Living in Abundance

As related in the previous blog post, “Living in Joy”, I have recently come to a revolution in my thinking. Or, to be more precise, what has happened is that, as a result of producing the Shining the Light on Shadow material, I have shone a light on my own shadow! Which has caused a massive re-integration of my ego-persona into my Inner-Self. I am now far, far more myself than I ever was before. My Inner-Self is much more present in this life now. And this, of course, changes how I relate to the world. I find myself thinking differently about things and relating differently to experiences. I find my life changing. I am certainly more joyful, peaceful and loving. And, by miraculous co-incidence, my life is in every measurable way far more abundant. And, yes, that includes having more money!

So I want to take a moment to address the money issue. It is one that most (perhaps all) of us struggle with to some greater or lesser degree. Even those whom you think are so wealthy that you cannot imagine them having money problems. Trust me. They might have very different money problems than you do. But they almost certainly also have money problems!

The first thing I wish to say about money is that, very much like joy, we make the mistake of thinking that we should try to get more of it. We think money itself is a desirable thing. And that is where we go wrong. Money is simply a counter for energy. It is an effect. And to pursue an effect without changing its cause is a kind of insanity. Or at the very least, a kind of deep ignorance.

If you wish to live a truly abundant life, then I have a new recipe for you. It doesn't ask you to work harder. It doesn't recommend ways to scrimp and save. It doesn't even request of you that you learn some fiscal discipline. And best of all, you will totally love living this way. It will not only bring you the money you need, but it will also bring you into right relationship with yourself. And it will bring you greater and greater Joy. Because, yes, it will bring you into alignment with your most God-Like Inner-Self.

So an all-round great idea, right?

This is very easy to describe, but a bit more difficult to apply. It is going to require a fair degree of commitment on your part. But the rewards are beyond measure. It is worth it and worth it and worth it, over and again.

So here's the way it works:

 I've offered this to you as a triangle because I wish you to understand that the three elements that make up the Abundant Living Triangle work together and are all of equal importance. They must all be done together for this to work. Now allow me to describe what each of the legs of the triangle mean:

Give Joyfully

To begin with, we need to understand that everything we experience in this world and beyond is all just energy. So everything you express into the world is energy. Some of that energy is expressed at work and that comes back to you in the form of a salary cheque. Some of it is expressed at home with your family and when you socialise with friends and this comes back (hopefully) in the form of love and support. But you are also constantly expressing energy in all kinds of other places. Your interactions with others at the store, on the roads, online on the internet on Facebook etc. Everywhere you go and everything you do, you are, in one way or another expressing energy into the world.

So the first thing is to be aware of this fact that everything you do is radiating energy out into the world.

The second thing is to become aware of how you feel when you express that energy. Rate all of your expressions of energy on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the most miserably begrudging activity and 10 is the most blissfully enthusiastic activity. As you do something ask yourself, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how do I feel about the energy I am expressing right now?” Rate literally everything you do in this manner. And then, after you have rated something that you have been doing, ask yourself, “What can I do to raise this number?” And keep asking yourself that until you find a way.

And then never stop looking for ways to raise this number in everything you do in all of your life.

Sometimes all you need to do to raise the “joyful giving index” on an activity is to change your attitude towards it. Sometimes you really need to take the feedback and stop doing something that is toxic to your soul and find something entirely different to do.

The details of this process will vary greatly from person to person and from circumstance to circumstance. But the bottom line is this:

What you put out comes back to you. If you are doing something with a negative, resistant, unhappy energy, that energy will come right back to you. If you are pouring sourness out into life, it will squirt lemon juice into your eye in reply. It can do no other.

So you must find a way, starting right now and ending never, to express yourself ever more joyfully.

And if you are expressing yourself joyfully, you will love what you do. It will be your pleasure to do what you do. And you will therefore do it excellently. People will seek you out for what you do. And you will be rewarded ever more abundantly for it.

In my circumstance, I can say that I used to get paid a fair whack of money to do a job that was wrong for me. It didn't matter that I was good at it. It didn't matter that I knew how to play the corporate game well enough to keep being paid a good salary for my efforts. It didn't even matter that I was, essentially, my own boss and could come and go as I pleased. When it came right down to it, what mattered was that I was energetically attached to an expression that I found to be toxic to my soul. And so, no matter how hard I tried to stay motivated and happy, I simply could not. I was miserable, my soul was sick with it and it was killing my body too. And life reflected that back at me in every possible way.

