Now for the main event!

Me: Let’s talk about a subject that’s a problem for a lot of people, abundance. I’m not talking about just money. I’m talking about the loss of friends, whatever. Tell me about that.

Erik: You gotta know that there’s no such thing as the loss of abundance because you don’t get to have ownership of the money, friends, emotional support–

Jamie: He’s listing a bunch of things.

Erik: There’s really no true ownership, so if you’re seeing it that way, and you wake up, and you’re not in control it and how you want it, then you’re going to view it as a loss. You’re going to see it as disturbing, but really there are cycles and shifts. You can talk to people who do numerology and they talk about cycles of 7 years or 10 years. We go through phases where we collect a lot, and then we decide that what we’ve collected is no longer helping us. It’s no longer what we want. So we stop taking care of it. We stop keeping it around us. Even if you have money in the bank, you are consciously saying to yourself, “I want to save it,” right? You’re doing steps and making budgets in your life to keep that money in the bank. Let’s say you wake up and decide that you don’t want all that.

(Count me out on this one.)

Erik: You decide you don’t want the responsibility; you don’t want that over your head, and you start liquidating it.

Me: Let me give them the wiring instructions so they can give it to me!

Jamie laughs.

Erik: So you stop giving it this conscious focus, and you enter the next cycle in your life or the next phase in your life. Maybe now you want to go more into nature or [unintelligible] or emotional health. When you recognize that you’re losing abundance and you’re not consciously aware of it, step back and see what you’re attracted to and what your goals are now.

Me: Attracted to it? Whatever attracts you to something like money or whatever?

Erik: Yes, whatever it is.

Me: Okay.

Erik: And it’s going to be by your own actions, by your own hands that you get this abundance or lack of abundance. Now, let’s say it was caused by somebody else like you were a victim of a robbery or had something stolen. It wasn’t your fault, that kind of thing, then –

(Pause)

Jamie: He’s just rattling on. Sorry.

Erik: Then, like I said it before, I don’t want you to look at it through rose tinted glasses and everything has to be positive and purposeful. That gets really tiring, thinking like that. I just want you to look at it for what it is and what it gives you. So let’s say you got robbed of everything, and, all of a sudden you have to move out cuz the house gets foreclosed on or the economy tanks. It sucks because you did your best, and it didn’t work, or maybe you made some bad decisions, whatever it is. So you end up with this new situation that you never imagined yourself in and you have to manage that. You have to look at what it’s giving you. You have to recognize—I swear; I swear you’re going to recognize—you weren’t really happy to the core with what you had and that these changes are being swept over you, whether you’re accepting them or not, to show you a different way of living, to show you a different definition of abundance. Abundance doesn’t have to be in bulk or a large quantity of something. Abundance can be in the form of simplicity; abundance can be in the form of scarcity. I’m not trying to fuck with your head and do this Zen thing, you know?

(Singing) Everything is Zen!

Jamie and I laugh.

Jamie: That’s some really bad singing.

Me: He wasn’t very good at it, but he was better than me!

Erik: You find, in the abundance of not having much, if that’s your case, that it’s allowing you to be a better person that you were before. There’s so much to gain from every situation that you can possibly find yourself in.

Me: The abundance of poverty, huh?

Erik: What is poverty? You go around to different countries, even in our own, and you can ask a person living in a mansion if they’re happy and you can ask a person who’s living in a box. You can get a yes in either case, and you can get a no sometimes. You can’t look at poverty as being “less than” or “worse off because a lot of people find comfort in this kind of life. They don’t want much. . They don’t want to strive; they’re don’t want to fight. They don’t all want to have the American dream of climbing the corporate ladder and driving a Cadillac.

Me: That’s interesting because, in my medical practice, the patients with the most wealth are often the least happy.

Erik: Yeah.

Me: Maybe they were amassing that wealth to assuage some wound or to fill some sort of emptiness. What about starvation? If you don’t have enough money, you could starve to death, living in a cardboard box on Main and 5^th, raining, snowing, whatever.

Erik: True but, just to be the devil’s advocate, this person might like that kind of survival experience. They find nooks and crannies. They’re not responsible for anything. They can walk away and leave nothing but footprints.

Me: What do you mean by “walk away and leave footprints?”

