On Sunday, I took a tumble on the hardwood stairs in my front entrance way. I have no idea how it happened. One second, I was holding my daughter’s coat out to her and the next second I was on my back and in a whole world of pain. (This is why you didn’t get your usual Monday post, by the way. In between pain and painkillers, I wasn’t in any shape to sit a computer and write stuff.)
Now, with my injuries making me more or less useless for Sunday night and most of Monday, I had a lot of time on my hands where I wasn’t doing much of anything. So, being the mindset chick that I am, I spent a lot of time thinking about what happened. Because I just had this feeling that there was a particular point to this accident. The injuries were not severe, but they were enough to slow me down considerably for a couple of days. And I felt there was a reason for that. There was a reason I was being made to stop.
Obsessing about fear
I’m currently working on my second book, and it’s about dealing with the fear that keeps us from really going for it and becoming all that we can be in life. And while I was incapacitated earlier this week, I read a book that I’d been “meaning to get to” for a while, and there were some parts in the book that sparked some greater insight for me with respect to this whole concept of fear. The book was Julia Rogers Hamrick’s “Choosing Easy World”, which isn’t actually about fear at all, but it made realize just how much of a choice it really is to let go of fear in our lives. It’s a deceptively simple concept that she presents in her book, but it’s powerful.
So, like I said, I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately, because it’s the topic of my next book, so there have been a lot of concepts and archetypes and theories about fear that have been floating around my mind lately. I’ve also been stewing a lot about money and job hunting lately, too. And through the concepts presented in Julia’s book, I started to see some parallels between my two current “obsessions” that I hadn’t considered before.
Insights about money and fear
As I started to ponder these parallels, I got some flashes of insight about abundance, money and fear that I thought I’d share with you today:
Money doesn’t like fear.
You cannot manifest abundance from a place of fear. I mean this specifically about money. You can’t expect to generate more of it in your life if you’re stuck in a mind-space of fearing what will happen if you don’t have enough of it. Money, I’ve come to realize, doesn’t like fear, and avoids it like the plague. In order to create more material wealth in your life, you need to shift the energy surrounding the concept of money. So, for example, instead of fearing the lack of it, focus on the fun that money could represent.
Abundance is a mindset.
Unless you are able to be happy with what you currently have, you will never have enough. Until you realize that you have always had “enough” and that you will always have “enough”, you cannot get to a place of “abundance”. Abundance is a mindset. If your mindset is rooted in thoughts of scarcity and lack, it doesn’t matter how much money you have – you could be literally worth billions, but you’ll still be worrying about money and whether you have enough, you’ll still be terrified that you’ll lose everything you’ve gained, if you haven’t fixed your mindset issues. And can you really consider yourself abundant, no matter what the numbers say, if you’re still in that place of fear? Most people want more money so that they don’t have to worry anymore. But the mindset shift has to come before abundance can come.
There is no such thing as “later”.
Don’t put off what makes you happy. We live in a culture where the things that make us happy and bring the most meaning and joy into our lives are considered unimportant. In fact, it’s almost as if the happier something makes us, the less importance we’re supposed to attach to it, the more “dangerous” it becomes to the status quo, and the more we’re told to squash it. We are told to work hard, to struggle and to sacrifice what makes us happy in the now, with the promise of “someday” we’ll be able to do those things (like when we’re retired, for instance).
But do you see how dangerous this is? Do you see what a lie this is? You can’t build happiness by making yourself miserable. If you sacrifice everything that makes you happy now, that someday will NEVER come. For two reasons:
- It’s never “later”. We are only ever in the “now”. We can plan for later, but when that later comes, it becomes the now. And we can’t possibly be happy “now”, noooo… we need to sacrifice and struggle now so that we can be happy later. Do you recognize the circular reasoning trap here? There is no later!
- The longer you keep yourself miserable, the greater an impact it has on your mental and physical health. And when that magical retirement day comes up, you’re going to be too sick to actually engage in any of those things that make you happy anyway.
What the accident was
I think sometimes accidents are part of that guidance system that keeps us aligned with Source. I think that when we don’t pay attention to, or don’t notice the gentler nudges that we’re given, the signals get correspondingly stronger that we’re going off track, until they become so strong that we cannot miss them (like falling on the stairs, for instance).
In this case, I think my obsessing about money and bills and fearing having to find a job I know I’ll hate just to pay those bills was sending me way off course from where I want to be in life. This accident slowed me down enough to make me think. And make me realize just how unhelpful my current thought patterns were in terms what I was trying to create for myself. I’ll be pondering the insights that I’ve gained through this experience for the next little while as I try to figure out how I’m going to use those insights from here on in.
Photo credit: Philip Taylor PT / Foter / CC BY
I was wondering what was up, Nathalie. I am glad you are okay and that this incident opened your eyes to some very important things I was also thinking about. And now I get it. I just could not figure it out until now. Thanks fro the insight and I am glad you had it.
Money is a manifestation of good things, like feeling good, right? But it could be bad, too, like screwing people over for it. Either way, you need to feel good about it. I know for a fact that hedge fund guys do not think about the money they are stealing. They do not look at it that way, but since they feel good about it and feel good about the work they do, it all comes to them. So, is it all in the eyes of the beholder? (You may disagree with me about some investment people, but most of them, I feel, are in essence stealing. They see other people’s money and think of how they can get their hands on it without getting too dirty, like pouring blood and sweat like other people. But then again, this is another concept that has gone awry it seems- that of working- a topic for another post. It does work for them, but you see, their vine got twisted in the economy and now things can’t run without them. But, it still works for them, so it is all good, I guess).
Worry does not lead you to where you want to go, unless it is stagnation, so it is best not to do it. It is a bad habit that can be trained out of you.
“To begin, begin.”- William Wordsworth
Money is just another form of energy. We allow it or disallow it based on what we’re sending out there ourselves. It’s one of the toughest issues out there for all of us, because, in this day and age, so much of our life experience is tied up in it. So there really is a lot of fear surrounding the whole concept. People want it, desperately, but they’ve also been taught to despise it, or at least distrust it. How can you attract something to you if, at some level, you think it’s “dirty” or “evil” or otherwise “bad”? Nobody wants to think of themselves in such terms, so even while they want money on the surface, at a subconscious level, they are repelling it. Our beliefs about money have to change at a fundamental level before we will see any kind of real, lasting change in our financial situations.