The Money Question
What would you do if money was no object?
What makes you rich?
Does your heart like your work?
Survival Mode (and how to escape it)
If you mentally strip yourself down to your basic humanity without any of your external influences and you put yourself in a pure survival situation (can be a paradisaic island too, because why…not? 😉 ) what is the most essential skill that gives you the confidence to survive?
One answer might be the ability to make fire with your bare hands from the raw materials in your environment. In a survival situation, the ability to make fire can do much more than only keep you warm and allow you to cook food or signal for help. In a survival situation, where fear can so easily dominate, everything changes from the moment you make a fire.
Or not?
What is Prosperity?
Only recently I came to the conclusion that the half (?) the secret of prosperity is knowing what prosperity really means for you. We may have an image of our life should look like, that is at odds with the natural flow of our destiny or our true vocation….role…you name it.
This so often conditioned image of our life might block the real flow of true prosperity from manifesting.
As you continue to open your heart more within your relationships, your priorities and goals may well begin to change too. What once seemed important to you, may well fade into the horizon of your past, to be replaced by a vision rooted in simpler qualities that you perhaps used to overlook. Contemplating the essential therefore has a lot to do with the architecture of your inner life – your secret desires and expectations, as well as your unconscious beliefs and dreams.
Our modern world, whether we like it or not, revolves around money. We have become so used to this, that very few of us question it or even contemplate what the world might be like without money?
“No one has ever become poor from giving.”
As adults, money occupies a huge part of our thoughts and feelings. It is an intriguing truth, that it is very hard (yet possible) to find a person in the world who doesn’t wish he or she had more money.
Would you be able to go as far as to imagine a world where money is no longer needed?
Might be challenging one…transformational? And maybe not for everyone. Yet?
Sometimes though we need to step fully beyond our current set of mental attributes, in order to see the present moment with clarity. Once we can see our own mind without external narrative, then the habits we have learned, and the anxiety we feel about money can disappear. Or at least become less limiting…in a way.
Prosperity versus Wealth
Wealth can be seen as the storage of energy or money. It is generally regarded as a healthy thing to have as much money as possible in order to feel secure in life. This widely held belief drives much of our society.
What if we directly challenged this urge or need to create wealth?
Wealth can be heavy. Rather than creating freedom and a sense of purpose, it tends to create a deep energetic drag in our lives. The more we have, the more we feel a need to spend it, and the more we spend it, the more complicated our lives become. We accumulate more stuff and more responsibilities. More things to worry about. More time we have to exchange in form of work to pay off all of these material things we most probably do not even need.
This natural tendency to want to spend the money we have (and indeed the money we don’t really have) is probably worthy of further consideration. Why do we feel the need to do this? Perhaps the reason lies deeper than we realize?
When we look at nature, we may see a similar pattern. Once the fruit has flowered, the tree drops it to the ground. Nature doesn’t cumulate. Nature is constantly flowering and releasing in tune with the seasons. This is the great secret of prosperity – the secret of flow. Whereas wealth stagnates, prosperity is a flow. We receive and then we give, creating a vacuum into which life once again flows.
How do you spend your precious energy?
Prosperity is not only spending the energy we have accumulated – it is about spending it in the right way. It is about spending it on the essential – on that which enhances, inspires, simplifies, and lightens, rather than on the inessential, which drains, burdens, and complicates your life.
Prosperity is a state of your mind. It is an attitude and a delight we must learn to cultivate.
Do you ever stop and ask yourself to look at the ways in which you accumulate weight? This can be physical, emotional, and intellectual… There is no judgement in any of this – we shall just have the courage to look honestly at ourselves. Daily.
Time and Money
There is a fascinating connection (for me!) between money and time. This well known cliché hints at another fundamental truth concerning prosperity. There is a grand collective mirage that having money means that we will have more time.
Is it really so?
If you pause to contemplate this for a while, you may well find yourself…laughing or at least reconsidering.
Maybe not.
Although money can buy you more leisure time, it doesn’t alter time itself. Only perception can change time. If you are already unhappy inside yourself, then whether you are working or not working, are you ever truly at ease?
Some of us spend lifetimes chasing this dream of being rich, and it can never, ever bring you peace or fulfillment. Isn’t it a little imperfect dream? How could you make it more…perfect*?
I want to break free!
Knowing the above, might save one of a great deal of pain (including physical) and disappointment. How to let go of the illusion that money will in any way help us to find fulfillment? At the same time we should not confuse fulfillment with comfort…. A large proportion of the world population still lives in poverty.
If you are truly poor then in most cases, money surely will make your life much easier. And we always should help those in need if we can. Yet money can also make our lives more complicated. The complication comes in whenever we start wishing we had more. Prosperity is an invisible line in each person’s life – it provides us with the exact amount of resources we need to fulfill our true calling. For some people those resources are simple and fairly minimal, and for others they can be considerable. It all depends upon what are we here to do…;)
Balancing Act
I believe that everything about prosperity is about balance. You have to balance peacefulness with practicality. If you live only for the moment without a care for the future, then your life will move out of balance. If you put all your energy into saving for the future, but miss out on the joyousness of life as it passes you by, then also you will be out of balance. Prosperity means that you can live both extremes. It doesn’t have to do very much with money after all. It has more to do with your ability to see life with more clarity.
This clarity of perception grows like a lens inside us, and as it does so, we begin to break out of our mental victim patterns. Our thinking offers us some of the most stubborn patterns to crack open. As with our emotional awareness, all it takes is seeing the pattern repeating in our lives, for the pattern to gradually lose its effect on us. One such pattern might be our struggle with money. Many people simply cannot see themselves as prosperous, because of the unconscious mental belief patterns they hold.
Stay grateful, not greedy.
It’s about the little things in Life.
Share your Blessings.
From the Heart.
The more you give, the more comes back to you.
Have you noticed that pattern in your life?
Observing is very important skill to cultivate.
For me.
What does Prosperity mean for you?
What would you do if you retired tomorrow?