Embrace Prosperity

If you believe “I don’t have enough” or “There isn’t enough”—whether that’s enough money, enough time, enough love, enough friends, or enough resources to do what you want to do in any area—then the answer is yes.

Laurie: I have been there. I once needed to make a daily choice between buying the lunch drink I wanted and the one I could afford. The difference in price was only two cents. This happened a long time ago, but the difference was very real to me when my personal spending budget was only five dollars a week.

Willem: I have been there, too. When I was 14 years old, my family was poor. One of my shoes had a hole in the toecap, because I had worn them for a long time. Because they were my only pair, I couldn’t bring them to the shoemaker’s shop to have them repaired. It took my parents weeks to collect the money for new shoes. In that time, I learned that there wasn’t enough.

After many years of struggle, we learned a process that helped us release the last vestiges of those struggles and discover the abundance that truly exists in our worlds.

This book will help you discover and experience abundance in your relationship to money. But it just might overlap into those other areas, too.

You Need to Start Where You Are Now

If you don’t feel like you have enough money, you’ve probably learned to believe some ideas like these:

• Money burns a hole in your pocket
• The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
• You can’t win for losing
• Money is the root of all evil
• One way to lose a friend is to lend him money
• Save it for a rainy day
• Marry a rich man—or woman
• Money doesn’t grow on trees
• You spend money like it’s going out of style
• We can’t afford this
• It’s only money

Did you hear your parents, grandparents or religious institutions insist that this is the truth, even the absolute truth? How did hearing them help you learn to believe in scarcity?

Laurie: Whenever I teach a class about relieving money anxiety, the first thing I ask participants to do is create posters of statements they heard about money when they were children. We put them on the wall and refer to the statements throughout the workshop. Later, we try to answer the following questions about each statement: