Scarcity complex?

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.” 

― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I accompany this post with this one of my paintings of apple trees. To me apple trees symbolize abundance. 

Actually fruit in general feels like that to me..

The concept that stuck with me most today while studying all of the 'Woman is a River' material is that we are taught to think in terms of lack of what we want and think we need instead of what recourses we do have available to us.  Today I am ashamed to admit I have started to ask myself for the 1^st time in my life in a real and honest way ‘why do I focus on the things that aren’t there’? What is the root of that way of looking at the world I am part of and surrounded with?  I am among the people that are the most lucky ones in the world, simply because I live in the West where there is no war, where there is freedom and where there is still all we really need, like food and water and roofs over our heads. Today one of the co-participants of this Woman is a River adventure brought to our attention this very interesting blog article that i will copy entirely in to this blog post. I do that because its angle towards the scarcity of abundance issue i think we who live in the western world (almost) all have is a very important one i think. Her theory sheds another light on this issue. I think that this is too a very  inspiring angle to look at it.

But fact remains that I am very well aware that we can only think or talk about this subject because we live in this abundant part of the world where we can afford to spend time thinking and writing blog-posts about this.

Is it scarcity complex, or a call to adventure?

If you tell someone with a bent toward the spiritual and/or self-help that you feel a sense of lack in your life, she might look at you with a faint hint of disapproval. She might tell you that what you put your attention on, grows, and we become what we think about most.

So don’t focus on the lack, she might tell you. Focus on abundance. Focus on enough. You have everything you need. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment is perfect. You are perfect.

But what if that lack isn’t the symptom of a scarcity complex, but something else?

What if it’s your call to adventure? The beginning of your hero’s journey?

What if it’s your way into a richer, deeper, more meaningful life?

According to mythologist Joseph Campbell and depth psychologist Jean Houston, inside all of us is a longing for more. This isn’t the voice of the void but the cry of your soul, driving you toward wholeness and self-actualization.

Houston explains in this interview that The Call might start off as bland and generic: I want to get married, or, I want a new career. The “usual things”. But at some point there’s what Houston terms a second genesis, when another level of possibility starts to rise and you realize there’s so much more to you than you knew or suspected.

That’s when your life’s adventure begins.

And by the way, you are perfect. You are exactly where you are supposed to be – until life keeps whacking you with hints and reminders that you should really be on your way to somewhere else. (In storyteller’s parlance, this is known as ‘resisting the call’, and the hero will continue to stagnate, to live out a death-in-life, and life will keep poking and frustrating and disrupting her, until she’s willing to leave her ordinary world and strike out for the territories.)

Moving into your yearning is different from trying to fill the void through a hard or soft addiction. The latter leaves you worse off than before, wanting more but requiring ever more to achieve the same effect. What is addiction, in the end, but a spiritual quest pulled inside out?

To move into your yearning is to recognize and honor your needs. It is to move to the other side of lack, where you can start to remember who you are.

This piece comes from here