Lesson 1: The Form of Abundance

If you’ve made it this far into the course it’s clear that you’re making a serious commitment to changing your energy, so before we get into the next module, I want to take a moment to recognize that. Take a moment to notice the changes that have occurred so far in your life: maybe you’re taking time to pause and notice your breath throughout the day, maybe you’re starting to develop a daily meditation practice, or maybe you’re just a little more aware of how attention, energy, or attitude flows in the course of day to day life.

Whatever those changes are, take a moment to recognize and appreciate them. They might not feel like much right now, but they’re actually monumental steps that are going to propel you into higher and higher states of this joy-bliss-love-light feeling that we’ve been talking about.

I also want to take this time to encourage you to take the time to start developing an adequate support network. Having people you can rely on that are both people who are going through a similar process and people who are already close with you in your life is really important as you start to move through these concepts of energy and begin to view the world through this new lens.

There are two main ways you can get support. The first is to engage with the Facebook community. That’s the main reason we have this community, so you can get support, interact with and start talking with people who are going through exactly the same steps you are now.

If you haven’t already, take some time to share your story with the group. Share your progress so far. Share your thoughts on the lessons as you’re going through them. I think you’ll find that the group is really open and really supportive. It’s a natural tendency to be a bit shy in a forum like that, but I really hope you think of it as a safe space and I think you’ll find an incredible group of people there who really are going through exactly these same steps, exactly the same reservations and hesitations you are.

The other area to turn to are people who you’re already close with. This can be a difficult step for many people, because it feels like you’re going through an incredible personal transformation and you might not be aware of how you feel exactly about that shift yet, so it can be difficult and very honest to open up about these concepts and these ideas that you’re starting to have about this energy.

I know for me, personally, when I first started to dive more deeply into spirituality and to have more profound meditations and work more consistently with this energy, there was a short period of time when I actually kind of thought I was going crazy and I didn’t want to talk to any of my friends about it because I thought they were going to laugh at me and ridicule me. But bit by bit I started to think about friends that were spiritual or ones who I thought would be open to talking about this change, and one by one I started to open to people. As I did, I found that people — even people who I didn’t think of as being “spiritual” — were often going through a similar process, but often in their own way that was different from mine. When I started to talk with them about it, I began to see the commonalities of that process and could commiserate with both the ups and the downs.

The point is, I think you’ll be surprised at how accepting people are and how eager people are to start talking about these concepts, once you bring it up. Like you, they’re probably a little hesitant, a little shy, because it can feel very personal. It feels like a momentous shift in your life, and in many ways it is.

Between those two areas: both working with people you’re already close with and telling them about your progress through the course, and talking with people already in the course via the Facebook group, I think you’ll find plenty of support, but you have to take the time to develop it.

Defining True Abundance

In this week’s module we’re going to be talking about the form of abundance. In Western society, we tend to have very deeply engrained beliefs about what abundance is and what form we think it should take. Specifically, we tend to associate it primarily with money, but also ideas of health, relationships, and other physical things that we can latch onto.

I want to take a step back from that mindset and offer a different view. I’d like you to start thinking of abundance not in terms of physical things in your life or circumstances that you go through, but rather as the ability to experience anything that you want, anytime that you want it.

Read that again: Abundance is the ability to experience anything that you want, when you want to experience it.

Think about that definition. It’s likely a radically different approach from the one you probably already hold. It has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you have, how healthy your body is, or how many friends or loved ones you’re close with in your life.

Instead, it has to do with the experience of energy — experiencing the essence of your desire. The idea of living a life of prosperity and living prosperously has nothing to do with attaining things in the physical world. Instead, it has to do with experiencing abundance as you move throughout your day to day life.

Unconsciously Blocking Your Natural Abundance

The problem with the way that most people think about abundance is that by associating their desires with specific forms they think the desire should take, they create the idea of lack.

This is really common, and is something that all of us do on one level or another. For example, you might think: “If I want something, I need to go earn $X to go buy it.” That’s a very specific route to achieving a very specific physical thing in your world. This is what we think of when we think of our desires (in most cases).

The problem with this approach is that as soon as you start to identify the idea of abundance with achieving a specific form, you begin to cut yourself off from receiving that very abundance in your life.

Let’s think about that: as you start to associate the idea that “I want ___.” “I want to achieve ___.” “I want to experience this specific circumstance.”

Your mind immediately begins to look for that thing, that circumstance, that event, in your physical environment. When it doesn’t immediately see that thing before you, it starts to believe that it doesn’t exist. It begins to focus on the absence rather than the presence of your desire.

Your mind, in trying to find the desire for you, instead finds the idea of lack, thereby cementing a belief that your desire does not yet exist. This belief begins to shift your energy away from the joyful experience of desire and into the category of “needing” to go out and work hard/do something/achieve in order to experience the desire.

The idea of identifying something that you want with a specific form, creates the idea of lack and begins to block you off from the very thing you want.

On the other hand, when we don’t restrict desire to a single, specific form the mind expects, we open ourselves more to the reception of it. That’s because we begin to focus more on the energy — the true essence of the desire — and therefore allow ourselves to begin to perceive that the energy is already present in our lives. It is coursing through us and around us in every particle that we see.

We’ll talk about this more in tomorrow’s video, but for now just let this idea start to sink in.

Exercise: Your Own Experience

In order to drive this point home, I want you to take a few minutes to come up with a list of 5-10 examples of times when you’ve had the experience of abundance, the experience of desire, that didn’t come in the form you thought it would.

This technique is especially powerful if you can think of experiences when you wanted something and you got it in a way that had nothing to do with money. It might be as simple as a time when you had a small craving for something and someone randomly (coincidentally) gave you that item, or it might be something to do with a longer-term aim in your life. Think about how retrospectively you saw that your desire came to you, but it didn’t come in the way that — at the time — you would have expected it to.