Inner Security (Mind Shift #1): From money to resourcefulness

Resourced fullness as a byproduct of alignment

I was only 8-years old when I started my training with money. At that tender age, I was trained to treat money as the primary source of my safety in the world. I was given a passbook for a bank savings account and told to start saving my allowance for a rainy day. The subtext was that you can handle whatever life might throw at you, as long as you have money. The program I downloaded was the promise that with a savings account, you can always buy yourself shelter if it rains.

In a disconnected and commoditized reality without strong local communities, using money as a source of security makes sense. Having money means having access to resource; in theory, we believe that money can be traded for whatever we need in the global marketplace of things. But the idea of this purchasing power providing us with safety is an idea that depends on a lot of assumptions. Those assumptions are crumbling in our current reality. Money, when held as security, is misleading.

Nowadays we have financial markets fluctuating wildly, global inflation running rampant, and a sick money system that’s tottering on its last legs. In this context, money has become a source of anxiety for us, more than it is a source of safety.

It doesn’t even matter whether we have a little or a lot of money in absolute terms. What matters is how we think about the money we have, in relative perception. In these times, the prevailing belief is: there is not enough money in our hands. Not enough money for what? We probably don’t even know. We just think we need more than we have because the value of money is decreasing, or at least uncertain.

We’ve all been subjected to this training, taught to put our power and faith into money. “In Money We Trust” — this widespread adoption of this shared belief system has severely eroded the connection with our inherent resourcefulness as human beings. And because we are trained to depend on projections and fantasies, we feel a deep sense of insecurity and fear. It’s part of our programming.

In common usage, the word “resourcefulness” usually refers to the cleverness that emerges from constraint. We use it to describe the ingenuity that arises when we are backed into a corner. But this traditional view is rooted in the shadow of fear and scarcity consciousness. If we want to expand in inner security, then resourcefulness is not about just “getting by” or “making do” with a limited amount of something. This definition presumes we can only be resourceful when something is missing.

True resourcefulness is about seeing and responding to reality as intrinsically abundant. It is the art of resting in resourced fullness. Resourced fullness is a fact of life, without us doing anything. Everything that exists on Earth — including me and you and this and that — is full of natural resource. All of life has inherent value because of its unique place in the ecosystem. We miss this fundamental truth most of the time. Instead of noticing the resources we have, we are often enchanted by advertising to look outside: comparing ourselves and coveting what others hold.

There is so much value lying dormant within us and around us. We have access to tons of hidden resources in cold storage, not moving. How do we unleash the potential energy of this trapped value? All we have to do is recognize its existence. We simply take note the gifts that we carry and connect with every day. We pause to account for our plentiful blessings of privilege, talents, capacities, experience, connections, creativity — things we own that no one can take away.

When we notice the abundant resources we’ve been given, they start moving. And as they move, they connect us to universal energy. There is a feeling of wholeness. There is a sense of having everything we need. When we feel whole and happy, and grateful for what is already received, we can redirect our focus and re-source the security that we have mistakenly placed in money. We can enjoy resourced fullness as the natural effect of alignment, as we find our place in the interdependent web of life.

This essay is a continuation from the previous one: Inner security as the key to a whole new economy. All three pillars of inner security are naturally part of the human experience — unlike money, power and status, which lead to striving. In this essay series, I describe each in detail and explore how we connect with them intentionally.

Next in this series: Inner security mind shift #2 — from power to resilience. Subscribe to free email notifications to make sure you don’t miss anything.

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