THE MYTH OF SCARCITY

"There is a natural law of abundance which pervades the entire universe, but it will not flow through a doorway of belief in lack and limitation."  ~  Paul Zaiter

It hasn't been until quite recently that I have become aware of the fact that much of my "Monkey Mind" is related to one of the biggest lies I have been telling myself ever since I can remember.  That great lie is that there will never be enough.  And at the very root of that sham is that I will never be enough.  I will never be smart enough, thin enough, pretty enough, and happy enough to live the life I deserve to live.  So many times I have felt the unsettled vibration of my inner critic frantically asking, "Do you love me now?  Am I pretty enough, smart enough, thin enough, and tap dancing backwards in this penguin suit fast enough for you?"

I now am beginning to understand that at any moment I can see abundance all around me if I only choose to do so.  I have been taking a class this fall at BeNourished in Portland which is helping me to understand the surprising truth of sufficiency.

The following is last week's lesson from Dana S. - one of my teachers:

The Myth of Scarcity

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.”  The next one is “I don’t have enough time.”  Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it.  We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…. We don’t have enough exercise.  We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits.  We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends.  Of course, we don’t have enough money either.

We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough – ever.  Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we are already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something.  And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day.  We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack…. What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justification for an unfulfilled life.

Choose a mindset of sufficiency.

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity.  Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency.  By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything.  Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance.  It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough.  Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all.  It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

From The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist.