Abundance seems to be the hot word these days.
“Live the life you deserve. Have abundance of wealth, joy, spirituality.”
This is well and good, and there are certainly psychological barriers we need to break through to help us be open to this level of abundance. But perhaps there’s another kind of abundance that the pop-conceptualization of this word does not hit.
In Burma, I spent the last two months of a six month retreat meditating 18 hours a day alone in my room with concrete floors, no technology, two small meals and no speaking. I alternated the same 3 outfits, hardly owned anything, and slept a few hours a night.
And yet, never had I felt more fulfillment, clarity, peace and love. Having a sense of abundance would have been an understatement.
While real life circumstances are VERY different than monastic life, and it’s more important that we have a certain level of material goods and comfort, I think we vastly overestimate what we need, materially, to find happiness.
If you made a modest salary, enough to provide for your family, to have shelter, to eat, and take some time off, but placed as a core intention of your life to focus on what you’re grateful for, what’s good in your life, and appreciating the small things like being able to breath, feel, or see, I have no doubt you will feel abundance.
Abundance is a mentality, not a reality.
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