A version of this piece first appeared in my no-longer-active New Earth Chronicles blog two years ago, long before the financial meltdown of 2009. In rereading it tonight, it feels as current now as it did then. And so I reprint it here for you.
"You enter into this lifetime in the leap of faith your soul takes into the being in your mother’s womb. You take that one huge leap only to discover that such leaps never cease being demanded of you."
—
The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to WriteIn recent weeks, several friends who are experiencing financial challenges have posed this question to me:
Why is that so many aspects of my life seem to be flowing, but when it comes to money, I feel so stuck?Or,
Why is it that when I’m meditating or writing, I feel alive and vibrant, as though I’m living at the highest of frequencies, but when it comes to finances, I come crashing back to earth?These are important questions and the answers are both simple and complex.
They remind me of a time in my life of profound financial struggle, a time when both these questions were constantly on my mind.
We were living on Maui then, in the coastal community of Kihei. Here, in this amazing Pacific paradise, money was a constant challenge. And despite my two jobs and our weekends selling crystals at the island's flea market, there never seemed to be enough to cover all our bills.
Kihei was supposed to have been a landing place, we thought, our first stop on the climb to prosperity. Our desired destination was the tourist-free -- and pricier -- uplands of Kula.
Every few weeks we'd drive up the mountain, often to the lush hills of Olinda, where we'd gaze admiringly at the handsome homes and go walking in Olinda's serene experimental forest.
While strolling among the stately pines,
anything seemed possible: infinite abundance, an Olinda mansion, work that impassioned us... It all felt within our grasp. Easily.
And then we'd drive back down the mountain to Kihei, down to our tiny condo with its overdue rent and overdue bills, back to the jobs I hated, back to a life that never seemed to be in flow.
By the time we reached sea level, the "Olinda Effect," as we'd dubbed it, had fully kicked in: We were anxious, fearful and no longer in that anything-is-possible Olinda resonance.
I’ve thought about that story a lot as I’ve reflected on my friends' questions and on my time both on Maui and now in Albuquerque.
It's said that if you do what you love, the money will follow. But money follows, when it does, not because we're doing what we love. It follows because in living our passion we are living at a vibration where lack cannot exist, where flow is infinite.
But -- and it's a big "but" -- unless we can hold that resonance when the bills come in, we crash back down into a consciousness of scarcity.
That's what happened on Maui. That's what's happening to one of my friends. Let's call her Alison, even though she's a composite of several men and women I know.
Alison loves her work. When she's in the midst of it — and in much of her life beyond it — she's one of the most powerful, conscious and aware people I know.
Then rent day approaches. Or the car payment. Or some other bill that she doesn't, in the moment, know how she'll cover.
Fear and anxiety roll in like a heavy fog, casting a pall over the passions of moments earlier. Like I did on Maui, she comes down from a mountaintop of infinite possibility and finds herself in a swamp of doubt and apprehension.
For as long as she lives in that place of doubt and apprehension, it will be harder for the money to flow.
I'm speaking here about money. But I could be speaking about love or peace or health or any other aspect of our life that doesn't seem to be working.
Whatever it is, the more anxiety we attach to it, the more our fear keeps us from living in the fullness of our highest potential around it.
Our fear will
always keep us from living that potential.
Some of you know that I left Sedona, Arizona just over five years ago on what would ultimately become an open-ended 30-month full-time road odyssey. I left with limited funds and no idea how I would be supported.
In those early months, I was very much like Alison, dropping into a state of panic whenever my car payment -- then, my largest singly monthly outlay -- was near due.
In those moments, that still, small voice we can all access would ask,
Are all today's needs taken care of? Food? Gas? Accommodation? My answers were
always "yes."
Then let tomorrow and tomorrow's bills take care of themselves, the voice would say
.Somehow, through more miracles than I could possibly name, tomorrow and tomorrow's bills always did take care of themselves. Not always in my preferred timing. Not always in my preferred manner. But in holding myself to the present moment and in
knowing that I would be taken care, I always was.
Today, my life is infinitely more complex. Yet the basis for how I live it has not changed.
Even as I still don't know how I'll be supported from day to day, I live each moment (to the best of my limited human ability)
knowing that by holding the resonance of my passion, I will always be in the resonance of flow.
Many of us maintain a meditation practice of some sort. We carve ten or twenty minutes from our day to spend in the higher realms.
But meditation can be like Olinda. Sure, it can carry us into a place where everything is possible because in that frequency everything
is possible. Yet when our moments of altered beingness come to an end, we can find ourselves back in our wordly life of bills, traffic and conflict, and the Olinda Effect can kick in.
We're called to do more than meditate our way into higher modes of being. We're called to reside there. Full-time. Even in the midst of all that life would throw at us.
(See Rule #7 in "Mark David's Rules for Living.")
Today, I live in the Albuquerque equivalent of Olinda -- in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, 1,000 feet above the city's lowest elevation.
And in many ways, it feels as though I've achieved at least some of what I thought I was seeking as I gazed longingly toward the Kula uplands from Kihei.
What I've achieved, though, has nothing to do with money. What I've achieved, most days, is an ability to live in infinite possibility full-time and to know that by living my passion, living in the moment and not freaking out at the latest stack of bills, the Olinda resonance lives within me
wherever I am.
Ironically, the Hawaiian word
kihei means "shawl" or "cape." Even in the midst of that Kihei energy that felt so constricting and impoverishing, I was always embraced in a protective blanket of divine love and grace.
Regardless of life's externals, that
kihei is always and ever present for us. The more we acknowledge it, know it and live it, the more we will experience it in all aspects of our life, including the financial. And the more that the Olinda resonance will show up -- and remain present and alive -- in our lives.
• Where in your life and your writing can you shift your belief from one of scarcity to one of infinite flow?
• Where in your writing and your life can you hold that "Olinda" feeling, regardless of outward appearance?
• How can you spend more of your day as a meditation? Can you allow yourself to create more -- in your writing and in your life -- from that place of centeredness? 
Writing/Creativity Coaching Groups with Mark David / in person and by phone via Teleconference• Albuquerque, NM / Feb 9-Mar 30 / 7 pm MT
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Conscious Life Expo, LAX Hilton • Friday, Feb 12 ~ 7pm
Free Talk• Fri, Feb 12 - Sun, Feb 14
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Photos: #1 View from Olinda; photographer unknown. #2 North Kihei, Maui; photographer unknown. #3 Mark David on the road, near the Medicine Wheel, Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming; (c) 2006 Mark David Gerson. #4 Angel over Albuquerque, (c) 2010 Mark David Gerson
-- "The past is passed. We let it go" -- when the incident occurred.
, that 2007 incident shattered some aspects of how I then viewed myself and how I had been living, and launched me into a major new phase of my life. 
I had just returned to Albuquerque and was asleep in Room 133 of the Howard Johnson Express when my room phone rang. It was a few minutes past seven.
