Lush and Lavish

Lush and Lavish

Hanging out on the porch one day last week, my friend and I were listing all the mundane things that make our lives lovely. How fun! I had been thinking about the notion of feeling like one is living in the wrong time. While this desire isn’t one of mine, I have known many people who feel this way. I guess it’s because if I had been born even ten years earlier, I would have died when I was three. And again when I was ten. And again in my 50s.

I joke a lot about living in the future. I say that because my inner ten-year-old remembers vividly discussing with a good friend what we thought things would be like in the 2000s. The whole bad idea of flying cars aside, we talked about communicator devices, teleporting, and fashions, and travel to the stars. I think about how exciting it was to imagine being in my 50s. I was so right! I remember thinking that I would live in luxury. I sure feel that way now. Thank you, prophetic former self!

How do I feel when I feel that I live in luxury? Why is my life so luxurious? What makes me notice my luxuries?

When I decided to give up my poverty mentality I had a lot of work to do. I had to really pay attention to what I was saying, to what I was thinking. For example, I often caught myself saying, “I can’t afford it.” The feeling I had when I said that was icky. I felt deprived, or undeserving, or I was lying and used that line instead of saying, “No thanks, I don’t want to,” which was more often than not what I actually meant.

I used to think I couldn’t afford nice clothes and shoes, for example. I did a lot of shopping for my stuff at cut-rate stores and felt frumpy and frowzy. I felt like I couldn’t afford wholesome food, so I ate processed stuff, and cheap snacks full of ingredients. I felt crummy but believed that I couldn’t afford to go to a gym, or take classes, or go out with my friends. I had the idea that I couldn’t make a good living, that somehow I couldn’t really take care of myself.

Poor little me!

Everyone learns to view the world through mental filters. We have to. The sheer volume of information we are exposed to would leave us completely overwhelmed. So we filter. And we filter. And we learn to filter for certain things, like the kind of people we are attracted to, like the way we view ourselves, like a poverty mentality. Many of these filters we acquire as very little children, and many of them are just plain wrong. I call that “mislearning.”

One of our tasks in life is to grow up. Not just to get older, but to mature, to eliminate our immature or childish thoughts and behaviors and to replace them with adult behaviors. It’s one thing to have a temper tantrum when we are 3, but another thing altogether when, as a fifty year old we are still giving people the silent treatment, or shouting at them, especially when we have the same fights over and over.

Shedding our poverty mentality is similar. Learning to notice when we get that lack-feeling and then immediately addressing it with a good Creative Question will go a long way toward turning poverty mind into luxury mind. Practicing gratitude and appreciation will also bring us a sense of the magnificent abundance in our lives.

How have I changed from feeling want to reveling in my abundance of luxury?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2015 all rights reserved 07012015