CHAPTER FOUR

Scarcity and Abundance

Once during a retreat, Marty began to feel very sad. Growing up with a father who was loud and domineering, Marty had developed a habitual reluctance to express his feelings. Yet his wife had recently left him, and at that moment Marty was beginning to feel the sadness of missing her. I went over and placed my hand on Marty’s chest and asked him to breathe slowly into his heart. He began to cry. I asked him to give voice to the feelings there. As the tears came, he said, “It feels like there’s never going to be enough for me.” When he spoke those words, it seemed he was telling me the truest thing he could say about his life. I asked him to repeat those words a few times. With each repetition, he opened more and more, touching that painful sadness, feeling the desperate grief of a child who never had the love he needed.

Raised in fearful desperation, we are convinced that sufficient love and care lie forever beyond the boundaries of our life story. A deep sense of scarcity infected our hearts; just as we learned to fear that there would be no place of belonging for us, so did we also learn to fear there would never be enough loving care. Regardless of how loving or generous our parents intended to be, it sometimes may have felt to us as if there were never enough to go around—not enough care, not enough attention, not enough touching, safety, playfulness, or love. We came to believe that even care was in short supply. It was something used sparingly, not to be wasted, nothing we could count on.

As children, we first learned about scarcity and abundance in the marketplace of family affection. Raised with the belief that there would never be enough for us, we calibrated our dreams according to what we assumed we would never have. We simply stopped asking for love, care, and affection. There was just too little available for us.

Here we have a pivotal dilemma as children: If there is not enough care to go around, then we must choose—who gets to be cared for, you or me? If there is so little love, who gets to have it? In a family where care is rationed like water in a lifeboat, who drinks first from the cup? And who decides?

When love is scarce, it feels impossible for everyone in the family to be cared for. If I take it myself, I will feel mean and selfish, hurting everyone else. On the other hand, if I give the love to you, I may not feel cared for. Thus we give birth to the scarcity contract: I will care for you if you promise to care for me. We pass a thimbleful of care back and forth forever, never being filled, rarely feeling loved.

When we grow up feeling that love is swiftly depleted, any caring relationship inevitably requires us to choose—which of us will be cared for? We have no sense that there is enough for everyone, no memory or experience that teaches us there is enough to fill the hearts of all who ask, enough to fill us up to spilling over. Care is never something shared—there is not enough for that. Love is either given or taken. And we all keep score.

Our fearful sense of scarcity sometimes drives us to latch onto anyone or anything that comes our way, just so we will have something in our lives. Barbara, raised in an alcoholic family, stayed with her husband for ten years, and even though she was miserable in her marriage, she was convinced she would never find anything better. “I just want too much,” she would tell me. “I can settle for this, I know I can.” For her, happiness was a dream, and she felt unworthy of wanting more than she had. “To want more than this is just stupid,” she told me.

Our feelings of scarcity become so chronic and habitual that they influence the way we approach major decisions in our lives. Confronted with important choices, we fear the wrong turn will bring disaster, cutting us off even further from any possibility of care and abundance. Every new choice invites the possibility of getting even less than we have now, so we must be very careful to make the right decision. But if we begin to let go of fear, we come to see that regardless of which path we choose, either one may lead us to care, to abundance, to God. The spirit of love and creation is not so scarce that we will be forever lost if we make the wrong choice. Whatever we choose, wherever we go, there will be some doorway, some opportunity, some person or situation that may bring us what we need.

What Is Enough?

Jesus spoke often of abundance:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and whoever seeks finds, and to whomever knocks it will be opened. Who among you, if your child asks for bread, will give them a stone? Or if they ask for a fish, will give them a serpent?

If you then... know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will God give good things to those who ask?

Parents know how to give the gifts of bread and fish to their children when they are hungry. But there are times when a child needs more than bread or fish; when the child aches for love, or kindness, or safety—things difficult to name, impossible to ask for. What of the deep yearnings of the tender heart for those things that never came, things our parents could never provide? Where do we knock, how do we seek what we were never given? And what can we ask for without feeling selfish?

