I’ve been pulling back new layers of the onion in my journey that involve revealing how much I tend to operate from a scarcity mindset. Not physically. For some, meeting physical needs may consume the bulk of anxiety’s energy. For myself, I don’t tend to worry about practical concrete details. It’s not where my brain fixates. But when it comes to relationships, emotional needs, margin, and attachment bids, my gut reaction is to assume there is not enough to go around. That thought is deeply engrained in the story I tell myself about who I am and who the people are around me and what they have to offer.

I learned this thinking early. When I was two, I had twin brothers join the family. I went from having the sole, undivided attention of my parents, to being third string. I’m not ragging on my parents. I’m not sure how they did it. I only have two kids and some days I feel run ragged and it seems impossible to face all the demanding needs around me. It’s just a statement of the reality of what happened. But the story that my little two-year-old self internalized was that there wasn’t enough to go around. I needed to give more than I took. The line of kids in our home got longer. We were all clothed and fed and schooled in nearly immaculate order. But at times it felt like attention went to the person in crisis. And when there are eleven people in the house, someone inevitably was always in crisis. So if I wasn’t desperately falling apart, then I didn’t get the attachment attention that I wanted. And I was too polite and aware of the whole house of needs to want to be a burden and insist on what I needed.

I’m ten years into therapy now, give or take a few breaks. But what I’m still discovering is that this scarcity mindset is still alive and well and affecting my current relationships. There have been afternoons when I’m having a fairly good day. I’m managing my world—at least well enough. I haven’t yelled at my children. I have dinner simmering on the stove. But then my husband walks in the door from work and a switch flips in my brain. Suddenly I’m moody and sullen, grumpy and curt. My husband wasn’t mean. He didn’t do anything wrong. So what in the world happened?

That highly engrained two-year-old with her scarcity mindset took over. She’s scared. She wants attachment from her husband, and she’s afraid if she’s okay and happy when he walks in the door that’ll he’ll think, “Danielle’s fine. She doesn’t need anything from me.” She’s afraid she’ll be ignored or overlooked, or that he won’t step in to help with the parenting and needs of the family. So she puts up a stink to make sure she’s seen and heard. She wants attachment, so she conjures up a crisis.

It always backfires.

A Different Way

One of the themes of The Divine Exchange course I took with Cynthia Bourgeault this past summer was one of abundance. It was one of the top two things I seem to be carrying away from the course in my core. I keep pulling it out to chew on it and hopefully digest it further.

She describes abundance as a reality that already exists, like an invisible stream that always flows. That flow is God, the Divine Essence, and the outpouring of its love. And it’s always there. It exists in the very DNA of each of our beings. Everpresent. Overflowing. Abundant.

Bourgeault points out that when Jesus talks about the lilies and the sparrows, he sees them as real, not an illusion. She states, “It’s not the world itself that is untrustworthy (like Buddhists and stoics tend to view it), but rather that the world is abundant and provident beyond belief. The beauty, the life-force of it is a direct expression of the heart of God. The world is not like the shadows of Plato’s cave where we hang out in the dark until released from our bodies to heaven. Right here, God is making God’s heart manifest. And I’m part of it. And if you touch one single piece of it, you touch the whole thing” (Divine Exchange transcript).

Wait, you say. that’s not how life feels! I know. Most days I tend to agree. That’s not how it feels. But that doesn’t change the reality that it’s there. It’s merely that we are out of alignment with it. We don’t sense it. Even still, it’s there, waiting for us to sink into at any moment, if we can only align our consciousness in a way that can perceive.

How would my life and relationships change if I fully believed and embodied this?

That is the question that haunts me. I hold the question, hoping that someday I’ll live into the answer.

As part of the course, Bourgeault taught practices that embodied some of these teachings. One was a Buddhist version of Tonglen breathing. This type of breathing exercise has multiple layers, but I was captured by just the second one. At the first level, you breathe, just working to be fully present and notice the switching of your breath from the inhale to the exhale and from the exhale to the inhale. At the second level, when you breath in, you breathe in abundance. When you breath out, you breathe out blessing.

