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(Happy Monday! Today’s post comes from Elizabeth Husserl R. She’s joining Know Abundance as our Money Expert. You can read her bio here and visit her website at Inner Economics. Thanks for joining us Elizabeth! We look forward to your monthly insights on this favorite fundraiser topic.)

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As a fundraiser have you ever felt perplexed by the complexities of economics and money?

Or been boggled by the intricacy of dealing with people who have enough money to sustain a fulfilling lifestyle, but never quite seem fulfilled?

I have…and for the last ten years I have been birthing a perspective that I have come to call Inner Economics to counteract the definition of economics that I was taught in high school which was “economics is the allocation of scarce resources.”

This was a definition that only gave way to a mentality of scarcity. Yet I inherently knew that there was indeed enough to go around.

All aspects of life (including fundraising) contain cycles of birth and death, recession and development, depression and growth. I knew that if all these life cycles were integrated into a healthier vision of economics and money, we would one day experience sustainability from within.

Inner Economics is a process of becoming aware of how economics and your relationship to money play out in your life. It is a new envisioning of Economics that finds its roots in the old – reclaiming the essence of the word “Economics” by going back to its Greek root: oikos-nomos (oiko + nemein) which really means”management of the household.”

If we can learn better how to manage our inner resources, we can better inhabit our inner home. We can embody a knowing of sustainability or a knowing of abundance that keeps us centered in our core. This is true stability.

In the following months my desire is to help you all connect to a healthier relationship to sustainability, to money and in essence to abundance. To really know abundance means not just “knowing” what abundance is in our mind, but to actually feel it and embody it in our hearts, bodies and souls. This requires trust. And we need to “touch” to trust.

So I will invite all of you to take one first step in “touching” abundance by answering the following question and digging deep:

• What sustains you in life? Really….what gives you sustenance, what makes you feel most alive?
Write out a list of your answers, letting it be different from a list of what you are grateful for.

Don’t be afraid if you don’t quite know. That is a natural step in peeling back a layer. Staying in the unknown is a skill and it is sometimes better to just ask the question than to know the answer.

Trust that by opening a process of knowing yourself you open a door to knowing abundance. The more you embody this, the more abundance and sustainability will come from within. And that my friends, is a radical revolution!

Happy questioning! And please feel free to comment on this experience or email me at ehusserl (at) innereconomics (dot) com. May your courage and questions inspire all of us!

Warmly,
Elizabeth

Substitute, “Economics as scarcity management” with “Economics as management of the household.”

Recession = the act of withdrawing or going back. Comes from the Latin word re + ceder which means moving back from a point, to rest, to recoup, to gain perspective.

Recession has a quality of gestation and waiting, waiting for the waters to recede before making the next move, practicing patience and embracing the cyclical nature of time.

Let this economic recession work for you- and go within….

- Elizabeth Husserl R.

Happy Monday!

Are you under pressure to get things done?

Do you feel stressed about meeting all of your deadlines on time? Are you juggling multiple priorities and afraid you might drop one of the balls?

I was rushing around last week in this sort of mindset, thinking that if I just moved faster I would have more time and get ahead of the tension and stress I was feeling.

Then I almost ran over a snake with my car and this made me stop.

I had pulled off into a residential neighborhood – cutting across town to get around freeway traffic. I was speeding along, thinking about all of the things I needed to get done in the next hour when I turned a corner and there in the middle of the street, coiled up with its head waving in the air was a snake.

Because I was driving impatiently and thinking ahead to what I need to do – my reaction was slow. I barely had time to maneuver my wheels to miss flattening the snake with my tires.

Sure, a 25 inch snake is not something you expect to see miles from any park in a concrete-and-asphalt neighborhood in downtown Oakland. I’m sure I could have made excuses for accidentally killing this random snake in a city street.

But the reality was that I was in rush mode and distracted – not caring much about where I was – just focused on where I was going.

The slow-moving snake was an instant reminder of how our rushing is more often harmful than helpful.

What are we rushing for? A few extra minutes? And what gets run over or killed in the process? Is the cost of our rushing worth the effects on our bodies, minds, health and relationships?

What matters more – our deadlines or being conscious and considerate of life?

Substitute, “Rushing” with “Slowing Down.”

“Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feeling groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feeling groovy

Hello lamppost, what’cha knowing
I’ve come to watch your flowers growin’
Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me?
Doo-it in doo doo, feeling groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feeling groovy

I got no deeds to do
No promises to keep
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me
Life I love you, all is groovy”

- The 59th Street Bridge Song (listen here), Feelin’ Groovy by Simon and Garfunkel

Happy Monday!

I used to think that I had to be something for my life to have meaning.

