Christy Lambert - Radical Abundance: A Journey From Not Enough To Plenty

Chapter One: Introduction

I grew up poor. The kind of poor that meant we couldnt afford a TV, did all of our school shopping at Value Village, and spent a lot of time at laundromats because we couldnt afford to fix the washer and dryer when they broke.

We didnt have much money, and life was pretty crazy.

There was a lot of drugs and alcohol around . When my parents said they were going grocery shopping,it normally meant they would get home around 3:00 a.m., wasted and fighting. The cops were at our house on a pretty regular basis. I thought the problem was that we were poor . Based on what I saw around me, I assumed that money was the missing link. I became convinced that if we just had money, all of our other problems would disappear, and wed be a normally, happy, Brady Bunch family.

Which is what I really, really wanted.

I made two decisions very early on. Decision Number One: this was fucked up and I wanted no part of living my life this way. Decision Number Two came when my sisters and I were school shopping for clothes at Value Village, and I was pissed off and embarrassed by it all. I decided I would always make enough money to buy cute clothes.

By the time I turned sixteen and moved out of my house, I had a very clear goal (happiness) and a plan to make it happen (get a job, make some money).

So, I went out and put my plan into action. Get a good job. Make a six-figure income. Get married to a nice guy. Buy a fancy house. Check. Check. Check. By the age of thirty, everything on my plan to happiness list was checked off so youd think all was well.

Except it wasnt, really. I wasnt actually happy. Needless to say, this realization left me feeling pretty disappointed, and more than a little confused. Something had gone terribly wrong with my game plan. And I had no idea what it was.

Turns out, the cute clothes part of the plan was pretty simple, but the happiness part was much trickier. Money didnt seem to do the trick by itself. I had done everything the way I thought I was supposed to. And it simply wasnt working. Both of the early decisions I made about life, I completely, one hundred percent, followed through on. But I had never taken the time to reevaluate the bigger picture of what I really wanted.

At that time, I didnt know that I could keep the early decisions I made, that were working for me, and include a bigger vision for what I wanted. A vision that included happiness, freedom, and joy. I thought money would solve all these problems for me but it didnt. And it wont, at least not on its own.

After coming to terms with the fact that I severely miscalculated my plan for attaining happiness, I decided to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate everything . I started doing the work of learning what real prosperity was all about.

Dont get me wrong, Im very pro-money. I wouldnt trade having the money Ive had in my life. Its made my journey much easier and more comfortable. While I believe that you can feel abundant with no money living in a van by the river, Im not interested in that kind of experience.

The heart of how I came to this deeper understanding of prosperity was that I thought I had the solution. I thought having money would make me happy. And it didnt. So I had to go back and figure outif the moneys not going to solve the problem, what is? And how can I utilize that to still have an amazing relationship with money?

I started learning who I was. That meant taking time to learn what I really wanted, and then getting clear about what I wanted my money to do for me. It was a pretty intense process of deep soul searching. Through this journey, Ive met some powerful teachers, including horses, and learned some powerful lessons about money and abundance that changed the trajectory of my life and my finances.

Since that time my net worth has doubled.

Best of all I actually know that I have enough. I feel abundant. I enjoy my money and my life more than ever before. Radical Abundance comprises the eight key principles I learned during my own process that had the biggest impact on my financial net worth and my spiritual wellbeing.

The root word of radical means going to the origin.

The root word of abundance means plenty.

Radical Abundance is about getting to the origin of plenty, so you start feeling good now. When you reach your goals, youll still feel good.

So whats the origin of plenty & how do you get there?

Im so glad you asked.

To me, the origin of plenty comes from reconnecting with spirit and yourself, and then creating a relationship with money and life from that space. I believe that once we embrace the knowledge that were loved and supported beyond our knowing, that there is a benevolent force that holds us, paves the way and cares for us really remarkable things can happen. You start to notice theres room to breathe. Room to choose. Freedom to be .

When you allow yourself to fully be and express yourself without fear and drama, real, tangible prosperity tends to follow. This is tangible in terms of how you feel and what your bank account shows.

Abundance is a tricky beast. Most of us readily admit that wed love to experience it, but most of us although were unlikely to admit it have no real idea of how to get there. When I ask my clients what the word prosperity brings up for them, youd think theyd say things like freedom and joy. Or bank balances and vacations.

Nope. They tend to say things like: distrustful, anxiety, out of reach, needy, secret, shame, fearful, wanting, hard, mystery, and vague. Keep in mind, I tend to work with clients who actually have money in the bank. Generally speaking, they have good paying jobs, or own their own businesses. They have the cash to pay their bills and some leftover money each month to grab a nice dinner out with friends or take a weekend trip away.

But they still dont feel abundant. They live in a constant fear of not having enough. Not enough money, not enough time, certainly never enough sleep. No matter what they do, they just cant seem to get ahead.

For most of us, not enough is an easy habit to get into, but its certainly not a fun place to live. One of my favorite insights on the power of scarcity in our culture comes from Lynn Taggert in The Soul of Money . She writes:

For me and for many of us the first waking thought of the day is, I didnt get enough sleep. The next one is, I dont have enough time. Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours of most of the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining or worrying about what we dont have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, were already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didnt get, or didnt get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, our arguments with life.