So, I’ve loooong been a huge fan of Louise Hay. She is one of the first spiritual writers that encouraged me to expand my perspective and see the connection between my mind + body.
I have at least a handful of Hay’s books on shelves throughout my home. I love to pick one up. open to a page, and feel inspired by what comes up for me.
Because I love her work so much, I subscribe to her Hay House newsletter.
Well this week, when I received a message with this excerpt from a new Hay House book: E~Cubed by Pam Grout, I was super stoked.
This is exactly the type of inspiration that has been helping me live with more trust + ease in my life lately.
I am so enjoying focusing on the abundance of life and I want to share this inspiration with you.
Grout is so clear + gives us simple powerful practices to help shift from the scarcity mindset that is keeping us stuck and into the abundance mindset that opens boundless possibility for creating fulfilled + joy~full lives.
Hoping these insights + tools inspire a fresh perspective for you…
And, be sure to share any aha moments you have after you try these fun practices. Communication builds community. And community uplifts us. Tell us in the comments what you think.
With so much appreciation for your presence on this gorgeous journey,
Denise
p.s. Be sure to grab your copy of E~Squared here. See what happens!
Your New B.F.F. Corollary
(or Money: It’s Not Complicated)
By Pam Grout
The Premise
This experiment will prove that money is nothing but energy and that it is only your baggage around money that keeps you from having it, enjoying it, and realizing that it is not what you are here for. Your current financial situation is a reflection of your beliefs and expectations. Once you change your beliefs and expectations, your entire financial situation will change.
Beliefs around money are completely skewed in Worldview 1.0. We actually believe the big green is more important than our brothers and sisters. We put these strips of paper and metal coins (and now plastic cards etched with our names) on a pedestal and prostrate ourselves in undivided worship.
It’s time to look these beliefs squarely in the eye and call them out as the big fat liars they are.
Most of us have an angst-ridden relationship with money. We think it’s limited, demanding, and as unpredictable as Lindsay Lohan. We believe it’s out of our control, and that forces higher than us pull the puppet strings. We have it tied up with jobs—jobs that, for the most part, we hate and resent. Thoughts like these, needless to say, do not for a happy relationship make.
Let’s take an unflinching look at the top ten lies about money:
Big fat lie #1: You have to have it to be happy. People in developing countries, who are still in touch with the natural world (although the developed world is doing everything it can to erase this knowledge), laugh at the lengths to which we go to accumulate money and some of the ridiculous things it will buy. And on every single index of happiness, there is no relationship whatsoever to GDP.
Big fat lie #2: If you have it, you’re happier. I have just two words to say: Owen Wilson. He’s worth $60 million, and in 2007 he slit his wrists. Lucky for us, he wasn’t successful, but he’s proof positive that money cannot buy happiness. Another well-known actor, Jim Carrey, is famous for saying he wished everyone was rich (and famous) so they could see it’s not the answer.
Big fat lie #3: You have to work your ass off to get it. Riddle me this: Who works harder—the eight-hour-a-day factory worker or Donald Trump? Some of the poorest people I know slave away at minimum-wage jobs, putting in more and more hours trying to get ahead. Money, at least in my life, often shows up unannounced. And all those e-mails I’ve been getting from E-Squared readers? There were countless stories from people who suddenly received unexpected money.
Big fat lie #4: There’s only so much to go around. There’s a $500 billion advertising machine whose sole job is to convince you that you are lacking and that there’s only so much to go around. Once money and resources are defined as limited, every ounce of energy (what you say, what you think, what you do) revolves around overcoming this lack and protecting what you already have.
Big fat lie #5: More of it is better. A natural dance partner to “there’s only so much to go around,” this big fat lie distances us from enjoying what we already have. When we’re constantly focused on the next big thing, worrying that we need more, more, more to avoid being left out, we don’t experience joy with what’s already right in front of us. Excess money often creates entitlement and isolation that diminishes the wealth of human connection. I have often argued that amassing seven billion, the dollar amount Donald Trump claims to be worth, is not that different from hoarding old newspapers, leaky buckets, and all the other junk collecting in the homes of the dysfunctional folks we watch on the A&E show Hoarders.
