How to Liberate Yourself and Remake the World with Just One Word ( in 5 simple steps)

We've internalized a "Never enough" culture:
Never good enough

Never smart enough

Never attractive enough

Never successful enough

Never rich enough

Never powerful enough

Never safe enough

Notice the fear, shame, hurt and longing contained within these seven common beliefs. Now multiply that by thousands and think about what that does to your spirit on a nearly constant basis.

We're constantly told there isn't enough to go around:

Never enough jobs

Never enough food

Never enough security

Never enough natural resources

Never enough oil

Now imagine what kinds of actions "seem" justified when it "appears" that our need for enough is either under threat or not being met. Imagine the violence, the jealously, the separation, resentment, anger and fear. Imagine the war, exploitation, hoarding and mistrust generated by a single belief of not having enough. Think about the ways we have been lured into horrible deals and trade-offs because of these beliefs - bank bailouts, GMO's, pesticides, fracking, strip mining, wars, dirty energy.

But if we apply a broader, truer lens to reality, we see that "never enough" is not inevitable in nature at all. It is a story we believe and therefore perpetuate on the planet with our choices. But it doesn't have to be this way at all. Enough has always been in our reach. In fact, it is written into our DNA and is present in the patterns and systems that have sustained the entire universe for billions of years. Enough ways of thinking and doing are organically being reclaimed as humanity's consciousness expands past learned ideas and habits that have kept us from seeing the whole or balanced picture and aligning with it. Enough is showing up as permaculture, the sharing economy, unity consciousness, new science and new technology, indigenous wisdom and feminine empowerment. As we embrace these truer versions of who we are and what the world is, old power structures based on Never Enough myths naturally lose their power to contain or control us. The expansion of consciousness cannot be stopped. The hard truths and abuses behind the never Enough facade can no longer be hidden from view. Our hearts are remembering we are and have always been enough to generate Enough. Enough is not a feel good fantasy or hopeful vision. We are not hopeless optimists, but we, who are reclaiming the Enough truth, are humanity's best hope. Enough is the most practical path to human survival and resiliency.

What is naturally emerging is an Enough future where we realize our inherent enoughness and joyfully participate in ensuring enough for ourselves, enough for our community and enough for Earth.

We step into our collective adulthood as co-creators of Enough for all.

The greatest thing? Shifting your life and the world at the same time is simple. It is the very same instruction for everyone on earth: shifting the way you orient yourself toward one single word: Enough.

Here is the Enough Shift in Five Easy Steps:

1. Each time you encounter the word "enough," ask yourself if you are assuming Enough is the truth or "never enough" is the truth. Notice: are you feeling sufficiency or scarcity?

2. Bring consciousness to the effect this one word (enough) has on what you have chosen to do or not do, to believe or not believe in this present context. Has a belief in scarcity made certain responses more likely, routine or habitual?

3. Ask yourself, "What if Enough is the actual truth and scarcity is a myth?"

4. Ask yourself, "What would I do or choose if I believed there was and I was Enough?"

5. Take action aligned with a belief in Enough and see how different your life and the world becomes, one decision at a time. 
 

When you truly embrace the Enough shift within you, here are examples of the types of results you can expect:

You will start to notice the word Enough more, giving you more opportunities to challenge scarcity myths in everyday life.  

You will notice how the belief in lack feels like fear in your body and holds you back from making decisions that are actually in your best interest.

You will experience more freedom and spontaneity as you move out of "fight or flight" mentality and into a more reasoned, mature and expansive lens.

You will feel more optimistic, happy and lighter. By the law of attraction, the amount of time you spend believing in Enough rather than Never Enough will determine your ability to generate enough for you and your family.

You will find codependent patterns and other disempowering relationship patterns less attractive. As a result of not playing old, stuck scripts, you will experience more peace and alignment with your purpose and passion. You will model healthy relating for others.

Your inner critic will become less powerful. As a result, you become more resilient to criticism and pessimism from others.

Knowledge is power. From an Enough perspective, you start to notice patterns that are in place that are designed to disempower people. You become much more aware of the scarcity myths all around you and will have more strength and awareness to avoid them.

You will feel less anxiety, fear and worry, freeing up energy and aliveness for what you do want.

You will feel more tender and compassionate towards Earth and all living creatures, and the illusion of separation and loneliness will fade. Your ability to feel oneness will accelerate.

You will trust yourself more and therefore will project more self-confidence in the world. You will take more risks and speak out more. You will be taken more seriously by others.

You will not fear vulnerability because you will naturally trust your own resilience and your own ability to magnetize enough.

It will be easier to identify and connect with others who are moving into Enough Consciousness, and together you will naturally build new Enough structures, organizations and communities.

You will become a systems thinker, noticing how science, spirituality, indigenous wisdom and new technologies contain the same core messages for what is true and where we are heading as a more conscious and mature species. Seeing these patterns, you can move with confidence into alignment with the most abundant throughline of evolution.

