Mining Your Mindset
Wealth is a lot more than just having a bank account with a large balance. In fact, wealth cannot have once specific meaning. I think wealth has to have a multitude of meanings. It is the idea of what we have on the external, yes. But what does it represent WITHIN you? What we have internally and how we label and define it lead to our wealth.
I have a beautiful daughter, Claire. She is an amazing little girl who brings abundance, love, and laughter into my life on a daily basis. From the time I see her in the morning until the moment I kiss her goodnight, my life is filled with love I never knew before.
When Kathy was pregnant with Claire, I knew my life was going to change in a big way. Kathy said that she felt I wasn’t really on board with her during the pregnancy, and that did cause some stress for her. I tried to explain how my being on board was working hard and ensuring that we had finances to allow me to spend more time with the baby after she was born. I know a lot of fathers who probably understand what I was feeling – that shift in responsibility looming overhead.
But there was another thing looming, too, and it was something more critical. It was more than securing our future financially by working hard. And what I found out by pursuing this wealth secured my future in other ways.
I knew that being a father was going to give me a wealth of emotion. And when it gets right down to it, that’s what weath really is. Joy, love, peace, happiness, understanding – all that we consider wealth to be comes from an emotional viewpoint.
When you get a new car that you have been dreaming of for years and you sit in it for the first time, you experience an emotion.
But this little girl, my daughter Claire, was going to change my experience. I knew before she was born that if I wanted to experience the wealth of emotion she afforded me, I had to do something to open up, expand my emotional playing field. I knew I had to do this, and I wanted to. I wanted to give my child more than what I had, but in order to do so, I had to give myself more than I was allowing myself.
I started looking for places in my life where I had wealth to mine. One area was my voice. People had told me for years that I had a great voice. One of my primary areas of generating wealth and giving to others was with my voice. I loved to sing, but often wouldn’t do it. When I sang, I would become very emotional. It got to the point where I wouldn’t sing because the emotions that came through me were more than I could handle.
It was WEALTH that I couldn’t handle. When Kathy became pregnant, I started taking singing lessons. First, I wanted to improve my singing voice. But more importantly, I wanted to open myself up to allow myself to feel the emotions coming through me. I knew if I was blocking the emotions coming through my voice, I was blocking myself in other areas as well. And with Claire on the way, I couldn’t afford to live with those blocks any longer.
I know that when I feel that opening in my chest that is more love, it is extraordinarily beautiful. Something flows through there. From this vantage point, I can’t believe I blocked that for myself for so long. But from here, I am grateful I took the risk to do something uncomfortable because I now have more love to give my daughter.
And I have more love to give my wife.
And myself.
Now, when I sit and play with my daughter, I often sing to her. She loves it. She lights up and even sings along with me.
Now that I have opened that part of myself and allowed what was there to flow, I can share it without having to sing to connect with that wealth within me.
Could you put a price tag on that? Could you sell it?
You can’t.
But that’s what wealth is.
What area of your life do you block wealth? Where is your biggest gift, the place where you feel emotion? Is there something you can do today to begin the sometimes uncomfortable task of allowing that wealth to come forward?
How will your life change by taking that step?
Some years ago, I served as assistant to the minister at a Unity Church. One Father’s Day, she asked me to deliver the lesson (sermon, for the more traditionally indoctrinated). My lesson centered upon the notion that parenthood represents our closest experience of the mind of the Divine. In that instant when we first truly realize what it is to be a mother or father, our highest calling is to provide for that child all that we wished for ourselves, and more. Even if it only lasts a moment, that is the time when we set aside our other goals and aspire only to ensure a perfect life for our progeny.
In those moments, we are offered the opportunity to recognize that joy is the only true wealth, and that the other trappings that we so often describe – and hunger for – are mere distractions. Unfortunately, we too often forget that blinding instant of insight, returning all too quickly to our pursuit of distractions.
In the guided meditation accompanying the lesson, I challenged the congregation to see themselves once again (or for the first time) holding that wondrous new life, and remembering their hunger to foster only joy in its every moment. To touch that place within that knows what is truly important in life. To touch the face of God.
Of course, in mere hours, I reverted back to the distractions, and relegated that Ah-Ha moment to its place on the shelf of my memories. Thankfully, it still falls off that shelf and smacks me in the head once in awhile. Hopefully, more often with each passing day.
Thanks so much for your comment, Ron. It matches up completely with my experience and adds to my thinking. It reminds me also of what Kathy sent me this morning, a quote from Roger Ebert’s profile on Esquire magazine available on the link below. Here’s the quote:
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
http://www.esquire.com/features/roger-ebert-0310