The Neverending Fountain of Abundance
Spending from scarcity and grasping are messages from your money
When scarcity is your daily state of being, spending money is often followed by waves of guilt, and decisions are made from a state of subtle or not-so-subtle angst.
When scarcity is our daily state, it creates a sort of grasping stinginess, an aura of “the world is trying to cheat me - I have to scrabble around and get the very best deal.”
If I pay this, I can’t pay that. If I buy this course, what if it doesn’t “work.”? What if I finally buy clothes, and then a tire blows out?
Buying anything even a little bit expensive requires you to price shop ten different stores, spending (wasting?) your precious life doing whatever you can to save 10% when if you took that time and created something with it, you’d more than make up that discount and then some. God forbid you purchase something and see it go on sale the next day! Oh, the horror!
Your/my first question is, how much?
Your/my next step is to look for a discount.
Then comes angling from the Mind - well, can I get a 2 for 1? If I buy this can I get a discount on that? What if I pay in cash?
Ugh, it’s just so exhausting!
We’re trained for this kind of mental contortion from a young age. Everyone’s waiting for Black Friday or adding ten apps to their phone to shop for deals or to get store discounts.
What’s at the root of this nonsense?
Fear.
Even if you didn’t have money problems growing up, you’ve been permeated with this fear. I should say if you’re American because I don’t know about other parts of the world.
We’re afraid to pay a dollar too much because we’re really poor or on a very tight budget with little room for error, or we imagine we’re poor and need a deal, or we’re entitled af and think we shouldn’t ever have to pay full price.
This isn’t too horrible, I guess, until it comes to artists and makers and service providers whose goods aren’t made someplace by industrial machines but by their own hands. Or when services are provided after years of study and practice to master skills that then look deceptively easy.
Then the discount attitude, scarcity scrounging, comes across as thoughtless, obnoxious, and terribly invalidating.
I got a harsh lesson on this the first time I went to Mexico. As a kid, I spent lots of weekends cruising flea markets with my grandfather, who really modeled the art of negotiation and taught me the same. I was ten years old, haggling over a small spoon with the State of Texas on the end of it, a dusty old shadowbox, a miniature tea set, or an old wallet. Come to think of it; I was kind of a weird kid buying that stuff!
Anyway, in Mexico, no one with me wanted to haggle, so I did it. Whatever the price was, I offered half or even less, and off we’d go until a price was set and the item purchased.
I was so proud of myself! I was getting my family good deals on all kinds of touristy stuffs!
Until I went through the process with a seller over a wooden carved Mary of Guadalupe statue for my daughter. We were going back and forth, and a man came up and said, with real pain in his voice, how tourists come and haggle them so far down they can barely pay the artists, pay their bills, make a living, etc.
It was like he poured an entire bucket of icy-cold capitalist water over my head.
I had never once in my life considered what the cost of the making was for the person on the other end. I felt sick to my stomach, and my hands started to sweat. I paid the $50 or whatever it was and slunk out of the booth.
I have never been the same since.
I do not look for discounts from makers or service providers. I don’t try to piecemeal their services like the menu at Taco Bell. If I have a payment plan, I make damn sure I fulfill it. I have offered trades when I felt I could offer the equivalent or a little more than what I’d be getting in return. I will ask for a payment plan if I need it and I fully expect to pay a little more for that service.
I can’t tell you how many artisans I know who make gorgeous items and are so hurt by being hassled over their prices that they stop offering them to the world. This is heartbreaking to me, and also - I wish they’d unwind all that and challenge themselves to grow into demanding the right amount of exchange.
We teach people how to treat us. We also teach people how to pay us.
The hassle over pricing is our cultural nonsense, our upbringing, AND messages from our money that these situations are dysfunctional and need healing.
All this said, in no way means I’m free of this, which is why you’re getting this post!
I recently caught this subtle stomach tension happening every time I paid for something for myself over the last year. I caught myself wasting enormous amounts of time looking for cheaper Blue Buffalo grain-free cat food or a deal on mealworms for the Eastern Bluebirds that live in my yard.
Every. Single. Thing. I was wasting hours on it searching for the cheapest price. Hours I could have been writing, making podcast episodes, marketing my work - ya know - shit that actually makes me money. FFS.
Again, what’s at the root of this nonsense?
Fear.
Fear that if I didn’t save, I’d be in trouble when the next emergency arose. Fear that the money I’ve been rapidly making more and more of is a freak accident and will disappear in a poof tomorrow, and I’ll be fucked because I paid $2 more a bag for the damn cat food. Even worse, a few weeks ago, I indulged in a crystal-buying extravaganza, and the guilt was so LOUD I finally caught it.
When my family got any extra or unexpected money in my childhood, here came the spending sprees. Buying “rich people’s food,” buying things quickly both needed and not needed until, within what felt like hours, it was all gone again.
None of us had the capacity to hold wealth - our bodies’ energies jangled like the extra change in our pockets until we spent it all and returned to the silence of empty-pocket poverty.
Another area of conditioned response. It’s everywhere y’all, and when you start unwinding all your knee-jerk reactions with money, it will take you on a wild ride.
What I asked about this in meditation last year, I created my money course, Train Your Body to Wealth. When I asked this week because it was all up in my face again, BE’N The Gang showed me this scene: a small stone fountain and me. I scooped water up, and it refilled itself. I scooped more and more water came. I tipped it over, and it continued to flow. I didn’t need a big fountain. I didn’t need a cistern to stockpile water. No matter how much I took, more was/is right behind it.
The neverending fountain of abundance. It’s real. Only we can divert the flow or pinch off the hose by choosing to resonate with the dominant culture, staying in victim-energy over childhood patterns, choosing to see all those things and not make a new choice, not talking back to the horrid voices in our head, etc.
This neverending fountain of abundance represents the resonant field of energy all around us. We are in resonance with wealth, or we are not. We are either spending from scarcity or from more than enoughness.
How do you know where you are on this continuum? Spending money slowly and mindfully will tell you great volumes of information about how in or out of resonance you are with the neverending fountain of abundance. With that information, you can start raising your awareness about how your whole energy system functions regarding money and the world of finance.