The infinite pencil may be a great idea, but it's hard to wrap your hand around. Taking away its limits takes away its usefulness.
Limits are a fact of our lives. It could be said that one of the purposes of our lives is to learn how to be masterful with what we have - our limited amounts of time and energy - and to learn to appreciate and respond well to the limits in our lives.
The feelings of stress, distress, and even panic that arise as we encounter a limit are part of scarcity. That fear provokes : "Oh, God! I don't have enough," or even "I don't have enough, I'll never have enough, and I'm going to suffer or die."
Most of us begin to run when this happens, and many of us feel driven to fend off the imposing dragon of scarcity. Let's look at how to face - and learn from - that dragon. Remember that if you are willing to learn from your dragons, you transform them into allies. But you must first ask to see the lessons they bring.
We keep ourselves moving so we never have to stop and look, really look, at the question I'm going to ask you now:
What do you hate most about the thought of not having money in your life? What is the nightmare scenario that keeps you awake when you think about not having enough of that energy?
If you are willing to strip away any theories you have about how you experience scarcity, and if you allow yourself to feel it and look at it and tell the truth about it, you will take its fearsome power away.
Scarcity is a reality in the physical domain. As a minister friend of mine once told me, "It's as though we got bored living without limits. We decided to incarnate - which means, literally, to turn into meat. We further chose to work with the limits of form, time, and finite energy. This was to see how much of the divine we could bring into the mundane before it was time for us to leave."
We reach the infinite through living fully in the finite. The infinite is not reached by trying to ignore limits, as many of us try to do.
from The Energy of Money
by Maria Nemeth
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3 comments:
So okay, the question, "What do you hate most about the thought of not having money in your life? What is the nightmare scenario that keeps you awake when you think about not having enough of that energy?"
For me I think it would have to be my fear of losing "everything", which would include my family, my friends, my animsls, my house, my car. I see homeless people every day on the way to work and back home - I know being homeless is a reality! Although my rational mind knows that my friends and family wouldn't allow me to live on the streets of downtown Kansas City, the fear is still very real.
Every time I hear of a family losing everyone in an accident, or losing their house in a fire, it strikes fear and panic within me. And I think not just the fear of not having food and shelter is scary, but just the fear of failure itself. For the last 20 years or so I have felt like I'm in the water, dog paddling like hell, trying to float, just barely keeping my head above water, always looking at the horizon thinking "safety is right around the corner", but I never quite reach it - every corner I round shows the horizon is farther away again! It's a very upsetting, panicky way to live to always feel like you are just barely making it - just barely keeping your head above water.
Twenty plus years ago I had a period of time of about 10 years where I was very comfortable financially - this was as a young person living on my own & married part of the time between the ages of 20 to about 30 - I never had to worry about bills - I always had plenty of money for bills and plenty left over to do basically whatever I wanted. Then at age 30 the bottom dropped out and I've been struggling ever since. I don't know if it makes it harder when you KNOW what it's like to not struggle or not - but I sure do know I'm sick of struggling and sometimes it's tempting to just let yourself go under!! If it weren't for the love and support of my family and friends, I may have done it.
The thought comes to mind that maybe if I did RELAX about it all, maybe things would get better - but then again, maybe I would drown. I keep hoping that all the work I've been doing on myself and self discovery, trying to understand the universe, will release me from this nightmare, but it hasn't happened yet. I welcome any suggestions!
I have had that same sort of thing, panic and fear that I wouldn't make it... trying to catch up and not being able to...
And I think that Melissa has a good point about what if the panic and the struggle isn't really necessary, like the person who falls into the shallow end of the pool, and thinking it's the deep end, flails around and almost drowns when all they needed to do was to just stand up..
Fear of ending up homeless or destitute does seem to be a rational fear. After all, people do end up living in shelters, under bridges, and in their cars. It does happen.
What I think that what she (Maria Nemeth) is saying here is that running from those fears instead of just facing them head on causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, and also uses up our valuable energy.
I wonder what would happen if we quit flailing around, quit paddling upstream and just said.. OK.. yes to even this.. and then found some peace. I wonder if at that point answers would come, and solutions would come, and deliverance would come. I wonder how much more money I would have if I wasn't spending so much of my energy freaking out over what I don't.. can't.. or won't ever have.
It's just a thought, and since I have decided to give up my normal reactions of resistance and fear.. I wonder what will happen now, and I wonder how hard it will be to be non resistant and embracing my fear the next time I have a zero balance and overdue bills...
Cindy, I have been thinking about this a lot. The Energy of Money is a cool book with lots of exercizes in it to help you work through angst, agony, and fear about money. I tried to do it once but got bogged down after the first couple of chapters. It would be really helpful to have someone to do it with. Maybe take one small thing each week, and work on it together (via email or whatever). I think it would make a great prosperity project, but 30 days isn't nearly enough time to really work it I don't think. Anyway, if you are interested, let me know. I do that upstream paddling all the time too...
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