Big fat lie #6: The economic system is set in stone; there’s nothing we can do to change it. Even though it often seems unfair (the rich keep getting richer, and those with the most money wield all the power), we continue to play the game, continue to buy the big fat lie that it’s “just the way it is.” That there’s nothing we can do about it. These assumptions, traditions, and habits not only trap us into resignation, but they also block a more accurate vision that prosperity is possible for all. As far back as the 1970s, the great futurist and humanist Buckminster Fuller recognized that human civilization had reached a turning point where a new paradigm was possible, a paradigm in which all of us could have enough food, water, housing, and land to lead fulfilling and productive lives.
Big fat lie #7: Money is bad, and people who have a lot of it are really bad.Remember that money-and-camels thing from the Bible? I don’t know whether that was the genesis of the rumor or not, but I do know there’s nothing inherently wrong with money. Money is a shadow of something much deeper. As Kate Northrup teaches in her book, Money: A Love Story, a more productive way to think about money is to see it as an exchange of value for value. Or, as my new friend Felicia Spahr says, “Money is everyone’s B.F.F. and they don’t even know it.”
Big fat lie #8: Jobs blow. Work is one of those things we have tied to the railroad track with unhappiness. When it comes to our jobs, every neural pathway in our bodies screams “let me out of here.” We believe it’s the weekends and the vacations we want and that work is only a means to an end. As long as we associate these two together, we miss out on massive amounts of fun and joy.
Big fat lie #9: The only way to get it is to have a job. Money and work go together like pancakes and syrup, like Russia and vodka, like celebrities and paparazzi. Although money and jobs have certainly been dating for quite some time, they’re far from married. Or certainly shouldn’t be for people who want to live an abundant life. I haven’t had a job in 20-some years.
Big fat lie #10: It’s a distant, magical demigod. As you’re starting to realize, the list of big fat money lies could fill the Grand Canyon. So in the interest of getting to the good stuff, the truth about the world and its largesse, I’m lumping a few more into this lie (I’m different from people who have money; To get it you have to cheat and lie; If you make it, there’s no time for play; and There’s no possibility of getting things without money) and calling it good. So that’s pretty much money in Worldview 1.0. Ready to look at Money 2.0?
Remember those beliefs and expectations that play out in our financial lives? They need to be changed. Abundance consciousness, which is what creates money in the first place, is equally available to everyone. Like air, it’s free… and anyone who wants can develop it. The simple fact of being human guarantees you have more abundance potential than you could possibly experience in a lifetime. And once you attain abundance consciousness, money will follow you around, chase you down, and spit in your face.
But first you have to get these six things, these paradigms from Worldview 2.0:
1. Money isn’t real. It’s a form of exchange. And all material things have no value except a random number we assign to them. That number can change at any time. A house that’s worth $500,000 today might sell for twice that tomorrow. Money-market funds have been known to grow by 25 percent in one week. None of it is real except the value we give it.
Money, or what we think of as money—bills and coins—is merely a tool that demonstrates a person’s wealth consciousness. And according to prosperity teacher David Cameron Gikandi, only 4 percent of money in banks (depending on the country) exists in physical form.
Money is always a shadow of something else. And how it plays out in your life revolves around two things: the value you place upon yourself and the ingredients you’ve placed in your money expectation beaker.
2. Money is an energy that forms around your thoughts. I once interviewed a woman who gave all her money away. Actually, I’ve interviewed several people who gave their fortunes away. Millionaires sloughing off riches is a hugely popular topic atPeople magazine. This particular person came from money. Her grandfather was some famous industrialist. Her parents owned houses all over the world. She didn’t feel right having such excess when others went hungry, so she gave away her sizable inheritance, the whole dang shooting match. And she began giving workshops on contributing to the greater good. Before she knew it, she’d amassed another million.