Try it out! Then share your stories on my Facebook or Twitter. 
To learn more about Laurie McCammon's upcoming book (April, 2016), Enough! How to Liberate Yourself and Remake the World with Just One Word, go to www.LaurieMcCammon.com

Could Humanity Be the Last to Know That Lack is a Myth?

In her new book, Enough: Beyond the Myth of Lack Laurie McCammon, MS makes an intriguing claim: lack is not real. How could this be when we see evidence everywhere of dwindling natural resources, species extinction and global warming?

“I am not saying there are no limits,” she says, “What I am saying is that most of the lack we see around us is the result of human choices and that such conditions do not exist naturally. Because the lack we see is a result of man-made choices, we shouldn’t accept it as ‘just the way things are.’ We should challenge the premise that keeps lack perpetually in place. Homo sapiens appears to be the only species on earth who lives according to this “Never Enough” myth. Wouldn’t you think we’d pay attention to how the other 8.7 million species successfully create healthy, sustainable ecosystems that work for everyone without depleting the systems upon which everyone relies?”

McCammon points out that if you examine human biology, you will find a nervous system designed to cope with short bursts of stress, but not one built to sustain a perpetual state of heightened alert. “And yet, isn’t this exactly what is perpetrated by politicians, mainstream media and advertising who would have us believe we don’t have enough and aren’t enough, or that if we are one of the fortunate ones to have enough, we should be afraid of losing it any minute?” Whole industries, she points out, such as luxury goods, insurance, and cosmetics are built upon this idea that we aren’t enough as we are. “We never seem to look back over our decisions to buy more stuff and ask if those decisions ever brought us the feelings of adequacy, belonging and accomplishment we expected them to. “ She believes that this insatiable longing to feel enough results in all kinds of hoarding and over-consumption, which greatly adds to the material burden humans place on the planet. She puts it this way: “When we lose our sense of belonging, we tend to fill our lives up with belongings.”

“What we tend to forget is that what one person needs to be happy is actually very different than what another person needs to be happy. In other words, my enough is not your enough. But when we get caught up in a consumerist society, we are apt to believe we must check off  the same list of standardized boxes in order to prove we are enough. This list becomes a story that rules our lives, creating achievement anxiety, shame and guilt. In truth, we could do without a great deal and never experience it as a sense of lack.  And conversely, when we have too much, there is a palpable stress burden placed upon us. In essence, we've traded a portion of our freedom for the material objects we possess, whether it is labor we’ve invested to buy the item in the first place, or labor and time required to maintain what we’ve bought. Then there is the emotional burden of worrying about our things – are they safe, in good working order, might someone damage or steal them from us, is there a better, updated version we should have instead?”  McCammon believes that the stress burden of things greatly complicates our lives and distracts us further from cultivating the real source of happiness - an inner sense of enoughness. "Enoughness comes from a felt sense of our own beingness, a sense of belonging to a universe which could not possibly be enough without us. Many things in the material world may leave us craving and wanting more, but most of us are absolutely starving for meaning - to know that we really do matter. What I've found is that the universe is absolutely barraging us with subtle messages that we do matter, each and every one of us."  

To understand how, when and why we forgot our "enough" roots, McCammon turns to anthropology, mythology and systems theory. According to McCammon, the “Never Enough Paradigm” began more than 5,000 years ago when humanity entered the Agrarian Era. This monumental shift in perspective involved moving away from total dependence on nature to take on the mantel of “masters of the material realm.” The progression of the “Never Enough Paradigm” accelerated in the industrial and digital ages, representing the height of intellectual prowess and physical efficiency, but crowded out the heart and acknowledgement of the spiritual and the sacred. Everything, including humans and the earth became objects in the drive to have more. We no longer oriented towards our depths. All that mattered was at the surface, in what we do or have. 

“The brain is very fond of breaking things into parts for analysis and manipulation, but it isn’t as good at perceiving subtle relationships and nuances, cause and effect at a distance, or whole systems dynamics," says McCammon.  The human capacity to perceive interrelationships and holism, she claims, is essential to survival of our species, and yet it has been greatly devalued in our society.  "It is not optional. Intuition and subtle reception aren't fluff.  They are cutting-edge. Both capacities are absolutely essential to keeping up with today’s science and technology which are huddled right now in the realms of the subtle, interconnected and intangible, such as quantum physics, scalar waves, wireless networks, and cloud-based technologies.” McCammon suggests that all we need to do is look at our cutting edge technologies and ask how they reflect the corresponding frontier of human consciousness. "It is always a mirror and a metaphor for the inner work we need to do to move forward. A greater awareness of subtle interrelatedness is where we are going. This means beingness. This means spirit. This means essence. It is unstoppable and inevitable.” To attune to the subtle, Laurie suggests that we explore something referred to as heart intelligence, which has been proven by science to be real and measurable. Heart intelligence is inherent and has always been evidenced in indigenous and feminine ways of perceiving. “The idea is that we are becoming more whole again in our ability to perceive. This means mind and heart. Yin and yang. Material and spirit. We’ve done our work on testing the intellect for 5,000 years. Now it is time to focus on the heart.“

