Okay, I admit it. I've had one incredibly powerful, purposeful and playful week. Ann and I have not only expanded the time we devote in the morning to our 'purposeful practices' but have included time when we read to each other from an assortment of spiritual materials and then discuss how we can apply it to our living on purpose. Awesome experience!
And on top of that I've been purposefully playing with a new product that we'll launch in the coming weeks — a video coaching series of me guiding the user through the 6 Passages of the Life On Purpose Process.
It's been great fun and has helped me connect even more deeply with my own reason for being alive…and so alive I've been this week. So, life is good in the Paradise Found of the North Carolina mountains where spring is in full swing, and my garden is growing beautifully as well.
I trust you will enjoy this week's article on abundance and purposeful prosperity — written in preparation for when Ann and I 'officially' start on the next leg of our transformational journey with Mark Silver's Heart of Money Program.
LIVING ON PURPOSE: Abundance: A Matter of the Heart
"This teaching about ease and abundance in provision is a teaching of the heart, and has nothing to do with whether you are a millionaire or not. Is your heart at ease with your work in the world? That’s the question. You have been promised that there is work that can support you that will bring ease to your heart." Mark Silver from Backwards: Why Common Abundance Manifestation Approaches Are Sabotaging Your Success
This paragraph jumped off the page this week as Ann and I were reading and studying Mark's special report, Backwards, especially this line:
Is your heart at ease with your work in the world?
I realized as I read this that the answer was a resounding YES!
The paragraph is also so aligned with my view of purposeful prosperity that I just knew I had to share it with you as well.
This is how I wrote about it in my Purposeful Prosperity report that became the basis of the Purposeful Prosperity Online Program.
The Source of Purposeful Prosperity & True Abundance
I’m asking you to try on and to consider that the source of Purposeful Prosperity isn’t a thing that you can locate in the having arena of life (the materialistic part of our physical Universe) and that it doesn’t come from doing, doing, doing, despite what you may have been taught or what you observe when you look at our culture. Nor is the dictionary definition accurate in this case:
Prosperous: marked by success or economic well being.
Can you hear how we’ve classified prosperity as a thing that is especially tied to our financial success — which is in the material or having arena of life? But if that's not the case (and Mark and I both are suggesting in our own way that it's not), where are we to locate the source of prosperity (and true abundance)?
Consider that Purposeful Prosperity is really a state of being, not doing and having. As Eric Butterworth points out in his classic book on the subject, Spiritual Economics, “The word prosperity comes from the Latin root which literally translates: ‘according to hope’, or ‘to go forward hopefully.’ This, it is not so much a condition of life (having), as it is an attitude towards life.”
In other words, we’re closer to the source of prosperity if we locate it in the arena of being.
But, are we really at the source of prosperity yet? After all, we know that there are states of being that aren’t prosperous — don't give us an experience of abundance or 'enoughness'. Those contrasting states of being are based in fear, lack and a need to struggle to survive. I refer this these as one's Inherited Purpose (and you're in the same ballpark with the term, ego).
Perhaps the true source of prosperity is where those thoughts and feelings of Universal Love arise –from the Universal Attractive Force of Unconditional Love, your relationship to God or a Higher Power, your spiritual nature. There is the source of Purposeful Prosperity.
How many people have I seen who have riches beyond measure and who are miserable in their life, and how many people have I met who live a very simple life whose lives are filled with love, compassion, the experience that their lives matter — purposefully prosperous and truly abundant.
So, this weekend I invite you to join me on this journey — whether you call it abundance, or prosperity, or whatever. It's a journey that can include for many of us exploring a new relationship with our material world where 'money is king.' This new relationship doesn't ignore the material. It just keeps it in its place.
"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's." Keeping these two world's clear, distinct, and in balance is key to finding or creating "work that can support you that will bring ease to your heart."