Moral of the story? You can take the money out of the girl’s wealth consciousness, but you can’t take the wealth consciousness out of the girl.
3. The world seen clearly without the lens of lack and limitation is wildly abundant. Bernard Lietaer, former senior officer of the Belgian Central Bank and chief architect of the euro currency, says in his book Of Human Wealth that the idea of scarcity is nothing but misguided cultural programming. In other words, a meme that has spread across the globe. Even though we consider scarcity and the greed it provokes to be a normal, legitimate reality, neither exists in nature. Not even in human nature.
Examine your body, that body that’s continually harping about lack and limitation. It has more than 50 trillion cells. Do you have any idea how many 50 trillion is?
Your eyes, those eyes that choose to focus so much attention on a tiny four-inch screen, have 100 million receptors, 100 million you could use to enjoy a rising moon, the Big Dipper, four-leaf clovers.
4. There is no shortage of anything. I remember picking grapes at a vineyard one fall. The owners of this vineyard, in a move rivaling Tom Sawyer’s fence-painting scheme, invite locals out to the fields for the opportunity to harvest their grapes. It’s so popular that there’s a waiting list every year. Yes, people elbow each other out of the way for the chance to perform a task that the owners, before hatching this genius strategy, once paid migrant workers to do.
I am so grateful that I participated because it showed me in living color just how bountiful the world really is. There were so many grapes that we couldn’t even get them all. Many had fallen to the ground before we arrived with our baskets. There was no way anybody could be there and not recognize the pressed-down and running-over reality.
Abundance is forever on display in the natural world. Just look at a tree. It has thousands of individual leaves, and as for the number of trees on this planet? I couldn’t hazard a guess. Or try counting the blades of grass in one square foot of your front yard. Mother Nature (aka the natural world before humans imposed fear on her) provides for every single need.
5. Everything you really need is already provided. You are fine right now whether you have money or not. Although we tend to pair money with such desirables as security, ease, relaxation, approval, and joy, we can have every one of these things without piles of money in our account. All of them are included in our inheritance. They’re given to us completely free of charge. Sadly, we barely recognize them behind the Halloween mask of the big fat lies from the previous section.
Here are a few of your other prized possessions, or they would be if you weren’t so busy thinking lack. Did you have to make the sun come up this morning? Say thank you! Do you have to order your heart to pump blood through your body, 36 million beats per year? Do you have to schedule your lungs to draw in fresh, clear oxygen?
If we focus on the planet’s unending largesse, rather than on the marketers’ drumbeat of limitation, on the bounteous gifts that spread out before us on every side rather than on TV commercials that suggest depression and sleeping problems, then we can rewrite the dominant paradigm.
6. It is only our illusory belief in limitation that keeps our riches away. The only real difference between me and, say, Donald Trump is that I choose not to carry my riches around. It’s comforting to know that anything I could ever want is available to me, but why flaunt it or drag around a bunch of material baggage?
No, my role model is Peace Pilgrim, who, when she was very young, made an important discovery: “Making money is easy.” Which is why she could give up her earthly possessions and walk around the world with nothing but the clothes on her back. As she said about her 28-year journey, “Life is full and life is good… There is a feeling of always being surrounded by all of the good things, like love and peace and joy. It seems like a protective surrounding.”
That’s all anyone really needs. To know with sure conviction that the world is limitless, abundant, and strangely accommodating.
Like everyone else on the planet, I received my engraved invitation to participate in the 2008 recession. Normally, I send regrets to those kinds of offers.
I learned ages ago that opportunities for pain and suffering are always going to be available and that if I was going to live with intention, it’s best to steer clear. I’d have never become the author of 17 books, a reporter for People magazine, and a world traveler if I’d accepted the onslaught of “negative invitations.”
