I believe that experiencing abundance is the antidote to being paralyzed by anxiety and fear about the state of the economy or your personal finances.
So what is abundance, anyway? The dictionary defines abundance as:
- A great or plentiful amount.
- Fullness to overflowing: "My thoughts . . . are from the abundance of my heart" (Thomas De Quincey).
- Affluence; wealth.
Practicing gratitude is the quickest and easiest route to experiencing a sense of abundance. As soon as you start appreciating all the things you have in your life, especially the intangibles like love, friendship, creativity, and inspiration, your perceptions effortlessly shift into an experience of abundance.
While it's tempting to think that abundance is comprised of affluence of material posessions or money, the truth is abundance comes from a different source.
Lynne Twist, in her book Soul of Money, observes, after many years of philanthropic work connecting people with loads of money with the poorest people on the earth, that the experience of abundance and the feelings of contentedness, security, and happiness that come along with it were more often found in the peoples in the poorest communities than among those individuals with great wealth of money.
Perhaps you noticed my very specific choice of words in that last sentence. If not, I'll lay it out for you again. The experience of abundance and the feelings of contentedness, security and happiness that comes along with it were more often found in the peoples in the poorest communities than among those individuals with great wealth of money.
Yes, it seems that abundance is experienced more by people interconnected and interdependent with each other within caring communities, than it is among individuals who feel all alone and defensive in a competitive world even if they have boatloads of money.
So the more you are connected to a collaborative community of other people who reciprocate caring for each other and sharing resources, the more likely you are to experience abundance in your everyday life.
And that's not all. Abundance is an experience of being and having enough.
As I said above, abundance can be a mindset. It can be practiced, cultivated, and mastered as a philosophical or spiritual path that truly comes from inside of you.
While there are those lucky folks who grew up feeling deeply loved and cherished and who experienced the sense of being good enough, valuable and worthy on a cellular level since childhood, most of us came from human families that did their best and still left us with some faulty formative experiences that convinced us at a young age that we were not good enough in one way or another.
And the nagging, often subconscious, beliefs of not being good enough, not being valuable enough, not being
Abundance is so much more than money and financial wealth, it's an experience of a different kind of currency - love, inspiration, hope, belonging, self-worth, etc...
To find out more, I invite you to join me for my teleseminar Opening the Flow of Abundance in your Life! on Weds, March 24th at 12pm. Register here.