Destroy scarcity thinking, stop holding yourself back, and improve your relationships with yourself and others by cultivating an abundance mentality.

“Mostly it is loss which teaches about the worth of things.”
–Arthur Schopenhauer

You might not realise it yet but 99.9% (approx. –didn’t do a survey or anything) of your problems in life stem from your fear of losing [something].

This doesn’t just apply to your fear of ‘losing’ physical things that you can never truly ‘have’ but also non-physical things like love, respect, or intimacy (that you always have no matter what because these things are within you).

This essay is going to teach you how to be unshakeable by giving you clear steps that you can take to develop an abundance mind-set and to free yourself from the friction, frustration, and misery that comes from thinking in alignment with the ego and its scarcity thinking.

Ultimately, what we are teaching here is that living with abundance means living without fear – in particular the fear of loss. The truth is that you have nothing to fear because there’s nothing to lose.

Our major premise for understanding this is a simple one:

You can’t lose anything real; all you can appear to lose is your illusions.

When you accept this truth and internalise it in the way that you think and behave, you will become immune to a lot of the unnecessary bullshit that life throws at you, have better relationships in your personal and professional life, and always have power over yourself and your boundaries because you know that you can walk away from anything unreal.

In short, by internalising the lessons in this essay and acting on them, you’ll have less fear of losing the things that don’t serve you, or that you can’t serve, by valuing the most important resource that you have: your time (aka your life).

Reality Versus Illusions

One more time for those at the back: You can’t lose anything real; all you can appear to lose is your illusions.

Before we dive into our steps for living with an abundance mind-set, you need to realise what makes you believe in scarcity in the first place and the short version is that nearly everything you need to know about your experience as a human being can be summed up as the relationship between wholeness and fragmentation, or between reality and illusions.

Human beings are happiest when they are whole – when they are in a flow state that allows them to live with spontaneity and to free themselves of the mental blocks and conditioning from the past that cause them to hesitate.

Whenever we hesitate, we are acting on our conditioning; we have some mental assumption or idea that crept into our experience of ourselves from the outside world, instead of expressing our natural joy and the abundant feeling of being truly alive from the inside out. This is the difference between the expression of what we are (whole) versus its repression (fragments).

Think back to how happy you were as a kid, how active you were, how you would act on instinct, intuition, and imagination, over just your intellect (in the form of conceptual ideas you picked up somewhere about what you should or shouldn’t do)…

At some stage in your life, you were shamed into holding back from whoever you really are (your realness) – and to deal with this shame you created a fragmented image of yourself to keep this real self hidden away.

This fragmented image led to the birth of your ego (the opposite of reality). This was the only way to deal with the shame, but, eventually, you forgot that you were even hiding and became convinced you were the fragmented mask you wore to serve in place of your realness.

Abundance is when you live without the mask on; scarcity is when you keep trying to live as some separated thing that doesn’t even exist in the first place.

When we say that you can’t lose anything real, what we mean is that what is real about you remains real for the duration of your life (and maybe beyond but that’s a whole other kettle of fish). You are born real and you will die real; the problem is that, when you put on and identify with the mask, you add layer after layer of illusion and become convinced that yourself, the world, and reality are something other than what they are.

Because this mask is disconnected from your real self it is disconnected from the whole (the source of abundance, the only place anything real can come from). The more you identify with this sense of disconnection instead of your ultimate connection to yourself and everybody else, the more you begin to believe in scarcity.

When you see yourself as separated, you see all things as separate – with this being the case, how could you not see the world as being fuelled by scarcity!?! We don’t see the world as it is, but as we are.

If you are always connected to what is whole and the whole is the only thing that is ‘real’ then you can never lose anything because there is nothing real to be lost. All you can ‘lose’ is the mask and the imaginary connections and disconnections it has built between you and the world around you.

As these conceptualisations are all illusory, you can’t really lose them – you just think you do!

Reality is unshakeable because there is nothing else. This means your realness is unshakable too and this is what you have to learn to identify with if you want to live with abundance over scarcity.

Remove the mask (at least before your own eyes) and you can kill your fear about losing things you never had or can never possess in the first place because when you remove it all you have is your own unshakeability.

