it wasn't that it was a shock, it's that it was [00:18:00] terrifying.

Jami: Ah.

Casey: I was having, having in theory, turned my will in my life over to a higher power.

Mm-hmm. When it came to money, there was a part of me that's been like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a second here. What if my higher power. Want something totally different than what I want, which is a recovery question people ask themselves in general. Right. But when it came to money, that became really scary because I honestly grew up as kind of the family screw up.

I was not good in school. I didn't get through college, just, you know, all these kind of things. So I was the guy from one of the top, depending on your list, one of the top 50 to a hundred affluent communities in the United States, and I was the one working at a warehouse.

Jami: Okay.

Casey: You know. People ask, they say, I'm a musician.

And especially in Los Angeles, people are like, oh yeah, okay. I get it. You know? Yeah. But in the back of my mind, there was this sense of shame. Like I hadn't finished school. I hadn't really done these things right. I was not in this financial position. Whereas [00:19:00] most of my friends from school, they were doctors, they were lawyers, they were in just a whole different socioeconomic status class.

And again, I had ambivalent feelings about that. So I'd be like, ah, well, you know, well, by the time I took the finances over, I was back in school. And so now I'm running the finances. I'm in school and I went back to school with this express idea of I'm going to do better for the family. Like that's why I went to school.

I wasn't going because I thought it would be fun or something like that. I picked a subject initially, music, to be a music professor that I thought would be the one. But when we moved outta California, as already mentioned, that went out the window. I was scrambling to find a job, and depending on your spiritual outlook, either I stumbled into completely weird coincidence or something led me to go work at a treatment center where when I went to the job interview, I literally did not know it was a treatment center.

Jami: Oh. Okay.

Casey: I was interviewed to be a part-time art teacher 'cause I needed a part-time art teacher. I'm like, I can do that. And I did the interview and the guy says, do you know anything about recovery? Because legally an employer can't ask, are you [00:20:00] in recovery? Ah. They can ask, do you know anything about recovery?

Which would be a relevant question if you're gonna be working treatments there. It's a good idea anyway.

Jami: Yeah.

Casey: And like anybody, I was like, oh yeah, I got a few years sober and blah blah. Here's my history. And the guy goes, great, let's go talk to the boss. And I got hired on the spot.

Jami: My gosh.

Casey: And so I became, I went from being an art teacher to being of all things an adjunct.

College professor for University of New Mexico because they had a program, it was like a nine month to a year long program for young men. And you could be, um, you could get college credit, which was big appeal to the parents. I think the young men, for the most part, could not care less, but the parents, it was a big selling point.

Oh, we'll send you there. You're not missing a year of your life, you're getting college credit. So all of a sudden I'm doing that. And then after a while someone said, Hey, you should really be a counselor. And so I thought, oh man, I don't know. School's never worked out. But sure, I'll go back to school. Of course, I went on student loans.

There we are racking up more debt.

Jami: Oh, lordy, lordy. I know student loans.

Casey: But in all of this, um, there was this sense of like, I have something to prove. [00:21:00] Right? I've been the screw up. Now I'm in recovery. My life is in a whole different plane. It is time to live up to all that potential people always told me I have, which if you're somebody who shares all the time, you have a lot of potential.

That's why that gets kind of frustrating, right? It's kinda like, yeah. Basically what the implication is, you're not living up to it, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. You're not living up to it. You're not there yet. So I'm on a drive. So when it came time to where I finally called that sponsor Arnold, God bless him, he's dead now, but he was a, he worked with me for over 20 years and saw me through a lot ups and downs, and he was the guy who every time I brought up money would say, well, you know, we can apply recovery and there's a program for that and all this kind of stuff.

So I finally called him 'em and said, okay, how do we do this? But when it came time to turn my finances over to that higher power who had saved my life and transformed it beautifully, magically, there was a part of me that still said, well, hold on a second. I'm not sure about that. Because what if that brings down my [00:22:00] self-justification, my proving that I'm finally gonna be a success?

What if my higher power doesn't have that kind of success in mind? So it was really scary. So I actually made a commitment 'cause I knew myself well enough to say like, okay, I need to make a commitment here. And so my commitment to my higher power was, I will follow your will around money, wherever it leads, and if that means I end up homeless under a bridge and my family hates me, I will do that as long as that is your will.

I knew . . . 

