This feature contains an extract from It's Not Your Money: Living Fully from Divine Abundance by Tosha Silver.
This extract has been reproduced with permission from the publisher.
The recently-published It's Not Your Money: Living Fully from Divine Abundance sets out a radically powerful way to learn to be abundance, rather than just chase it. By this I mean much more than just finances, but also quality of life, relationships, time, and so on. Over years of teaching others to live in this way, I've found that in the beginning it does take practice, but that eventually divine abundance begins to guide you. Any need to constantly try to manifest, visualise or co-create starts to fall away for most people, because Love begins to reveal necessary actions in a spontaneous way.
While there are many tools to help you learn how to do this in the book, here's one of the simplest: the release of the word 'my' from all problems, desires, and even achievements. By removing 'my', the rulership of the ego is disentangled, creating an almost immediate spaciousness and peace. Many people have expressed to me the freedom that comes from that one small change.
Here's an excerpt from the book that shows this.
Offering is the heart of this book.
It’s handing any burden — whether a desire, attachment, illness, finances, or anything else — back to God. After all, it was Hers to begin with! In a way, doing so says, “This is persecuting me so much, I can no longer lean on my ego’s own strength. Please show me Your will.”
True offering takes what can be an unbearable cross, and returns it to Love. It untangles you from the seemingly inescapable thicket of doer-ship. One easy way to begin is simply by replacing 'my' with 'the'. We’re taught to think of 'my money', 'my body', 'my partner', 'my happiness', 'my failure'. Even 'my awakening'. In Western culture, the trance of 'my' is king. But here’s the catch: if it all belongs to you (or your ego), the burden is all yours as well. With the simple substitution of 'the', grasping softens and offering begins. Take, for example, “I’m worried right now about this business... and I’m thrilled to be offering all to Love for the right actions to be shown at the right time.”
This can be applied to anything. Sally had built an entire agonising identity centred around her terrible rheumatoid arthritis, which is so easy to do. She was always saying, 'my illness,' 'my restrictions,' 'my expenses' — with increasing anger and desperation. I suggested that since she had nothing to lose, she could offer the entire mess to the Divine and release the 'my'. She began to say, “I give this illness fully to You. Please, please make me open and show me the right actions. And if there’s not currently a solution, please at least let me accept this for now and make clear what I need to learn.” She immediately felt more spacious, simply from dropping that 'my'. And over time, the process of offering, acceptance and disentanglement brought healing that Sally had never imagined. She felt guided to return to an acupuncturist she’d seen many years before who used treatments, herbs, and diet. This time it all worked, perhaps because Sally had finally released the grip of her ego’s identification with the problem. Although flare-ups still come, she’s much improved.
Another part of Sally’s process was acceptance. While this idea is currently popular, it can be far easier to invite through prayer than by trying to convince the ego to accept what it hates. This means praying to embrace something as it is in the now. Not forever, just right now; in God’s world, things can turn on a dime.
Radical acceptance in the now opens the flow. The concept that “whatever you resist, persists” has some truth. One of the greatest revelations of my life was that I could pray for this radical allowing, especially when stuck in total resistance. I could say, “Let me embrace this only for the moment. Let me say yes just for now.”
Acceptance is neither resignation nor powerlessness, but an opening of the way for the next right actions.
Find out more:
Tosha Silver graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature but along the way fell madly in love with yogic philosophy. For the past 30 years, she has taught people around the world ways to align with Inner Love. She is the author of Outrageous Openness and Change Me Prayers: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Surrender. She lives near San Francisco, where she runs 'Living Outrageous Openness: Think Like a Goddess', an online course that offers an ongoing way to support those who truly want to live these beautiful, ancient practices for transformation.
www.toshasilver.com
Photo credit: Monique Feil