To become abundant you must remove the mask – you can’t lose it because you never had it, but you can stop treating it as being real.

 Lesson 1: Kill Your Idols

The ego needs scarcity to be real so that it can convince you to continue believing that the mask you are wearing is who you really are. It wants you to forget that you only put it on in the first place to forget about the pain you felt at being shamed by the world and its masked inhabitants.

When you save yourself from ego, you save yourself from scarcity; this is because the ego is the opposite of reality and reality is whole.

When we’re disconnected from ourselves within, we begin to believe that the value we have become disconnected from must be somewhere outside of ourselves instead.  We don’t want to believe that the love or abundance or whatever else we need is inside us because that would mean confronting the lies we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are (and though reality itself is never painful, the journey from illusion back to reality often is).

This might often manifest as a sense of restlessness or a void; the inescapable feeling that something isn’t quite right within us (it isn’t) but that we can alleviate this feeling by chasing money, power, and sex or any of the variations which may occur (nothing wrong with any of these things in themselves – it’s our intention for chasing them that screws us up).

Many will say that this restlessness or void is just the human condition and it’s true – most human beings do have such a void. But it can’t be filled from the outside.

The void only exists because of the gap between your image of yourself and who you actually are – it is a lighthouse calling you home, if only you can see the light.

Abundance comes when you learn to not just fill the void but to become the void. You must learn to seek oblivion within yourself so that you can kill your idols and close the gap between yourself and everything else.

Unlearn all of the things that make you chase life outside of yourself. Stop idolising other people or material possessions or things – none of these things can save you. The only way to free yourself is to let go of your ideas about yourself and dive into the great ocean that links you to everything else.

Oblivion is salvation when you realise that you and the void are one – the things that you try to fill it with are inflated in value by your ego to keep you running on its illusory treadmill. The things you chase for salvation only seem scarce because they only exist in your head. Find something real instead. That’s how you get abundance.

Lesson 2: Everything is on Loan

“Remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission—indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, we should love all our dear ones, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever—nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.”
-Seneca

Everything that comes into your life is on loan from life, even your life itself.  Every thing and relationship that you appear to ‘have’, including the nature of your relationship with yourself as you change and grow over the course of your lifetime, is temporary.

Abundance comes from realising this and appreciating the things that we appear to ‘have’ whilst realising that in reality we ‘only have them right now’.

That new relationship you started with the girl from the coffee shop? It will probably come to an end, you’ll grow apart, or one of you will die before the other.

Your new job? Maybe it will last a few years or even decades until they decide to downsize or the economy takes a bad turn.

Your life? Maybe you’ll be around for another few decades or perhaps a little longer – either way, it’s going to be taken from you soon.

Your car? Falling to pieces on a long enough timeline.

Your house? Crumbling.

Etc.

Etc.

The mask that we wear uses the external things that we like to believe we ‘have’ in order to paint itself in more intricate colours and to present an even more sophisticated image to the world.  It wants to project the opposite of whatever it is we feel inside: bigness instead of smallness, success instead of failure, peace instead of shame.

But it’s all a lie.

We develop abundance when we realise this so that we can appreciate the things in our life for being temporary, step back when we need to, and then let go when the time comes because we realise that nobody really ‘has’ anything.

Abundance allows us to live like this because it shows us who we are behind the mask and we know what we really want. When something becomes unreal, we can let it go, because we know we’ll eventually find something else on loan that can give us a deeper experience based on what we learned last time round. At the very least, we can find something that’s more compatible with who we are becoming as we grow more real.

The wheel keeps turning but only if you let it – don’t cling to things and stop the cycle. Be fully present whilst you can and for as long as you can but don’t expect things to last forever. 

That’s how you get abundance.

Lesson 3: An Attitude of Gratitude

When you realise that you can’t lose anything real, you develop a sense of gratitude for all of the wonder and beauty in your life and the abundance of these things in any given moment.

This isn’t some mystical nonsense, just a fact – reality is always with you and it’s always worth being grateful for. If you’re alive then you’re receiving the gift and in every new moment there’s a new present if you just allow yourself to be open to it.

