Honoring your needs
Right now I am working on a chapter about honoring your needs. These can be any needs – physical, emotional, spiritual. And while on the one hand I have made great strides in honoring my needs in all three categories and no longer feeling guilty about it, I still had a block in place when it came to a certain need: money.
Without going into too much detail, lest this post turn into a “triumph over adversity!!” daytime movie, I grew up, shall we say, in a “scarcity” mindset. And that mindset followed me well into adulthood. I always felt like other people had things, other people had opportunities, other people had things go their way, and I thought that just didn’t happen for me. Even as I learned (and am still learning, because I don’t think any of us can ever truly say we’re done learning such things) to accept various things that I have long struggled with as not bad; even as I learned to accept my body the way it was, etc., I still had some convoluted notions about wealth. Either there was the old self-esteem issue of thinking I didn’t deserve wealth; or perhaps the spiritual guilt issue of not thinking I should want it at all; or the flat-out defeated notion that even if I deserved it and and wanted it, it was never gonna happen. In short, I could think “that would be nice” or “I deserve a turn” all I wanted, but that was not going to open the path for wealth to come into my life.
My revelation, while working on this chapter and with my own internal struggles with not having a regular job and hence, a regular paycheck for some time now, was that I needed to change how I viewed money. Money is not a bad thing. It is not “evil” or a vice. It is the means to an end. I can squash the spiritual guilt with the knowledge that if I was awash in abundance, I could truly focus on “higher level” growth (see “The Manifesto” about my history with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). The physical plane is not “worse” or “less than” – it is its own perfectly valid and here-for-a-reason experience. It is not something to be suffered through on our way to a spiritual afterlife. We are not supposed to suffer. We are to overcome suffering. We are here to learn things that we couldn’t learn without taking physical form. Being in a physical body is not a punishment. It’s OK to be taken care of here in physical form. We don’t need to be poor and struggle to be holy. We are holy, by default. If you believe in creation, God created all that is, right? That means all of us are “of God”. Do you think God would create not holy things? Knowing that we’re safe and secure and will continue to have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies does not make us not holy. Now I’m not saying that materialism is holy – but things are tools that we use to achieve other things. I’m using my computer right now to communicate. You might use your car to run errands and go volunteer. A computer or a car, or possessing them, is not “unholy”. It’s simply having the tools to accomplish goals.
I’m writing this entry after having just had a wonderful meditation session, so I hope it’s not as rambly as I fear it might be. Let me know what you think in the comments. Have you struggled with accepting abundance in your life? Have you overcome this struggle? Share your stories! It is my hope that this blog can become a forum for everyone to find happiness together as a community.
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