When we are convinced how little is available for us, we feel confused about how much is enough. How much can we ask for, what can we hope for? When we resign ourselves to a life where love and joy will never come in abundance, we reduce the depth and breadth of what is possible for us, making our lives small and sparse. “Ask and you shall receive” rings hollow in the heart that has grown to expect less and less. There will never be enough for us; why bother asking at all?

As we reduce the perimeter of our dreams, we become less able to name what we truly need. Are we truly able to ask for what we really want, or can we ask only for what we can expect to receive? Our requests are tempered by our belief in scarcity: Since there is so little to go around, we learn to do without. But this is not a serene acceptance of whatever we are given. Underneath it all we are angry and hurt, we feel cheated and deprived.

Some of us try to rectify this feeling of scarcity by becoming more aggressive in asking for what we want, trying to create abundance by demanding that we get what we deserve. When we were small, there was not enough to go around, so we gave our part away: Now that we are getting stronger, we want our part back. But this strategy, while moderately effective, can still have an edge of desperation behind our request that reveals a lingering conviction that there is still not enough to go around. We have not come to believe in abundance, we have simply changed our response to scarcity: Instead of giving what little there is to you, I am going to keep it for myself.

This is not an act of abundance, it is still an act of fear. Learning to ask for what we want—while giving us a sense of power in our lives—can subtly mask the fact that we have yet to believe that there really is enough for us. Rooted in a theology of scarcity, we still have not touched that place where we truly believe there is enough care, nurture, and love for everyone.

Many healing therapies understandably begin by helping us to practice listening to the quiet needs within us, needs that have remained unnamed and unspoken. Then we learn to speak those needs and desires in the company of others, asking for what we need and want. As we name those inner needs, advocating the desires of our heart, we begin to heal ourselves, correcting the old injustices and negotiating for what we never received.

But getting everything we want is not the culmination of our healing, nor does it necessarily spring from a sense of abundance. The mind, given free reign, will perpetually generate a lifetime of wants and desires, always wanting more and more, and is never fully satisfied. An experience of abundance is not dependent upon the number of things we can accumulate. It does not matter how many jobs, lovers, compliments, dollars, or houses we manage to acquire to prove to ourselves there is finally enough for us. The practice of abundance is not about how much we can get; the experience of abundance arises when we feel that whatever we have is enough.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who has studied Oriental and Western spirituality, says that abundance “is not measured by what flows in, but by what flows over. The smaller we make the vessel of our need... the sooner we get the overflow we need for delight.” Many of us shape the “vessel of our need” out of fear and habit. We rarely examine with mindfulness and care what we truly need to be happy and serene. When we are raised in scarcity, our impulse is to heal ourselves by wanting and getting more and more. If we can have now what we couldn’t have then, perhaps we will be fulfilled.

However, when we begin to examine the nature of our wants and needs, we find we may increase the possibility of feeling abundant by actually allowing some of our desires to fall away. The Buddha said that our endlessly multiplying desires are the source of all human suffering: The more we want, the more we experience suffering when it does not happen. We all have wants and needs; but if we expect those wants to be always satisfied, we will inevitably be disappointed. As we carefully check the proliferation of our desires, inviting the “vessel of our needs” to gently become smaller, we open ourselves to abundance. G. K. Chesterton said:

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” Henry David Thoreau put it another way: “I make myself rich by making my wants few.”

When Jesus said “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly,” he was not promising his followers that they would always get everything they wanted. He was speaking of the abundance that comes when we can recognize what is available to us with different eyes, with an open mind and heart. If we hold onto the frustrated wants of childhood, still aching for the love that mother or father or family never gave us, then we endlessly postpone our capacity to be filled in this moment.

Many of us still wait at the doorstep of childhood for the understanding, acceptance, love, and approval that never came. Whatever we were given was not enough, not what we needed, not what we hoped for. Yet as we endlessly wait for our childhood wants to be fulfilled, we miss the abundance of this breath, this living instant. What of the care the earth has for us now, the beauty available in the light of morning, in the sunset, in the color of the sky? There is great care available in the feel of grass beneath our feet, deep nurture in the water that cools our lips, tremendous nourishment in the air that fills our lungs. As we sit with the habitual yearnings of an unfulfilled childhood, waiting for Mom and Dad to finally care for us in the way we dreamed they would, we can feel only the scarcity of what we have lost forever. But if we can begin to let go of the disappointments of childhood, we are free to wade into an ocean of care, nurture, and love that may be available to saturate every moment of our life.