To have an ‘attitude of gratitude’, you have to be real, which means removing the mask; this has to be true because the ego can never be grateful for anything as it is a denial of reality. The ego will always move you into scarcity and separation from yourself, the world, and reality because it is founded on the illusion of disconnection and fragmentation.

We develop abundance by acknowledging that “everything is on loan” and being grateful for the time that we get to spend with these things. More than that, we become so grateful of this time spent together that we’re not scared to lose these things when the time comes.  We can do this because abundance is about knowing that whatever we shared that was real will last for eternity – it has to be this way because whatever is real is whole.

Abundance is a life lived without fear of loss. This means when the time comes for things or people to move in different directions because their paths diverged then we let it happen. It means appreciating what’s real about ourselves and others so we won’t argue or fight to keep these things around for the sake of our ego alone. If there’s no real reason to stick around, then we can walk away or let go.

You can’t say goodbye to things without appreciating them, not properly anyway – you can cast them out of your life and try to forget about them but that’s just ego. Abundance is about love (eww) – if you love yourself and others, you can let go when you need to. Ego can’t do that.

To develop abundance learn to find something real and be grateful for the things you’ve had to let go of. Once you can do that you will have less fear of losing the things you ‘have’ and have better relationships with them whilst they’re around.

If you know you can choose to walk away, you know you can choose to be with somebody or something for the right reasons. You can’t have the right reasons if your main motivation is that you’re scared to walk away for the sake of keeping your ego in place.

You can’t kill your ego but you can stop listening to it and put it in the back seat. That’s how you get abundance.

Lesson 4: Your Realness is Unshakeable

When you see the truth about abundance, you are able to step back and realise that you are abundance. This doesn’t mean that you can ‘manifest’ whatever you want, or any of that bullshit, but it does mean that you have the power to make better choices and to set healthier boundaries for yourself.

This is why abundance leads to better relationships – if you know you can replace somebody or something, you know that you are actively choosing to keep these things in your life.

If you can find something real in yourself and you can express this, then you can live without hesitation and conceptual barriers getting in the way of you doing ‘you’. If you can remove the mask, or even just peek behind it, you will realise that what’s real in you is connected to everything else that’s real and so you’ll see that this has always been true.

What is real is whole and what is whole is unwavering. Your realness is the key to being unshakable in the world because it makes you aware of the abundance in your life. Your abundance will make you unshakeable because it will allow you to identify as what you really are. When you do this you will stop clinging to things that don’t exist.

Often, when we cling to something it’s because we’re scared that we’ll never replace it or that we’ll no longer be ourselves without whatever it is. When you’re real, however, you realise that both of these things are untrue:

1) Everything is replaceable in one way or another because everything that matters is about being real and everything that doesn’t is about illusions. When you’re real, you keep working on your purpose and growing into yourself and so you can always bring new opportunities into your life and go deeper than you did last time round.

2) It’s not true that you won’t be yourself because you ‘lost’ something – all you can lose is your illusions (and you can’t even lose those because they never existed). If it was real, you wouldn’t have lost it in the first place and if you lost your illusions then all you lost was part of the mask that you’d been using to hide from yourself. What is real about you can never be added to or removed from. Knowing this is what gives you abundance.

Abundance makes you unshakable because it allows you to be real with yourself and to see what is really going on in your world. It allows you to be clear about what you want from yourself and others and to walk away if you’re not getting these things because some unreal situation or dynamic has arisen between you.

No abundance, no boundaries: Abundance allows you to become unshakeable and set better boundaries because it teaches you to accept yourself and to be able to walk away if a situation arises that asks you to be something other than what you are.

No abundance, no opportunities: If you know your value and you stay on purpose to keep growing real, then you can bring new opportunities into your life and not be afraid to move on from situations that didn’t work out.

No abundance, no grounding: Abundance allows you to stay grounded in your true identity which is an unshakeable realness. When you have this you have no fear of moving on, because you know that you can handle anything, and you know that amazing new things will be on the horizon for you to grow with and into.

All you have to do is keep moving. Scarcity keeps you where you are; abundance carries you into the future.

