Embrace Prosperity

This is a quick way to answer two important questions.

1. Do I want this thing only because of outside stimulation? I experience this kind of stimulation like sweets beckoning to me from a bakery window and inviting me to eat them.

2. Does my desire for this thing arise from within me? Is this like a background hum that is hard to ignore?

I often feel pulled to respond to the outside stimulation because it acts as a trigger to a past experience of pleasure. I’ve discovered that the kind of pleasure I get from saying yes to the beckon does not last long and sometimes interferes with honoring my long-term goals. That is why I hide my chocolate and other sweets in cabinets where I don’t accidentally encounter them.

On the other hand, if I respond to the hum that arises spontaneously, I usually feel very satisfied. I take those sweets out of the cabinet when a hum for them arises—and I enjoy them and experience enough quite quickly.

This is one way that I experience abundance. I learned it originally as a weight control method, and it has been very effective in helping me discern how much is enough for me in many different situations.

Experiment with answering those questions, either with or without the shortcut.

Our Journeys

As co-authors of this book, living on two different continents, with vastly different life experiences, we find it useful to share how we each traveled our own very different life paths from experiencing scarcity to experiencing abundance. On this path, the journey is as important and exciting as the destination.

Our destinations are very similar. We both experience abundance every day. We each enjoy enough money to live comfortably and do things that please us. We each experience the love and support of family, friends and our professional communities. Neither of us needs to work to earn money anymore. Instead, our money works for us.

We each came to our own methods of teaching others about experiencing abundance. Our paths converged when a mutual colleague invited me, Laurie, to study the system of guided life change, Logosynthesis, that Willem had developed. One of the reasons I accepted the unusual premises of this new system was that it worked. But another is that Willem and I both had earned our teaching certifications from the International Transactional Analysis Association.

When Willem first developed a workshop called Coins that used Logosynthesis to release frozen energy that kept people from using money effectively in their lives, I was excited about learning his methods. It all meshed beautifully with what I had been teaching for a long time. When I expressed interest in watching Willem teach his new workshop about money on the Internet, he suggested that we write this book together.

Laurie’s Journey

I can still remember my days as a young, newly-married, recent college graduate who had to make a careful decision about every penny I spent. So much has changed since then, and I am grateful for all that has happened that has made those changes possible.

I'm one of a small percentage of people my age in the United States who is comfortably retired after a thoroughly satisfying and fulfilling career as a psychotherapist, consultant and coach. However, I haven't retired from my life mission of helping others emerge from the boxes their families and cultures taught them to live in. I carry out my mission now through writing and publishing books to help individuals experience joy and abundance in their lives and relationships.

It wasn't always this way. Although I was raised in a middle-class family and I’ve always had more than enough material things, I was taught to believe in scarcity. And no wonder—my parents met and married in New York City during the Great Depression of the 1930s. They must have experienced scarcity wherever they looked.

Once, when I realized that my mother had started working in her father’s grocery store when she was about eight years old, I commented on it, and she told me, "All immigrant families worked.” I was startled when I realized that although both my parents were born in the US, all their parents immigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe in the early years of the 20th century. I had never before thought of them growing up as members of immigrant families.

I was taught to believe in scarcity and to save what I earned for important goals, like going to college or buying a house. I was taught to carefully conserve my resources. None of that advice was bad, and following it has served me well.

The part that hasn't served me was the built-in definition that there wasn't and wouldn't be enough. I could never really relax and enjoy what I did have because of the fear and constraint that went with that belief.

It's been a lifelong journey move from "earn, save, spend only on necessities" to "earn, save, spend, invest, enjoy and share." This journey also included learning to work and share with a life partner who urged me to do what I considered to be irresponsible things with money.

There been many bumps in the road since we married in 1960. Overall, it's been both fun as well as challenging.

My first awareness of the need for financial literacy beyond knowing how to balance my checkbook came in 1976 when my husband and I were blamed for competition problems and excluded from a group practice we'd started with professional colleagues several years earlier. This painful experience was largely the result of ignorance and the mismanagement of the financial aspects of our business.

Continuing our practice and teaching on our own made us squarely responsible for the financial success of our business. We needed help so we started out on our financial and management education.

A casual conversation with another colleague some years later led to the question, "If we’re so smart how come we’re not rich?" Our colleague invited us to a workshop about money that opened the door to two very different things. One was a focus on important practical aspects of creating wealth beyond just what you could earn. The other was a beginning awareness of the energy aspects of money.

Our journey included a deliberate education about how money works in the world. It included books and workshops about the practical, the metaphysical and the spiritual energy of money. Willem and I will share some of these tools throughout his book as we encourage you to begin or continue your own journey to experience abundance.

A small inheritance from my husband's parents allowed us to make a larger down payment on a home a little bit earlier than we had planned. A small inheritance from my parents made almost no difference in our lives.

Our journey also included some major mistakes including a money-losing attempt at investing in real estate. In that case, doing something we did not love doing, in an effort to create wealth, led us badly off course.

I learned to enjoy both the process and the rewards of creating the experience of abundance in our lives. This money has arrived in our lives because we focused our energy on our important life work: helping others get what was most important to them.

Now the financial abundance in our lives comes from income from investing some of the money we earned while doing that life work. Those investments were suggested by our financial advisors.

Even now I sometimes pinch myself when I spend what used to be an unthinkably large sum of money. I remind myself that there is enough. Now, my biggest challenge is finding the time to balance doing all my projects with all the wonderful possibilities for relaxation and play that I also enjoy.