Seeking abundance

If you’re reading this blog, the odds are you spend most of your days exposed to a stream of advertisements. Those adverts sell you dissatisfaction, fear and a sense of insufficiency to get you to buy the latest new, improved, shiner, faster thing that you can’t afford and don’t need.  It is a planet destroying approach, and constantly undermines our happiness and creates vast social and economic pressure.

The antidote, is to deliberately seek a sense of abundance that doesn’t depend on buying stuff. It’s an approach that doesn’t depend on being wealthy. So long as your basic needs are covered, you can have abundance if you know where to look for it.

There can be a tremendous sense of abundance in giving things away and taking care of other people. The well-off person who is seeking abundance can do it in part by helping others. Donate to the food bank. Give away old clothes. Buy someone lunch. Solve a problem for someone else. You get to feel heroic and powerful, and to make a difference.

There is no greater richness than being time rich. Time is finite, it is the stuff our lives are made of and it is easy to feel like we don’t have enough of it. Time that isn’t scheduled, time to do as you please, to do nothing – this is an incredible abundance to be enjoyed and celebrated. Turn off the machines of an evening, and great swathes of time can appear, rich with possibility. Learning to do nothing is a great antidote to information overload and fast lane nonsense.

Health is another great richness. Devoting time, energy and resources to your mental and physical health improves your quality of life and again, creates that feeling of abundance. If economic activity becomes more important than health, we end up deeply impoverished, ill and miserable. Claim back whatever time and energy you can find to put your health first.

Enjoy the small things. Every day life is full of wonderful small things – moments of beauty, kindness, inspiration, laughter. If you look for them you’ll see them. If your attention is always focused on some distant goal, you may miss all the good things that are right in front of you. Taking the time to enjoy what you’ve got increases feelings of abundance.

Stop treating hard work, long working hours, exhaustion and stress like some kind of virtue. There’s a lot of social support out there for doing this, which is of course why we end up doing it. These are not virtues, these are social ills and we need to free ourselves from them. Celebrate sloth, daydreaming, quietness, non-consumption, lack of speed, days off, and you start celebrating quality of life, not your economic usefulness to someone else.

Abundance is not some future goal to buy our way towards. Abundance is something we can only have if we look for it here and now.

Do not ask what the universe can do for you…

Ask what you can do for the bits of the universe you encounter. This is a line of thought inspired by a recent comment on the blog (thank you). Rather than looking at how magic answers can be persuaded to come to us, why not look at how to be magic answers, for other people and for the planet?

Of course this depends on being sufficiently resourced, but many of the things I’m poised to advocate don’t require a person to be silly amounts of privileged. When we spend all our time asking the universe/the gods/angels/crystal dolphins to help us out, we may feel that we are loved by the universe etc. But we may also be teaching ourselves to feel powerless.

Give praise. It’s an easy way of uplifting people who are doing good things. Self esteem courses recommend praise giving because it empowers the giver, too.

Give away things you don’t need. Nothing creates a feeling of abundance like giving stuff away – so long as you can afford it. Even if it’s very occasional, passing something along gives a real sense of power, and solves a problem for someone else.

Listen. There’s a lot of distress that can be eased just by hearing, acknowledging and witnessing people. It costs time and emotional labour, but if we all spared a little of that, the world would be a kinder place.

Every charity out there could do with more volunteer support than it gets. The same is true for pretty much every volunteer organisation out there. The scope to be someone else’s miracle is vast.

A kind word, a small deed of assistance, a gesture of respect and friendship – these things can and do save lives. A little bit of taking care of each other goes a long way towards producing miraculous results.

Make things of beauty.

Speak up for that which has no voice – for creatures, landscapes and ecosystems. Help amplify people who are not heard. Education is essential for solving most problems.

Don’t be afraid to stand out, to go against the flow, or dispute the consensus.

It’s just a small flavour, not an exhaustive list. If you believe in magic – well, magic works better when you give it something tangible it can latch onto. If you believe that like attracts like, then what you do has to be in that equation. If you believe in karma, then your actions in the world have got to matter. If you think the universe loves everyone, be the vector by which some of that love gets out into the world. Be the change. Be the magic you want to see happening.

Personal privilege is not a measure of how spiritual we are. It’s not the advantages you have that count, it’s what you choose to do with them. And I promise, if you want to feel magical and powerful, then doing some discernible good will give you that far more than any ego massage ever could.

Life lessons from your mediaeval monarch

With the mediaeval king as your spirit guide, everything looks different!

I’ve been blogging recently about the role of abundance in our lives and the importance of recognising the good that we have. Most of us have things in our lives a mediaeval monarch would envy, so, with tongue only a bit in cheek, take the king as your spirit guide and journey into new ways of seeing.

Have you got windows? Do they have glass in them? Can you see out through the glass? Your mediaeval king envies you.

Own more than three books? Your mediaeval king is a bit in awe of your wealth and scholarship.

Oranges all year round? A steady supply of almonds and spices? He’s hoping you’re going to marry his daughter.

Got some mode of transport at your disposal? A bicycle? Access to a bus or train? (Don’t get him started on cars). Your mediaeval king can only get places by getting on a horse and travelling along muddy roads. There are no road signs where he is going.

Got a phone? The fastest way your medieval king can get a message out is to get some other person ride a horse down the unsignposted barely roads at top speed. It counts as the ‘information superhighway’ when he’s got something faster than a donkey.

Worried about your love life? Sadly lacking in the contraception department, your mediaeval king is trying to stop his illegitimate children killing off the ones born in marriage, and the ones born in marriage all hate each other, and hate him, and all want the crown sooner rather than later. Also he has to contend with a set of holy days that rule out large chunks of the year for getting laid without offending God. He lives in a time when de-lousing someone is an act of courtship.

