There’s just something about seeing someone’s eyes and having the chance to hear a laugh that trumps any Facebook or Twitter update.

A friend gave me a book recently that I love. The message is simple and yet profound.

The author, Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 33. She spent months immobilized by depression, unable to stop thinking about how the disease would ruin her life and dreams. She became addicted to her meds and self-absorbed in her problems.

She had a friend and spiritual adviser, Mbali Creazzo who told her that she needed to stop thinking about herself. “If you spend all of your time and energy focusing on your pain, you’re feeding the disease. You’re making it worse by putting all of your attention there.”

She encouraged Cami to spend some time focused on others – and to do this by giving away 29 gifts in 29 days. But Cami insisted that she needed to focus all her attention on her own healing, she was worried that focusing on others would sap energy she needed for herself.

Mbali replied, “Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but through our interactions with other people. By giving, you are focusing on what you have to offer others, inviting more abundance into your life. Giving of any kind is taking a positive action that begins the process of change. It will shift your energy for life.“

And it did! You can read Cami’s inspiring story in her book: 29 Gifts – How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life. Or watch a video of her on the Today Show as she describes how the simple act of giving transformed everything.

Now, 29 Gifts is a global giving movement with nearly ten thousand members in 42 countries. I joined today. My first gift was $5 to the man who sings love songs at the train station entrance in the evenings. His music is always a gift to me after a long day of work – a reminder of the joy of giving and sharing without expecting anything back.

What do you have to give?

I was busy all weekend hanging art and covering my windows with black trashbags and black curtains for the next Frisbie St. Art Show: Illuminating Shadows – Art Show in the Dark.

So today’s post is fairly short. I’m excited about a new book that just came out by Kathy LeMay called The Generosity Plan.

I heard Kathy speak about the book on Friday and was inspired by her vision of a world transformed by everyone, “Doing what they can, with what they have, where they are. (This is a Teddy Roosevelt quote Kathy used to sum up the heart of her book.)

Kathy says, “There’s no single dollar amount, no particular activity or cause that is better than another, no income level or demographic that matters to generosity, no set variable that is best for giving one’s self to another in time of need.

It’s about finding your passion, envisioning a better world, and putting yourself on the path to making that vision become a reality.”

The Generosity Plan can help us all learn how to better share our “time, treasure and talent” to improve our communities and the world.

I want to thank you for reading our Know Abundance posts this year.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the mix of topics and the new voices we’ve added the past few months.

Your feedback is always welcome. Let us know what you like and don’t like and if there are things you want us to talk more about in 2010.

This blog was started as the economy in the U.S. was tanking and recovery wasn’t in sight. Even then, the world around us was full of abundance. But our focus was on scarcity and lack, panic and fear as we faced the unknown.

We are being asked by necessity to create new systems and new ways of being with each other and living life on this planet.

How do we untie ourselves from an economic model based on endless consumption with scarcity as a key motivator? We realize that everything we need, we already have.

Start with yourself. Give thanks for what you do have. Let that be enough.

As the memories of our recent Thanksgiving gatherings linger behind us, I find it a perfect time to reflect on the flip side of the “act of giving thanks” which is “knowing how to receive.”

In our holiday season we usually get the opportunity to practice the art of giving and to experience its abundant benefits – giving promotes a sense of inner and outer generosity, a sense of peace and well being, and is an act of selflessness which benefits those around you.

Yet, just as important is the act of receiving. Receiving opens our hearts, it allows us to feel loved and plants essential seeds of feeling supported and held within our community and circle of friends. Without receiving there is no channel in which to give, and the cycle of abundance and flow is broken.

As Bernard Lietaer would describe in his Yin/Yang economy, polarities such as giving and receiving inherently exist within the other, and can not flourish if there is the absence of one.

This holiday season allow yourself time to reflect on how well you know how to “receive.” Oftentimes receiving can make us uncomfortable. We become the center of attention, we may have childhood defense mechanisms that block the entry of this particular energy flow, or we want to receive love and acceptance so dearly that we are not really sure how.

Use the practices of receiving in your organization to help guide you on how to receive in your daily life. (Sometimes it is easier to receive when it is for someone else!) Some of these may include:

• Know how to let “resources” come in. Reflect on how you feel when when a grant or donation comes in. Your heart may get warm and a smile may come to your face. Take the time to let both the monetary resources and emotional resources come in. This deepens our felt sense experience of being supported and sustained by those around us.

• Allow the energy you received to flow and be expressed through you. Try to find your unique way of giving thanks in return. It may be through a card or something different this year such as a picture, a collage or a drawing. The more you allow the embodiment of your act of receiving to be an expression of “you”, the more the act of receiving nourishes you from within.

• Allow there to be times where you just receive. Just as important as the suggestion above, allow times in your life when you receive, where you do not have to give anything back immediately, but you can rest, relax and “be” in the state of receiving. Here you can explore what you like about receiving, what may make you uncomfortable about it and what effects it has for you.