“That’s not possible,” naysayers insisted on telling me. “It’s hard to write a book. Even harder to sell it. You’re an unknown from Kansas. You got B’s in your journalism classes, for God’s sake.”
“Talk to the hand,” I’d always say to those voices. “That may be your way of seeing things, but I choose a different reality, a higher path.”
But after three years of ever-increasing income, even being in a position to turn down a fourth project for National Geographic, I took the ego’s bait. By then, a constant stream of bad news dominated the headlines. My profession, journalism and book publishing, was among the hardest hit by the global downturn. Publishers were cutting back their lines, lowering their advances. Many of my colleagues in the newspaper business were suddenly without work.
Again, I normally don’t listen to such nonsense. I much prefer a spiritual reality that proclaims abundance no matter what the circumstances. But by 2009, after little by little letting the dire news seep in, I plucked the aforementioned recession invitation out of the trash. I decided to take just a peek.
The party was in full swing. My agent was repeating the “nothing’s selling” mantra over by the punch bowl. Regular clients were on the corner sofas, moaning about the economy and their need to buy less.
Before I knew what happened, I bunny hopped right into the middle of the celebration. I began singing the “ain’t it awful” blues along with the party’s deejay. I told anybody who’d listen about my hard times. Before long, I convinced everyone I know that my career as an independent author was over. I even fooled them into believing that, after all these years on my own, I was old, washed-up, and as yesterday as the History Channel.
I actually reveled in the sympathy.
Then one day, I got out my beat-up copy of Think and Grow Rich. As I read Napoleon Hill’s words about thoughts being “things,” I suddenly got it. Look how powerful my thoughts and words had been. Look what I’d done to myself. If I could create this disaster with nothing but my thoughts, then I could just as easily create the opposite.
When I think back about it now, I’m slightly embarrassed. How could I have fallen so bumpily off the wagon I’d used so successfully for so many years? I know good and well how this stuff works. I know that I create my own reality. I know that listening to doomsayers is the most futile exercise in the world.
I wasted no time using Hill’s famous advice. Within a week, I had two new assignments. The book contract for E-Squared came next. Rather than live frugally, the advice my friends were freely passing out, I decided to spend the summer overseas, volunteering and letting my newly recovered faith pay the bills.
That decision to affirm “I am prosperous, and of course I can afford to travel overseas to volunteer” was the beginning of a more fruitful life.
Needless to say, I’ve taken that beautifully engraved invitation and ripped it to shreds. And don’t bother sending any more. Because from now on, my RSVPs to any negativity will say one thing: “Have a good time. But don’t expect to find me there.”
The Method
Because money is so fraught with fear and antiquated old paradigms, I’m posing two sub-hypotheses (like I said, the world—and this chapter—is wildly abundant) in this experiment to prove the main hypothesis: If I change my beliefs about money, my financial situation will change.
Each of the two experiments takes three days.
Experiment #1:
Johnny Moneyseed (or The Circle Can’t Be Broken)
The sub-hypothesis: If I give away money, I will receive even more money.
It’s an inalterable principle. “What you give comes back to you multiplied and running over.”
During the three days of this experiment, you are going to seed money. You’re going to leave small bills (or large ones if that’s more to your liking) with notes about your newfound beliefs about the nature of abundance. You’re going to do this freely, playfully, and openly.
My daughter Taz and I did this recently in Chicago. I was writing a travel story about the mighty Peninsula. If it’s not ringing any bells, let me just say that this is where all the A-listers stayed when they came to Chicago to bid Oprah adieu. We could see the Magnificent Mile from our suite. We shopped, saw The Book of Mormon, and, of course, made a return engagement to Second City. In the audience, not on the stage.
We also performed the secret mission I’m asking you to perform. We took a stack of $5 bills and left them at bus stops, taped to park benches. We pinned them into clothes at the stores on Magnificent Mile. With each fiver, we left an anonymous note about the abundance of the universe and how this is just one small sign of how much whoever finds it is loved.
