What Is Your Relationship With Your Blessings?

There is a bay leaf in my financial life right now.

Mine has my name on it and a clear intention. Yours may be tucked into your wallet, sitting between your cards, resting beneath your laptop, or living beside the place where you do your banking.

For this part of our August ritual, we are not burning anything.

We are letting the leaf stay.

I think there is something important in that.

Most prosperity practices focus on getting.

Call it in.

Manifest it.

Open the road.

Ask for more.

Receive.

All of that can be useful.

I am increasingly interested in what happens after something good arrives.

Can you let it stay?

Can you have money without immediately finding a reason it has to leave?

Can you experience peace without creating a problem to solve?

Can you have an empty afternoon without filling it with obligation?

Can someone love you without making them repeatedly prove it?

Can work become easier without deciding you must be doing something wrong?

Can your body feel good without waiting anxiously for the next symptom?

Can life improve without immediately preparing yourself for punishment?

Receiving is one skill.

Holding is another.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that human beings are often more comfortable with a familiar limitation than with an unfamiliar freedom.

This is one of the places that becomes visible.

We can want better conditions desperately and still have very little practice living inside them.

Scarcity may be miserable, but scarcity gives us instructions.

Conserve.

Brace.

Watch.

Prepare.

Do without.

Do it yourself.

Do not get too comfortable.

Do not assume this will last.

Those instructions can become so familiar that when circumstances change, we continue obeying them.

The emergency ends, but the body remains on duty.

More money comes in, but we still experience every expenditure as danger.

Someone becomes dependable, but we keep anticipating abandonment.

There is finally enough time, but rest feels irresponsible.

Something begins working, and we immediately start looking for the flaw.

Better conditions have arrived, but some part of us is still living at the old address.

This is why I think prosperity requires more than attracting resources.

We have to develop a capacity for having them.

Having requires stewardship.

Having requires tolerance for stability.

Having sometimes requires doing absolutely nothing dramatic with what has arrived.

That may be one of the strangest lessons of abundance.

You do not have to turn every blessing into an emergency, a project, an opportunity, or a sacrifice.

Sometimes you get to keep it.

Money can sit in the bank.

The house can remain peaceful.

The afternoon can remain unscheduled.

The compliment can simply be true.

The relationship can be good.

The opportunity can belong to you.

The beautiful thing can remain beautiful without your immediately preparing for its disappearance.

I think many of us have confused vigilance with responsibility.

They are not the same thing.

Stewardship says, “This matters, so I will care for it.”

Vigilance says, “This could disappear at any moment, so I cannot relax in its presence.”

Those create very different lives.

One allows relationship.

The other allows possession without ever allowing safety.

This week's bay practice is remarkably quiet compared with burning leaves.

There is no flame.

No smoke.

No visible transformation.

The leaf simply remains beside the thing we are learning to hold.

Maybe that is the lesson.

Not all magic requires action.

Some magic is staying.

Some magic is allowing.

Some magic is resisting the impulse to interfere with what is already becoming good.

For the rest of today and tomorrow, leave your money-intention bay leaf where you placed it.

Notice it.

Notice what you feel when you see it.

Notice whether your intention feels exciting, embarrassing, impossible, dangerous, greedy, peaceful, or completely ordinary.

You do not have to correct the feeling.

Just become interested in it.

Ask yourself:

If this intention became my normal life, what part of me would have to learn something new?

What would I stop bracing for?

What would I no longer have to prove?

What would I have to become comfortable keeping?

Then, beginning August 20, our bay practice changes again.

For the rest of the month, we will bless what we are building.

Each day, write something you want to bless and strengthen in your own life on a bay leaf. Your home. Your work. Your marriage. Your health. Your creativity. Your money. Your courage. A project. A new beginning. A better condition you are learning to trust.

Then offer it to the flame.

We began this month by burning what we were ready to release.

We moved outward and blessed others.

We learned to hold an intention without immediately consuming it.

Now we will bless what we intend to keep building.

That feels like a pretty complete piece of magic to me.

Release what cannot come with you.

Bless goodness when it reaches someone else.

Learn to hold what reaches you.

Then tend what you want to remain.

Maybe prosperity is less about convincing the universe to give us something and more about becoming increasingly trustworthy with what is already trying to stay.

Love all ways,

Lisa

P.S. If your bay leaf has fallen out of your wallet, disappeared beneath your desk, been eaten by your purse, or you simply forgot this part of the ritual, there is no magical truancy officer coming for you. Write another one today. The practice is always return.