I am waiting to discover the perfect way to help people find the cure for Money Madness - the hidden emotions and misperceptions around money that lead to dysfunctional, irrational financial behavior, again and again.

One of the ways I have found this is the ‘Money Breath’ :

Every single time you interact with money-investing, spending, saving, earning, giving, or talking about money-do what I call the money breath.

Inhale deeply through the nose and let your rib cage and chest expand as you fill your lungs with air. One, two, three seconds.

At the top of the inhalation, lungs filled, pause and hold your breath.

Now exhale, letting your breath out easily through your open mouth. Four, five, six seconds.

At the bottom of the exhale, say to yourself, aloud if you can: “May my money wisdom increase.”

Do the money breath and you cut through your money madness. You interrupt your automatic conditioned response to your childhood money message, slowing everything down just long enough to question the response. Physiologically, the money breath relaxes your blood flow after the adrenaline rush of madness has constricted it, and it gets more oxygen to the brain, letting you think more clearly.

Practice the money breath persistently until it becomes automatic. Do it when you’re buying your morning paper, or discussing bills with your partner, or going into a job interview. Just stop. Be idle, take six seconds, breathe, and ask for money wisdom.

Then, when you’re ready, take the money breath to the next level. As you inhale, consciously take in the emotion that drives your money monster-fear, anxiety, greed. Feel it; take it into your body. If fear is the feeling, tell yourself: I am taking in my fear.

Pause at the top of the breath, then exhale, consciously breathing out confidence, clarity, joy, and wisdom. Say to yourself: I am sending out wisdom and joy. Let it move through you and pour out of your body, replacing the emotion that drives the money madness.

You will find that it is hard to be afraid when you are offering goodness to others.

A friend of a friend of a friend invited my wife and me to a fundraiser hosted by one of the world’s most powerful women in her own home-and just like that, I found myself at Oprah’s house.

Since childhood, my money madness has equated self-worth with net worth.  Conflating self-worth with net worth has driven much of my dysfunctional behavior around money, including my knee-jerk reaction to disconnect from those I perceive to have more or less than I do. I experience that separation not just in my mind and spirit, but in my body; I may greet someone wealthier with the appearance of ease and equality, but my body tells me I’m inferior-tight shoulders, a nervous stomach and a quickened pulse are the typical sensations. No doubt the other person feels nervous, closed-off energy on some level.

My money monster also made me assume that others would behave the same way-that is, if someone perceived me as richer then they were, they would distance themselves from me as a matter of course.  In order to stave off this distancing, I kept my money private for a long time. Ironically, the isolation led to less joy and, as I’ve connected more to the world without hiding my money, I’ve felt more joy, more inclusion and less separation from others.

Which brings us to Oprah. Here she is, a billionaire, a powerhouse, a woman of deep self-awareness with a profound sense of social-responsibility and connection, opening her home and encouraging all of her guests to get real and get open about their wealth.

Oprah’s honest, embracing energy powerfully reminded me that whether you’re a billionaire or in debt, the more you can connect with others through money conversations, philanthropy, giving and receiving, the more we all feel a sense of inclusion and joy. Money does not have to be a force of divisiveness; it can be a tool for change and intimacy – if we’re willing to use it.

If you pay more, you get more.

That’s the standard formula, the common wisdom. Buy the basic product for one price, the better-performing deluxe product with extra features for a higher price, and the super-deluxe wow-performance product with every possible bell and whistle for top dollar. More money equals more value, right?  I haven’t found it so.

I bought a watch complete with electronic compass, ten alarms, and altimeter. After a few months, the altimeter still worked but the fixed time was correct only twice a day, and I needed to haul the operating manual around with me to figure out how to work the alarms.

I upgraded from a boom box to a full stereo system and discovered that the antenna on the full system was inferior-full-system users are expected to be CD-listeners, not radio fans–and I couldn’t hear my favorite FM station.

The interior-lighting salesperson sold us on a push-button, dimmable scene-programming system for our kitchen to replace the standard on/off switches. Well, yes, we could create many more moods with the scene lighting, but we couldn’t stop the constant, maddening flickering. Until we replaced the fancy, cinematography-ready system with a more conventional one, our solution was to use the kitchen only while the sun was up.

At the clothing store, when I said I assumed the six-hundred-dollar suit would last longer than the three-hundred-dollar suit, the salesman introduced me to the facts of fashion. No, he said. Actually, because the six-hundred-dollar suit is made of finer material, it will wear out sooner. And since it’s the latest style, it’ll become obsolete earlier.

Yes, lunch at The Four Seasons tastes better than at any diner, my $400 blender does a phenomenal job making smoothies, and our $300 ceiling fan is a lot quieter than the $49 fan it replaced. But many times, adding new! and improved! features to a basically successful product seems only to compromise the product’s integrity and undermine its original purpose.

It’s certainly true for investment products.

A typical S&P Index fund-the investing world’s “basic product”-usually costs about 0.3% per year or less; that’s an annual expense of $30 for every $10,000 invested. The fund has no bells and whistles; it’s just a lamp with a light bulb. It won’t claim to protect you in a down market or shift all your money to the technology sector if that’s where the “smart money” is going. You know exactly what you’re getting: an average return of 11% per year by staying invested in a cross-section of the largest 500 U.S. companies.

But, wait, what if you increase your expenses to 1.5% per year, or $150 for every $10,000 invested, and try to do what academic studies show can’t be done -that is, beat the market? The extra bucks will buy you the bells and whistles of lots of trading, racing around trying to time the market, rotating assets from one sector to another, or ditching the stock with which you’ve become disenchanted in favor of the new “hot pick.”

In so doing, of course, you actually increase the taxes you owe because of all the turnover. And so what if 80% of these active funds under-perform? You’ve got the dimmable scene-programming lighting design that is sexier than the basic product (i.e., the S&P index fund), but is it worth it? Put simply, no.

Think about it. At least five-times the extra money for less performance means less money for retirement. Excuse me, but I’ll take the lower cost, no-frills investment and use some of the savings and extra performance for lighting I can see by-and for the occasional lunch at the Four Seasons…