Breathe in abundance.

Because it’s right there. I can remember this by turning to an intentional breath. My family moved in the last few months. I’ve channeled way too much stress through my body during the transition. But there were handfuls of moments when I remembered to breathe. I was driving across town in the car with another load of stuff, juggling school pick-ups and moving logistics and long lists of to-dos and deadlines in my brain. The stress was overwhelming. But then, for a moment, I remembered to breathe. Abundance. Breathe it in. It’s right there, waiting for me to claim. So do it. Breathe it in. Divine Essence, all around me. Believe. Slow. Move my body in an act of faith. Lungs expand. Fill with abundance. Breathe out blessing. There’s enough to go around for all of us. Even in the midst of the moving stress.

It’s not a magic cure. Let me be clear that I’m not advocating for any kind of practical or emotional prosperity gospel. I still went back to picking up kids and moving boxes and collapsing into bed with a headache at night. The stress of life didn’t go away. But for one moment (or a scattering of them), I connected to something more. I wanted to believe that abundance is true. I still do. I want it to transform my being. I want to treat the people around me with more care and compassion, something I believe will come if I truly believe there is enough for us all, that we aren’t all fighting over the scraps.

Letting Go of Unhelpful Perspectives

If religious culture has been a part of your story, this type of thinking may feel counterintuitive to you. Sometimes it does to me. I’ve had to unlearn unhelpful versions of theology that taught me that abundance has to be mediated: God won’t bestow his abundance until his dues are paid. Yes God is good, but he’s so good he can’t be around you with your fallen sin until someone mitigates a payment to appease his wrath.

Well, that’s not conducive to channeling abundance.

Some people call that atonement theology, and it’s a very pagan way of viewing God. The early church fathers labeled it heretical. The truth is that God is love—abundant overflowing love. Divine love has always loved me. Always loved you. Period. I firmly believe that. I believe God can love anyone and forgive anyone anytime he wants. So the cross wasn’t a pagan sacrifice of appeasement; it was already-abundant-love made visible in a way we could finally see and understand in a tactile way. The cross is abundance made manifest. It is God saying, “Welcome to what has always been. You couldn’t see it before, but now I’ll show you. Maybe now you can believe how much you’re loved.”

Then there are theologies that draw lines about who is in and who is out. Who is chosen, who is not. Stipulations for all the hoops you have to jump through before you can access the Divine love. More and more I’m letting those fall away. Don’t spend much energy trying to dissect who’s “right” and who’s “wrong.” Rightness and wrongness are not the point. Divine Love is the point. Besides, I’m not in charge anyways. I can’t change reality, whatever it is. It’s my job to trust the Divine Love. The rest is mystery and wonder. Trust the mystery. Lean back and find you are held.

The point of sensing abundance will never really be external. It may bear external fruit in the way I treat myself or others. It may help me be less reactive. But it won’t change external facts. It won’t make disease or poverty or complicated parenting go away. But it can ground us in knowing the truth of who we are and who we belong to on a level so deep within our consciousness that we may come to find the external complexities of life have less impact on our wellbeing. They might hold less sway.

Like Jesus said, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house; and yet it did not fall, for its foundation had been built on the rock.”

What if the task of “building” doesn’t have anything to do with external behaviors or theologies or hoops to jump through? What if it has everything to do with deepening our consciousness into the reality of abundance. What if the rock is Divine Love? What if you already have what you need because Divine Love is pervasive and abundant and all around us? What if?

There are lots of days I’m still arguing with my two-year-old self who insists she only gets the scraps and has to fight others for what she needs. But I also hold hope that she’s learning; that I can settle her into a different way. That there will be a day when she can finish laying that misperception down and join me fully in the stream of abundance. Till then, we keep reaching and practicing and wondering.

What if?

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Shalom.