Prosperity Key No. 5
Prosperity Key No. 6

     Being prosperous is feeling fulfilled - 'filled-full' with a sense of life and love.  In this state we are no longer searching for love, we are living love.
     Ironically, to enjoy this emotional abundance, we must release our intense 'need' for love - a major block to prosperity consciousness.  As long as we stay in 'scarcity thinking' we will never feel loved enough.  When we feel 'needy', or deprived, our desire for love seems to outrun our supply.
     Before discussing ways to avoid or release the repetitive cycle of scarcity thinking about love and relationships, let's look at how cultural training contributed to starting these cycles.

     How have we allowed our need for love to supersede our other needs, drives, and desires required to pursue prosperity?
     It started very early, when we were petted, curled, told how sweet we were, and given dolls to play with.  We got the message, and most of us liked it.  We were girls; that meant our destiny was tied up with getting a Daddy to go with our play-house.
     We were groomed, and groomed ourselves, to catch a 'love'.  Taking on characteristics of self-responsibility, in-dependent thinking, and self-confidence was left to our brothers.  Women are here to find someone to please.

Men are here to provide, to be responsible, and to make us feel good about ourselves.
     We bought this game.  That's an important point to remember - that we did buy it, in different degrees and in different ways.  There were benefits in accepting that receptive, pleasing role; we were to be provided for, taken care of.  A bargain was made.
     What we did, of course, was to set up total dependence on the 'great provider'.  Everything depended on the reaction of the male toward us.  Our whole sense of rightness, of goodness as a person, of being of value to the world, depended upon a man's 'love'.

     It is really hard to love someone you need.  Without developing a strong inner-core feeling of independent strength, a centered awareness of self - separate from our partner - our 'love' is more likely to be conditional.  Most of us confuse love and need.  Love is a spontaneous, pure outpouring of feeling, coming from within.  Al-though we attribute others as being the 'cause', love comes when we have developed our capacity to feel love within.
     Your love belongs to you; you take it with you; you only share it.  Love is self-generated - an extension of your inner being.  There is no 'bargain', no 'exchange' in love.  We love for love itself.
     What we have called 'love' in a relationship is very often a fulfilling of needs - a feeling of being grateful that we are being provided for, both in physical survival needs and in emotional-psychological needs.
     We limit our growth and potential experience when we confuse love with protecting and providing.  Love then becomes the fulfillment of a role we have estab-lished.  When we come together out of need, it can be to feed each other's weaknesses.  For example, if you choose a partner because he can plug a hole that exists in your personality - e.g., you're shy of meeting people so you (perhaps unconsciously) marry an assertive out-going partner who plays that role for you - then you never have to grow in that area.
     Even in this new age when both women and men are taking time out to find who they are as people - separate from their roles - we still resist giving up the great myth.  There must be some 'Shining Knight' or 'Giant Mama' who is going to save us from ourselves - to help us avoid learning what we need to learn in life, to validate us painlessly so we won't need to grow.

     What we are all looking for, of course, is that elusive unconditional, uncritical, and non-judgmental love.  What we all need to understand is simply: it starts within.  When you let go of the 'judge and jury within, you will find a perennial garden of love.

     You are already it.  You are love; that is your true nature.  Letting go of the great search for the perfect love, and looking within instead for your own reservoir of love can free up tremendous amounts of energy which are then available for redirection.
     As we begin to see the truth in this key, we also see that the female's compulsive desire for a providing, protective 'love' is a deterrent to prosperity consciousness.  Until we women come to understand to what extent we have been programmed to feel like women only when we are taken care of - when someone other than ourselves loves and accepts us - we will not even be free to desire true prosperity.  That very concept will instead be threatening to our basic life structure built around the idea that women are first and foremost in the serving, giving role.

    To many women, work has been a filler - a 'holding place' while we waited for life to begin.  Many intelligent, creative, well-educated women have devoted years of their lives in voluntary or part-time, entry-level, low-paying jobs in order to carry out the image of themselves as servers.
     In many cases, the jobs themselves were taken so we could do a double shift of serving and providing in our promotion of the well-being of others.  These jobs were attractive because they had the benefits of non-commitment and high mobility, and they were often short-term.  All of this allows women to increase their support services but does little to promote the future career of the woman.
     It is amazing how many young college women of today are still not taking themselves seriously They do not see themselves having a career, but rather see them-selves "in English," or "in History" temporarily, until they get married.  Although the trend is lessening, the college programs drawing the most women students are still teaching, nursing, and secretarial.  This still con-tinues, in spite of the fact that the job market in teaching is at its lowest ebb, few secretaries make it up through the ranks into better paying positions, and nurses as a rule feel underpaid for the tremendous amount of work and responsibility they have.  None of these factors is deter-ring enrollment in these three areas.
     As prospering women, we must recognize that even with twenty years out for raising a family, the average woman will work twenty to thirty years of her life.  Realistically, for most of us, our life income and lifestyle are directly related to our job choice.  Marriage no longer precludes working; half of all married women are work-ing, often in low-paying clerical jobs.  Even after ten years or more on such jobs, many of these women still picture themselves as 'temporarily employed'.  Now, with half of our marriages ending in divorce, we see the added necessity of planning a work career with sufficient finan-cial reward to support the family we are often left with.

