Shifting from the paradigm of scarcity to the paradigm of abundance, in awareness of our interdependence.
Yesterday I had a deep conversation with the founder and CEO of a big company who, two weeks ago decided to close down her 17 year old thriving business because she felt it was not aligned with her deepest values. One of the many issues she was not happy with was the fact that she was earning much more than others who do their work with amazing art and skills. She would honor the fact that she has taken huge risks and big responsibilities, yet she still felt very uncomfortable with this, and wanted to have more orientation around social justice, and the impact big businesses have in the world. I woke up today reflecting about the paradigms of scarcity and abundance.
As I understand it, the mystical principle of abundance is about equilibrium of giving and taking. It's about thriving in the awareness of our interdependence. In this equilibrium, justice, or alignment, every living being can grow.
A key pillar of a healthy community is to support everybody’s growth, and, in order to support others, we and those connected to us need to be nourished in many ways. The more we are nourished, the more we can support everybody’s growth and wellbeing, the more everyone can grow and thrive.
However, the mainstream paradigms of most western civilisations are built on the paradigm of scarcity - competing for limited resources - which depletes our world and destroys the homeostasis of our social tissues, instead of generating sustainable economies. At the core of this paradigm lies the the belief that if someone grows, this person is taking something away from us. However, things can look very different from a higher perspective. I like the way Thomas Hübl expresses it. He often says that when someone grows, they expand the game board of humanity. They are not necessarily taking something from the others, but growing our whole human field.
What is in the way of us finding an appropriate balance of giving and taking?
Because of trauma or adverse childhood experiences, many of us can only take very little and give very little. For similar reasons, some take a lot, and can give very little, whereas others take little and give a lot, and they get depleted.
Often trauma does not allow us - as Bert Hellinger would say - to “take our parents”. This creates many dynamics. At the root cause of this issue is having to “parent” our own parents: learning since our childhood to stabilise our environment by being energetic providers for our household, learning not to ask too much, and doing mostly everything on our own. We often carry this pattern into our adult personal and professional relationships. This is not sustainable. It does not allow us to be nourished from our roots. The healing movement is to be able to be “the child” again, being able to “take” from our parents what streams through them from our ancestral lineages.
When we are adults, this “taking from our parents” is a stance in which we recognise the orders of life. It is not going back to be children. It also does not mean we need to agree to former transgressions, or expect to get what we never got due to neglect. It means that we can drink from the river of our ancestors - our blood ancestors as well as the ancestors of our land, our teachers, and benefactors - filtering what has not been aligned, thus strengthening the growth of our lineages and communities forward in abundant exchange with our environment.