Jami: that's radical trust. That's radical. Radical, radical trust. So you have to be at a place in your life where you're like, I'll do it. I'll do it right,

Casey: I'll do it was the point of I'll do whatever. Yeah. Because I knew that, uh, I had actually, I used some of the principles of recovery around, you know, that I'd heard from Arnold around money and recovery to the point where I paid off all the credit cards and I still have an envelope.

Tucked away in a folder that [00:23:00] has all of the original credit card balances. When I started, wow. What the interest rates were? Uhhuh, and you can see the dates as I paid each one off.

Jami: Wow.

Casey: And there's different ways that are suggested within recovery programs around this. I did the one where you take the highest interest rate one, pay that one off, so I'm paying all these minimum payments and I'm paying the highest interest rate.

Once that's gone and then down the next one, eventually one day they were all done. I was making more money than I'd ever made. I was feeling more successful than I've ever, ever felt. The credit cards were paid off, and I still didn't feel peace around money.

Jami: Good. I was gonna get to that. Yes. Yeah. Yes, because there's, there's something about, yeah, I can pay my bills, or, yes, I'm solvent, or I'm debt free, or I don't have any unsecured debt, but that peace.

That P-I-E-C-E, that piece of this whole picture plus the peace, uh, that's in your heart, you know, where was that? Sounds like there was a missing piece.

Casey: Absolutely. I was, I was missing all [00:24:00] the peace because I was in great financial shape and I was still anxious all the time. I was always gonna fall apart.

So that was the point. That was the moment of desperation where I went to my higher power and said, whatever it is, you take it because mm-hmm. I can even steer the ship and get it to where I think I want it to be and I still don't feel better.

Jami: Yeah.

Casey: So I needed to make the really big spiritual leap of surrender to just say, it's gotta be outta my hands completely.

I need to just follow directions, which meant that my higher power had to be in charge of the finances. So it wasn't my wife anymore, and it wasn't me. Mm-hmm. It had to be my higher power.

Jami: So, so let's, let's get this clear, Casey. God's not an accountant. As far as I know, God doesn't write rent checks. Money doesn't grow on trees. Yet, you could turn your will in your life over to a higher power as you understand that higher power, including money. 'cause I think a lot of [00:25:00] people worship money. I think money has become a higher power for a lot of people and when that is your higher power. It's not working or it's not working the way you want, or it's not working the way society tells you it should work.

I can see how that would go completely awry. So yeah, how is it that God's not an accountant, but you can turn your will in your life and your money over to the care of God as you understand God?

Casey: Well, that means that I'm actually asking for directions.

Jami: Ah.

Casey: So I'm not saying here, God, you do it for me.

Jami: Uh-huh.

Casey: I'm saying you show me how to do it. Okay. So I can get up every day and say, what is your will for me around money? Yeah. It reminds me if you'll indulge me a, a story that I've heard. It's not a true story, it's one of those parable kind of stories, but, you know, a guy goes down to a crossroads and says, higher power. I, I don't know if you exist, but I need your help. Mm-hmm. And shimmering being appears at the crossroads and says, [00:26:00] I'm your higher power. I'm here to help. And the guy says, okay, great. 'cause I am in trouble here. I just need to get sober. I need to turn my life around. And the higher power says Fantastic. Um, but I'm gonna need all your money.

And the guy goes, what? All my money, higher power says, yep, gimme all your money and I'll do this miracle for you. He goes, okay, fine. So I'll do whatever. I'll give you all the money, but I mean, my wife and kids got to eat. And the guy says, oh, higher power says, well, I'm gonna need your wife and kids too. He goes, what loan to my house?

He goes, oh, you have a house. Well I'm gonna need your house. House, car, job goes through everything the guy has and the guy's like, I'm so desperate that okay, that's what I'll do.

Jami: Wow. Okay.

Casey: And higher power says, okay, I'm gonna give it all back to you, Uhhuh, but it's on loan. So when you spend that money, you remember whose money you're spending.

'cause it's my money that you're spending. And when you talk to your wife and your kids, you remember, that's my wife and kids you're talking [00:27:00] to and you treat them accordingly. And you treat that home that you live in, like it's my place. And you go to your job like you're working for me, and I can still feel like some emotion when I, when I talk about this, this idea of story,

Jami: it's affecting me too. It's like, wow. I'm just like, wow. Yeah.

