The Abounding River

The spiritual is financial and the financial is spiritual

The Abounding River is an astounding spiritual practice guide written by my friends and mentors Matthew and Terces Engelhart. The book is out of print, but you can find it used on Ebay or new from their website. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I graduated last month from my two year Franciscan spiritual director training program. I’m a spiritual director! Here’s my new website for spiritual direction. I want to serve people outside of organized religion, who still feel there are deeper meanings of themselves to explore. Obviously one of my interests is helping people have a healthier relationship with money. Whenever I reread Matthew and Terces’s spiritual practice book, I see it’s a money practice book too.

So in celebration of my graduation from Franciscan spiritual director training, I leave you with quotes from the book. As you read them, see how the spiritual is financial, and the financial is spiritual. As above, so below. Transcend the divisions of spiritual/material, the sacred/profane, the mystical/mundane, and realize that this all is one world. There you find heaven is a place on earth.¹

Warmest regards,

Douglas

• "Nothing is enough to one for whom enough is too little" - Epicurus

• "Enough is as good as a feast" - John Heywood

• One is rich in proportion to the number of things can let alone - Henry David Thoreau

• True affluence is not needing anything - Gary Snyder

• How few our real wants and how vast our imaginary ones. Johon Casper Lavater

• When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you. - Lao Tzu

• Abundance can be had simply by consciously receiving what has already been given.

• In order to have something you must first be it - Goethe

• My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants - J. Brotherfor

• An Abundance mentality springs from internal security, not from external rankings, comparisons, opinions, possessions, or associations - Steven Covey

• Better is a handful with quietness than both hands full together with toil and grasping. - Ecclesiastes

• Unhappiness is the hunger to get. Happiness is the hunger to give - William Jordan

• A covetous man is always poor - Claudian

• Take a moment to listen to your inner dialogue. What version of "something's wrong" or "something's missing" are you listening to right now, or have you been listening to recently? - Matthew and Terces Engelhart

• "You are what you are by what you believe." - Oprah Winfrey

• Every thought you have contributes to truth or illusion. It either extends the truth or multiplies illusions - A Course on Miracles

• All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become. - The Buddha

• The wise count their blessings, fools their problems. - Anon

• A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue but the parent of all other virtues - Cicero

• Most human beings have almost an infinite capacity for taking things for granted - Aldous Huxley

• Gratitude is the bottom line of happiness - Lewis Smedes

• A thankful presence is a divine present - Matthew Engelhart

• The beginning of man's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart - Francis Schaeffer

• If the only prayer you say in your whole life if Thank You, that would suffice - Meister Eckhart

• The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life - Robert Louis Stevenson

• Being grateful I see all I have to give away - Matthew Engelhart

• The only genuine love worthy of the name is unconditional - John Powell

• Wisdom is not found in making divisions and comparisons - Maitreya

• When God sends rain, rain is my choice - James W Riley

• I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind. I should not be ungrateful to those teachers - Kahil Gibran

• Love is the doorway through which the human soul passes from selfishness to service and from solitude to kinship. 

• Expectation reduces the joy in life - Sri Ravi Shankar

• Striving is an obstacle. All the time you are doing spiritual practices, the truth is standing before you, smiling at you. - HWL Poonja

• Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience. WR Inge

• Abundance is knowing that everything you need has already been supplied

• By letting go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond winning.  - Lao Tzu

• There is a treasury of joy within you, why do you keep begging door to door? - Sufi saying

• The outer situation is always a reflection of the collective inner situation - Peace Pilgrim 

• It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult - Seneca

• What concerns me is not the way things are but rather the way people think things are - Epictetus

• Happiness and love are just a choice away - Leo Buscaglia

• One's own thought is one's world. What a person thinks he becomes - that is the eternal mystery. The Upanishads

• A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval - Mark Twain

• How can we send the highest love to others if we do not have it for ourselves? - Prentice Mulford

• It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him - Abraham Lincoln

• No matter how much you seek, we never find anything but ourselves - Anatole France

• Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness - Ram Dass

• If we are not responsible for the thoughts that pass our doors we, at least, are responsible for those which we admit and entertain - Charles Newcomb

• There are no others - Ramana Maharshi

1. Belinda Carlisle, anyone?