Erik: Well, they don’t have to carry any shit with them.

Me: Ah, I see. Okay.

Erik: Even people who’re living in housing projects. That is their comfort. If they don’t like it, you can see it as how they strive to be a better person and make changes. They’ll grow out of it; they’ll step out of it. There are millions of people who find that that is their way of living; that is what they want.

Me: What about those people who say, “Hey, Joe Blow makes a lot more money than I do. He won the lotto and I want that!” What about the people who aren’t happy without abundance?

Erik: You mean those people who look to others to define what they want but won’t look at themselves and see what way they can make the changes themselves?

Me: Right, but some people aren’t jealous but want more that they have.

Erik: What about those people, Mom? What do you want to know because they’re not signing up for their own responsibility? They’re putting the blame on somebody else. They’re using the passive aggressive guilt technique to get them to a place where they really can’t handle it.  They’re not ready for it.

Me: So I guess they’re too in that comfort zone of the lack of the abundance that they want. You talk about this comfort zone, but they don’t want simplicity; they don’t want a lack of abundance. They want more, and maybe they want more so they can put their kids through college. Maybe it’s not a selfish thing.

Erik: There’s a difference, kind of like the selfish thing, there’s a difference. There can be a person that’s jealous but never takes action, and they’re can be a person who yearns for abundance and gets themselves a job so they can put their kids through college, and they can get an even better job and learn how to budget. People strive and grow. That’s beautiful, but if we’re specifically talking about the person who’s jealous but not taking the steps to be a better person, this is not—

Jamie: I have no idea what he just said.

I chuckle.

Erik: This is not the person you want to reach out to and help because they won’t help themselves. That could be a lesson. That could be a life lesson, their own thing. You shouldn’t get involved in it and rob them of it.

Me: What about people who try? They have kids they want to put through college, but they just can’t seem to find the financial wherewithal to do that?

Jamie: He’s so excited.

Erik: What do you mean? They can’t seem to put it together, and they keep trying and trying?

Me: Right.

Erik: Those people kick ass. Those are the people that you reach out to and help. They might fall on their ass a thousand times, and they’ll absolutely get the end result they want. If you’re using the example of putting kids through college, they’ll see their kids going to college.

Me: How do we help them? They’re trying their best. Hats off to them, but they still can’t seem to make it. Maybe they don’t have the education they need to get a higher paying job, and they can’t go back to school because they’ll starve to death if they can’t work to put food on their table? How can we help them?

Erik: You reach out and ask what kind of help they need. Maybe you provide the meals for the family while that person gets the education. You ask that person how they need help, but they stay in control. Helping is not meant to belittle someone.

Me: Okay. What about a loss of friendship?

Erik: Friendship for what reason?

Me: Well, let’s say you don’t have any friends because you’ve lost a bunch of them?

Erik: Because of what? Death? The Plague? What are you talking about?

Me: Maybe they don’t like your ass. I mean, we have the abundance of money. We’ve talked mostly about that, but this is just an example of nonmonetary losses of abundance.

Erik: Mom, if we’re talking about this, then we have to assume that to have is better than to not have.

Me: What if they’re lonely and they want their friends back, or they want new friends but can’t seem to find them?

Erik: Then they’re not looking in the right places, or they’re not opening up in the right way to collect those kinds of friends.

Me: And I guess they need to look inside themselves to see the kind of behavior that drives people away.

Erik: Uh huh.

Me: Or get a life coach who will help them identify those behaviors.

Jamie: He does seem to like the life coach thing.

Me: He does!

Jamie: He thinks it’s better than traditional therapy.

Me: Yes, he does.

Erik: You’ll see why. You know, it’s exactly what we said. If you’re looking for friends and you can’t find them, you’re not putting yourself in the right circumstances or acting in the right way. We can take the whole poverty thing where a person is striving so hard to make a better life, but they only interact with poverty. They need to step out of that environment, mingle with the middle class, talk to them, interview them to see what they’re like. Then they need to adopt them as friends and step into that world so they can understand how to make those changes and get out of that poverty and move up.

Me: Yeah.

Please follow me on twitter guys! I’ve been tweeting some great stuff some of which are Erik-isms. I need more followers. #channelingerik.