OVERVIEW
Join us this Sunday as we challenge our conventional notions about money and Prosperity in our lives. Begin to uncover the hidden beliefs and attitudes that may be holding you back from financial abundance. This Sunday we begin the journey to redefine your relationship with money, debunk the Money Myth, and pave the way for a more prosperous future. Whether you seek financial stability, abundance, or a more harmonious relationship with your finances, this talk will provide you with valuable insights and actionable steps to bring positive change into your financial life. We hope you can be there.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was automated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
(00:00):
Who loves that movie. I wanted to plant an earworm, and I was on the fence about it because I’m like, some people might say that is not a spiritual song, but the whole point of Julia Cameron’s work is your prosperity is not about the money. And we think that our prosperity is only about the money. So let’s dive in. So once upon a time in a small, quiet village, nestled among rolling hills, there lived a woman named Mia. And Mia was known far and wide because she always had a warm smile on her face. She had a kind heart and she had an unwavering sense of contentment. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? And she didn’t have a lot of stuff, but she always seemed to radiate happiness. So one morning as she tended her garden, she had flowers and she had vegetables out there. A traveler passed by, stopped to talk with her.
(01:05):
And he was a wealthy merchant named Elias. And he was very successful, who had seen a lot of the world and he had acquired a lot of wealth. But he had heard about how happy Mia was and he said, I need to understand what her secret is. And so he approached her and he said, I’ve heard that you’re the happiest person in the town. And she said, ah, my friend, happiness does not reside in the accumulation or of wealth or possessions. It dwells within our heart, nurtured by our spirits, and nurtured by gratitude and love. So he was intrigued, but he was super skeptical. He lived in a different world, but he decided that he was going to take what she said to heart. She had spent some time with him and they had walked around the garden and she had seen him how she lived off of what she had, that she said, yeah, I don’t have much, but I have this garden and I garden it myself and it provides everything I need.
(02:12):
I really have everything. And so he left and he began to shift his perspective as he went through life. And he began to notice just the little things in life, like a warm and friendly conversation if he had a fresh picked piece of fruit, the beauty of nature. And he found that as he let go of his relentless pursuit, we might say his relentless pursuit of more, and he started to focus on gratitude and love and cultivating those in his life that he had a profound sense of inner prosperity. And years later, he returned to the same village and he said to me, you changed my life. And she said, my friend, you have discovered that the true essence of prosperity is the wealth of the heart. So that’s what we’re going to be focusing on the next two months, the wealth of the heart. So what is prosperity? We all probably have our own definition of what prosperity is, don’t we? Julia? Cameron says, prosperity at its root is a belief in a benevolent something and a belief that something will guide us and guard us. We will be led in the direction of good no matter what amount of money we have at our disposal. Prosperity is never just about money. I love that. So this inner sense of prosperity, I’m defining my prosperity by what’s inside of me, not what’s outside of me.
(03:56):
And I invite you as you contemplate this idea of prosperity for yourself, just to think about what is calling to you in your life. We’re going to look at a bunch of different principles and practices, both from Julia Cameron’s book, but also what people feel compelled to share, who are speaking from their own experience. Because I was working on this talk and I was like, wow, there is so much out there about prosperity. I don’t even know what I’m going to talk about. So let’s just look at this as a process. We’re going to go through the next two months, and if I miss something and you’re like, Hey, I’m wondering about that, come grab me after service. So we want to do practices and use these principles in our life because I think Julia’s book is really to me, creating an energetic clearing in our life.
(04:51):
What do we need to look at in our life so that we’re available to whatever our deeper experience of inner prosperity is? And there’s no right and wrong in this. I really want to say this because a lot of us got infused with the should word when we were young and we let it run our life. I should be doing this or I should want to do this or whatever. And I just invite you to set that aside and really just kind of be with yourself. What is it for you? What is it that you are wanting more of in your life or less of? I learned something this week, my practitioner, we were talking about saying no to things, and she goes, I heard this from someone. I can’t attribute it, but I’m borrowing it. We always think about divine will, but there’s also something else, and it’s called divine.
