The Ever Present Flow of Abundance – Rev Aimee Daniels
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
Abundance isn’t something we chase — it’s a state of consciousness we cultivate. Spirit’s substance is infinite, unbroken, and always available — waiting for our recognition. Join us this week as we explore how to move beyond scarcity thinking and tune our awareness to the divine supply already surrounding and sustaining us. When we embrace this mindset of abundance, we become powerful channels of good in every area of life.
SUMMARY
The summary is as follows:
– Rev. Aimee Daniels emphasizes the importance of recognizing the “ever-present flow of abundance” and the presence of God/Spirit, which is never absent.
– She discusses the concept of prosperity as a “way of living and thinking” rather than just material things, and how it is about spiritual well-being.
– Rev. Aimee encourages listeners to shift their mindset from scarcity to abundance, and to become aware of where they still believe in lack or limitation in their lives.
– She highlights the importance of inner work, consciousness, and beliefs in shaping one’s prosperity and experience of abundance.
– Rev. Aimee suggests practices like affirmations, visualization, and connecting to the subconscious mind to help cultivate an abundance mindset.
– The talk concludes with a guided meditation and prayer affirming the presence of divine abundance and possibility.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
So I’m really excited to kick off this month, which is we’re calling Living Intentionally. And today we’re specifically talking about the ever present flow of abundance. And Michael Beckwith calls Spirit or God, whatever your word is, the presence, which is never an absence. It’s the connection to this presence that is really the key, not only to abundance, but really to intentionally living in your whole life. So let’s dive in. I love that song. They just sang. I got to say this is what chat GPT came up with a visual representation of the song Mysterious Ways. But I think if we all look at our lives, we can see the ways that that time where you just really didn’t know how things were going to work out, whether it’s a relationship or a job or all the many other things that happen in life, like losing someone, just all these parts of the human experience.
But we can see how Spirit was moving through it. And our role is to first recognize that the spirit is there. Michael Beckwith would say, recognize. So remember that the spirit is there and even when we can’t see it, that presence is there and it’s always and everywhere working on our behalf. But we’re geared, Ron and I were talking about this, we’re geared to see what’s missing. We’re not geared to see what’s present as a culture. And I know I’ve certainly been guilty of this and I probably still am right guilty of seeing what’s absent and not what’s present. And in her book, our book of the month is Abundance Now by Lisa Nichols. She shares her story of having fallen on hard times when she was a young woman. She got pregnant, the guy wasn’t in the picture and she was struggling financially and she had to go on food stamps.
And she said she went to go use them the first time. And she felt this incredible sense of shame. But then she had this experience where she was looking at herself in the mirror and she said, if I’m going to shift the external, I have to shift the internal. And she said, this moment showed me that abundance isn’t something that arrives from outside us. It’s something we recognize. It’s something we notice. And I can relate to this in several experiences I’ve had in my life when I got divorced and I literally got locked out of my house and all I had was my clothes. I get this apartment and I don’t have anything. And my friends gave me stuff. And I remember sitting and thinking, oh, Donna gave me this chair. Isn’t this great? And this was way before I was a new thought. But I look back on that and I think, what a wonderful time.
And I also think about the time when I did leave my corporate job and I moved back here and I didn’t have a job. And I was used to my life being so focused on my work and I was trying to figure myself out. But it was a wonderful time with my family. I had been away from my family and I was kind of heartbroken about having been away from them. And I think Spirit knew I needed that. I needed that time to just be with them. So I think spirit’s always happening for us. We just need to pause and recognize that really everything that is happening now was built on something that happened before. And that might’ve even been a disappointment that happened before that somehow puts you on a different path. So this book that Gordon read to you from Spiritual Economics, this is a classic book about prosperity.