Abundance can blossom as we shift our perception. “If your eye is full of light, your whole body will be full of light,” said Jesus. Love and abundance arise when we pay attention to what we have already been given with freshness and curiosity. When we are always looking at the places where love never came, we tend to feel an overwhelming scarcity. But when we open our eyes to the fertile garden of the present moment, we may feel the earth itself hold us in her love, as in this poem by Wendell Berry:

Like a tide it comes in,
Wave after wave of foliage and fruit,
The nurtured and the wild,
Out of the light to this shore.
In its extravagance we shape
The strenuous outline of enough.

Sometimes when we sit down to eat a rich meal, nothing tastes quite the way we like it, and we feel dissatisfied. Other times, at the end of a fast or a long meditation, a small piece of bread and a sip of cool water can taste like a feast. Which is abundance, the grand meal or the bread and water? Or is it the mindfulness we bring to what we are given that helps determine our wealth?

Thich Nhat Hanh, a loving Vietnamese Buddhist master, suggests we can use our shifting perceptions to shape our experience of wealth and poverty:

A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn sorrow on, we are sorrow. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.

What Belongs to Us?

Our feelings of scarcity and abundance are complicated by the concept of ownership. We are taught to believe that certain things belong to us and other things do not. This piece of land, this spouse, this child, and this food belong to me. Those other things belong to you. What belongs to me I call “mine”; what belongs to you, I call “yours.”

But what if nothing really belongs to any of us? Mahatma Gandhi said that when we buy and sell anything, we are simply contributing to the illusion of ownership. In the Old Testament, God instructed the Hebrews to observe a Sabbath day of rest and contemplation, a day to think about the multitude of gifts and blessings they had received from God. The Hebrews were also required to take a Sabbath year—a year when no one could plant, sow seed, or harvest crops. During this year, everyone had to rely on whatever food grew in the fields on its own. This was to remind the Hebrews that it was not their work alone but God and the earth that fed them.

Further, every seventh Sabbath year—every forty-ninth year, the Year of Jubilee—all lands that had been sold or confiscated were returned to their original owners, and all debts were canceled. It was just like the end of a game of Monopoly, when everyone gave everything back and had to start over. This way, the Hebrews would be reminded that nothing really belonged to anyone. It was all on loan from God.

Many spiritual traditions recommend owning as little as possible. After the death of the Buddha, it was decided that monks would be prohibited from keeping food overnight. Each day they had to beg for that day’s food, reminding them to be dependent on whatever came from God. Similarly, when the Hebrews were in the desert on the way to the promised land, God fed them with food from heaven called manna. It was forbidden to keep manna overnight, inviting them to trust that God would feed them anew each day. One day’s food was all that was needed; to demand more was to mistrust God’s care.

Many years ago an American tourist paid a visit to a renowned Polish rabbi, Hofetz Chaim. He was amazed to see that the rabbi’s home was completely empty, a simple dwelling furnished only with a few books, a single table, and a bench.

“Rabbi,” asked the tourist, “where is your furniture?”

“Where is yours?” the rabbi responded.

“Mine?” asked the puzzled American. “But I’m only passing through.” The rabbi smiled.

“So am I,” he said.

We cannot measure abundance by what we accumulate. Abundance is an experience of the heart, a wind that blows through us like a flute. There is nothing to hold onto—who can hold onto music? It floats in the air. Our treasures are in the eye, the ear, in the heart that feels the wonder of things. “Where your treasure is,” said Jesus, “there will your heart be also.”

A few years ago I was visiting with Padre Pedro Ruggiere, a Maryknoll priest working with the poor in Pamplona Alta, a barrio on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. He was showing me around the village, and all the children ran to greet us and grab our hands as we walked, shouting, “Hola, Padre” and laughing with delight. Everyone loved this priest who had lived and worked beside them through illnesses and childbirths, poverty and oppression.

