By Elizabeth Herman | Posted: June 13, 2019
What does it feel like to have plenty of everything? Imagine a ton of delicious, fresh food crammed into one refrigerator, a house big enough for your entire family, including distant friends and relatives; all the pets, toys, appliances, and collectibles you’ve ever wanted; and everyone in your community being fully and successfully employed, contributing greatly to the society according to their full potential.
In life, each individual human being has universal basic needs, including food, shelter, air, water, meaningful work, education, and good relationships with others. But our perspectives on all of our needs can often determine how much (or how little) of these we can see, stay aware of, and permanently bring into our lives.
In this illuminating 18 minute TEDx talk by Mona Shah Joshi, 5 simple secrets for manifesting abundance make plenty of everything accessible. Her wistful and beautiful stories about her family life teach how these values can form the context for this advice:
Creating plenty of everything
Here are the following tips from Mona for creating abundance in your life:
Feel grateful: Regardless of what level of abundance you currently enjoy, as long as you’re alive there’s something to be grateful for. Recognizing the gift of life, the air you breathe, the food you eat, the water you drink, and your ability to grow, can in itself transform your energy into openness to receiving plenty.
As Mona states in her talk, “When we look for reasons to feel grateful in life, we’ll find them, and if we look for reasons to complain, again we’ll be disappointed.”
Give generously: “Your name doesn’t have to be Oprah, or Gates, or Zuckerberg, to practice philanthropy,” says Mona. She quotes Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar as saying, “Generosity is a quality of the spirit,” rather than an indication of accumulation of financial wealth. In addition, she offers the remarkable insight that middle income households actually donate a larger percentage of their incomes to charity than the upper income earners.
The power of giving brings up an abundance of love and compassion from within us, and this type of abundance translates into a sense that there’s plenty to go around.
Be inclusive: “It’s hard to keep people out, but when we get to know someone of a different culture or tradition, an expansion happens inside of us. An expansion happens inside of our heart,” asserts Mona.
So inviting everyone to your party or program can make you see that your heart can be big enough to encompass the whole world, and you have all that you need to share and embrace others. You again enact an abundance of love and compassion, and the others who enter your life then gain a chance to feel grateful to you and share with you in return.
Lend a helping hand: After citing statistics about the correlation between happiness and volunteer work, Mona observes, “It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re dishing out macaroni and cheese at a homeless shelter. Every act of kindness makes you feel like you’ve got something to contribute in this world.” The shift you make from worrying about your own life to focusing on how you can make a difference for others can really transform your mindset towards abundance. “You feel you’re a part of something bigger than yourself,” she says.
Meditation: In her talk, Mona recounts that a Harvard Study in 2011 ran MRI tests on brains of practicing meditators compared to non-meditators. The research results “found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.”
Understanding the abundance that’s available to us, and how to access it, can often mystify and confound our thinking, especially if we’ve created the mental habit of paying attention to what we lack. By meditating regularly, you can clear away old thinking habits and start to manifest what you desire much more easily. According to Mona, meditation “allows you to plug in to that abundant source of energy inside.”
By using these 5 tips for abundance, you can develop a true sense of plenty that lasts, and goes beyond your finances. As stated in Mona’s introduction, a study of millionaires showed that those with an average of $78 million dollars in assets still felt financially insecure! This must be difficult to imagine for the 99% of us whose bank accounts haven’t come close to that level.
But by counting our blessings, and following the 5 steps of gratitude, generosity, inclusivity, helpfulness, and meditation, we can create confidence that we really have been given plenty. Whether we find ourselves replete with material objects, money, health, creativity, or potential for growth, we can feel abundant in every area of our lives! In fact, for some of us, the challenge will be to reduce what we have, and simplify our lives, in order to appreciate just how abundant we really are.
To learn more about how meditation can help you bring abundance into your life, check out the Art of Living Happiness Program and Sahaj Samadhi meditation courses near you!
By Elizabeth Herman - PhD in English, with concentrations in Rhetoric and Composition, and Literature, she offers writing support to clients, teaches locally, lives in Boone, NC, and volunteers for a better world.