(05:45):
It’s what you don’t feel called to. So I’m stealing it. And I also want to invite you as you look at this, to hold yourself in some grace about it and not to go into any judgment. If there’s something that comes up for you that you feel you should be doing different or you’re judging yourself, whether it’s about money or something else, I just want you to invite you to hold yourself lightly. I know this can be triggering if you’re not having the experience you want to have, especially around money. And so I just want to invite you to hold yourself lightly, get some prayer either in the room or online because we want to have the courage to look at all parts of our life. And when I think about how she’s constructed what she’s doing, part of it is too, we have to take care of the basics of our life, having our basic needs met, whether that’s for shelter or for money or whatever, or to feel good, to feel healthy, right before we can address other things. So you are where you are, and if it feels messy, just hold yourself lightly and add my two favorite words until now. So if you’re having an experience in your life that is not what you want it to be, add the words. Until now, we can just anchor ourselves and our current experience. But as Gordon read to us, we want to be focused on creating and where we’re moving.
(07:18):
Neville Goddard was a teacher in the early 19 hundreds, and Gordon read to you from one of his books, feeling is the secret. This idea when we say feeling, we’re not talking about your feelings, we’re talking about what is the feeling that you have within yourself when you’re thinking about something. And it’s easier to, he said, it’s easier to ascribe your feeling to the events in the world than to admit that the conditions of the world reflect your feeling. However, it is eternally true that the outside mirrors the inside as within so without, and I want you to think about it this way. If you’re having an unwanted experience in your life, because we all have them. I don’t care how long you’ve been on this path, everybody has unwanted experiences or we have our life changes and maybe we’re not happy about how our life changed.
(08:21):
We all have that. So I want you to get curious when these things happen in sort of a noticing way about how is that a messenger for you? Right? I’ve talked about this before, but I had some health problems years ago when I was working in banking and it was all stress induced, but I had to really take a look at myself and say, I need to change because my inner sense of prosperity was apparently not good at that point. I wasn’t taking care of myself, I wasn’t valuing myself. I was putting everything before me. And I have someone that I work with, one of the CEOs I work with, he’s been going through this terrible time at work for about a year, and he feels very personally attacked frequently. And he said, every time it happens, he begins to notice that his whole body tightens up and he’s like, I got to do something about this because I’m not dealing with this well. So that’s what I’m talking about, just noticing what’s happening with you, noticing when something makes you feel good and feel energy and noticing when something just causes a tightening within yourself.
(09:41):
Also too, things like when we think about what’s happening in our life as a messenger, I’m going to talk about money for a second for me. If I make a mistake with money, I don’t know if Rich is listening this morning, but I made a mistake in our checking account this week. Honey, you don’t know about that. But it wasn’t major, it was minor. But anyway, I realize it’s because I’m not paying enough attention. That’s what it says to me. It says, slow down and pay attention. That’s the message of that. And so as you think about the circumstances of your life right now, what’s the message your life is giving to you? It’s just another way that spirit’s communicating with you. We’re getting messages all the time this week. I was talking to one of my clients on Thursday morning and she said, remember that Mary Oliver poem about the journey?
(10:38):
And does everyone know that one? And it’s kind of stepping boldly in yourself. It’s beautiful. I can’t remember the name of the poem. But anyway, then I had my session with my practitioner and she brought up the same poem, and I’m like, I guess I’m supposed to take a look at that poem. That’s what I’m talking about. Your life is always speaking to you. Are you listening? And Neville Goddard talks about the subconscious mind, which I think the conscious mind and the subconscious mind can get a little confusing to people, but we want to pay attention to what’s the conversation in our head. Some examples, I’ll take this example for myself. My parents were very hardworking people. My father was a very hardworking person. So what got implanted in me is, oh, if I’m going to do well in life, I must always work hard.
(11:35):
And I don’t consciously think that, but it’s in my subconscious. It’s sort of a belief that’s driving me that maybe doesn’t serve me too well. Or you might have a subconscious belief that it’s selfish to take care of yourself or to focus on yourself. So what I want you to notice is what’s your inner dialogue and is there something you want to shift, some belief, some way of being that doesn’t serve you anymore? And use this time to start creating the feeling tone of what you want to experience instead. We always say, act as if, right? What you want is already yours. I think about Terry Cole Whitaker. I’ve used this example before, but she was a very prominent new thought minister for a long time. And when she first came into the teaching, I think she might’ve been in Louise Hayes community and she wasn’t experiencing prosperity in her life.
(12:38):
And so she went to a thrift store and found a nice suit, and she would go put her nice suit on and she would go sit in the lobby of a nice hotel and get a cup of coffee just to start to feel like, well, what would it feel like to be more prosperous in my life? Right? That’s what I mean when we’re talking about the feeling. That’s why vision boards are so popular, right? Because it helps you get in the feeling of what you want. There might be songs that put you in the feeling of what you want. You have to figure out what is it for you? But how do you get in that feeling of what you want? And I’m going to encourage you, I forgot the handout at home, but there’s something we used in coaching called The Wheel of Life, and I’m really a business coach, not a life coach, but anyone who’s in business is also a person and they have a life, and it applies to them too.