Padre Pedro and I walked to Mass one Sunday morning, through the dusty streets, past the open sewage and refuse that filled the byways of the barrio. The church was a half-demolished concrete shack with broken glass on the floor and a single table in front for the altar, and no other furniture. People from the village crowded in, singing and playing Peruvian pipes and drums. When everyone was settled, Padre Pedro shared the parable of the mustard seed.

“The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed,” he began, “which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all trees, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” Pedro continued, “A mustard seed is so small that if you are not careful, you may drop it, even lose it. We must take care of the small things, for they may grow to be the most wonderful.”

Pedro had lived with these people for a long time, and he knew their poverty and their despair. But he also knew about their courage and their joy, and he knew that the well of spirit from which they drank was deep and rich. He also knew that in spite of terrible poverty, injustice, and want, there lived in that community, in that makeshift church, a tremendous sense of abundance.

As I was leaving to come back to the United States, a young boy presented me with the cross from around his neck. He said I should have it, because I had come from such a long way to be with them. I wept as I thanked him, feeling unworthy of the gift, humbled by the generosity of one who had so little.

What is enough for us? How will we know we are cared for, what do we seek as a sign? Many of us feel that since we were not given enough as children, it is up to our parents to somehow tip the scales by giving us more love, or a full apology, or some reparation for what we never received. But there is love available for us here and now, in the smallest of things, if we would only look. If we hold our parents hostage, refusing to feel loved until it comes directly from them, we may miss the gifts that are possible in our lives in this very instant.

Thus, we begin to cultivate a practice of abundance as we empty ourselves of the unfulfilled wants of childhood. There are other seeds, other places where we may seek love, grace, and sustenance. Our parents were never meant to be the only source of our care and abundance. There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that says, “Keep sowing your seed morning and night, for you never know which will grow—perhaps it all will.”

The Larger Family

While abundance is not necessarily measured by what we possess, still, millions of children and families experience a very real scarcity of basic human needs. Forty thousand children, the equivalent of a midsize city, die of hunger and hunger-related illness every single day. Many die for lack of ridiculously inexpensive vaccines. For these children, scarcity is a genuine, tangible source of suffering.

When those of us who live more comfortably are plagued with feelings of scarcity, we are tempted to take more than we need, to hoard more than we can use, and spend billions to protect ourselves from loss. For example, what we in the United States spend on weapons in one day would support all the United Nations hunger programs for a year. If we can begin to heal our own fears about scarcity and abundance, we may be free to more fully attend to the needs of all people in need.

Gandhi said that God inevitably comes to the hungry in the form of food:

It is good enough to talk about God whilst we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon, but how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day?

To them God can only appear as bread and butter...

We are not always aware of our real needs, and most of us improperly multiply our wants, and thus unconsciously make thieves of ourselves. If we devote some thought to the subject, we shall find that we can get rid of quite a number of our wants.

By simplifying our needs, we may become more conscious of the needs of those around us. If we feel a desperate scarcity in our lives, then everyone else is a competitor, an opponent on the battleground of survival. But if I am filled by whatever I have received, everyone else is my sister or brother. There is enough for everyone, and my practice is to help them be fed.

We truly need little to feel abundant. When we are paying attention, a single breath can fill us to overflowing. The touch of a loved one or a moment of sunlight can bring delight to our hearts. The simple gesture of someone’s hand resting in our own, a single word of kindness, or a small gift of appreciation can be all we need to feel a tremendous sense of care and well-being. We need so little to feel loved; all we need to do is begin to notice the multitude of tiny gifts and small miracles that punctuate each day we are alive.

Many of the world’s religions were born in the desert, a place with very little food or water. Yet generations of women and men have found that through spiritual practice and mindful attention to the exquisite gifts of the earth, even in the midst of the desert they may experience a rich spirit of abundance. As Isaiah sings, “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.”

