This week, during a busy-ish few days, I impulsively made an appointment at the local spa and gave my long-neglected toes a shiny new pedicure.
For the last few months, I’ve been working my way through The Artist’s Way. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a book written for writers, or any creatives, really, who have lost sight of their creativity and seek inspiration.
Each week, I set aside a few hours to read a chapter and do the work. This week’s “work” centered on “Recovering a Sense of Abundance.”
Are you rolling your eyes? Stay with me.
For me, doing the “work” to manifest abundance involves deep reflective writing and reshaping my perspective on wealth. It means exploring the emotions that come up for me, how I define abundance, what I am doing to get there, and – most importantly – how are these thoughts and actions playing out for me? How are my thoughts on recovering abundance hindering in some way?
I often imagine abundance as a tidal wave of wealth and fortune, rising higher and higher in the distance, heading in my direction, and ready to overflow into every hard-working part of my life.
Abundance would flow in as cash in the bank, as clients on the calendar, as comfortable, or shiny things adorning my home.
Do you see abundance in this way, too? That an abundance of something incredible cascades from the glittery heavens, splashing into the hollow spaces and empty cracks where before only lack lurked?
The flaw with this thinking is that abundance would only flow our way at the end of years of working long and hard.
Currently, I work my way through holidays. I work from a mental place of urgency and perceived lack. This is not necessarily the wrong approach, working hard can be an admirable quality.
This past year, I’ve begun to shift my perspective of abundance to feel less far away. Now, I am beginning to recognize that abundance can be accessed in small doses throughout my present journey forward, and still have the same tidal wave effect.
Rather than working and waiting for the big payoff at the end of a long, loveless stage of earning, which would be realized when I have all I need, (money, a successful business, a safe home), and also all I want (freedom to travel, owning a piece of land, buying a playhouse for Tino, cuter skirts in my closet, new wedge shoes, fresh blueberries in the morning, my bicycle tires fixed, the A/C repaired in my truck, new green flowy plants to replace the ones that didn’t survive on my porch, fairy lights for inside the house . . . wait . . . . what was I saying?
Oh yes. Small doses.
I have a spreadsheet I check weekly. It includes a budget and financial goals and also lists all the things I would like to manifest in my life.
Material things, sure, but also experiences and achievements. The kinds of things that would edge me closer to feeling like I am bathing in abundance.
Sometimes, I have a timeline attached to actualizing these goals – a time in the future where my abundance awaits.
Unfortunately, trapping our life goals of abundance into a rigid time frame is like calculating the length of our journey without any understanding of the arduous road conditions. Or the inclement weather. On occasion, what I strive for manifests sooner than hoped, but more often, abundance in anything will come much later down the road.
But, back to my mid-week-get-a-pedicure-for-no-reason story.
The $20 pedicure was more about enjoying a self-delivered moment of recovering a sense of abundance than it was about the toes.
The A/C in my car still doesn’t work. I’m trying to save cash for an upcoming flight. But treating myself after the past several months of focused hustle felt really good. Especially because it was not the weekend, but a workday. Especially because I had nowhere to take my shiny toes except home.
Doesn’t it feel good to splash out a little indulgence once in a while to feel abundant? Don’t you feel better??
I’m not encouraging us to flee from our obligations and prance in the sunlight tossing out our dollar bills into the air like wedding rice.
I’m encouraging us to add more moments of abundant feeling where we can. Get your toes done. Take a nap. Buy the good cheese. See how it changes your mood. Enjoy the feeling of guilty pleasure from it.
Would this be considered micro-dosing? Micro-dosing abundance? Yes.
Try it for a week. Perhaps you spend less on something else in exchange for buying the good stuff this time. But don’t tap into the guilt, the sacrifice, or the worry. Tap into feeling the joy it brings you.
Watch how you interact with others after, moving from a point of feeling good and abundant, rather than tiresome and stressed.
It may not feel comfortable to try this. Many of us carry guilt into everything we do. But remember, these are small doses we are helping ourselves to. Small. Micro. Tiny. But enough that we can feel abundant, just for a bit.
The point I am learning and inspired to share with you is that when you think about it, if abundance is ever in the distance, that’s where it will always be: Ever. In. The distance.
Or, we can choose to pepper our days on occasion with something that ignites a true sense of abundance in our being.
Think of stacking our days on top of each other, days given a small dose of abundance. After weeks and years of our lives go by . . wouldn’t all of those stacked-up days add up to a full life? A life we will have lived in abundance?
You bet they would.
~ Christy