Casey: And so I'm not gonna pretend that I do that perfectly by any stretch, but I'll say that is the benchmark that I'm shooting for. That idea of just recognizing everything in my life is really the result of my relationship with a higher power. I can say that really objectively true.

Everything in my life is a result of the action of my higher power. And I'll say for me personally, mm-hmm. I don't need or really seek an interventionist higher power, who does things for me, changes things.

Jami: No, God's not a puppet master.

Casey: Well, you know, some people will kinda, in fact, I've, I've talking with someone recently and I felt really bad and pointed out immediately.

People sometimes fall in this idea. Like [00:28:00] anything good that happens in my life, that's the blessing of my higher power. Anything bad happens with my life, I screwed up Uhhuh. I'm like, hold on a second. That, that sounds like a terrible relationship just to start with. Really terrible relationship with yourself and self view and probably not a great relationship with higher power.

Instead, I think of my higher power as being a guide. Mm-hmm. And I don't need to know where the guidance comes from. I don't need to nail down who that higher power is. All I need to know is I am seeking guidance and when I listen for it, it shows up. Whether it's in two-way prayer, conversation with someone, something I read small still voice in my heart.

Mm-hmm. An intuitive thought or decision where I go like, ah, that one does sound right. I mean, it's not necessarily what I wanna do, but I, I know that's the right thing to do. Yeah. Wherever it's that I'm getting that guidance, it is showing up, and the more that I seek it, the more easily it shows up. And there's stuff in recovery literature that reinforces this idea.

You know, we might have all kinds of absurd ideas at first, but over time it becomes [00:29:00] a working part of the mind. We come to rely on it. And it says in other parts that we, we would no more do without this than we would air or water. Mm-hmm. For good reason. And I can't imagine life without spirituality at this point.

And I can imagine what my finances would look like and what my life would look like if I wasn't seeking that direction and doing my best to follow it. And again, not perfectly by any stretch, but that is always the direction that I'm walking in. So when I talk about, you know, God, higher power, spiritual force, whatever you wanna say.

Mm-hmm. That guidance running my life. I don't need it to do anything for me. I just need it to guide me into what I need to be doing. And when I do that, yeah. All kinds of stuff works out.

Jami: Yeah. So the way I think about it is when you're on a road, dark and it's foggy. If you turn your high beams on, you can't see jack in front of you, but if you keep the low beams on or you turn on your fog lights, you can see just far enough ahead of you [00:30:00] to keep the car on the road.

And the same thing if you're walking, right? You're walking across a bridge, you don't know where the other side of the bridge is. But you know, there is one. You know that this is a bridge and you know that if you just look down, you can see what's right in front of you. And I think of God as guiding me to the next step.

I don't need to see what's 20 steps ahead right now. I just need to know what is the next right one, what's right in front of me? And that involves radical trust because I would like to see what's on the other side of the bridge. I would like to see 20 feet ahead instead of just two. But there is a saying, light, a light into my feet and a lamp into my path, or a lamp into my feet and a light into my path.

And I, I think of that whenever I am asking for guidance. It's like, yeah, I just need to know what to do right now or what's the next right step? And it does take a [00:31:00] lot of faith and trust to do that because. If you're like me, you wanna run the show a little bit, you know, you wanna take control of the reigns and it's sometimes hard to let go of those reigns and trust in a, in kind of, it's called trust fall.

Right? It's a trust fall.

Casey: Absolutely. And one of the things that I see in that for me is that at first, as with so many things in recovery, it started out as an exercise in avoiding fear. Like I am scared. I'm anxious. I'm uncertain. So under those circumstances, I'll turn everything over. Yeah. So I'm moving away from a fear.

I wasn't moving towards anything in particular. I see. I was just trying to avoid consequences and avoid pain. Yeah. Over time in recovery and doing this more and more, I'm moving towards blessing and goodness and peace and serenity. Yeah. I know that that pain is still waiting for me. If I stop seeking a spiritual solution, I feel [00:32:00] very confident that

Jami: yeah. Mm-hmm.

Casey: It'd be easy enough to slide into it. I, I haven't tried that personally. I have in other aspects of my recovery where there's been relapse, there's been further pain, like, uh, as I would say, turns out the stove is still piping hot. Don't need to put my hand on it one more time, right? Yep. So, I recovery around money, it was easier to say, what if I just stick with the program?

