What's Your Version of Rich?

Hi, I'm Nicki Kuurman, and welcome to the Practical Mystic Podcast, where universal wisdom meets modern life. What if your version of abundance isn't actually yours? What if you inherited it from family, from social conditioning? What you think you're supposed to want versus what actually makes you feel rich, alive, and fulfilled.

Some people think that having more and more money is going to make them happy. Some people think money is abundance. But what if it's not really what you're chasing in life?

I've come to this realization because my own spiritual seeking was because I felt like I wasn't enough My constant search for something more, something missing in my life, is because I didn't feel like I was [00:01:00] good enough, thin enough, smart enough, pretty enough, anything enough-enough.

When I look at my life and I want to feel abundant and rich and alive, the last thing that I want in that moment is money.

Money is a tool to give me some of those things that I want. I'd love to travel more. I'd love to explore more places in the world. I'd love to have the money to do that in absolute comfort and so yeah, money is a driving force of that abundance, but it's not the money in and of itself that I'm searching for.

I'm searching for richness of experience, deep connection with people. I'm searching for spaciousness to think and be myself without judgment, without criticism, mostly from me. But just a [00:02:00] freedom to live a rich life full of interesting, curious, exciting things that light me up. It's been really easy to kind of fall into a funk for some years, especially after a really deep period of grief, and then came a whole lot of physical pain, and I really notice how much I've lost of myself over that time.

The things that light me up now aren't the same things that used to light me up ten years ago. And even the thought of having lots of people over and being a social butterfly, that feels exhausting these days. And not because I don't want deep connection and lots of people around me, but because I can't hold myself in the same way that I used to.

I want to go deep, and I want to go juicy, and [00:03:00] I want to be curious, and I want to hear what other people have to say. It's not so much now about an abundance of people, it's the depth of the experience that makes me feel abundant. One decent conversation at the supermarket can be just as fulfilling as a dinner party.

Nowadays, abundance to me is the, the richness of conversation, the richness of learning new things, of culture and understanding people. I love people. I love meeting new people. I love talking to them, and I love finding out what makes them tick. But I used to play the good girl, and I used to mask just being overly excited and happy, hiding a whole bunch of sadness and pain and insecurity.

And I didn't know I was masking it at the time. I thought that that's [00:04:00] just was normal, that people put on a face in social situations because that's what I had learned. You never showed your deep emotion or how you truly felt about something in my family growing up. It wasn't safe to be anything but calm, nice, pleasant, nothing to see here And yet I craved more.

I craved deeper, deeper connection with friends. Even as a little girl, I wanted one-on-one deep connection with friends. I was never really great as one of a group. It left me having shallow conversations, shallow connections, and a deep, deep loneliness that I never could feel like I could fill. And that carried on in my first marriage.

That carried on with friends well into, to my thirties. And now the [00:05:00] people around me in my close circle of friends, we have great connection, deep interesting conversations. Lately, my longing for spaciousness is my own search for an abundance of deeper connection with myself. Time to pause, time to reflect, time to ponder the mysteries to me, a life where I'm not rushing around feels abundant.

But once upon a time, if I had nothing to do, I felt empty and lonely. What's your definition of abundance versus rich? Of wealthy versus completely fulfilled and satisfied with your life. What's different to performing, [00:06:00] showing up, doing the things you have to do, and choosing to be fully present and alive and involved in every single one of those choices?

You might not like your job. You could change it, or you could change how you feel about your job you can go in and appreciate the work, the people, the things that you do. And if you're really miserable in it, I feel like life is too short to keep continuing in a miserable, unhappy way. You either change the job, or you change how you feel about it.

When I started questioning what abundance actually meant to me, I realised something surprising. Some of the things that I'd spent years pursuing weren't necessarily things that I wanted anymore. [00:07:00]

They were the things that I had learned to want. Here's something that you might like to try. Think about what you're currently working on, something that you're striving really hard to achieve, and now ask yourself, "If nobody else knew I'd achieved this, would I still want it?" And if the answer is still yes, question yourself a little further and say, "What feeling or experience am I actually hoping it will give me?"

Because following that feeling and that experience, that is what fulfillment feels like. That's what striving for something meaningful gives you aliveness and motivation to keep going. it's so much easier to find that momentum [00:08:00] when you truly believe this is what you want and that it's your desire driving the vehicle.

Perhaps abundance begins with allowing ourselves to receive the life we really want rather than constantly chasing the life we think we're supposed to have