When money is scarce in our lives it can become all too easy to begin envisioning a future without it as well. Our belief in lack creates a kind of inertia that seems to sweep everything along with it. The imagination starts swimming with dire images and predictions. We have to put forth energy in order to reverse this negative pull. We have to do what may seem to be a silly and pointless thing in the moment: Tell ourselves that we’re surrounded by abundance even when everything in our lives serves to remind us that we are not.
We act as if what we wanted was already in our possession. This is the magical demonstration of faith that works, energetically, to attract abundance to us.
In the process of doing this, we will run head-on into beliefs – our own personal beliefs – that are counter to our intent. There are many reasons why people may fear and distrust money or believe that it is out of their reach. It may seem that wealth, by and large, is in the hands of a small group of greedy and powerful people. But the truth is that the same universal source is open to everyone.
It may seem that money is in limited supply – a supply that is insufficient to meet the needs of the masses of people and is unevenly distributed as well. But the truth is that the inner source of abundance is not limited.
Only a material world such as this one could teach us certain lessons about our spiritual nature. For example, if we didn’t need sustenance to survive then the extremes of poverty and wealth that we see all around us would not exist. As a consequence of this, we couldn’t learn the true nature of compassion, generosity, altruism, and sacrifice. The limitations of the physical world make certain lessons possible. This is one of the reasons why we’re here – and why inner work does not involve denying the world.
Money is, in a sense, a symbol that many of us use to work through our own issues of self-worth. In essence, we enjoy as much abundance in this world as we believe that we deserve. If we feel unworthy then we will suffer lacks. This will also hold true if we fear that our own abundance will deprive someone else of it. Believing that money is “unspiritual” or “dirty” will also restrict the flow of it into our lives.
Such beliefs cut us off from the spiritual source of abundance. We may believe that the source has run dry, but this is an illusion. We have only made ourselves unavailable.