(Note: the following is best experienced by being read aloud in a breathy voice, with soft harp or pan-flute music in the background, and choosing occasional syllables to elooooongate unreasonably. )
Hi everyone, I’m Gerard LeBeaux and I’m here to guide you through one of the most stimulating and beneficial income tax reporting sessions you’ve ever experienced. This exercise is intended not only to walk you through a standard Form 1040 with associated schedules, but also to enhance your quality of life and spirit.
You know, we all want to get better at doing our own taxes. I know for years I struggled with these forms myself, and it was not until I discovered the ancient Eastern methods here that I began to find centering peace, as well as a proper understanding of itemized deductions. The Chinese have been practicing these enlightened methods for paying U.S. income tax for literally billions of years—ever since they were mere single-celled organisms swimming in protoplasmic goo.
With me today on this video are my tax companions. These people aren’t professional accountants or IRS workers. They’ve received no (or some) formal training in tax preparation, but just look at their bottom lines, and the serene smiles on their faces. If you’re new to this form of reporting, you may want to watch Zeta, who will be doing the modified 1040-EZ form. Then when you’re ready you can work your way up to the standard form. But don’t push yourself until you know you’re ready.
OK, let’s start with centering ourselves. Take a few deep, slow breaths. Start to feel your sense of balance develop, and really begin to lean into that sensation of lucrative monetary excess that resides at the center of your being. Beginning your taxes in this way can often provide counterfactual data that can save you money.
After you’ve filled in the correct name and address, begin with calculating your current dependents and exemptions. Most people have anywhere from 1 to 4, but as you progress, you’ll learn that even without birthing more qualifying children, just closing your eyes and imagining a field of lavender at sunset can increase your exemptions by 50% or more.
Now we’ll move to filling in your taxable income, in lines 7 to 22. This is the second chakra chi zone, also called the Goatherd. Be careful not to strain yourself here. The object is not mathematical precision or even accurate reporting, but a sense of peace between yourself and the Federal Government. And it’s really here that as you stay with this type of exercise, as you develop what the ancients call the “cleansing fire” of mind and spirit, that you’ll discover some wonderful developments happening. For example, many people find that much of the income they were planning on reporting, while factually correct and even legally real, was not personally meaningful, and hence need not be written down. We call them “toxic assets”, and these types of balance postures we’re doing now just flush those right out of your portfolio. Others have found that simply focusing on their breathing while writing in numbers can actually change the way that arithmetic behaves, saving them thousands of dollars, and preserving that balance of yin and yong so necessary to healthy stasis.
And while some may say that it’s crazy, fiscally irresponsible and even wildly misleading to think that holding your body rigid in a certain position while breathing deeply could alter spiritual, physical, and much less financial realities, we know different. After all, doctors trained at the best non-accredited schools have known for decades the healing powers of herbal and chiropractic methods. We’ve seen the results of this ancient wisdom in our lives, and if yoga can make your body longer and leaner, your self-destructive eating habits less worrisome, your relationships more stable and your spirit more in line with an arbitrarily borrowed Cambodian word, then why can’t it increase your income tax returns? We know it can, and we encourage you, in a non-legally binding non-advisory capacity way that will hold us free from responsibility for your future actions and their consequences, to continue with this program until you see the results you want—the results you deserve.
Let’s move on now to adjusting your gross income. I want you to close your eyes first, and sense your income total moving down, slowly down in a spiral, until it comes to rest at a minimal figure of your choice. Then write that number in the line for the total, and we’ll work up from there.
