Worrying about things that are outside my circle of control.

The need to control.

Self-doubt and the need for approval.

Filling my time with things that do not fulfill me.

Cleaning up other people’s messes.

Sadness for events that took place long ago and that I cannot alter.

The constant need for approval and worrying about what other people think.

Limiting beliefs.

Fears that hold me back from expressing my true self.

Anger, frustration, and regret.

Criticisms, hurtful behavior, and the tendency to squelch others.

The vision of how I think my children should be and my need to control their behavior to satisfy me.

Familial expectations and restrictions.

Blaming others for my experience.

Email list subscriptions, volunteer responsibilities, burdens, duties, obligations, and other ways of filling my time needlessly.

…and Distractions from my authentic self.

Letting go = open space = creativity = opportunity for new experiences. 

With best wishes for an abundant and prosperous New Year to all.

We are trained as a culture to believe it’s all about “getting” it (whatever the “it” is.) We’re told:  Focus on the goal!  Go for it!  What no one talks about is that it’s actually harder to sustain the achievement than it is to achieve it initially.

We say, “I am going to lose 20 lbs.”  We don’t say, “I am going to change my eating and exercising habits so that I learn how to control my eating and be more active so that I maintain my ideal weight throughout my life.”  We say, “I want to get married.”  We don’t say, “I am going to practice being loving and being in relationship and letting go of control so that I can sustain a long-lasting, loving marital relationship.”

So we set our sites on this goal, whatever it is. And we’re doing pretty well – losing the weight, meeting someone we really like, getting adequate rest…  Then one day, we say, “Ok!  I got it!  I got what I want!  I am my ideal weight!  I got the guy! I feel great!”    And we think we’ve got it handled, so we are less vigilant.  We think, “I’m doing great, so… it’s OK to eat this one piece of chocolate cake; it was just one argument; it’s OK to stay up late this one time” and suddenly we’re stepping on the scale and not liking what we see, or getting into more arguments with the person, or feeling tired again, and saying, “Oh, here we go again!” It’s an old familiar feeling, and somehow, that feels so comfortable.  Except we know it’s not what we want, but now we feel helpless and a failure.

It’s all a practice.  No one is perfect all of the time.  We are led to believe that we can be perfect because we read about people who woke up one day and “decided” to make it all different and from then on out it was!  Well, yeah, maybe that can happen.  But just like all the fairy tales that claim that they live happily ever after, they’re not telling us the whole story.  It’s the equivalent of winning the lottery.  Just winning the lottery doesn’t help people.  It’s what you do with the winnings that matters.

I began my own abundance and prosperity journey 23 years ago when I arrived in NYC fresh faced from college, with high aspirations and not a clue as to how to achieve them.

I was born in a city but raised by Wolves on a sheep farm in western PA.  We moved to the farm when I was 6 years old, and, after my parents divorced, my mother, my two sisters and I ran the farm.  We supported ourselves by creating products from the available resources – selling lamb meat, spinning wool, creating sheepskin coats and many other diverse items. It was not a financially successful endeavor; by the time that I was an adult, my mother had declared bankruptcy and sold the farm.  On the other hand I had learned entrepreneurial skills as a method of survival, and was able to see how money could be created from our skills and efforts.

Growing up, I was told to be responsible with money but never taught how to actually do that.  I learned from my engineer father that a father’s job was to provide for the family, despite any struggles, but I was not allowed to know what his salary was or how exactly he managed to pay the bills.  Money was shrouded in secrecy and confusion and I carried that into my adult life by mostly ignoring it.

Because I grew up not understanding money, I wasn’t particularly motivated by it, which gave me freedom to live sparsely and creatively as an adult.  I seemed to be able to create just enough of it to get to do whatever I wanted once I was living an independent lifestyle.

My Aunt Edith, who was a minister and an important influence in my life, always said that for the first 10 years out of college, “it’s not what you earn, it’s what you learn.”  So I focused on learning new skills and finding myself as a productive, creative adult.  I followed a zigzagging career path that only made sense in retrospect.  And at just about that 10-year mark, I started my own company, which flourished in time, especially after I became partners with my new husband.

After the birth of our first baby, my husband and I looked for a spiritual home and found it in a Unitarian Universalist congregation on the Upper West Side.  While a wonderful community of people, the church was struggling financially.  Over time I became the chair of the Finance Committee.  By this time I had gathered my own evidence that prosperity was much more than just the accurate accounting of an accumulation of money.  It quickly became clear to me once I understood the inner workings of the church that it was a scarcity mentality that was driving the deficit, not the fact that we didn’t have generous members.  As a first step in helping to guide the church out of this scarcity mentality, I presented a sermon called “Spiritual Abundance.”  This sermon then became a workshop that I presented at the church.  From there I continued to develop the material around the workshop until it became a 3-day affair, and is now manifested as this blog and website.

The confluence of so many factors:  growing up poor but educated; having a dynamic speaking personality; moving to a city like New York; meeting and marrying my fiscally responsible and brilliant husband; joining my wonderful but financially struggling church; and attending many different spiritual and transformational trainings all contributed towards my personal abundance and prosperity journey.

The purpose of my workshop and blog is to teach people to live abundantly and manifest their desires with precision and elegance.  The results that everyone – including myself – have created as a result of applying these practical principles of prosperity never ceases to amaze me.  It’s simple yet very powerful.  I hope you will join me.