May 16, 2014

 

Another Thursday night.  Another yoga class.  Another intention card.  Another synchronicity orchestrated by God, who chuckles at me regularly these days.

I’d missed the previous two weeks of yoga due to scheduling conflicts and grading needs, so I was very happy to return to class Thursday night.  I dressed in thin layers and walked through the overheated parking lot into the cool and relative dark of the studio, unrolled my blue mat in my usual corner, and walked over to draw an intention card with my non-dominant hand.  Given my track record of drawing intention cards since I gave myself over to the discipline, I was both nervous and interested to see what I drew.  They’ve been absurdly accurate and timely.

This one said:

Deprivation

Prosperity Guides

Huh?  My intention was deprivation?  WTF?

Ordinarily one sits with the intention throughout the practice and then, if so desired, reads the explanatory book that sheds further light on the possible significance of the intention card.  But I was confused and a little troubled, so I had to read the book before class.  I couldn’t sit with that uncertainty through the entire session.  No way was I intending to be deprived or to sit willingly with deprivation.

At the first line, I laughed out loud.  The exact wording eludes me now, but it was something to this effect:

“You may be feeling worried about finances.”

Exactly.  And I knew immediately that God and the universe he created were conspiring to send me another precisely tailored message.  Or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it.

The essence of the explanation was that a deprivation mentality actually creates deprivation, that indulging fears about “not enough” to the point of withholding or stinginess leads to further scarcity.

“You are a trust-fund baby of the universe,” it read, as it reassured me of abundance, of enoughness. 

Synchronicity?  Timeliness?  Yes.  The events of this year have led to belt tightening, worry, and fear.  The savings have dwindled.  Survival over the summer doesn’t feel as assured as it has in past years.  I had to buy a new car, a stressful ten-hour event that led to a mini-meltdown in the finance guy’s office when he started adding “necessary” packages to the car payment which was already at my absolute limit.  And the next big bill just keeps coming due.  Every end of the month, the paycheck deposits and gets paid out immediately, along with an amount from savings.

So yes, I may be feeling worried about finances, dammit.

But throughout my practice Thursday night, I kept reminding myself that “I have enough.”

And that became a synchronicity with something else I’ve been reading and processing slowly, Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, in which she reminds the reader, “You are enough.”

I’m considering putting a decal of that on my ceiling over my bed, so that it’s the first thing I see in the morning when I wake up:  I am enough.  I have enough.