Last year I went to the Red Sea to rest and to snorkel in the coral reef. Even if we chose a small resort, for the first time in years I found myself surrounded by many people. I am naturally very curious and I started to observe.
What struck me the most about the people around me, was what I read as a ravenous attitude. Starting from how much food people would put in their plate at the buffet – and waste. Most people were filling up their plates all at once and they would then leave most of it over, in the end.
The same was happening with drinks, so many bottles and glasses were left half full on the tables. Who cares, you could always find some more later, right?
I noticed a similar attitude in the sea, too. There was an amazing and rich coral reef just in front of the hotel: humans were eager to touch it, to scrape it and some even walked on it to shorten their way back to the beach. It was as if people simply wanted more and more, they could not get enough, they could not miss out on anything. It felt like a predatory behaviour.
Why am I telling you this? Because it made me think and realise that: no matter how much abundance there’s in front of us, at our disposal, we can still feel as if we don’t have enough, that we need more (even more than what we can consume). We can still perceive a sense of scarcity that influence our behaviour. Many of us think that we can feel grateful when we have many things, that we are rich because we have a lot, but actually it’s the other way around! No amount of money or resources will make us feel thankful and abundant per se, that feeling does not depend on something external. In fact, when we try to change things externally, to get more and more, that will only raise the bar and we never feel satisfied. It’s all about how we feel internally, and therefore how we see the world: it’s the lens that we choose to look at the world with, to shape the way we feel. If you have a grateful attitude, you can then appreciate what the world is offering you. You are abundant, not the world around you. Change needs to happen inside of you, this is how you change the way you feel and behave.
Thanks to the recommendation of a lovely client of mine, when on holiday I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia, which is the perfect book to dive deeper into this subject, should you want to. It encompasses the concept that different people read the same event differently, leading to very different experiences of the same event. The adventurous and allegorical stories of the book show what happens when we are driven by fear, or by the heart: fear can only take us away from the right path for us. When we fear that we don’t have enough, we may end up on the wrong path, searching for the wrong things for us, wasting a lot of energy and feeling depleted. Does it ever happen to you? I know that it has happened to me many times, until I turned to gratitude and abundance.
It is who we are, to create our reality. You can permanently change something only if you change who you are internally, if you transform yourself – not your environment. When you will be a different human being, your reality will be different. If you act upon fear you will be a slave of your predatory behaviours, of the mechanical needs of your body. Yes, I know that fear is a mechanism that shaped itself through countless years of evolution and it’s there to protect us…but when fear goes overboard we get stuck, we loose the compass and we let our body and mind take the lead. What the mind wants can be very different form what the heart wants. When we connect to our heart, it is our authentic self to determine what happens, instead of the mind. This is where real willpower lays. This is how we feel thankful and abundant.
