How to Truly Access Abundance

Abundance isn’t built through hard work. Abundance follows alignment.

Productivity is a Trap

If you follow me, you’ll notice I took about a month away from Medium. It wasn’t an intentional break, though it would look good to say so. We so love “intentional unplugging” that helps us come back “refreshed” and ready to work harder than ever (yuck).

I’ve realized that sometimes I feel creatively inspired — my brain is moving fast, the words flow, and I’m in an incredibly productive frame of mind. But there are times when I’m processing, integrating, or — horror of horrors — just resting my mind. Both states are equally fine; one isn’t in service to the other.

Productivity isn’t always the goal, and, in fact, sometimes we can be focused on productivity to our detriment.

I’m not just speaking about burnout here. I’m talking about this pervasive belief society has drilled into us that hard work and productivity are the qualities most valuable in a human being. (This is, of course, to perpetuate inequality and ensure those who are most wealthy stay wealthy, but I digress.)

This mindset keeps us running on a hamster wheel, often in the wrong direction. We get so caught up in the grind — in this idea that the harder we work, the more money we’ll make, and the more value we’ll have.

Leaving aside how we directly correlate our value in society with how much money we make (we’ll tackle that another day), this model for attracting abundance is built on a lie — namely, that abundance comes from self-sufficiency and hard work — in the United States this is known as the bootstrap myth.

And this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Examples of Work Smarter, Not Harder

Though I loathe using them as examples, we can even see how this plays out in the world with people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos — three of the ten richest people in the world. Their wealth is not the result of decades of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s the result of a fair bit of ingenuity, a larger dose of opportunity (right education, right place, right time), and a heap of courage.

They had the willingness to bet big, to take a risk, and see how it paid off.

All of these men are the definition of “no risk, no reward”. They each planted the seed of something, without knowing how it would or could grow, without fully seeing the tangible evidence of its success. There was no way, after all, to predict the dot.com bubble.

No matter the reason (perhaps, some combination of privilege and personality), each of these men had the mindset that allowed them to break away from conventional pathways to success. They pursued their interests and their inspirations — they put their faith in those inspirations instead of what society might have told them, at the time, was the smarter, safer path.

It’s easy to look back retroactively and assume they were so genius, they could predict the future, but Microsoft, Paypal, and Amazon were all just ideas before they injected belief into them. Even before execution, they had to trust the idea was worth time, energy, and investment.

This is generally what alignment requires above all else; taking a leap of faith into the unknown, trusting your intuition above all else, and investing in the vision, without a full picture of the end result.

I talk about this kind of vision in my most recent article, too. It’s the combination of intention, investment, step-by-step action, and faith. The level of financial abundance (because there are, of course, many other kinds)that these men accessed didn’t come to them through physical action alone, it required faith.

Finding Alignment Means Mindset Over Matter

So, here’s where we get into the nitty-gritty of getting into alignment with abundance. You see how I phrased that? It isn’t about going out and getting abundance. You get into alignment and abundance flows to you.

And this isn’t just an energetic thing, as many lauders of the Law of Attraction would have you believe. But it’s not solely a physical thing, either.

The mind is just as important as the matter.

I’ve found being in alignment is as simple as moving relentlessly toward the things that bring you joy no matter what your circumstances. Your clarity and strength of mind, in this case, is more important than the matter — the physical state of your world.

Now, I understand it feels like you don’t always have the luxury to do this (bills to pay, mouth to feed, etc.) but I’m afraid that’s where faith comes in. You need to learn to trust that when you're in alignment, life will support you. You’ll be provided for. This requires a certain amount of surrender to life.

Just like Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard (yes, I know, Harvard) to found Microsoft, steps toward our purpose tend to require letting go of old stuff— old people, places, and things that tied us to the original path we were on. You might need to quit a job. Leave a relationship. Move to another country. This is the matter.

We’re used to thinking of loss as something bad, something to resist, but in the case of alignment, these losses are a necessary release to create space for what you’re bringing in. An adjustment in your mindset around letting go is what lets you move forward.

Similarly, your faith in yourself and your vision becomes paramount. Again, you might not be able to see all the way to the endgame of what you’re building, but you’ll be able to feel how right it is, and feel that you’re doing what you’re meant to do.

So, we train the mind to move not from sight, from physical evidence that we’ll see the results of our efforts, but from feeling that we’re in alignment with our purpose. Then, of course, we have to trust that abundance will follow.

Alignment Brings in Abundance

It’s important to get clear on what is for you, that is what feels most right to do in this moment — not what you should do, not what so-and-so says is smart to do, but what lights you up inside. This will lead you to your purpose, which in turn, leads to greater abundance. The logic of this is three-fold.

First, when you’re doing what you’re born to do, it doesn’t feel like work. It sounds trite, but it’s true. When you’re in alignment, work feels rather effortless. Inspiration comes, creation is painless. There’s ease. Flow. So, you’re not dragging yourself into work — you want to put energy and time into what you’re doing. The natural consequence of that is you do more of what you love, which brings in more financial abundance.

Second, when you’re in alignment, there’s a kind of energetic flow that you fall into. It sounds very woo-woo, but if you’ve experienced it, you know what I mean. Finding collaborators, clients, gigs, is again, effortless. You’re not pushing anything into place. What you need finds you. And so the process of showing up is easier. This is, in and of itself, a form of abundance. But of course, more clients/gigs/etc. means more financial abundance.

Lastly, when you’re in alignment it puts you in the place for your people to find you. What do I mean? Well, we’re all part of something larger than ourselves, and generally, you’ll find when you are doing what you came here to do, the people who align with your vision — believe in what you believe in, value what you value, want to support you in doing the thing — are attracted to you.

You don’t have to beg someone to invest in your idea, to co-sign your loan, or to buy that storefront with you. And when you’re ready to scale, perhaps, to broaden your reach and impact, people who want to follow in your footsteps will be magnetized to you. Even greater abundance follows.

Depending on your path — the lessons you’re learning and the process of your unfolding — you may struggle to know what alignment feels like. I’ve found the easiest way most people stumble upon what’s right for them is by understanding what isn’t. Most of us will find ourselves in resistance to our highest alignment, but the quicker we adjust, the quicker we can truly manifest all that this life has to offer us.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to leave anything on the table.

❤

If you’d like to talk more about spirituality and money, feel free to drop a comment! I love chatting down there.

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