And I’m going to use the words prosperity and abundance interchangeably. They’re not exactly the same thing, but I would say they live in the same neighborhood. So Gordon read this to us, but I want to point out a few things here. Prosperity is to go forward, hopefully to go forward. Hopefully there’s a trust in that. There’s a trust that the spirit is present. And he says it’s not so much a condition as it is an attitude toward life. Prosperity is a way of living and thinking, not just things. And he calls it spiritual wellbeing. And I love that definition of prosperity because prosperity looks different for each of us. And he also says it’s a condition as much as it is an attitude toward life, the whole of God’s substance is present in its entirety at every point. And this understanding is crucial to us, to our ability to connect with, call it source energy, call it whatever you want to call it. But this presence, we might say, right where I am God is that God is present right where I am. And if you’re praying or speaking, you’re praying or speaking from that place. So often we can think when we pray that we’re praying to something outside of us, but we’re praying from that place of knowing that God is our source.
And we also know that God is limitless substance. That’s what Charles Fillmore said, substance, the invisible, unlimited reality of all things. So spirit contains all things. Spirit creates all things. So it is unlimited substance. Ernest Holmes says, there is no place. There is no spot where God is not. So again, I’m going to point you back to this. Abundance is not acquisition. It’s recognition. So you think about the story in the Bible of the loaves and the fishes. I was trying to remember how many loaves were there, how many fishes were there? It really doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter. But Jesus prayed in that moment from the presence. He didn’t pray from the absence. And so often we can pray from the absence, I don’t have this thing, I need it, right? But when we pray affirmatively, we’re praying from the presence. We’re praying as if it’s already done. And I just want to invite us all just to kind of raise the bar on our spoken word, because often we’re speaking into absence. We’re speaking into what is not present in our life. That means we’re not working the principles, we’re creating what we don’t want. And there’s no judgment in that. We all do it, I do it. It’s going to own that. So Lisa Nichols tells us, abundance is not something you acquire. It’s something you tune into. So you’re tuning into what is already present. And I love this quote by Eric Butterworth.
God is not your resource. God is your source. Think about that for a second. If God is a resource that’s like the God we’re praying to, that is outside of ourselves, it’s a resource that’s going to bring something to me. But when we really know God is our source, we don’t worry about the how, right? We don’t worry about the how. So I love that quote. So Lisa talks about the four ease of abundance. Today I’m going to talk about enrichment. I’m not going super deep into her book because I want us to stay with this idea of the presence, which is never an absence. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about what she’s teaching and then I’m going to point us back to where we started with this presence. That’s not an absence. So what I like about her is her book is very real.
It’s like she’s just telling you the story of how she changed her life. And it gets you to think about Scott and me to think about where do I still believe in scarcity in my life? Where do I still believe that certain things are not possible for me? So her first seasonal growth and inner wealth, it’s cultivating that. And this is foundational because enrichment, it’s about who you’re becoming. And as we step into this, we also are invited to look at how much do I value myself? What is my self-love and self-worth? I don’t know about any of you, but I still say things about myself. I’m like, that was not very affirming, right? Confidence and personal power. That’s the thing that to me is most powerful about her story. She just dispersonal power. And now she speaks. She’s actually a public company now. She took outside money. That’s what she created. All this. It’s really incredible. But it’s about your mindset also. What’s the mindset that you choose to go through life with? Or do you have a mindset of abundance or do you have a mindset of lack and developing habits and patterns and things that are more helpful for where you want to go in life? And then she also talks about emotional and spiritual abundance. But the whole idea is that you cannot live a big life with a small mindset. So we’re all encouraged to grow our mindset about ourselves.
Lisa says, your life expands in proportion to your willingness to grow. And does anyone ever knows somebody who just really wasn’t willing to grow? I don’t know why that just popped in my head just really fixed. But your life expands in proportion to your willingness to grow. And the thing that’s powerful about this is she’s encouraging us to shift from how am I going to do this? To who do I need to become? Who do I need to become to create the life I want? Who do I need to become to notice the flow that is already happening in my life? So this soil of enrichment really makes all of the abundance grow. Ernest Holmes said, the abundance of life is within each of us waiting to flow through us according to our conscious recognition of it. So we are recognizing, we’re recognizing just to keep using that word.