The more you intentionally know yourself in the act of receiving the more you can truly know abundance, from within.

Happy Holidays!

He was born without arms or legs. And yet his life is full of abundance. So often we live our lives thinking, “If only I had x,y, & z, I would be happy.”

Can we be happy with where we are and with what we have?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MslbhDZoniY

The most pernicious myth of our existence is that there is something outside of ourselves that we need.

The most powerful freedom that knowing abundance gives us is this: the freedom from seeking external fulfillment.

What does this mean? Let’s break it down.

Name something you would like to do – to be – to create. A dream, vision or goal. Write this down.

Pause for a minute. Scan your life. Can you see where this dream, vision or goal is already present in your life? Already happening? Already in existence?

Can’t find it? Keep looking. It’s there.

Look everywhere – don’t limit yourself to your idea of how things should be. We do that a lot – create scenarios for how we think things should happen and narrow our perspective to only that which fits within our view and understanding.

For example, here are some myths that I’ve had:

The myth: “I need to go to art school to be an artist.”
Reality: www.breatheonelove.com

The myth: “I need a lot of supplies to create something.”
Reality: Glue sticks, magazines, paper, eyes and hands.

The myth: “I need to own this building to create an art/community space.”
Reality: www.frisbiest.com

What scarcity myths are your thoughts circling around?
Everything starts from what you already have and grows from there.
Again we come back to ourselves: everything we need, we already have.
What do you have? What can you share?

I went to a fundraising dinner on Saturday night where more than $45,000 was raised in less than 10 minutes.

I also went to the mall on Saturday to buy a top to wear to the dinner. The mall was Christmas-time packed with long lines in every store I entered or walked by.

Even in “these economic times,” there is money. People are buying things they want and giving to causes they care about.

There was no lamenting over the economy during the dinner program. Every speaker focused on core mission and impact.

Personal stories were shared highlighting:

1. the need/problem
2. the solution
3. what had been accomplished so far (because of our support)
4. the continuing need
5. how this need was going to be met (with our support)

Given the challenge “Are you in?” from a dynamic speaker, the stage was set for the fundraising ask. And people responded. $10,000, $2,500, $1,000, $500, $100, $25 gifts were enthusiastically made and gratefully received.

There is money. We might not be raising as much as we did last year – but people are still willing to give.

Adjusting to change, especially change we don’t particularly want and didn’t ask for, can be difficult. We can become myopically focused on what used to be or what we wish was.

Babysitting for a friend this week, I watched her five-year-old daughter dissolve into total misery when she couldn’t have what she wanted. We were eating lunch and she had her food, but wanted it in a blue bowl (which her sister had.)

She became fixated on what she didn’t have, refusing to eat. All she could see was the blue bowl she wanted – not the food that was in the purple bowl she had.

We’re like this sometimes. We focus intently on what we can’t have or what we wish we had and stubbornly refuse to enjoy what we have because it’s not exactly what we wanted (or what we see that someone else has.)

The person who led the giving spree came by our table afterwards feeling discouraged. “I didn’t get any gifts at the $5,000 level.”  Focused on what wasn’t received, he was disappointed.

When the need is great, we can easily slip into seeing only what is lacking. Step back for a minute. What is in your bowl?

This is our last post in the five week Time series. So far we have four tools for helping us know abundance in time:

Tool #1: Let the time we have be enough

Tool #2: Ability to shift our perception of time

Tool #3: Value the process as much as the goal

Tool #4: Give up (the illusion of) control

This week we head into the territory of Now, where everything takes place. Our thoughts, feelings, experiences and conversations, our planning for the future and our analysis of the past – our whole lives are lived here – in the Now. 

Now is where we feel busy and stressed, where we experience lack of time and the frustration of not being able to accomplish everything we want to. Now is where we rush to get ahead and multi-task to save time.

This then is the most important place to learn to know abundance in time. Here, Now, where everything happens.

Our tool here, Now, is choice.

We choose how we view time. We choose what we do. We choose how busy we are. We choose to rush. We choose how to think about something. We choose how to respond.

The complicated web of our daily lives is made up of choices.

I know, sometimes it seems like we have no choice. We have meetings to attend, phone calls and emails to return, bills to pay, deadlines to meet. Our lives are dictated by what we have to do and we scramble for “free” time to fit in what we love to do. We don’t see options, we have to do these things.

But why? Why do we have to do these things? Because for whatever reason (and reasons vary for each person, family, organization, business, religion, culture, country) we have decided that we need to, that we have to, do what we are doing. We make this choice.

Of course there are many things that happen that we do not choose, that we would not choose. Our lives are impacted by choices that other people make or by natural forces or events that we can’t control or change.

We loose our job or our house, our largest donor stops giving because of stock market declines, our dog dies, or our sister develops cancer.

These things and others are happening and we did not choose them.

We can’t control what is happening but we can choose how we perceive, how we think about, how we respond to, and how we participate in, what is happening.

