Economies of scale: love's trickle-down effect

During a period of profound spiritual questioning, I penned a haiku entitled simply, Economics:

Waking on the edge
Of tears, I blink, creating
A trickle-down effect.

The poem expressed grief, not financial gain — though the two are interrelated. We trade our life energy for money, and tend to feel abandoned if we experience a reversal of fortune.

Abandon, from the Old French, means, "to put under (someone else's) ban". The modern meanings are "to give up (something) completely; to forsake or desert; to yield."

Yet to abandon oneself to something means to indulge deLightedly: "she danced with abandon." Free of another's strictures, we reclaim our truth, turn to face the music, and accept our invitation to the A-Bun-Dance.

Abundance, also from the Old French, says "see Abound".  The definitions are: "a great supply; more than sufficient quantity; wealth." Abound means: "to overflow, to rise in waves." Modern meanings: "to be plentiful; to be rich (in) or teem (with)."

For many of us, money equates to love: the more money we save, the more emotionally secure we feel. Once, thinking I was overly invested in a relationship, I envisioned the other person as a retirement account! We hoard and hold on from belief in lack and limitation. If you've yet to open an emotional bank account, there are no deposits there for you.

How might this apply on a national and global scale? Instead of perceiving the economy as an intractable entity that must be rescued from fiscal distress, we can see it as an aspect of our lives that needs to be nurtured back to health. This is the mindset in Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan country that measures success not by production or consumption, but by quality of life. They call it Gross National Happiness.

In order to replenish chronically low wells, we must abandon maladaptive behaviors, rather than abandoning our senses and one another. Our present approach is akin to using toxic measures to eradicate insects, versus harmonious methods that encourage the bugs to move on.

Moving from toxic to tonic is another subtle shift, like scared to sacred, density to destiny, nowhere to now here. It's simple, though not necessarily easy.

I remember when I realized, during my own healing journey, that the toxic relationship I most needed to get out of was the one I was in with myself. Finding and releasing our blocks to love is the core of the cure, because at root level, all illness, all hunger, is the same.

Hungry, we chase after people who don't want us, defend against possible good, since we don't know how to receive. Restoring right relationship with ourselves means re-storying our lives: looking again at the story we've created about how the world is, and seeing how this filter distorts our view of beauty and potential — our own beauty and potential.

When we can begin to change our cellular memory, a lifelong deficit starts to recede, and sufficiency becomes possible. 

With the ear of my heart, I hear one of my great teachers, cultural anthropologist and author Angeles Arrien, PhD, saying, "We give to others from our overflow, but many of us are still down there wringing out the moss to give to other people." I also hear the tithing prayer I recited on Sundays en masse at Celebration, a new thought community gathering I attended during my New Mexico years: "Blessings abound in my life/And I am free/To live and give/Abundantly."

This is a time of intense purification, a cleansing of the doors of perception. We're mirroring one another's processes to ever-greater degrees. As we abandon ourselves to love, it trickles down and fills in the cracks and crevices that formerly hosted the parasites of fear and lack.

The more we regenerate, the greater the abundance for all, at zero cost to us or our planet. On a scale of infinite love, there's no need to economize. Let's dance!