And the process of enrichment is about recognition. It’s tuning your consciousness to the infinite. Eric Butterworth says, this is my favorite quote. I’m going to say all day. So I’m going to say it twice. I want to make sure you hear it. You do not make your prosperity. Your consciousness makes no, you make your consciousness and your consciousness makes your prosperity. I’m going to say that again. It’s a good one. You do not make your prosperity. You make your consciousness and your consciousness makes your prosperity. So again, it’s all pointing us to the same thing. The true work of abundance is the inner work. It’s the work we do within ourselves. And I was thinking about this for myself, the times in my life where I began to believe that more was possible for me, certainly coming into this teaching, realizing that there even was a teaching.
I didn’t grow up with this, but I think even before that, God was working on my behalf as a young adult, I started working and I realized that people valued what I had to offer. I grew up in a time when a lot of women, you thought the range of what you could do would be to be a nurse or a teacher, and then maybe you get married and have some kids. But this idea that you’re going to have a career, it wasn’t really something I grew up with, even though my mother was a fierce advocate of me never giving up my career by the way. But for anything different to come in for us, we need to change our mindset. When I shifted to the work I do now outside of Cityside, one of the things I liked about it was that I would have some freedom about what I put in, that it wasn’t being dictated by someone else, what my work life looked like, and that I had to embrace a different relationship with work. Like no, that I’m going to think about my time differently. And so we can all expand if we’re willing, but Lisa tells us abundance is on the other side of your comfort zone.
I know we don’t want it to be true, but growth requires us to stretch. It does. And it’s not about being comfortable, it’s about expansion. So where do you need to stretch your thinking? Where do you need to stretch your thinking about your own life? And where do you want to experience more abundance? As I read her book, it did make me think, I said, okay, where do I not believe in abundance in my life? I have this one group that I work with in my work with Vistage, and it’s in a geography where we’re not very known. And I’m going to be honest. I speak scarcity out loud. I do it right even though I know better. I speak scarcity out loud. I realized this morning, rich and I were talking about something and I realized the belief that I have, that I must be independent, that really my mother put that in me.
Like women, you should be independent so that you have choices. And so no one can tell you what to do. And that belief is a belief in scarcity if I live it, because then of course it’s got its good side, just like everything, but it can cause me to not ask for help. It can cause me to not recognize. Now I’m a married person and we have a partnership and that offers certain advantages for both of us. But my other area is where I still believe in scarcity is time. I still, even though I’ve changed my relationship, I still say all the time, I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do. And Rich is shaking his head, he’s in the front row if you don’t know him, but I’m the conscious chooser here. So I could choose something different. I could make different choices.
And it reminds me of my friend who asked me recently, what’s your relationship to saying no, right? Because to say yes to something else, you got to say no. You probably are saying no to some things. And it stopped me. And I go, well, the answer to that, that’s why you asked me the question. I’m terrible at it. And so for me to shift, I have to get uncomfortable and say no to more things. So where would you like to have a different experience in your life? I love this idea is prosperity is spiritual wellbeing. It’s not just about money. It’s about how you’re living your life. So would you like to have a different experience in your health and wellbeing or in love and relationships or in your vocation or your creative expression, time and money, freedom, all of these things. So where would you like to have a different experience than you’re having now?
And in abundance? Now, Lisa talks about how I act like she’s my girlfriend, Lisa. I don’t say her last name. Lisa. Lisa talks about how she began to speak her dreams out loud. Now, she didn’t do that to other people. I say them to other people. She recognized that people around her were not going to support her dreams, but she said them to herself. And this is one of her enrichment practices. But it expanded her capacity to see herself differently. And she spoke from the presence of what she was calling forth, not the absence of it. And so again, if we’re praying to something outside of ourselves, then we feel like we have to be good enough or we have to deserve it, right? Anybody else get hung up in that stuff besides me.
But when we’re praying from the presence, we’re praying as if we already have it. We already are it. And she also encourages us to start with small goals because a lot of times we want to be like Jim and Carey when he wrote himself the million dollar check, and we want to go from here to there in three seconds, but sometimes it’s just too big for us to believe it. So she encourages us to just start with small things like what’s the next step toward your vision? What’s the next step toward the level of abundance that you want to call in your life?
