Good morning from Montauk. What’s on my mind this morning is the word sufficiency, and here’s why. I was en route to Montauk and I had two nights with my dear friend Dana in a very basic old school motel directly on the beach. It’s our little secret spot –  a place we both love – and when I arrived at my friend’s house in Montauk, I was telling her what a magical time we had. She said to me “what was so magical about it?”, and I said “it reminded me of the concept of sufficiency.” And she said, “Say more. Why not abundance?”

While we talk a lot about having an abundance mindset, abundance is more tied to scarcity – the opposite of scarcity – and sufficiency is a very different thing. Sufficiency in Sanskrit means I am full. It’s about not having a desire for anything more. It’s about contentment. Gratitude for what you have. I saw this great quote and it says, “abundance is knowing sufficiency.”

So anyway, this morning I got up and I said to myself, why am I using this word sufficiency, and it took me back to this incredible woman by the name of Lynne Twist. She wrote a book called ‘The ‘Soul of Money’. It is a beautiful book about this concept of sufficiency. I remember my eyes rolling when I saw the title of the book, The Soul of Money, but I read it page to page and underlined it throughout.

You can look up Lynne Twist. She is the co-founder of something called the Pachamama Alliance and she works with indigenous people in the Amazon. She has worked with 100,000 people in 50 countries on alleviating world hunger and environmental sustainability and she’s associated with a lot of great thought leaders like the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa and Desmond Tutu and Jane Goodall. She’s a very powerful speaker and a very special woman.

So, I went back this morning and Googled her, and I’d like to end this morning by reading just one paragraph from ‘The Soul of Money which I think beautifully captures this idea of sufficiency.  This is Lynn Twist from her book and she’s talking about letting go of scarcity:

“By sufficiency. I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps from poverty or one step from abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate. A declaration. A  knowing that there is enough. and that we are enough. Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need.There is always enough.”

I think this reading perfectly captures this essence, this feeling of pinch yourself delight and abundance Dana and I had in our little basic hotel perched on the beach at the very tip of Long Island. We both felt so rich and so lucky, and I think that quote I started with is just perfect: Abundance is knowing sufficiency.

Abundance is knowing sufficiency . I’ll leave you with that thought today. Until next time, from my heart to yours.