Gina LaRoche - The 7 Laws of Enough: Cultivating a Life of Sustainable Abundance

Parallax Press

P.O. Box 7355

Berkeley, CA 94707

parallax.org

Parallax Press is the publishing division of Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc.

2018, Gina LaRoche and Jennifer Cohen

All rights reserved

Cover design by Debbie Berne

Text design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Author photograph Mistina Hanscom

Text printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper

Ebook ISBN9781941529911

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: LaRoche, Gina, author. | Cohen, Jennifer (Executive coach), author.

Title: The seven laws of enough / Gina LaRoche and Jennifer Cohen.

Description: Berkeley, California : Parallax Press, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018001629 (print) | LCCN 2018008290 (ebook) | ISBN 9781941529911 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781941529904 (trade paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Self-realization. | Spiritual life. | Sustainability. Classification: LCC BJ1470 (ebook) | LCC BJ1470 .L37 2018 (print) | DDC 170/.44dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001629

v5.3.1

a

To Miriam Hawley. Thank you for standing for a sufficient world and gathering an incredible group of people who became known as the Boston Sufficiency Team.

This book is for you.

Contents

The Seven Laws of Enough invites you to explore the nourishing wellspring of enough. By connecting us to the taproot of sustainable abundance, Gina LaRoche and Jennifer Cohen offer each of us the opportunity to feel strong, whole, blessed, at ease, and able to rest in the profound fullness of life itself.

This book is a powerful pathway to the life we all dream of.

In order to find our way to this blissful outcome, Gina and Jennifer first wisely plunge us into awareness of the myths of scarcity, a set of unconscious, unexamined assumptions that govern our lives without us even knowing it. They show us how we live in a consumer society that promotes the cultural conditioning and pervasive mind-set of scarcity. This mind-set makes us believe that we are unworthy or less than until we acquire more of anything and everything. We find ourselves lost in the treacherous terrain of scarcity, constantly vying for more but never feeling that more is the enough we are hoping for.

All the while, the source of enough or sufficiency and a life of sustainable abundance is within our graspwaiting patiently for our attention.

Delving in to a body of distinctions created by my own mentor, Buckminster Fuller, years ago, and developed and practiced powerfully by the Hunger Project, The Seven Laws of Enough lays out practices that help us orient, anchor, and find ourselves living and expressing true sufficiency, the exquisite experience of being and having enough.

Allow the message of this book to bless your life and liberate you from the tyranny of not enough time, not enough money, not enough love, not enough sleep, and the feeling of not being enough.

The thoughtful practices in this book will help you see how true abundance flows from enough, never from more. Follow the sound and sage words that follow and your life can be an expression of contentment, gratitude, light, and love.

Lynne Twist

October 2017

A Radical Decluttering

You are in The Matrix. You are offered a blue pill and a red pill. The first lets you continue on in your life as is. The second promises access to the truth about existence, the whole unadulterated truth. Which do you choose? In the Matrix version, the truth turns out to be that we humans are grown and harvested to feed energy to the dominating machines.

Knowing this, we probably want that blue pill. But, what if the truth is the opposite of such a sour reality? What if the truth is that everything is OK? Like, Garden of Eden OK?

Its hard to imagine. But it is the truth of sufficiency. Here are the facts: there is enough food, air, water, and other necessities for every human being on the planet to live a quality life, full of resources and abundance. In 1970, Buckminster Fuller, the architect and futurist, predicted that it would take us fifty years to see this. And, now, almost exactly fifty years later, we still havent accepted this. Nor have we begun to organize ourselves to reflect the fact that there is enough. We believe its time to go public with this message and to share the truth.

Here is this book in a nutshell: You are enough. You do enough. You have enough, already. If you were to orient to life, to your team, your family, and society as if that were true, we guarantee you would see life in a whole new way. You would ask different questions and frame problems differently. New solutions would emerge.

Our modern society is already scaring the pants off of us and making us feel bad for who we are and what we do or dont have. But fear and shame arent conducive to positive change. To help counteract them, well paint a picture of what is already available to us. Let us peel back the layers of distortion we have grown up and been trained in and bask in the bounty available to us.

We call this bounty sustainable abundance. Sustainable: ethical, reciprocal, just. Abundance: grateful, radiant, and present to the bounty everywhere.

As we have reflected on our own paths to living lives of sustainable abundance, we have developed a framework that we call the Seven Laws of Enough, which offers a map of the territory ahead.

Law 1Stories Matter. We are living in a web of stories, most of them not of our own making. Well help you go from being stuck in your inherited stories to being the author of stories that further your lifes purpose.

Law 2I Am Enough. You are. I am. We are. When we stop questioning our birthright everything shifts.

Law 3I Belong. Everyone does. No one has the right to tell us otherwise. We live in a culture that teaches us were separate and has a vested interest in making us feel as if we dont belong.

Law 4No One Is Exempt. Were set free when we accept impermanence and face what is finite and infinite. This helps us see through the lies of scarcity.

Law 5Resting Is Required. Society encourages us to be overworked, overmedicated, overfed, undernourished, and terrified. We crave the kind of deep rest we have almost lost. We can and must reclaim it.

Law 6Joy Is Available. We can find deep and abiding joy when we see clearly, let go of the lies, and notice what we have already.

Law 7Love Is the Answer. This is the final law and our deepest truth. Love is the answer to the questions that plague our society and close our hearts.

Our aim for you is pure and simple: guiding you to a way of being in your life so you feel powerful, at ease, able to rest in life itself. When you are done reading, we hope you will know what is enough for you.

In each chapter, we will give you an opportunity to learn a new practice, to unwind from habits that no longer serve you, and connect you directly to the well of enough thats waiting for each of us.

But reading isnt enough. You must make an everyday practice of being who you wish to be, and living how you wish to live. It requires that you continually unlearn bad habits from a culture of scarcity, and persistently engage in learning new ones.