Neville Goddard says, when belief and will are in conflict, belief invariably wins. And if you don’t know who he is, he to me was one of the most powerful teachers of consciousness. He teaches us that the subconscious mind is the most important part of consciousness. It’s the cause of voluntary action. And the subconscious is actually what a person is. The conscious is what a person knows. And what we are conscious of is constructed out of what we’re not conscious of. So assumptions, beliefs we have, beliefs we have about ourselves, not enoughness, whatever. However, we’d fill in the blank. All of those things influence our behavior, but they also create a pattern in our objective experience of life. But the good news is that prayer modifies or changes our subconscious assumptions. And a change of assumption is a change of expression. You may have heard the joke.
Your subconscious mind can’t take a joke or you might’ve heard that said, your subconscious mind can’t take a joke. Anyone know that one? So literally, whatever we put into our subconscious mind, it doesn’t evaluate whether it’s true or false. It just accepts the premise and it acts on it. And we have a friend, rich and I have a friend, they’re couple’s friends, and we were at their house on Friday night and literally her self-talk, I got to sit down and talk to her about it. I decide that this morning about herself is so negative. She’d be walking around and she’s having a really nice group of people over to her house, and it’s this lovely night. And she’d be saying critical things about herself. Well, when any of us do that, we’re planting it in our subconscious mind, right? We’re repeating it. And Joseph Murphy reminds us that we have free will.
He was also a teacher of consciousness, and our lives are not fixed or predetermined. Sometimes people believe in predetermination, but he’s reminding us that our lives are not fixed. And through prayer and through suggestion, we can shift our experience. And there’s also the collective subconscious, which is kind of what society, and we as they call it, race consciousness in our teaching, a lot like what we believe to be true. And the world is manifesting from the collective subconscious what we already believe to be true or what we believe is going to be happening. That’s why, especially right now, we need to pray because we need to call forth something different. We need to call forth a shift in that because when we pray, we suggest into the subconscious mind a different reality. And we also connect to our subconscious mind through our feelings. Neville teaches that.
He says we, what does he call ’em? He says, we submit them to our subconscious mind. I would say we suggest them. But when we do our practice, when we have quieted our mind, then we are open to be able to suggest something different to our subconscious mind. Whether that is through affirmations or prayers, just simply quieting the mind opens up a different field of experience. And Neville’s also very big on imagining. So visualizing what you want to call into your life. She talks about this in the book as well. But when you begin to see something in your mind, when you begin to imagine a different reality, you start to feel it. You have you ever done that? You start. If you picture yourself in a different experience that we’re having, you start to feel it in your body because your body has a wisdom.
Think about this. Your body has a wisdom. It knows when you’re thirsty. It knows when you’re hungry. It knows how to breathe you. It knows when you’re tired and it gives you a signal, but your spirit is always giving you signals too. But are you tuned into that channel? Joseph Murphy, and actually, I think Neville teaches this too, and Napoleon Hill talked about this in Think and Grow Rich Before we go to bed at night, this kind based on this belief, that’s spirit’s working on you when you’re sleeping. So before you go to bed at night, it’s a great practice to put into mind, whether it’s through prayer or affirmation or whatever you do, whatever you want to call forth in your life. They also talk about it when you’re struggling to find the solution to a problem. If you just invite a solution while you’re sleeping, you’ll often wake up and something will come to you.
So I decided last night to try it, and I was like, oh, I was kind of thinking about what could I call something else into the talk? And I am not kidding. This is really actually kind of funny. I wake up daylight savings time, and I hear the word jato in my head. Now, does anyone know who Jato is? Yeah. Okay. So Jato Jato was the creator of Pinocchio, right? I’m like, what does this have to do with what I’m talking about? It’s kind of funny, but I actually had to go check it out. And it’s actually, this is a beautiful story that was written to encourage the children of the day to live a certain way that was going to be better for them than what they were experiencing socially. But to bring it back to my talk, when you think about Pinocchio, he was just trying to become real.
