Do you think you need someone to have an abundant life?

Stop reading this blog for a moment and take a mental snapshot of yourself and your surroundings.  Look at that snapshot and identify all the good things that you have and that are going on right now.  I'll do the same.

(pause)

Here's a small portion of my list:

• I have a purring cat on my lap.
• I am writing in my blog which I love to do.
• I made homemade bread and it smells wonderful.
• The sun is glinting beautifully on the water, and I'm inside while it's cold out there.
• There is a movie waiting for me to watch later.

I could go on, but the point is I have just identified a multitude of reasons to acknowledge my life is abundant.  If you did the exercise you also have a small list of the abundance in your life just in this moment.

Why is this important?

Well, in my experience people are deficient in realizing their abundance.  They function from a mental attitude of scarcity and lack.  This causes big relationship problems.

How?

When you are functioning from sparsity, then you become needy.  It makes you over-react when you feel disconnected from your partner (because you fear even more loss.)  Imagining you have an insufficient life makes you grasp to try to hold what little you think you have and you experience unhealthy self esteem and poor boundaries. 

Let me give you two possible outcomes when you are in the mindset of scarcity rather than abundance.  You and your partner have a disagreement which is a little angry.  You go one of two ways:

1. One-up which leads you to say something like, "Well screw them, I don't need them- they are just ____."  You fill in the nasty word here.  Because you feel a lack, you feel like the other person is depriving you of something and is therefore reprehensible and you react poorly toward them.
2. One-down where you begin to beat yourself up for not being good enough.  "I'll never keep a partner, I'm not good enough; no one will want me."  Your actions are pitiable and may even move your partner further away just like reaction 1 did.

There is a third option- the healthy one.  Because you have reminded yourself regularly your life is abundant, you are not thrown for a loop when you get into a disagreement.  You remind yourself, "My life is okay and abundant even if she/he is mad at me right now."  This keeps your feet under you and you respond in a more giving way with healthy self-esteem and boundaries.  

Your courageous work is to practice acknowledging your abundance daily.  Then when you start to feel disconnected you can remind yourself you will survive and even be okay, but in this moment you can now respond in a healthy manner.

P.S. If you struggle with thinking of abundance listen to Louis Armstong's song "What a WonderfulWorld" or "Sittin in the Sun."

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