     For you to be prosperous, you will have to deliber-ately choose to be.  You will have to re-evaluate your life priorities, and take yourself, interests, and career seri-ously.  You will have to look at your traditional role as server and giver to others, and decide what you want to give to yourself.  In other words, you must re-evaluate your 'love priorities'.

     We have been taught from early childhood to "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and we have been given some idea of what "love they neighbor" entails.  But somehow the "love thyself" part has been sadly neglected - or worse, it has been given negative, narcissistic connotations.  Many of my women clients have had difficulty even comprehending how to start to love themselves.  I recommend a copy of this list to be put up on the bath-room mirror, to be reviewed each day, for a healthy reminder of the person we must love first:

I listen to what I want and I respond to that want

I make my own rules to live by

I give myself credit often

I surround myself with beauty

I create an abundance of friends

I nourish myself with only good food

I allow myself to have abundance in all ways

I reward myself appropriately

I trust myself

I give myself pleasure in a variety of ways

I enjoy the sensations of my body

I enjoy my sexuality

I forgive myself

I give myself authority

I have fun

I talk to myself gently

I regard my needs, wants, goals, and welfare as being as important as anyone else's. *

* I recommend "I Deserve Love" by Sondra Ray (Celestial Arts, Millbrae, CA) for
more information about these ideas.

     The beautiful lesson to be learned about love is that loving yourself does not take away from loving others.  It is a prerequisite before genuine love can happen.  Love only multiplies.  I can only give that which I have.  Unless I create love within, I have little to share with others.

     A discussion of women and love and how they relate to prosperity is not complete without looking at the role sex plays as a driving, motivating, satisfying force for women.  An interesting theory among some sex therapists is that women must have plenty of what is sometimes called 'P.  S. A.' - pleasure, security, and ap-proval - before they feel really fulfilled.
     Trouble starts when we attempt to satisfy all three needs with our sexual relationships.  Trying to meet sec-urity and approval needs through sex detracts from the pleasure sex naturally brings, and can make a stew out of our self-image.  It sets up the possibility that we will feel insecure and disapproved of when we don't have a good, frequent sex life with a partner.  When that happens, making love can become a desperate need for improving our self-esteem.  Sex has then lost its value as a unique and separate experience.  The experience of wanting to make love, versus desperately needing to make love to satisfy a suffering ego, are extreme opposites.
     Prosperity is providing security and approval from within.  Feeling we have to wait for someone else to give us pleasure is yet another way we experience depen-dency.
     As one sex counselor, Grace Darling, points out in her seminars on human sexuality, the female is complete in herself sexually The female body is built for pleasure and she need never feel deprived.  The clitoris is the only human organ whose sole function is giving pleasure.  Women, therefore, do not need a man to experience sex-ual fulfillment.  When we learn to separate the need for sexual satisfaction from the need for approval and sec-urity, we are free to be completely with a man in a loving, giving way - not because we need him, but because we want him.

     it is only when we learn that we can give ourselves pleasure, security, and approval that we then come from a centered place and can be totally with a man without trying to figure out if he loves us 'enough'.  We experi-ence true prosperity when we have already done that for ourselves!
 
 

Joy Van Pelt has been married to a pilot for 20 years, and has four children.  She works for a company that sells travel packages to large companies as sales incentives.  Her job as trouble-shooter with these groups takes her around the world with top business executives.

Q: Your job sounds exciting and challenging.  Have you always been independent and out-going?

A: As a young woman, I was very independent.  Something happened after my marriage, however.  I reverted into a child-like, irresponsible state, waiting in my little suburban house for my husband to come home so I could start to live each day. There was always a part inside, my survival instinct, that kept saying, "I don't like this," but I would use liquor to stifle that voice.  I gave my husband the father role.  As a mother, I became an active overachiever. Eventually my buried feelings became so painful I became an alcoholic to try to suppress them.
     One day, stone sober, I got a glimpse of my choice point.  I saw a clear image of a playground slide, and I knew I could slide down - way down - or I could turn around and walk back down the steps.  I chose the steps.

Since that moment, it's not been easy to find out who I am.  I had to allow all those 'cries' in my heart their say.  As I changed my role in the family and with friends, all the roles around me changed, sometimes with great anguish for all of us.  But there was no turning back.  I no longer wanted to be a nursemaid; I saw that I couldn't be responsible for anyone else's happiness.  I stopped rushing in to make everything right for everyone.  I saw that I had always come last in my own life -every one else came first.  And I also saw that I was acting from guilt - living a life of how I was 'supposed to be'.

Q: What was the hardest part of your change?

A: I knew I couldn't let go of my old behavior patterns until I found my pay-offs.  I soon saw that there was a lot of power involved in my old role.  If you're responsible for everyone else's good, you are powerful.  That was hard to give up, Now, however, I'm feeling good about being responsible for myself. When people ask me, "How can you leave your kids?  " - which I do for a week or so at a time for my job - I tell them that they are much more mature because of it.  My husband does more things with them now too.  I kept the older ones as children far too long.  I only saw my option as being a wife and mother or nothing, and worried about what would be left for me once they were grown up.
     One good thing about learning to prosper so late in life is that it is so exciting.  I almost have a 'born again' feeling. Sometimes when I'm out running in the morning, I feel the wind in my face, and the strength of my body, and I say to myself, "I'm so grateful to have lived long enough to experience this new aliveness!"