(13:38):
So the idea of this, and it’s in the chat for our online friends, the PDFs in the chat, and if anyone wants it, just let me know. I’ll send it to you, or I’ll put it in the city side thing. But the idea is you look at every aspect of your life and you say, on a scale of one to 10, where would I put myself right now? And it helps you think about how are you feeling about the balance of your life. So maybe in business and career, I’ll use myself as an example. I’m probably like an eight. The reason it’s not a 10 is because I’m examining this is my prosperity work, the relationship between time and money I work, I get paid for what I do. That’s my kind of work. And so I’m working on that relationship, and I already told you that.
(14:26):
I was told by my family had to work hard. So the relationship between all of that, that’s what I’m working on. But you do this in each area of your life, and it’s just a good way to take a look at where do you want to be having a different experience than you’re having. Just to give you one more example, health, I’m probably, is it on their health right here? I’m like an eight or nine on health, but it’s still something I want to work on. I’ve had a few of my older siblings pass away, and also I have a brother who has Alzheimer’s who’s still alive. And so it’s like I need to support my body. So this is what you do when you go through it. Just to give an example. And is anyone look at this and say you have an area where you want to have more prosperity in your life, you want to share what it is, what is it?
(15:21):
The business career, okay, anybody else have an area? You look at this and say, Terry, physical environment, anybody else? Jason, go ahead. Romance, I love that. And our online friends, come on, play along, type in the chat there. But that’s what this is about is just beginning a contemplation. And when we start, we have a class starting Wednesday night, which we are offering at a love offering basis. So give what you can. It’s going to be on Zoom, and the idea is for us to create a mastermind to help you look at your life. What do you want to call in for yourself? Kind of not a super heavy lift class, but really to help you almost like in an environment of friends, to draw in a different experience. So let’s talk about how do we shift our thoughts and our focus? Just a couple quotes from some famous prosperity teachers, there’s only one way by which you can achieve prosperity.
(16:25):
It is to take charge of your mind. Easier said than done sometimes. And then Esther and Jerry Hicks, who have been important teachers to me on the journey, we could rightly say that how we think and feel about our troubles is critical to keeping ourselves in a prosperity consciousness. So it’s all about, we’re all going to have the negative thoughts sometimes or go down a rabbit hole. It’s all about how do you bring yourself back, whether you get prayer, whether you have a little way of coaching yourself with affirmations. And Julia Cameron shared that she was inspired to write this book because she believes that every person is creative and they can use their creativity to create a life of enough. And she was married to, is it David Cameron who did the Titanic movie? Anybody know James Cameron? James Cameron. Thank you. She was married to him. So she had this experience of having a great deal of money.
(17:27):
And then she said she realized even when she had a great deal of money, and they’re divorced now, but even when she had a great deal of money, she still didn’t feel that inner sense of prosperity. And so she realized that it was really about her cultivating this, not worrying about money, and she to share these tools so that she could help others to have more prosperity. She says, prospering is something we can do right now today, no matter how much money we have. She also shared a story about a friend of hers who lost everything. In a Ponzi scheme, it sounds a little like Bernie Madoff, but this person literally was in danger of losing their home, and she was afraid to spend a dime. I mean, who even carries dimes anymore? But she was afraid to spend a dime. But what happened? She had friends, she had family, she had colleagues, she even had strangers reaching out to her, offering her help.
(18:30):
Do you need a place to stay? Can we bring you some food? Can we give you a loan? Or can we lend you some money? Or do you just need someone to listen to you? And this person was blown away by this, but what Julia said is this person had been super generous with others her whole life, with sharing herself, with them, being available to talk to them, and that it was just the universe bringing it back to her, right? And the divine was speaking to her about her life. And I know a lot of people have stories about when something goes terribly wrong and then it turned out to be good. It’s that kind of thing. It’s like spirit is always prospering you. It’s just a question of whether you’re aware of it.
