Having Enough: Cultivating an Abundance Mentality

Once it happened, that a man said to God, God, I would like to know what heaven and hell are like, God showed them in two doors, and said, the first one in the middle of the room was a large round table, the large pot of stew it smelled so good and made the man’s mouth water. But other people sitting around the table were thin and sickly, they looked like they were starving, appear to be literally literally starving, they looked like they were in agony look terrible. They were holding spoons with really, really long handles. And each of them were able to they found it possible to take their spoon and put it into the stew. But because the handle of the spoon was so long, they couldn’t put it into their mouth. So they couldn’t actually eat it. The man just shuttered the sight of it the misery and suffering, God said, you have seen hell. By the second door, the room appear to be exactly the same. There was the same large round table with the same pot of delicious smelling stew. People had the same spoons, but they were too well nourished, and they were plump, they were laughing and talking and having a great time the men said, I don’t understand. God smiled. It is simply said, Love only requires one skill. These people learned early on to share and feed one another. While the greedy only think of themselves. I just love that story. It’s called the parable of the long spoons. And it is great gets me thinking about a lot. One of the things that makes me think about is living in abundance versus living in scarcity. Abundance versus scarcity. think that that is something that we probably have all thought about, or we’ve heard supposed to be living in abundance don’t want to be living in scarcity. But have you actually thought about it. And something that I have been thinking about for probably five years at this point? It’d be six, seven years time. But it’s really, really important. And I’d like you to think about and answer these questions for yourself. I’d like for you to do it quickly. You know, we’ve got the two parts of our brain, the fast part of our brain, that’s our impulsive reaction, our knee jerk reaction. And then there’s the slow part of our brain that is more reasoned, and logical and thoughtful. And I want you to do both. Because they’re both telling think that the fast part of our brain is what we really think and believe. And then the reason part is, when we rationalize or sort of reason, my way through it, this is what I ought to be thinking about. But the first part is really telling. So do you have enough? Do you have enough? Enough white? Enough of everything? Do you have enough money? Do you have enough to eat? Do you have enough time? Do you have enough energy? Do you have enough? Next question is, is there enough for everyone? Do you think that there is enough to go around? Or do you think that life is a zero sum game, and that when one person gets that means you can’t get that means it’s taken away from your portion or your share? Really, really, really important thing? Next question, what is enough? What is enough? Is there such a thing? And again, finally, is there enough for you? Big Questions, big questions to ask and, and and answer. Honestly. I never want anybody to lie to anybody. I certainly don’t want anybody to lie to themselves. I never want to lie to myself. I’m going to try to interrogate my reality as thoroughly and as hard as I possibly can. So are you currently living Do you live in abundance? Do you live in scarcity? Maybe it’s somewhere in between those two things on the continuum of abundance and scarcity. I’m right here, I’m in this area. Thing about I don’t, there are problems and a trap to living in too much abundance, and I’m gonna talk about that in a second. But when you live in in scarcity, you can try and trick yourself into an abundance mindset. But I don’t think that it works because our core beliefs and if you have a core belief that there is not enough for everyone If you believe that when one person wins, it means you lose, then you cannot override that belief or that operating system with some kind of a nicety or a bandaid by just telling yourself I live in abundance, I have an abundance mindset. Well, you don’t really if you have core beliefs of scarcity. Now it took me years to realize that I was living in scarcity that I had a scarcity mindset, particularly when it came to money. And just briefly told the story a million times, so I apologize if you’re about to hear it again. But growing up in northern Minnesota, we were working class household, my mom was a single mom, she was a school teacher, and we didn’t pay school teachers any money back then either. That fundamentally, just there was never quite enough money to go around. We had enough, but never quite enough. And I remember, not unlike the allegory of the lung spoons, that once a month, my mom would pay bills, and she would literally spread our bills out on our big circular kitchen table. So instead of stew, it was bills. And instead of spoons, it was a checkbook, because she was trying to figure out how to, I’m not sure that that holds up, try to figure out how to pay everything. And there’s just not enough to go around. And what that meant was my brother and I just avoided her because it was a stressful time. So month after month, year after year of observing that and recognizing money, stay away money, stay away money, stay away, it just it that’s how you form core beliefs. Your core beliefs are formed from birth to about the age of seven years old, fascinating. You ever get interested in, I encourage you to examine your beliefs about things and dig deep, because when we have a limiting belief, it becomes like a glass cage, we don’t see it, there are glass ceiling, a self imposed glass ceiling, that is preventing us from achieving or just getting whatever we want or realizing our fullest potential. So once I learned about core beliefs, I recognized it’s like why am I interacting, I’m having a hard time interacting with money, because I believe that there’s not enough of it. And I have been conditioned to avoid financial matters, even though I was working as a financial person. Crazy. So once you recognize it, then there’s the opportunity. So that’s the good news is, once you recognize that you do have or you potentially have some kind of a limiting or negative belief about something, you can go about the work of rewriting it. So you can override the negative belief with a positive one. So but it doesn’t happen automatically. Here’s some realities of the world that we’re living in, just to give some context and some perspective on abundance versus scarcity. And where you and I currently are here we are watching this video or listening to this podcast. And the realities are that over half of the human beings currently living on planet Earth, your fellow humans, men and women live on less than $5 a day. Let that sink in 2.3 billion do not have access to basic sanitation. So that means flushing toilets. That also is true of electricity. So almost half of the Earth’s population also doesn’t have access to basics, sanitation and electricity. around 100 million people don’t have access to basic drinking water. 700 million people are malnourished. And here is the really atrocious awful one that right now. around 40 million people right now are living in slavery. Yeah, that’s shocking. It is shocking. It ought to be. Maybe you knew it. Maybe you don’t believe me? Well, then research. Research how many people right now are living in, in current day living in slavery, modern slavery. So shocking and sobering, but still not enough for you to overcome a limiting belief. It’s just a band aid, like I really ought to, I ought to feel good about my life, and I ought to recognize I have so much in comparison to other human beings currently alive on Earth, but it’s still not enough. You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to dig in. So me just telling you, you need to do the work and dig in. That’s not super helpful. It’s like saying just do it without telling you how to actually just do it.