I know $5 isn’t much (one of these days, we plan to leave hundies), but for us it’s about “being” who we want to be—confident, freely giving—and knowing that as we give, so shall we receive.
We were doing what you’ll be doing in this experiment—building muscle, practicing “being” what you want to be—united with all that is, knowing with complete surety you are provided for in every way.
Record what comes back to you during the 72 hours.
As for me, E-Squared surged to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list within a few weeks of that experiment.
Experiment #2:
Pennies from Heaven
The sub-hypothesis: Money is easy to come by.
I learned this experiment from Greg Kuhn, my buddy and fellow author who writes about the same stuff I do. He has penned a whole series of books about applying quantum physics to the law of attraction. (Check out his website,www.whyquantumphysicists.com, and his acclaimed Why Quantum Physicists… series.) I particularly love the game he invented called “Grow a Greater Greg,” only when I play it, I change the title to “Grow a Greater Pam.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring, but you get the point.
Greg gave me permission to share this experiment that, as he says, puts you into an abundance mind-set and forms coherence between the quantum field and your financial abundance.
It’s pretty simple. For the next three days, intend to find pennies:
- On the ground
- In your pockets
- In your car
- On the sidewalk
- Everywhere
Conjure them by dwelling not on Where are they? but on How exciting it is to manifest a penny! After all, how challenging is it to find a penny? Pennies are the fruitcake of the currency world. Some people throw them away because they consider them worthless.
And, if you want to look at it that way, pennies are sort of worthless. So you’ll have no trouble manifesting them every day, because they are simply no big deal.
The Quantum Field Doesn’t Care If You Play Tricks on It
But here’s where the experiment kicks in. You’re actually going to trick the quantum field. Don’t worry—the quantum field won’t care; it makes no judgments, it just responds.
After finding a penny, privately celebrate it like you just won the lottery. Go way overboard. Way over the top. Get silly with it. Privately shout hosannas to the universe!
Doesn’t sound realistic to celebrate a “dumb” little old penny? After all, a penny certainly does not represent the abundance you truly desire, does it?
But here’s how you trick the quantum field with this game. What you celebrate is notthe amount the penny represents; you celebrate the principle it represents. You celebrate the principle that the universe is infinitely abundant and that manifesting is child’s play.
You are celebrating the universe “goosing” you with this penny—getting your attention and saying, “Hey, my wonderful, most special child! I am at your service, and I can and will create anything your heart desires! And I can create your heart’s desire just as easily as I created this penny! Isn’t that awesome?!”
The Quantum Field Wants to Give You More of What You Celebrate
And the trick is, the quantum field doesn’t know the difference between your celebrating the amount versus celebrating the reminder. The quantum field simply forms coherence with your energy of “this is awesome” and readily lines up to bring you more of it.
And you benefit because you can truly, realistically, and believably celebrate thereminder of abundance each penny represents in the super-grand, Fourth-of-July-fireworks style I’m suggesting.
Denise Duffield-Thomas (the Lucky Bitch)
September 23, 2014
I love this post so much – thanks for sharing Pam’s words – they are SO powerful.
When you realise that money is just a simple energy – not good or bad – you can invite how ever much you like into your life.
xx Denise DT
Denise Dare
September 24, 2014
I knew you would, Denise. 😉
I love that you teach these same powerful principles…you, too, are an inspiration.
More YES to allowing the vibrant flow of energy ~in all forms, including money~ into + through our life experience.
Thank you for being here!
xo,
D
Asja
September 25, 2014
So great to read this Denise – a few little tasks for my day tomorrow! Thank you for sharing xx
Denise Dare
September 25, 2014
Absolutely!
So happy to know this inspires you, Asja!
Thank you for sharing…and keep us posted about what you discover.
Love + Appreciation,
D