(19:21):
So we want to change our mindset about where we’re at. Catherine Ponder, who’s one of, I think he might, I don’t know if he’s online this morning, one of John Mackey’s favorite teachers says, instead of fighting problems, picture your way out of them. Ernest Holmes said, today, I recognize the abundance of life. I animate everything in my experience with this idea, and I want to invite you to use this question a lot the next two months. What else is possible? Because we’re trying to create a new mindset about our lives, and we want to see what’s present and not what’s absent. But we also want to really open our minds. We often get stuck in what we’re experiencing, and we often get stuck thinking the past is going to dictate the future. Instead of stepping into more possibility thinking, we’re saying, okay, what else is possible?
(20:20):
What else could be possible? And if you have trouble doing this in your own head, phone a friend, right? Phone a friend, talk to a practitioner, talk to someone, because sometimes we get stuck. So used to what our experiences instead of saying, what else is possible for me? So she’s got some daily practices, and I just want to share what they are. So she’s got five of them. Five of them. The first one is the morning pages. And has anyone ever done the artist’s way? So the artist’s way you do the morning pages and what the morning pages are about is that first thing in the morning, you get up with your journal and you just write stream of consciousness, three pages. And what I noticed when I did it many years ago was that the things I wasn’t happy with in my life were what I wrote about every day.
(21:15):
And I got sick of myself. So I’m like, well, maybe you ought to actually do something about that instead of writing about it every day. But the morning pages are for mental clarity. That’s the purpose of the morning pages. It helps you check in with how you are doing. And then she has something called counting, which is about financial clarity. So this is really getting related to your money. She recommends you walk around with a little book and write down everything you spend. You might have another way to do it. Some people in today’s world might use mint or an app like that. I’m a geek, I’m going to admit it. I have an Excel spreadsheet that I go through once a month. And the reason I do that is when I stopped working in my corporate job, I didn’t know what I was going to make every month.
(22:03):
So I had to be careful. I had to be careful that I had enough money to meet my obligations. So it just helped. It’s how my brain works. Your brain might work a different way, but it’s all about getting related to what’s going on in your money. The next one is abstinence. And no, it’s not referring to a particular category of life, but it’s about stopping debt. Now, I want to say, I mean, we could talk about debt for a whole talk. All I want to say about it is there’s kind of good debt and unhelpful debt. If you’re buying a home and you’re getting a mortgage, that’s good debt. But if you’re constantly running up your credit cards and it has become unmanageable for you to service them and stuff, that’s probably, I’m not going to say bad debt. It’s probably not good debt.
(22:57):
Okay? So that’s her thing is to stop debting. Next one might be a little surprising, walking at least 20 minutes two times a week. What does it do for us to walk? It gives us perspective. When I’m out walking Ali, I don’t listen to podcasts or whatever. It just helps me to think about what’s going on in my life. And it gives me perspective. And sometimes I get ideas that hadn’t come to me before, and then she calls it a timeout. We call it meditation, but just this idea, five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night. You can use it however you want. You can count your blessings, you can simply rest, but it’s to begin to get you in touch with your inner resources, just sort of taking a break. And so I want to talk a little bit, this is a less glamorous part of her book, but it’s what kind of spender are you?
(23:54):
And this is another thing she invites you to get related to. So if you’re a big ticket spender, your money might go for status symbols. If you’re a bargain buyer, you might be more interested in quantity, not quality. That was my dad. My dad grew up very poor. He grew up during, they experienced the depression. They never had enough. They ate a lot of chicken. He grew up on a farm, and he would go to the store and he would buy like 10 ketchups if they were on sale or 10 open bits. Because for him, he wanted to make sure he always had enough, right? Because he had had the experience of not having enough. Monetary miser means you don’t buy something for yourself even when you need it, because you’re always trying to be careful with your money. And the enabler, I love this definition, medicating the anxiety of another by spending our money on their behalf.
(24:56):
And I can say I have been in more than one of these camps. I’m just going to confess it. When I was in the corporate world and I was trying to keep up with the Joneses, I felt like I needed a certain kind of suit. I needed to look a certain way to be taken seriously. But I’ve also been the enabler where I had someone in my family who was not doing well, and I was constantly offering money to help. So we all can live in different camps, but it’s just to come to an awareness. And sometimes, sometimes we’re in a good balance place with our money. We’re not acting out of any of those. So it’s really about having the awareness of where are you in your relationship with money. It’s just an indicator of what’s going on on the inside. And where do you tend to default? Anybody want to share where they think they default?
