The Radiant Spirit: Ten Practices of Abundance

Note: Rick is immersed in a particularly busy flurry of activity currently, so I am posting a recent article of his, in installments.  I hope you enjoy it.  Following is the introduction; the ten practices have been subsequently posted in manageable bytes.  

The Radiant Spirit: Ten Practices of Abundance

The Practice of Abundance is a doorway into secular enlightenment, the non-denominational openness to the free flow of Spirit in our lives. It is not to be confused with feel-good prosperity programs and romanticized new-age proclamations that deny economic and social realities. Rather, the practice of Abundance allows us to develop an open flow and compassionate awareness through these very realities. It asks us to be clear, alert, and awake enough to transform every interactive moment into an opportunity for the expansion of consciousness. In this way, the temples of truth and beauty take up their residence in our shopping malls and offices; and if we are willing to practice, there is no real need for a meditation cushion. The life you are given becomes your meditation, and the cushion just helps to prepare you for the true challenge of living every day in source and heart connection with everything and everyone.    

Abundance, the radiant flow of well-being throughout one’s life, is not achieved through philosophy alone. Abundance needs to be cultivated, for it emerges through the choice to act and react to one’s environment with the fullness of one’s being. The willingness to suspend habitual judgments is crucial here, and it need not diminish one’s critical intelligence. What it can do is unlock barricaded space and allow feeling to flow fully. Feeling energy is more than reactive emotion: to feel one’s entire life fully, from its vast expanse to its petty meanness, is to engage with the terrain that has been given. Such engagement bestows gifts of passion, aliveness, and a profound sense of belonging.  

What we often do not realize about choice is that it is not limited to a singular moment, it is ongoing. And it does not really matter if ultimately, on a causal level, there is no such thing as choice or free will, for our attention is constantly receiving invitations, and our response to these invitations opens the doors we pass through, and reveals the rooms we inhabit. 

The Practice of Abundance is about learning to choose positively in an ongoing manner, to turn the stuff of daily life into an exercise in breakthrough, openness, and freedom. It is not a matter of pushing so-called negative circumstances, thoughts, and feelings out of the way, but rather of reframing them through a much wider lens. The practices offered here are practical, sustainable, and feasible; they are ways of moving one’s daily doings into eternity.

…to be continued