But there are plenty of people that sort of drift away. Then many of them show up one day and say, well, I went back to all, you know, gave me enough time. I went back to all my old habits. Mm-hmm. And everything started to fall apart. And now I'm another $50,000 on debt. And I, I like to think, at least for today, I can look at that and go, that doesn't have to be me today.

Mm-hmm. I can stick with this and use the tools, but also always, you know, whether it's through the 12 Steps, daily spiritual practice, just how I live my life, trying to move towards that spiritual solution. And so. As I moved forward in that, which by the way, as [00:33:00] soon as I joined my first recovery program around mm-hmm. Money at all. Mm-hmm. That same sponsor immediately said, okay, now you need to do the business version of that. And I'm like, look, I don't own a business. I don't know what you're talking about. He goes, you're a musician. Right. You get paid for that. Oh yeah, but that's different. He says, you have a house you're renting at, right?

Well, yeah, but that's different. I'm not a business owner. I pushed it away as hard as I could. I would even report the business income on my taxes. Mm-hmm. I got a business license, I got a business checking account. But if you'd asked me at any time, are you a business owner? I'd be like, oh, no, no, not me.

That's not me. Mm-hmm. I don't do that. Mm-hmm. So, of course when Arnold suggested it, once again, I was like, Nope, don't know what you're talking about, blah, blah, blah. Don't talk to me about that. But when I wrote my second book, which was Spirituality for people who Hate Spirituality, I thought, I'm getting kind of serious about this, man.

It's time to join the business version of the program and. Bring it into business. So now it came really full circle. I mean, just the farthest I could have thought spirituality would be away from money now was bringing it into that and that idea of like, okay, now [00:34:00] this is infused in my business. And then later as I was actually going through the, the recovery process and the steps, um, one more time I've lost track how many times I've done it.

Think one or two times ago, I was standing in the line for the jungle cruise at Disneyland, talking to my aunt, explaining why I would never open my own counseling practice like I was laying out all the reasons why I would never do that, including, I don't wanna be running a business uhhuh because even though I had a business where music income, book income, podcast income, uh, you know, all these various things, royalties from past stuff.

It was all going in the business, it was being reported. I still was kind of wishy-washy on being a business owner until it was time to be a real business owner because I didn't need that income. It wasn't a major amount of money.

Jami: Yes. So I'm gonna stop you there because we're out of time for this episode.

Casey: Okay.

Jami: But what I suggest and propose is we pick this up and do a [00:35:00] part two. 

Casey: Oh,

Jami: because, this is way too important to let go, but I try to keep the podcast at about a half an hour, and so I'm gonna leave our listeners and our viewers with that. Hanging over the head, the carrot on the stick, and we will pick this up later and we'll talk about, we'll pick up right where I don't have a counseling business.

I don't, I'm not a business owner. And this Disneyland idea or Disney World, if you were in Florida, that sound okay?

Casey: That sounds great.

Jami: We'll pick it up with how do you, how do you not just bring it into money, but really directly into business?

Casey: And I would love to talk more about that.

Jami: Yes. Yes, because I think everyone is gonna wanna hear the rest of this story.

I know that I've heard some of it and it's definitely worth hanging around for. So before we leave, Casey and I shared a moment with [00:36:00] regard to a song. And so I'm just gonna play a small clip of it and we're gonna go right to it.

Song I'm On Your Side: When a voice came from somewhere deep in my heart that said, honey, I'm on your side. I'm on your side.

I'm on your side . . .

Jami: Oh, and that, that my friends, is a great way to start, start thinking about the rest of your life is who is on your side. And if you have ever [00:37:00] entertained the notion of a higher power. Know, that, that higher power is on your side.

Casey: Absolutely. And if I can just toss in, 'cause I don't remember if I actually said this.That is my band with the same young woman that I was recording with,

Jami: oh my gosh,

Casey: 36 years ago. That is my wife singing a song that I wrote.

Jami: Beautiful.

Casey: I'm playing the piano of the drums. And, uh, it was her and some of our friends that we've played with over the years, getting together to record one last album with that group.

And so,

Jami: oh wow. Okay, so we will pick that up as well. And again, Casey, thank you so much and we will talk soon.

Casey: Sounds great. Thank you again so much.

Jami: Thank you. And for those of you who are still tuned in, please don't forget to like and subscribe to this podcast because the more people who hear about it, the more people who can benefit from it.

And we need you. So thank you. Thank you, thank you. And we'll talk again soon. Take care everybody. [00:38:00] Bye.