When you’re unshakable, you’re living from your balls. That’s how you get abundance.

Lesson 5: Kill Your Fear of Loss

If your life is a mess, then you probably made some bad choices somewhere along the line and there’s a good chance that you made these choices based on the scarcity mind-set assumptions of your ego, instead of the truth that comes from your realness and its abundance.

When you fear loss, your life is a mess.

It’s just the way it is:

You’ll stick around in relationships that are bad for you or keep toxic people in your life because you’re scared of being alone or you think you can’t replace them with something better (or, even worse, that you don’t deserve anything better).

You’ll make bad business decisions and get involved with jobs or opportunities that don’t serve you or ignite your passion because you think there’s nothing better out there.

You’ll take shit from people because you’re scared to walk away and so you tolerate disrespect. You’ll allow people to walk all over you or manipulate you for the same reason.

All of this because you’re scared of losing something that doesn’t exist in the first place: the illusions that keep you involved in these unreal situations and the mask that you wear to keep hiding from yourself.

Take it off!

Ask yourself: “What am I scared to lose?”

This will show you where you have room to grow real.

Just for the sake of argument, imagine that whatever it is you can live without. Yes, things may add value to your life so you ‘need’ them in that sense (if you don’t need the people in your life, then what’s the point of having them in it, for example?).

Remember though:

“If you can’t be ‘happy’ without it, you can’t be truly ‘happy’ with it.”
-Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

If you’ve convinced yourself that you can only be ‘happy’ with a certain thing in your life then you’re being unreal with yourself and coming from a place of scarcity. Your ego is involved.

The ego only exists because we have disconnected from our realness because of trauma, shame, or guilt. Often, when this happens we have to externalise the love or abundance that is always within us so that it doesn’t threaten the ego and force it to change from the inside out.

When this happens we often create the idols that we talked about in ‘Lesson 1’ by creating ideas about other people or things that engender the illusion that they are providing for us what we’re not ready to give ourselves – a simple example of this is our pets which only stick around because we feed them but onto which people project the unconditional love they don’t get from anywhere else and can’t yet give to themselves.

Not ready to love yourself and grow through your conditioning? Create an image of somebody else giving you this love, even though those feelings can only come from inside you.

Not ready to see yourself as being big ‘enough’ or a ‘success’ or whatever else? Imbue an object or situation with these qualities so that you can feel them within yourself without embracing who you really are and putting the ego and its comfortable illusions in the backseat.

You’re scared of losing things because you’re scared of losing your ideas about yourself.

Kill these ideas and you kill your fear. Take the mask off.

You can’t lose anything real; all you can appear to lose is your illusions.

That’s how you get abundance.

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Self-Guidance Questions

#1: Kill your idols: What are you using to fill the void inside yourself? What are you running towards in order to run away from yourself? What idols have you created for your ‘salvation’? What emotions are causing you to chase these things over others? How can you start ‘saving’ yourself instead of seeking this in the outside world? How will you tap into your abundance?

#2: Everything is on loan: What are you treating as being permanent in your life that isn’t? What relationships are you taking for granted? What do you need to learn to appreciate instead of trying to possess? What might you have to let go of one day? What are you clinging to that has already gone?

#3: An attitude of gratitude: What are five things that you’re grateful for about your life at the moment? What are you grateful for about the things that are no longer in your life because they slipped through your fingers? What might you need to say ‘Goodbye’ to if you truly appreciate it? What are you clinging to because you don’t appreciate its realness? What work do you need to do on yourself? How are you being unreal?

#4: Your realness is unshakeable: How can you get in touch with your realness? What new habits can you add to your daily routine to help you find your edge? What are you seeing as being irreplaceable that isn’t? Where can you set better or healthier boundaries? What do you need to walk away from?

#5: Kill your fear of loss: What are you scared of losing that you don’t need to be? What are you actually scared of losing? How is your fear of loss preventing you from living your best life? How is your fear of loss making you cling to unhealthy relationships? How can you get your balls back by shifting to abundance over scarcity?

What action will you take in your life after reading this article and answering some of these questions?

Thanks for reading and good luck!

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