I used to think that I had to do something to earn my life.

Then I woke up to the fact that I am alive.

Sure, this sounds obvious, but I was so distracted by all my striving to be and to do that I totally overlooked this elementary truth.

Being alive is a new revelation every day.

That’s where the Know Abundance mantra, “Everything I need, I already have” comes from.

Our scarcity beliefs are most prevalent at this fundamental level of our relationship with life. Why is being alive not enough?

We constantly judge ourselves and each other based on standards (created by ?) that say we need to do more, we need to be more, than what we are.

I notice this underlying belief all the time in the women’s movement as we try to make a case for why women and girls should have equality with men. We say, “Invest in women and girls because it is better for society, for democracy, for the family, for the economy, for a future without extremism and violence…”

This might be true – in fact a lot of studies have been done to show that “investments in women yield large social and economic returns.”

But while this recognition of women and girls as vital and important is welcomed after years of marginalization, there is a subtle message that is also carried: we are not valued for being alive, only for what we can produce.

Why are the elderly and people with disabilities often seen and treated as “less than?”

A friend said to me last week, “I always thought the world would be better without me.”

In our striving to be something and to do something – we overlook the fact that each and every one of us is a unique expression of life. This is a given. We don’t have to do or to be anything.

We make up those requirements. That’s our story – added on after our birth. We tell each other and ourselves how we should look and behave, what kind of jobs we should have, how much money we should make and how things should be in our lives.

This week, let being alive be enough.

Substitute, “If only I was different” with “Being alive is enough.”

“And God saw every thing that s/he had made, and behold, it was very good.” – Genesis 1:31

Or for the atheists,”The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.” – Richard Dawkins

(Happy Monday! Today’s post is from Sande Smith, our communications expert.)

Those of us engaged in social change must ask ourselves, how do we help others see the new world we are trying to create?

It’s easy to get stuck in telling stories of what’s wrong. Yet, while telling stories that show the problem is very important because it helps to wake us up, limiting ourselves to telling those stories won’t get us where we need to be.

That’s why we say, you have to be the change you want to see in the world. . . being the change provides living examples that others can see and then replicate. Even better, be the change and tell the story of how you got there.

I was reminded of the transformative power of being and telling different stories when I saw my dear friend’s new book, Prickly Cactus: Finding Sacred Meaning in Chronic Illness.

I met Concha 9 years ago, when we were taking a writing workshop together. We were both writing non-fiction narratives – mine described my experience with my mother as Alzheimer’s took her memory. Concha’s was called Dancing Still and depicted her battle with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).

Here was a woman whose life had been a challenge from the time she and her family emigrated from Mexico. She’d struggled with a new language and culture, battled racism, and worked tirelessly to become an advocate for other immigrant families and children seeking fair and equitable access to education. Plus she was a high-performing professor of anthropology and education. Yet, the disease threatened to take it all away. There were times when she was unable to get out of bed because of the insidious and painful toll that that lupus was taking on her body.

Concha and I would meet and share our writing with one another, pointing out places that didn’t work well in the texts and encouraging each other to keep going. I learned so much from watching Concha as she worked on her book. She refused to give up! She’d submit the book to publishers, and get rejected. She’d consult with other writing professionals, and get advice on how to change it.

She’d rewrite the book, finally rewriting the whole thing at least 3 times, and sections of it many more times. Throughout the process, which took at least 10 years, she continued to transform the pain and discouragement — of the illness and the rejections — until she published Prickly Cactus, a beautiful, life-affirming narrative, this year.

In Prickly Cactus, she describes learning how to turn chronic illness into a doorway for achieving wisdom and building community. She talks about the incredible pain that racked her body, finding a way to create a supportive and respectful medical community, and seeking and finding spiritual guidance. She talks about the challenges of day-to-day living which included redesigning her work habits and life so that she could still earn a living. She describes learning how to rest – for the first time in her life! And she tells a lovely story of dating again, and creating a loving, long-term relationship.

Both the process of watching Concha live the lessons gained as she navigated this journey of chronic illness and reading her book, in its newest form, gives me a sense of joy and hope. Her illness was not just an end, but a beginning.

She says, “We need to speak about illness, about potential for healing, and about building supportive communities around us to transform our lives.” Her narrative of discovery and transformation helps to remove the fear of disease by drawing a map for living with joy, engagement and significance, no matter what.

Substitute “I can’t do the things I used to” with “No hay mal por cual bien no venga. (There’s no bad thing from which something good won’t come of it.) Concha’s mom

”When we share our stories, we change our collective stories. The world is an expression of our collective narrative. . . At this moment, we are poised to change our collective narrative . . .”

Deepak Chopra, The Happiness Prescription