Abundance

Happy Spring to everyone!

As I was looking for a picture for this email I was drawn to flowers which reminded me of this quote "Florals? for spring?, ground breaking (rolling eyes)" by Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in "The Devil wears Prada". Not ground breaking but aren't they gorgeous? :)

Last weekend we started the spring season in the northern hemisphere. I went out with a friend for a walk on that day and I felt such a sense of renewal and freshness that I have not felt in a while. It was great to see all the buds in the trees getting ready to bloom, and shrubs getting new growth in their branches. My jasmine plant lost all its leaves three weeks ago. I thought I killed it but this past week it started getting new leaves growing everywhere.

It is great to see the abundance in nature starting to burst forth. Even though things have changed in the last year, nature still keeps going despite of this it seems. This week we start a new month and a new focus which is: Abundance. This is another quality of the word Srī.

Śrī is also a name for Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth in the hindu tradition. As I was researching this word a while ago I learned how important it is to be content with what we have before we embark in the pursuit of wealth big or small. I have always attached this kind of endeavor to a sense of lack or not having enough. It is so important to genuinely recognize what we have and appreciate it before we start getting more. If we don't we can easily fall into greed, a state in which no amount of anything will suffice. One of my teachers once said that greed could swallow the whole universe in one bite and it still would not be satisfied.

It has been an on going paradigm shift to approach wealth of any kind from the stand point of contentment for me. There is nothing wrong per se with the pursuit of wealth. It is very human to want to live with a certain level of confort which can free us in some way to investigate and understand ourselves and the world in a much deeper way.

It is a very challenging paradigm shift because a sense of lack (which does not depend on how much one has) is the fuel for the pursuit of wealth. If that is not there then what will push us forward? This is a question for all of us what could propel our pursuit for more wealth if that sense of lack was not there? I am not talking about becoming a billionaire necessarily but achieving and sustaining a comfortable level of living. how could this effort come from contentment?

We will be exploring this in class this month.

Blessings

Jorge Nihal