So I took the feedback. I committed myself to listening to my heart. Which meant learning how to do that and then staying with it. My heart led me directly to giving my business away, selling up in the city and moving to the forests. My heart led me to writing The Ascension Papers. And then it led me to offering Soul Re-Integration and other healing modalities. It led me to invite people from all over the world to journey deeply with me in Spiritual Safari. And it continues to lead me to move into closer and closer relationship with my Inner-Self. And every step of the way, my heart has led me to expressions that are so right for me that I become more and more joyful in giving them.

So these things that I do “for a living” are all done in great joy. And besides this, I make sure that I express myself in the other aspects of my life with as much joy as is possible. I minimise my interactions with people if I cannot interact joyfully. And, by contrast, I expand my contact with those with whom I do find myself to be in joyful expression. And, in many cases, all I need to do is to shift my attitude to find the joy. Chores around the house are an example. If I simply shift my focus and see how these little tasks are expressions of loving service that I can do for Lisa, the dogs and myself, then they change aspect and become altogether more joyfully done.

Without trying to offer you a dissertation on the subject, I am sure you can, with a little thought and introspection, see what you are putting out to life that is not joyful. What of that needs to change, what you need to stop doing, what you need to replace with other activities, what you can do differently and what you can simply change your attitude towards. Because, obviously, if what we get back from life is a mirror reflection of what we are putting out, then we really do need to be expressing ourselves as joyfully and lovingly as possible.

And speaking of what we get back:

Receive Gratefully

Every single thing that is going on in your life right now is a reflection. A return on what you have previously, in one way or another, put out.

So, the question is, are you gratefully receiving what life is giving you or are you trying to resist and block that return flow?

If you are putting a lot of negative energy out, you probably won't like what you are getting back. You will probably be seeking ways to avoid the pain that is being reflected back at you. That would be a normal response to a profound misunderstanding.

It is a misunderstanding because you cannot avoid what life must deliver to you. You will get back what you have put out. So instead of trying to block or avoid, you should simply change what you are projecting!

And if, in the past of this lifetime or previous lifetimes, you put out a lot of hatred, fear, anger, greed or other similar negativity, then you might have developed a pattern of resisting and attempting to block life's replies. And it could be that this pattern of resistance remains in place, even though you have more recently begun to put more positivity out to life. Perhaps you are in the habit of blocking and resisting even though life is now trying to give you beautiful, joyful things? This is something I have done myself and have also seen in many of my clients.

The point, really, is that the choice to express yourself more and more joyfully needs to go hand-in-hand with a choice to open yourself to receive ever more gratefully. To accept with grace that which life is offering you.

So I invite you to consider:

* Do you know what you would like to get back from life in exchange for what you are putting out? Do you have clarity on what you want? If not, you should find it!

* Have you opened up avenues through which life can easily gift you with that which you would like to receive? If not you should figure this out and open them up!

* Are you saddled with beliefs about energy, money, poverty, receiving, having enough, safety, security, wealth and abundance that cause you to limit what you can receive from life? If you are, you need to get to the bottom of those beliefs and release them!

* Are you noticing the many ways in which life is right now blessing you abundantly? Are you finding gratitude for those? If you aren't, you should be!

* Do you understand that truly, all is one, and you will therefore very often receive your return from a different part of the oneness to which you gave? A kindness to your cousin might be returned by your neighbour, for example. So, are you open to receive, even from unexpected quarters? Or do you block up when you don't feel you have done something to deserve a gift from that quarter? If so, you must know that this is not possible! Every experience is an effect and the cause lies within you. So, by definition, you deserve that which you are offered by life. Even if you don't understand how. It is not your job to know how. It is your job to discern if that which is offered to you is right for you to accept. And then to accept gratefully.

So, to sum up:
Life will give you back a return on your investment. It will return it with interest. Since you are consciously seeking ways to give joyfully, your job becomes to consciously open up avenues for life to return your positive outputs to you in a way that will please you. Then, get out of the way and allow those returns to come flooding in!

