Today's
Meditation:
It
took me many, many years to be able to focus on abundance
rather than lack, and I can honestly say that I'm still
not there yet. I still fear running out of money and
resources; I still fear not having enough food someday and
not being able to meet my responsibilities and
commitments. My focus has always been on what I
don't have rather than what I have, and now that I'm more
often focused on gratitude for what I have, I find that I
have more and I don't fear losing it nearly as much.
In my family when I was growing up, the focus was always
on lack. We had little money-- sometimes none at all
for a month at a time when my father would drink away his
paycheck the weekend he received it. My mother was
really good at keeping us fed, so we didn't starve at all,
but that was partly because she grew up being poor, also,
and she had learned how to stretch food to amazing
lengths. Because of her poverty, though, she focused
on what was missing, and she and my father taught us kids
to do the same.
The world is full of resources for us, and it's up to us
to take advantage of them-- nobody's going to fill our
baskets for us. Unfortunately, many of us take a
defeatist attitude that says, "I'll never be rich, so
I'll never have the good things." But the truth
is that we can have the good things-- we have to keep
focusing on the abundance around us and figure out ways to
tap into it rather than wishing against all hope that we
could somehow have just a slice of it.
A lot of it has to do with choices, of course. I
could have a lot more money than I have now if I were to
choose to do some work other than teaching, but I love to
teach and I'm good at it, so I keep with it. I do
without certain things that I don't really need in order
to experience abundance with other things-- my wife and I
never go to movies in expensive theaters, for example, but
with the money we save there, we take nice little weekend
trips to nearby areas. Abundance doesn't mean having
it all, but it does mean experiencing a rich and
fulfilling life.
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For further
thought:
When
we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives
but are grateful for the abundance that's present--love,
health,
family, friends, work, the joys of nature, and personal
pursuits
that
bring us pleasure--the wasteland of illusion falls away
and we experience heaven on earth.
Sarah
Ban Breathnach
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