So the first step is, how do I know if I have a limiting belief? Well go back and answer those questions. As I suggested earlier, is there enough? Do I have enough those questions and answer them honestly. Recognize when you are triggered by something, recognize when you are upset, you become emotional. When you see something. What is it that triggers you, maybe it’s somebody with wealth. Somebody in the 1%, a billionaire, big companies, massive amounts of profit, material possessions that other people have houses that they have vacations that they go on, whatever it is, look for those triggers, that’s evidence that you have a negative or limiting belief about the thing that you’re triggered by. And then once you identify that, trace it back to when you were a kid to your childhood, and try and connect those dots like I shared with you a couple of minutes ago, do that work, then recognize that a human superpower is our ability to decide how we want to think, feel and respond. It’s a superpower, I don’t have any control of what happens to me. But I get to choose how to think, feel and respond to the circumstances of my life. So you get to decide how it is that you want to feel, you get to decide how you want to feel about scarcity and abundance, about money, love, success, all of it talking about scarcity and abundance, but you can apply this to everything that is important and worthwhile in your life. And the stuff that’s not important or worthwhile, it’s still bothering or triggering you and getting you off course. So pay attention to when it is that you’re triggered. And replace the feeling that you get with the feeling that you want to have. So it’s notice it’s, it’s intervene with the inner with, this is how I want to be feeling and thinking about abundance or money or possessions. And you keep doing that over and over again and you retrain your brain. It’ll take you some time. But it’s really, really possible to do it. It’s really important because living in scarcity can and oftentimes does cause negativity, essentially, that’s I don’t have enough. And when you don’t have enough and you feel and you believe that you don’t have enough that’s going to cause resentment, hatred, just bad multitude of other bad emotions and feelings, which can lead to bad actions. Emotions, lead can lead to action, which can hurt people. And what goes around comes around the universe balances the scales, balances, the accounts, the checkbook, however you want to think about it. And when you put in negativity out in the world, it’s going to come back around to you. There is Esquire magazine years ago did a cool and I’ve talked about this before to Esquire magazine some years ago did this really cool feature about what I’ve learned, and they would interview people. And I remember reading the piece on Michael DeBakey. He’s a pioneering heart surgeon. And this has stuck with me forever. And he’s talked about he said that there was a historian in the 14th century who wrote a book about what he knew of the world. And for that time, it was pretty good. One of the interesting observations he made is that all the tribes that have difficulty feeding themselves are lean and healthy. And those that have plenty of food are fat, lazy and unhealthy. Let that sink in to ruminate on that as well. There’s an abundance trap, and it’s a trap that many of us have fallen into here in the United States. Some combination of privilege, softness, apathetic empathy, entitlement, which is all led to overconsumption and it’s really over consuming everything negative. It’s not like we’re over consuming. We probably are over consuming kale and health food, but it’s over consuming. Negative crap like fast food, social media, or not being good. curators are good stewards of what we’re putting into our heads and our bodies are obese. Like just unhealthily obese. We’re obsessed with celebrity culture and materialism. We think that words are violence. We’re so far removed from actual violence, we think words of violence. We need collectively to take a step back, reexamine our priority get back to doing what truly matters, loving others through caring and feeding them. Like the allegory, the long spoons teaches us to think of others, and not only to think about ourselves. So to wrap this up, I want to share with you a benediction that my priest would close our services with when I was a kid. He would say, life is short, and we have little time to gladden the hearts of those we meet along the way. So be swift to love Swift or still to be to forgive and make haste to be kind. Swift to love. Swift are still to forgive and make haste to be kind. When we can live in abundance in a healthy fashion. Better we’re going to be, as always, do your part, doing your best