If life offers you something other than that which you have stipulated: a different return than that which you have asked for, you simply decide if this is right for you to receive or not. If it is, accept!

In any event, when you do accept a return, accept it with grace and gratitude. Give thanks to the agent of the return of your investment. Tell them that you are grateful and that you enjoy their gift. Allow yourself the joyous luxury of feeling gratitude in your heart. Let it emanate outwards to all of life. For certainly, when you receive a return on the goodness you have projected it has come back to you from the whole of the oneness, even though one particular person might have been the agent that brought it to you.

Then ask yourself if there is a way in which you can multiply the joy by giving back, yet again! Keep the positive energy flowing and reverberating as much as you can!

And finally, when you are pleased with the events of your life, you can be grateful to yourself. You are the one who expressed yourself in such a way that life could reward you. So... well done! And “thank you” to Self!

Live Peacefully

Your mind is the conduit through which you pass all of your experiences. If your mind is in a state of turmoil, you will not be able to process truthfully and effectively what is occurring in your life. You will block your ability both to give joyfully and to receive gratefully. You will get in the way of your own abundance and certainly you will limit your ability to live a joyful life. So I invite you to observe your own thoughts so that you might see where you are creating disharmony in your mind and to see how you can work on that to bring peace to yourself. And to notice what thoughts and feelings you are trying to avoid because they seem too painful to attend to. And then to see if you can gently and lovingly “go there” to bring forgiveness and healing. If you can, then you should! If you cannot, then you should get help with this. And, in this regard, I'd like to tell you now about some very specific help that I can offer you:

Some time ago I discovered that I had spent my life making some very counter-productive choices for my own mind. I had been creating turmoil in my mind when I could have been choosing for peace. Now, to be fair, at the time I neither knew that I could choose to have a peaceful mind nor how to go about making such a choice. It has taken me quite some journeying to discover this. And what I have discovered is that there are two key aspects to finding true, lasting peace of mind. The first is learning to listen to the heart and to align the mind with the heart. The heart is the portal to the limitless, divine self, you see. Whereas the mind is an ego-tool. So clearly we should teach the mind to listen to the heart! If you wish to gain what I have to share in this regard, then the help I can offer you is the Heart and Mind Aligned seminar series, as it teaches exactly this.

The second key to finding true, lasting peace of mind follows on from the first. Once you are listening to your heart, you need to learn to deal appropriately with your Shadow. As long as your Shadow runs rampant in your mind you will never find true or lasting peace. And so, appropriately enough, the follow-on to Heart and Mind Aligned is a second seminar series called Shining the Light on Shadow.

Living in Abundance

There is a third seminar series in this sequence called The Tools of Creation. This teaches you how to recreate yourself and your entire reality. Though I do invite you to read more about that third module, a discussion thereof lies outside of the ambit of this blog post. The point of this blog post is to demonstrate that there are three equal parts to abundant living:

Giving joyfully, receiving gratefully and living peacefully.

Each of these concepts are complex. They are not things that you can just do once and then tick off. They are lifestyle choices that you will need to incorporate in your very way of being. And when you do, you will discover new avenues for yourself in ways that you can give ever more joyfully, receive ever more gratefully and live ever more peacefully. You might, for example, discover that a peaceful mind is only the first step towards living peacefully. That there are specific, powerful, purposeful ways in which you can create ever more peace in your life beyond that which you find in your mind. You might find that you can give more joyfully by, for example, teaching others to give their gifts. You might find that you can receive more gratefully by, for example, taking the time to see the gift that lies behind everything that life shows you – even the things that you might otherwise label painful, difficult and uncomfortable. I cannot know what unique discoveries will lie ahead for you on your path should you choose to adopt the Abundant Living Triangle for yourself. But I do know that you will love the journey and relish those discoveries!

Conclusion

I can assure you, as a fact of my own life's experience, that the degree to which one is able to enact these three choices: giving joyfully, receiving gratefully and living peacefully, is the degree to which you will find your whole life to become ever more abundant.

And, of course, we really should not be measuring life's abundance in money terms only. In fact money is just one very small part of the whole picture. There are all the other many ways, such as love, kindness, support and companionship that other people offer us. There are the intangibles such as the beauty that we can receive from nature and from life. So broaden your view. And give and receive abundantly, whilst living peacefully.