The MONTHLY Motivator - September 2008

Allowing prosperity

What is it that determines the amount and nature of prosperity in your life? It may seem obvious to attribute your level of prosperity to factors such as your job, your financial investments, the condition of the overall economy, or even to influences such as your lifestyle and the people you know. These factors and more certainly play a role. Yet by far the most powerful influence on your level of prosperity is your choice of how much and what specific form of prosperity to allow.

The prosperity that occurs in your life is the prosperity that you allow into your life as the result of your moment-to-moment thoughts, feelings and actions.

There is a commonly held assumption that one must go out and get prosperity through difficult and tedious effort. And certainly it is true that all of life involves effort. After all, it is, for example, the constant effort of your heart beating that keeps you alive. Yet it is not mere effort that brings prosperity. There are people who put forth much effort and yet never manage to increase their levels of prosperity. And there are those who achieve great prosperity with hardly any additional physical effort at all.

The relationship between effort and prosperity is similar to the relationship between breathing and playing the flute. You must indeed breathe air in and out if you wish to play the flute. However, you are breathing anyway, so it’s not really the breathing itself that makes the flute playing happen. Playing the flute involves focused control over that breathing, as well as coordination of your breath with the movement of your fingers. To play the flute, it is also essential to understand and apply mental skills, such as the ability to read music.

In the same way, prosperity does involve effort. Yet you are already making some kind of effort or another during every moment of your life, and those efforts do not necessarily lead you to prosperity. To attain higher levels of prosperity, you must allow

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--Ralph Marston

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