Yes, he has the power of life and death and a crown and a lot of other bling and some castles, and knights and horses and whatnot, but he can’t get a cup of coffee of a morning.

It’s surprising how effective it is to picture yourself being envied by a mediaeval king when you’re feeling down about things.

Scarcity, abundance and sufficiency

We live in an age that creates an impression of scarcity and often creates a reality of scarcity, to keep us hooked on buying more stuff and working more hours. We don’t have enough time. There’s not enough money to take care of our homeless or help refugees from war zones (there is money for weapons). We are encouraged to fear others, who may use resources, we are encouraged to accept environmental degradation for the sake of there being ‘more’.

The truth is that many of us have an abundance of good things, some of us have excess, but we can’t always see it. I blame the corrosive effect of advertising. The best way to deal with the issues of scarcity in your life, is to look for abundance, and practice gratitude. Let me be clear, if you do not have enough food, if you can’t heat your home, this is not going to be of much direct help to you. But, having been through some harsh times myself, I do think that recognising whatever you have, however small it is, helps with dignity and a sense of wellbeing. Poverty causes considerable stress, alleviating the stress will help you.

It’s easy to get trapped in obsessing over what we haven’t got. If you are missing essential things, this is an issue that can never be that far from your mind. However, for many people, the sense of scarcity and threat has more to do with fear than it does with life. Take the time to find whatever small goods there are in your life. What makes you happy? What do you have enough of? More than enough? What can you share?

If you are keeping things for the sake of it, give some of it away. It’s a liberating feeling, but nothing will help you feel abundant more than recognising that you had something you didn’t need, and passing it along to someone who could use it. Whatever time off you get, look at how you use it, for your own sense of wellbeing and to contribute to other people’s. You might have little money, but a time rich person has all kinds of opportunities. It may be that you are a compassionate person, and that care is the abundance you can share with others. If you have a car, your abundance might mean giving lifts to those who don’t. You might give away excess produce. Write a blog and share your ideas. There are many other ways of doing this, too.

A person doesn’t have to go a long way out of their way to feel a bit abundant, a bit generous. Of course, in sharing your abundance, however small, you are making life better for someone else. You are alleviating their sense of scarcity and showing them how to share whatever abundance they can find. Imagine the possible knock-on effects. Imagine what could be alleviated.

We can use our feelings of abundance to tackle feelings of scarcity, and by doing this, we can move towards a sense of sufficiency, of recognising when we have enough. This in turn would reduce overall consumption. We can help reduce the scarcity experienced by others. If abundance means sharing, then hording would be less acceptable. It would be a hefty cultural revolution, but it is thinkable.

Prayers for abundance

“May we be sufficient in all things, may we have abundance enough to share with others.”

As far as personal prayers of petition go, this is something that I regularly repeat, but there doesn’t tend to be much else because this covers all the practical stuff for me. I tend (at the moment at least) to simply address prayers to the universe. Does anything out there listen, care and respond? I can’t tell, but for me that’s not really the point. Most of my prayer practice is about being open and listening, on the off-chance anything does flow towards me. This small prayer is my way of wrapping up all the practical things so that I can let them go.

It has other consequences, too. Divinely inspired or not, I can’t say, but the process of using this prayer regularly certainly changes things for me. Firstly it focuses me on the idea of sufficiency. “Enough” is a magic word. Recognising the ways in which I am sufficient helps me. We live in a culture that promotes the idea of scarcity, and that we have to be afraid and grasping because everything is scarce. By focusing on the ways in which I have enough, I am able to see through some of the narratives of scarcity and get better balance in my life. In seeing through the scarcity myths I become better able to recognise where I have abundance and how I might share it to good effect.

Thinking about when and where I have enough helps me recognise where I don’t, and where that needs to change. Enough rest, enough inspiration, enough gentle happy time – these have been the areas of lack. These are not scarcities driven by poverty, but by responding to fears of scarcity. I have, slowly, learned that I do not have to be working all the time to feel safe. I don’t have to earn more all the time in case there’s a disaster ahead. I just need enough. Do I have enough for the things I need? Then I have enough. I don’t need much, and much of what I need is not for sale anyway. The more I understand this, the more able I am to have a life that I find good.

Where is the abundance? In a household with two adults working full time yet collectively earning less than the average wage for one person, how can I talk about abundance? Answer: because we have things set up such that we can live well on what we have. I’ve lived in arrangements where a good deal more money came in each month, but where very little was good or happy. As I don’t want a lot of things, and I don’t need my things to be new, or fashionable, I’m not expensive to keep. I like upcycling, re-purposing, I like using the things other people would throw away. There is abundance available in this. I can say yes to things n one else wants and experience them as richness.

At the moment my flat is full of fabric and wool that no one else wants, and I’m in the process of turning it into things that I can gift to people. Here is abundance! I can create something cheering and useful from something no one else wanted in its old form. I can use my free time making things – which I delight in, and which rests my over-busy brain and gives me time to think gently about stories. I can keep things out of landfill. I feel blessed with riches when I’m doing this.

“Enough” is fairly simple, abundance is not as hard to find as it might seem. So why does our culture encourage us to seek excess and guard it jealously? Why are we encouraged to use up our precious time – time we really want for resting, sleeping, playing, being with friends and family, getting exercise and eating well – why are we encouraged to sacrifice all of those things so that we can afford new cars, gym memberships and pre-packaged food? And why are we encouraged to feel good about all the excess we might own, when around us others go hungry, can’t heat their homes, or end up on the streets. Recognise enough, and see what you can share, because we all deserve better than these toxic normalities.

For more of my thinking on prayer, check out When a Pagan Prays.