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How to Find Abundance
When joy is in short supply — like, say, during a global pandemic — insecurity has a sneaky way of stepping in to fill the emotional void. All around you, it seems, other people are doing better: in their career, their creative work, even their pandemic-ing.
As Mary Chang writes on Medium, we have a tendency to adopt scarcity as our default assumption — to assume that what they have takes away from what you have, or could potentially have. But really, there’s not some cosmic success pie with only so many slices. When Chang, a meditation skeptic, embarked on Deepak Chopra’s 21-Day meditation challenge as a way to cope with her own pandemic stress, the challenge netted her an epiphany: What we want to aim for is not competition, she writes, but a feeling of abundance — an acknowledgment that there is enough of everything to go around.
It also taught me an invaluable unexpected lesson in “seeing the light” with a personal issue; my own insecurities and envy of others.
Now, when I see others excel or who have the “never-ending spotlight” in their lives on social media, I step back, remind myself there’s no reason for me to envy them if I see them as better writers, braver adventurers, or whether they have stronger physiques, talents or capabilities than me because there is no shortage of abundance. It doesn’t “end,” and it’s not “only available to certain…