McCammon shows how the last 5,000 years correspond to humanity’s adolescent stage of growth. “This means that we aren’t, as we have assumed, at the pinnacle or adulthood of our species. We have yet to enter adulthood as a species, which is characterized by taking responsibility for our actions and fulfilling our desire to widen our affiliation from ‘me’ (humans) to ‘we’(all beings on earth). We have been exploring tribal mentality so far in quite an adolescent way. Although the tribe has expanded over time from smaller to bigger – from family to village, to religious or political affiliation, to country - it doesn’t become truly mature until it reflects an ability to think globally and universally.” The motivation and action to fuel global change arise naturally from an expansion in what McCammon calls affiliative consciousness. Affiliative consciousness is incorporating more “other” as “we,” a departure from separation consciousness. “This is why it is pretty useless to try to convince someone whose primary consciousness is himself, his job or his family’s economic well-being that he should care about what his employer is doing to contribute to global warming. He is not a bad person. He just can’t see beyond his own affiliative bubble right now.” says McCammon. “But what this also tells us is if you are someone who deeply cares about the earth or other species or regions of the globe, you are already embodying the expanded consciousness. You are the proof of the ripening maturity of our species. You are proof that humanity’s capacity for solving the earth’s most threatening and complex problems is amid a great transformation and expansion. And the good news is as this circle of affiliation expands, so does humanity's own felt sense of security, joy, empowerment, purpose and fulfillment - automatically.”

What does this have to do with the book’s primary focus, “enough”? “If we look at all the forms of suffering in the world today, we find a common cause, the belief in lack or “Never Enough.” McCammon says, “The imperative to get more is so reinforced from an early age that we are blind to how it distorts everything from our self-esteem to our relationships to our consumer and career choices, leading to the waste, exploitation and hoarding so prevalent on our planet today. We have mistakenly believed that 'survival of the fittest' was our primary orientation as human beings, and this false idea with no basis in science unfortunately has lingered on, taking on benign or overly-positive names such as competition, achievement, winning, success and growth. Self-preservation and individualism became the name of the game, driven by the belief that we were not born enough, so must prove it over and over again through what we do or own. All this keeps us from being available to participate in the bigger game, which is participating in our planetary ecosystem in a way that sustains enough for ourselves, our communities and our planet.”

To illustrate how ingrained the idea of “Never Enough” is in our thinking, McCammon poses a question to her readers, “If I were to ask if you are enough, what would you say? Most people would conclude, ‘ No, I am not enough yet. I haven’t achieved all I want to yet. I have goals I haven’t reached, so no, I’m not enough.’ But here’s the trick. I didn’t ask if you have enough or if you have done enough. I asked you if you are enough.  Do you see how quickly we skip over beingness? A newborn baby hasn’t achieved or owned anything, but would you say he is enough? Does a newborn need to do anything to be deserving of his family’s or society’s love and care? Of course not. We need to cultivate a sense of our own beingness, deservedness, worthiness and preciousness, a sense that we are enough because we are here. Then we find we do not need our achievements and our possessions to do the heavy lifting for us. We can relax and focus on doing what we really love to do. Really, the stories we carry about not being enough cause us so much deep suffering, so much 'stuckness' and disempowerment.  All this suffering is optional, not mandatory.  Do we really love our 'I'm not enough' story so much that we won't let go of it? Nature builds in an aversion or pain response for a reason - to guide us to safety, health and well-being."     

Enough: Beyond the Myth of Lack is a book whose optimistic tone is a refreshing departure from the bleak, urgent arguments posed by so many that it is almost too late to correct the damage humans have done, an assumption she states is only true if we remain in the adolescent “Never Enough” consciousness. “And this is not going to happen. We are part of a much larger evolutionary flow, a design which is the based on the dynamic of enough, and we are waking up to it, realizing we have outgrown the Never Enough Story. Exponentially more intelligence, creativity and courage becomes available to us when we embrace that we, too, are part of the universe’s big Enough design. We are enough to address every man-made problem, and to do it quickly and efficiently together.” The latter chapters of Enough are devoted to highlighting the global explosion of independent social movements and green businesses that McCammon says are proof that the Enough awakening is already happening in earnest.  All of this is to say that she wholeheartedly believes that  "An Enough future is inevitable. The shift is happening now. And each and every one of us are enough to be part of it."

Laurie McCammon is a planetary change agent, blogger, facilitator and author of Enough!How to Liberate Yourself and Remake the World with Just One Word, published  by Conari Press, out  April 1, 2016.  You can contact Laurie with comments at lauriemccammon@gmail.com, Like LaurieMcCammon on Facebook or follow her on Twitter at @EnoughMessage