Copyright Lance Kinseth, Mind Flower / Jitsuzan, 2011
Tiny hermit florets of Spring have gone to
Summer’s throngs of florets composing each flower head
Looking like the sun itself.
AUGUST in the North American mid-continent: composites, butterflies, overflowing biomass presses the growing abundance against us, even in mosquito-form, and in air swarming with tiny flyers that spark in backlight like flowing stars.
This overflowing abundance of nature may provoke attention to “abundance” in our own lives. Abundance is not just landscape around us, so that landscape is either overflowing abundance or scarcity. There is a sense of abundance that is within each of us that may be only poorly accessed.
We tend to operate from a “scarcity mentality” when we might be operating from an “abundance mentality”—a belief in enough to share. In the decade of the 1970s, a communication theory termed Transactional Analysis would describe a common perception that there was not enough kindness to go around. With this perception, a person felt the need to restrict giving out too many “warm fuzzies” to others [compliments, acknowledgements, support] in order to maintain one’s limited energy. However, “TA” stressed that abundance was inherent in each of us so that “warm fuzzies” might be doled out endlessly, and actually amplify our energy.
Specifically in fitness and wellness, a scarcity mentality can prevail. Survival can be a “scarcity strategy” in which we do not really grow, but rather aspire to compensate as best can due to limits. Thriving is an abundance strategy that aspires to optimize. While a person’s life has many challenges, life can be an upward spiral of growth, change, and improvement. Problems offered opportunities, and the learning that results from challenges is an expression of the presence of abundance.
It has been said that our problem is not that we have limits, but that we believe that we have limits. In A Return To Love [Harper Collins, 1992], Marianne Williamson writes.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us….
And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates us. [Excerpt]
It is not that we can do anything we want right now. In yoga, we face limits in flexibility and strength. But in the face of limits, we are offered capabilities. And in life, we may lose our connection with our capabilities. When we find our capabilities, we act from a posture of abundance rather than scarcity.
In gentle body-mind practices such as restorative yoga, we have an opportunity to listen more closely to ourselves and to others. Spending time there can be quite different from our everyday life. We may open pathways and inherent strengths where there had seemed to be an impasse or a wall. We may touch upon a light within, a mind flower, a flower of overflowing abundance.
In restorative yoga, in August and in any season, we settle into no less than overflowing abundance. Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, we may dehisce, opening our capabilities—our overflowing abundance—and transform.
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