We do have, in every moment, in every situation, this choice.

Choice is our most powerful tool for knowing abundance in time.

How we view time is one of the choices we make.

Can you see how your choices – in your thinking, in your beliefs or opinions, in your actions and responses – creates your Now?

What are you choosing?

(This post is #5 in a 5 part series on Time)

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p.s. The tool of choice is about your choice. This is not an exercise in sitting back and judging other people’s choices or saying that your choices are better than someone else’s choices.

You already know from your own experience that sometimes it is hard to see choice when you are in the midst of something. We all do the best we can with what we have, with where we are and with what we know.

Happy Monday!

There is another guaranteed way to discover abundance in time: let go of trying to control what happens.

This is a hard one because our daily lives center around creating order to reach goals and to manage and respond to what is happening with our selves (body, mind, emotions), with each other (same list) and in our environments (natural, social, work, economic.)

Control is a tool that has served us our whole lives:

• Control is how we face the unknown.
• Control gives us a sense of security and assures us that we are in charge of everything that it is possible to be in charge of.
• Control is power to make things happen.
• Control is a way to get people to do what we want.
• Control helps us eliminate undesirable factors and predict and prepare for the future.
• Control enables us to manage what is happening – so that things don’t get out of control.

Control is such a useful behavior, why would we want to let go of it?

Because contrary to our belief – control actually limits our ability to freely live our lives, to creatively respond to what is happening and to relax, to be stress free, to know abundance in time.

Our desire for control causes sickness and tension in our body, anxiety, shortness of breath and stress in ourselves and in those around us.

Why are we so busy – why is there not enough time? Often it is because we are trying to manage and control things that are not within our ability to manage and control.

What are the things that you try to control? How does this impact your life, your relationships, your health and your perspective of time?

We all have our own idea of what should happen. And we carry these ideas into every interaction, every situation. This habit often leads to frustration when people around us and/or what is happening in our environment does not fit into our timeline or behave the way we want them/it to.

Letting go of control doesn’t mean that you don’t plan or have goals – it just means that you don’t become rigid in your plans or in your mindset. As soon as control sets in you shut yourself off from the infinite possibilities that are alive in each moment.

When you try to control what happens, you narrow the possibilities to only what you can conceive – to only what you think matters and what is important to you.

What often happens in planning ahead or in trying to predict the unknown is that our idea of what might happen or what we want to happen becomes our only view.  Our idea becomes what should happen – what must happen.  And here is where our desire to control steps in and becomes a trap.

Letting go of control doesn’t mean you don’t act or respond. It simply means you remain open in every situation to what is happening.

You allow your self, other people and your environment to have the freedom to be – whatever they want to be – instead of trying to conform everything to your limited, controlled view.

Control is an illusion – a mirage.

As much as we try to order our lives (with time, and other systems) the unknown element always remains. We’re reminded of this every day. (For example, will the stock market rise or fall?)

Notice this week when you become tense, or stressed or upset. Can you see how your idea of what should be happening is determining your response and affecting your emotions and your body?

Don’t limit yourself or the world to only your idea of what should be happening.

Let go of trying to control and let yourself ride the wave of possibilities.

(This post is #4 in a 5 part series on Time)

There is never enough time.
If only I had more time.

Do you ever have these thoughts?

I know I do. My scarcity mentality always kicks in when it comes to Time. For some reason, there is never enough.

Especially when there’s so much to do…juggling a million and one priorities, rushing to get things done on time, pressured by endless to-do lists and we need to keep up with everything that is happening and there is always something else that needs to be done and…if only there were more Time.

In our fast-paced, multi-tasking, ultra-busy lives, how do we Know Abundance in Time?

This week’s post is the first in a five part series on Time.

Why spend so much time talking about time? Because our understanding of Time affects our relationship with every aspect of our lives – and in today’s world we live our lives by the clock.

Since I know you’re busy, I’ll get right to the point: Our problem is not that there is not enough time. The reason we don’t have enough time is because we are never satisfied with what we have.

Sure, we are grateful for what we have, but we want more. What we have is never enough.

How do we know abundance in time?

Let the time you have be enough.

Let the time you have be more than enough.

I know this seems laughable almost, doesn’t it? Ridiculous even. To know that we have all the time we need, to be satisfied with what we have and to actually enjoy an abundance of time.

There’s too much to do. Too much that has to be done. And we don’t want to be late and we want to make the most of the time that we do have. And people are counting on us. We have deadlines.

Maybe after we finish everything we can know abundance in time.

But this is a futile exercise in impossibility (as you already know looking at your to-do list from last week and your to-do list for the week ahead) because we never finish everything. There is always more to do.

We can’t base knowing abundance in time on our to-do lists.

Looking at what has to be done we will always come up short.

Accept the reality of the time that you do have. Let what you have be enough. Let the time you have be more than enough.

Be satisfied.

This is how to know abundance in Time.

(This post is #1 in a 5 part series on Time)