Brother David says, “Fullness flows into us in the measure we become empty.” By opening our hands and allowing the fearful holding of childhood scarcity to fall away, we may learn to drink from a limitless reservoir of care—care we can feel and taste, care that fills and sustains us. The poet Kabir writes:

Thou hast made me endless such is thy pleasure This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

Ages pass and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

MEDITATION
Cultivating A Sense Of Abundance

The experience of scarcity and abundance is influenced by what we feel is “enough” in any given moment. When we become trapped in “wanting,” we find ourselves propelled into fear and scarcity, and we desperately look for that person or thing that is going to make everything work for us. If only we had the right job, the right relationship, more money, more time, less pain in our body... then we would be okay.

The “wanting mind” brings us much suffering; it is a self-perpetuating habit that prevents us from experiencing the fullness of where we are and what we have in this moment, driving us to grab desperately for something else, something different. It teaches us that when we are here and now, we are somehow incomplete, and that what we already have could never be enough. We are cut off from the abundance of the moment.

In these meditations, as we mindfully investigate our wants and desires, the way we constitute what is “enough” begins to shift. When we observe the endless play of desires without identifying with them, we may begin to sense a whole new inner spirit of freedom, and the experience of abundance becomes more available to us.

Part One
Observing Our Desires

For approximately ten minutes, sit comfortably in your quiet place of refuge, arranging your body in a meditation posture. Begin once again by letting your awareness rest on the breath. Allow a few moments for your attention to become clear and focused. As your concentration settles on the sensation of the breath as it rises and falls in the abdomen, gently shift your attention to the arising of wants and desires in your mind. For these ten minutes, notice each want, each desire as it arises. They may appear as pictures, words, feelings, or sensations in your body.

Let your mind be blank like a clear sky, and wait carefully for each desire, like a cat waiting at a mouse hole. They may hide a bit when you are first watching, but they will come.

When a desire arises, make a silent mental note of it: “wanting, wanting.” Turn all your attention to the investigation of that desire. Whether it is a desire for food, or to move your legs, or to finish some project, to go to sleep, or to be a better meditator, try to see the desire as clearly as you can. Notice what kinds of things you find yourself wanting. Are they material things, changes in your life, emotional states? Silently note each desire as it arises: “wanting to move,” “wanting to eat,” “wanting to go to the bathroom.” How does it feel in your body? What does it feel like in the heart? Continue noting each “wanting, wanting” until it naturally recedes. Then gently return to the breath, until the next desire arises.

Pay meticulous attention as you await the next desire. Some wants come as soft whispers, others arrive with a loud and demanding voice. Note each one and observe its nature until it subsides and the sky is clear again. After ten minutes, relax and take a short break.

Part Two
Cultivating a Sense of “Enough”

Rearrange yourself in the meditation posture. Allow your mind to become quiet as you focus on your breathing.

For this period, visualize the breath flowing directly into the heart. As you inhale, fully experience the complete nurture and sustenance of the air as it flows into your body, precisely nourishing each and every cell. Feel it soften and open your chest cavity, allowing the muscle tissue to gently relax and open. As you exhale, feel the relaxation move through your body. As the breath-spirit flows out, softly note, “enough.”

With the inhalation, experience the fullness and completeness of this moment. With the exhale, noting “enough, enough,” allow yourself to sink ever more deeply into a sense of complete fulfillment. In this moment, in this breath, there is enough for you. All that there is, all that you need, is here for you in this moment. Allow the fullness of the sense of “enough” to flood your heart and body. Gently soften, drinking from the care that is provided for you in this breath, in this moment.

Now and then, wants and desires may arise. As before, silently note, “wanting, wanting,” and return to the breath. On the exhale, allow the word “enough” to flow out with the breath. What do you notice? What does it feel like to say “enough”? How long does it last? What takes its place when it goes? Take several moments to use the breath as a tool to explore what the sensation of “enough” might feel like in your body. Then you may gently open your eyes.

As we expand and deepen our ability to experience a sense of “enough, ” we may find a reservoir of nurture and peace open within us, bringing a sense of gentle abundance. In this one moment, in this single breath, there is enough for us. Nothing else is needed. All we need is here, now. Enough.