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There is a common New Age fallacy that goes something like this:
“If you just live your truth and follow your bliss, material abundance will inevitably follow. When you’re aligned with your soul, miraculous manifestations continuously appear.”
I myself have espoused various versions of this idea on many occasions.
And don’t get me wrong, I think there is a lot of truth in it.
My ultimate view is that Life itself is abundance, we always receive what we need, and every moment is a miraculous manifestation.
I also have repeatedly experienced incredible synchronicities, manifestations, and “doors opening where there were only walls,” on the path of following my truth and excitement.
BUT…
I think New Age ideology gets overly rosy about this.
There’s often a shadow undercurrent of greed within New Age ideology…
In which New Agers insist that “we can have it all” and that spirituality and worldly abundance are perfectly compatible.
Such people desperately want to believe that Living True will definitely always equate to material success…
Because on some level they’re deeply afraid of sacrificing the latter for the former.
They need to “have their cake and eat it too.”
The Harsh Truth
Well, I’m here today to tell you that this viewpoint is inaccurate.
Like so much of New Age ideology, it’s over-simplified and doesn’t hold true in all cases.
Some of the Truest Beings I know are largely unknown in the wider world and struggle to make ends meet — they are not “successful” by most any common metric that most would associate with that word.
The harsh truth is this:
The path of living one’s truth often does not lead to anything the world would recognize as “abundance” or “success.”
For many, it is a rather lonely and thankless and profoundly challenging path of being unrecognized and misunderstood by the vast majority of people.
That doesn't mean it is not worthwhile — I can't think of anything more precious than being what we truly are.
But we’re bullshitting ourselves if we believe a True Being will always effortlessly “manifest abundance.”
I think this line of thinking leads a lot of beautiful people to question their worth, because even though they feel they're living their truth, that hasn't translated to conventional “success” or “abundance.”
And I just wanna say to such people:
You’re beautiful. Thank you for staying true, even though it hasn’t been easy.
The New Age insistence that Living True must equate to material abundance, also leads many people to distort their truth.
In order to attain the material abundance that they believe is supposed to come to them for Staying True…
They compromise themselves.
They become “soul coaches” and “soulpreneurs” and fall into the widespread traps of over-hyping and over-promising that plague the New Age industry.
They convince themselves that becoming a transformational entrepreneur is their truest path—even though it often likely isn’t—because they believe this path will enable them to make good money.
This is Me
I know a little something about this, because this is basically what happened to me.
In order to fund my lifestyle of traveling the world and “manifesting epic shit” over the past years…
I found myself pursuing “spiritual entrepreneurship” in ways that didn’t always feel truly congruent and integrous in the depths of my being.
Instead of creating the absolute truest thing that wanted to birth through me…
I often found myself creating the pretty-deeply-aligned thing that I thought would actually be marketable and sellable.
On many occasions, I also created the absolute truest thing — especially when it came to my writing and music.
As one might expect, though, the absolute truest thing rarely translated to material abundance of any kind…
Whereas the things I created to be marketable and sellable, often did.
This mismatch wasn’t always the case, though.
In some cases—e.g. with my in-person retreats and with The Sovereign Man container a few months ago—I created things that felt profoundly true to me and also generated decent income.
So it’s not cut-and-dry, and yes, sometimes creating the absolute truest thing *can* translate to material abundance.
But often, it just straight up doesn’t.
Does that make it any less true, beautiful, and precious?
No, not at all.
Many of the greatest gifts ever given to the world, do not generate material abundance for their creators.
My great-grandmother birthed 15 precious children into the world, sparking a chain of procreation that eventually led to the birth of my daughter, Lila, the most priceless treasure in my world. I don’t know much about my great grandmother, though I am almost certain she was not materially wealthy, and I cannot imagine the (artistic) challenge of creating and raising 15 kids.
Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching probably never earned him a dime, yet it is one of the most gorgeous, sacred, wisdom-filled books ever written.
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