The reverberations from our community call about Receiving is the New Giving, continues. A friend who joined the call for the first time said how the concept of sufficiency is new to her, and incredibly radical. “What do you mean I am enough already? And that I get to receive freely?!”

Even after so many years of studying and practicing being enough, remembering my sufficiency remains just that, a practice. I still forget how truly unbelievable it can feel at the beginning, how slippery and ethereal, more like a belief than a thing. And I think this beginners’ mind approach offers access to the awe that would actually cause the truth of enoughness to arise, spontaneously and naturally.

Rather than a thing, sufficiency is a living phenomenon. An experience. A mindset. A context, from which to act, not the action itself, not a definition or a diagnosis or a criterion.

Author Oliver Burkeman talks about awe in an interview on thehairpin.com (Nov. 13, 2012) about his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (2012): “I really like the way the psychologist Paul Pearsall put it — that what we need is more “awe,” an emotion that mixes wonder (the positive) and fear (the negative). The things you [the interviewer] mention, bravery and kindness, are definitely going to lead to more awe if you pursue them seriously.”

I’m beginning to think that to receive the truth of our enoughness – to receive anything – we might have to give up the pursuit of happiness, at least the pursuit that is in current style. I’m going to open up to awe. Will you?