And he went out and he did stupid things, and he told lies and his nose grew and all that stuff. But we’re doing the same thing too. We’re just trying to become real. That’s what we’re doing. And we know that our real life is our spiritual life. It’s not all of the stuff in the outer world. So when we tap into the present, this presence, this ever present flow of abundance, which I call spirit ideas are going to come to you. Esther Hicks calls them leads, leads will come to you that you should follow. Whenever you get an idea, you should say yes to it. It may amount to something, it may not, but that’s like your spirit speaking to you. But it all starts with us cultivating our connection to this presence. And I know that that’s a hard thing, right? Because we go through life, we meditate, we’re having a great morning, we meditate, we go out, we’re feeling good. And it’s easy to forget about the presence when we’re going through our day. But I think our job is to remember there is a presence that is going before us to make our way. The spirit that moves in mysterious ways, it’s always working on our behalf.
So the key is really to recognize the present flow of abundance. But this takes a commitment. This is what Eric Butterworth tells us. It begins with this decision to focus on our mindset, to shift to abundance, to notice what’s present and not what’s absent, and to trust, to really trust that God is not your resource. God is your source to really be in the trust that spirit is always and everywhere working on your behalf. And to be willing to grow, to ask the question, who do I need to become? Who do I need to become to experience this prosperity, this spiritual wellbeing that I want to have in my life? And to do our practice, to really be committed, to do our practice, and to consciously use our imagination, to pray, to meditate, to do all the things we know to do, but we don’t always do. Let’s be honest. But to consciously use these to practice the presence every day. So we’re going to go into a short practice and a little prayer. So I just want to invite you to close your eyes. Now.
Let’s just take a couple deep breaths together, just breathing in and breathing out, just breathing in and breathing out. And if you want to, you can put your hand on your chest, if that helps you to remember to connect to your spirit. Just let your body soften. Just let your mind settle gently, bring your awareness inward. There’s nothing you need to do in this moment, nothing to reach for, nothing to strive for. There’s nothing but peace in this moment. And right now you are resting in the presence of spirit, this endless ever present flow of abundance itself.
This eternal nature of spirit that continues, that is bigger than our human lives. We know that our prosperity is a way of seeing, it’s a way of being. And so I just invite you in your mind’s eye to call in that area where you’re looking to experience more prosperity, more spiritual wellbeing in your life, and just bring that to mind and just begin to see a picture of it. We live in a universe of infinite substance. It surrounds you, it supports you, it flows through you effortlessly like breath. There’s no shortage for scarcity in spirit.
There’s no withholding in the mind of God. Nothing’s missing, nothing’s broken. Nothing is withheld from one who is willing to recognize the flow that is always present, that is already present in your life. So just take a deep breath and inhale divine possibility. We are inhaling divine possibility, and we are remembering that we don’t make our prosperity. We make our consciousness and our consciousness makes our prosper prosperity. So just breathing into that, just in this moment, I know the presence of God, the presence of spirit, this presence which is never an absence. I know this to be the ever present flow of abundance and goodness, and life and love and grace, all the good things that we want to call in our lives. I know that this is what God is, and I know that I am one with all of this. I am one with this perfect divine possibility, this perfect divine flow of abundance, this perfect good, which is the very truth of my being.
And as I know this for myself, I know this for each of you, that we are all one with this divine flow of abundance, this divine grace, this divine source, this presence, which is never an absence. And so from this place of oneness, I now declare for each and every person hearing my words, an absolute and profound shift to a deeper realization of the presence in our lives, a deeper and profound realization of this spiritual wellbeing, this prosperity by whatever name we give it. I just know that God is the source of it all, and I know that that is the experience that we are all having, that our consciousness is expanding to deeply knowing that and that that is happening now. So I know that we are all uplifted, and as we uplift ourselves, we uplift those around us, and we uplift the entire vibration of this planet. So I just know that more is possible. I call forth love. I’m grateful to know that God’s got all of this, that how does not belong to us. I’m grateful for this deep deepened experience of prosperity, this deepening consciousness of the presence and power, and this deepening consciousness of the presence of love as our very beingness and with so much gratitude for all of this. Let’s say it together. And so it is. Amen.