The Nature of Wealth June 17, 2010

The Nature of Wealth  40×40 Acrylic on Canvas

The concept of wealth, like happiness, will probably evoke as many different definitions from people as the number of people you ask.   Being a word that, in many cases, is only used to refer to money or ownership of things that can be exchanged or valued monetarily, it really is unfortunate that most of us have whittled it’s meaning in our own lives to such a limited scope.  I feel safe in assuming that I have been like many other people in not only defining wealth in these terms, but I’ve spent huge amounts of mental and physical energy trying to acquire an amount that I felt I needed to be happy.  If every thought that I have ever had about the lack of money could actually be converted to a dollar, I would be a wealthy woman many times over!  I have expended much of my energy in the past either contemplating how to make money, or where to get it; worrying about not having enough, or actually experiencing the sheer terror of some imagined bleak future where I did not have  enough money to live. 

But what is wealth really?  One of my favorite definitions that was listed when I looked it up was as follows:

Wealth n. an abundance or profusion of anything

Perhaps if we thought of wealth in these terms, it would be more evident that there are many ways in which we can focus on wealth and feel ourselves to be the truly abundant beings that we are.  For instance, I really appreciate my health–but if someone were to ask me if I were wealthy, my abundance of health might not be the thing that immediately comes to the forefront of my mind.  But ask any person that has been seriously ill, and they will tell you that health is their most prized possession and their most valuable treasure.

I once had dinner with a good friend that I had not seen in some time, and upon catching one another up on the events of our lives, she commented that I seemed happy.  I said that, indeed, I was happy; but her following statement was what struck me…she began describing my life to me from her vantage point:  I was happily married to a wonderful man, I was doing something that I loved, I had two amazing children that were so talented and thriving that it overjoyed me just to think about them, and on and on she went.  I could not deny that everything she said was accurate–she was not exaggerating or painting some ridiculously romantic picture–yet, seeing my life as she told it, from an outside point of view, I realized that I did not experience the abundance of it to the level that she was describing, and I had to ask myself ‘why?’. 

I thought about this for several days and came to a very simple conclusion: though I give inordinate amounts of energy and time to not only thinking about the shortages in my life, but actually experiencing these shortages in my body through emotions such as overwhelment, frustration, fear, sadness–though I do this, I do not give the same amount of energy and time to experiencing and thinking about the abundance in my life.   Something about our conditioned brains focuses on the problem, but rarely the areas where  no problems exist–only realized desires.

So, I began a practice.  Daily, if possible, I would write down all the wonderful things about my life I could find and spend time thinking about them, feeling them, experiencing them in my body through my emotions of well-being, contentment, enthusiasm, and yes, happiness.  We are our thoughts, there is no denying it.  After a short period of time, I began to see a change.  I was less likely to see shortage when I had practiced seeing the abundance, and my life got richer in every aspect.  The nature of wealth has nothing to do with money, because if all I can see is shortage, it doesn’t matter how much money I acquire….I still will only see what I don’t have. 

The painting above was born out of this mind-set.  The funny thing about learning to see the abundance in your life (and if you’re breathing, you’re abundant) is that the more you look for it, the more you see.  It’s like growing new eyes, or finding new muscles you didn’t know you had.  The whole world is simply a projection (a mirror image) of my mind–and if what I see is nothing but an unending field of abundant flowers for me to pick, then so it is.  If the world in my mind is beautiful and plentiful, the world I experience has to mirror that.  ‘As a man thinketh, so is he.’  This is truly good news!

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