10.09.07
Living in Abundance
Sunday Talk (Rough Draft)-Delivered at the Unity of Shepherdstown in Shepherdstown, WV on October 14th, 2007 and the Unity of Kanawha Valley in Charleston WV on October 21st, 2007.
Living in Abundance
When Rev. Anne Murphy at the Unity Church in Shepherdstown recommended that I focus the Sunday lesson topic of “Living in Abundance” I thought that it was a fantastic idea. For the last couple of years, Melissa and I, as well as many of my friends, have been focused on living a life of financial freedom. We’ve read the books, taken classes, learned “the secrets”, and even started to take action. However, as the time drew nearer to develop a talk on the subject, all that I had learned started to break down in my mind, and an extreme form of doubt set in and I had no idea how I was going to be authentic in giving this talk, and here is why.
As a few of you know, Melissa and I will be moving to Asheville, NC in December. She will begin her work in the public health field after graduating with her master’s degree from WVU and I will be focusing on creating the Asheville branch of Center of Spiritual Awareness, a Kriya Yoga meditation center. Now all of this sounds well and good, and did to me too for the last year and a half that we’ve been planning it, but somehow as the stress of moving seven hours away from the place I’ve lived all my life and the cost of moving and the cost of purchasing our new home with a ten percent down payment all balled up into one, I started to lose my faith that this was really a good idea. In fact, even though at the core of my being I knew this was the best thing in the world for both Melissa and myself and I had the blessing of my spiritual teacher in the endeavor, I was really starting to think this was a totally insane endeavor.
Now the reason this would’ve been easier to give, say a year ago, was because a year ago I was feeling pretty secure in my financial abundance. Even though for many years of my life after leaving my parent’s house up until recently, my income was just a couple thousand dollars above the poverty line, I was able to pay my bills, not go into debt, save lots of money, eat well and even afford a few well-appointed musical instruments along the way. To me, I was feeling very much in the flow of abundance. I didn’t even need a super stressful high paying job to achieve it. So in my mind, abundance had nothing to do with the amount of money I made, it had to do with how I managed it and how I lived within my means. I still hold that this is true, but my mental outlook was somewhat prideful on this point, and that was a block to prosperity. We’ll get more into that later.
The difference between then and now is that although I was still in the flow of grace the world around me was changing and I was being called to take more responsibility in life and it scared me to death. I was being called to move far away to fulfill what I knew in my heart was my true calling. I was being called into joy and into service. I was being called to do what I was sent here to do, yet it required me to tap into the grace of God that had grown so strong in my life, and I was unwilling to tap into that for fear it would run out and leave me high and dry, and that was the mistake I was making. That was my mind feeding me a line of bull and I was listening. As I let the weight of this move, which is really a total blessing, stress me out without need. I was looking at everything that could go wrong, rather than focusing on everything that was so right about this change.
After having a heart to heart talk with Melissa about all the turmoil I was experiencing about how I was perceiving the situation, and the doubt that had risen about my inability to speak on this matter I began to understand what was really happening. God was giving me exactly what I had asked for, as God does for all of us.
I’ve known for a very long time intellectually that if I want to change some circumstance in my life two things need to occur. One, I need to change. Two, I need to start doing things differently. So really, all that was occurring was right in line with that understanding. The information I’d been absorbing about learning to be financially free and all the inner work I had done was manifesting. My life WAS changing. Yet I was staying the same and that incongruence was causing the unneeded pain and stress. For the last two years I had been telling the universe I’m ready to be provided for in all ways. I’m ready to accept my value in this world. I’m ready to do what you created me to do! And like clock work the universe responded.
So the moral of my personal story is, if you want to strengthen your prosperity consciousness, be ready to ride the wave that will carry you to your destination. Because it WILL come, and freaking out just as your beginning to get carried to the destination does not help at all! Take some time to really understand what might be required to make the changes necessary to achieve your goals. Many people can talk about the changes they want to see in life, but few are willing to make the changes.
(To be continued…)