(25:58):
Nobody’s volunteering. Judy. Okay. Judy’s doing the enabler right now with some of her family. Anybody else? Okay. Gordon? Yeah. Okay. So Gordon says he resonates with the enabler because there’s something going on with one of his kids, Ryan. Ah, okay. So Ryan’s saying he doesn’t know where he falls because he doesn’t want to spend money in a system where goods are created from exploitation. Don a big ticket because all this stuff. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So Don’s saying he’s a big ticket spender so that he has good stuff, so he doesn’t have to buy too much and have too much. Right? Okay. Awesome. Thank you for sharing.
(27:22):
So let’s talk a little bit about the spiritual view. And this is from Eric Butterworth, one of the great prosperity teachers, in my view, from his book, spiritual Economics, God, spirit. I added the word spirit. I know not everyone likes the word God. I’m also changing pronouns these days too, but can do no more for you than I’m just say, spirit can do through you. All. The help of spirit cannot aid you except as it flows through your consciousness, through your faith, through your vision. So before you attempt to raise money, the first step should be to raise consciousness to know that the place on which you were standing is holy ground. It’s important to recall that it’s not really for lack of abundance that you’re experiencing want, but for the lack of awareness of the ever present reality of divine substance and the faith to shape it into manifest form. I think anything with prosperity is really about trust and faith at the end of the day, right? Do we have the trust and the faith that what we teach, that as we practice it, that there is a responsive spirit out there that’s bringing it into our experience? Ernest Holmes says, we are like a sculptor, having both the training and the tools with which to work, standing before a huge block of marble admiring its beauty, yet never turning a hand, and all the time wondering why an interesting statue does not emerge. I love that quote.
(29:05):
So for you, what’s the vision of your life? If you thought of your life like a statue or a collage or something like that, what’s the vision? When I think about myself, I think at this point in my life, I think it’s about inner, just inner peace, inner harmony, being happy, feeling like I’m connected with the people in my life. I don’t know what kind of picture I’d make of that. It might be the Buddha sitting with a lot of other Buddha hanging out. I don’t know. Just making that up right now. But what’s the picture you want to call in? And I want to invite you to share.
(29:49):
Oops. Why is it not my screen? Decided not to work here for a sec. Lemme see. Okay, I’m hung up. So I guess I’m not going to go to the next slide. I’m just going to tell you what it says. Oh, there it went. Okay. I want you to finish this sentence. I feel prosperous when, let’s just get some shout outs from the room and shout outs in the chat. I feel prosperous. When do you feel prosperous? Okay, when I’m in nature. So when else, when do you feel prosperous with family? We’ve got a couple with families in the room. Around friends. Around friends. Quincy.
(30:36):
Oh, when you hang out with your cousins. Fun. Fun. Anybody else? Tiffany? Ah, Tiffany says, sharing my creativity. So I don’t see any in the chat right now, but please share in the chat. So just begin. And she’s got an exercise in her book about this. Just begin in the contemplation, maybe do some journaling on it. I feel prosperous win, right? I feel prosperous win. So the invitation of the Stein is to expand the container for your good. Emma Curtis Hopkins, the teacher of teachers who taught Earnest Holmes, the film wars, lots of other people said There is good for me and I ought to have it. So what greater good do you want to declare for yourself? What do you want to affirm for yourself? As we move into prayer, I just want to invite you to close your eyes and just in your mind’s eye, just begin to picture envision what you want to call in for yourself and your life. And just in your mind’s eye, just affirm that I affirm love, friendship, connection to family. Whatever it is for you time, just affirm that in your mind. And in this moment, I know that the presence of spirit, the presence of God, this divine grace, this divine wisdom, this divine intelligence and creativity, this divine field of life that we are living and moving and having our being in. I know that I am one with it. And I know that each person hearing my words is one with this divine creativity, this divine possibility, this divine
(32:38):
Love and connection and prosperity and grace, and ease of life. I just know that spirit is surrounding and supporting each one of you and what you are calling in. And I know that as we ask, spirit says yes. Spirit is always saying yes. So I know that as you affirm, as you pray, as you call in, as you embody the feeling of that which is desired, I just know that you begin to see it manifest in your experience. And I know that you are fully supported in this moment, that there is a beauty that is unfolding in your life, that is inner, inner wealth, inner prosperity, inner wellbeing, inner grace, inner goodness, this goodness itself, which I call God. I know that that’s the truth of each and every person’s life. So I say yes to this, and I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful to know that spirit is loving, supporting, leading, guiding each one of us. I’m grateful to know that whatever is being put in prayer by the people hearing my words, I’m grateful to know that spirit is saying yes right now, that there is a great big divine yes happening. And I’m grateful to know that this prayer is fulfilled now, and with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.