You Are Already Rich - You Were Born That Way!

Wealth is your birthright. It’s everyone’s birthright! The silver spoon was in your mouth on the day you were born. You may not realize it because you think that to have riches you need lots of cash or financial holdings—or a genuine silver spoon—but this is a very limited and distorted way of thinking about wealth. Being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you have a pile of $100 bills, a stack of gold bars, or a mink coat in your closet.

What most people don’t understand is that wealth is an energy force. Every one of us can tap into this wonderful force whenever we like because it comes from a divine source of abundance that is always available to us. We’re all born with access to this faucet of abundance. Turn it on and you’ll find that wealth manifests in your life in many different ways: You may have plenty of friends and family, a treasure chest full of ideas, abundant joy and enthusiasm, and any number of expressions of affluence. When you develop the 21 Distinctions of Wealth, you’ll know how to turn on that faucet.

A major reason why most of us block the flow of wealth and abundance is that we get stuck on the details of how it shows up in our lives. This blinds us to the creativity of the Universe, which has far more clever ideas about how to manifest riches than we can possibly imagine. We insist that we want cash or gold, but really, what good is a stack of green paper or a bar of gold? What can you do with them? I suppose that you could use a bar of gold as a paperweight or to prop a door open, and you might use a piece of that green paper to mark your place in this book. Currency, precious metals, jewels, and fur aren’t wealth; they’re merely symbols of it, representing something of value that can be exchanged for something else of value. If you recognize all the forms of wealth available to you, you can start trading them in for what you most value.

Right this moment, you may be extremely wealthy and not even realize it. Everyone has a great deal of value, or assets, that they can enjoy and increase. You probably don’t have stacks of bills or gold bars lying around your home, but I’m certain that you have a personal hidden gold mine you can work with and turn into another form of wealth. Your gold is special because unlike the precious metal, it’s magnetic. Once you recognize it, value it, feel gratitude for it, and experience the joy of possessing it, you’ll find that your gold is vibrating and acting as a magnet, attracting even more wealth to you.

Do you doubt that you have a hidden gold mine? Most of us focus on what we lack and overlook our special gifts, qualities, and resources—whether it’s our creativity, our abundant love, our willingness to work hard, our excellent communication skills, our boundless enthusiasm, or some other quality or skill that has great value. Instead, we start subscribing to negative thinking and telling ourselves that we can’t have wealth, that it’s foolish to hope for it. These kinds of thoughts and the oppressive feelings they create blind us to the riches we hold within us.

In the 1930s, a ten-foot-tall clay statue of the Buddha, which had been found in a deserted Buddhist monastery, was moved into a storage facility. Twenty years later, monks at a monastery in Bangkok, Thailand, expressed a desire to own the statue of the great Buddha, so arrangements were made to move it. But as it was being lifted, it slipped off the crane and fell. The giant Buddha cracked, and at first everyone felt terrible that this beautiful statue was ruined. But then the movers realized that peeking through the crack was a shimmer of gold. Upon investigation, they discovered that beneath the clay exterior was a solid-gold statue, which had been covered in mud centuries before in order to prevent robbers from recognizing its value and stealing it. After hundreds of years, none of the monks who knew the Buddha’s secret remained. Those who had valued the statue for what it represented now discovered that it was a treasure in another sense: It was worth a fortune!

In your life, what golden Buddhas lie hidden beneath the mud? What qualities and resources have you forgotten about because you haven’t considered just how valuable they are? What are your overlooked blessings? What do you possess that can be exchanged for what you most desire? You may be thinking, I don’t have what it takes to be wealthy. I don’t have the right skills, the education, the connections, or the time to create wealth. Yet if you look carefully, you might unearth talents, wisdom, qualities, resources, and ideas that are secretly worth a fortune.

Like everyone else, you were born with precious seeds of wealth . . . but have you claimed them, planted them, and nourished them? Some people are born with a knack for making friends and networking with other people—they might know the very individual who can direct them to where they need to be in order to receive the riches that are ready to flow into their lives. Others are tremendously creative and hardworking by nature, but they end up squandering precious time and never planting the seeds of their ideas in fertile ground. Still other people are brilliant observers and communicators who have the potential to transform those exceptional talents into another form of abundance.

If you’re blind to the gold beneath the surface of your Buddha, it’s because you lack the positive emotions that would open your eyes and allow you to rediscover and claim your birthright—emotions such as faith, confidence, worthiness, joy, enthusiasm, and abundance. Yes, abundance is an emotion. Feel it and experience it and your eyes will open to all the affluence already present in your life. Then you’ll attract even more of it to you. Your wealth is there before you—ready to be claimed, invested, exchanged, built upon, and enjoyed.

Wealth truly is every human being’s birthright. The Divine doesn’t want us to go without. That’s why we’re born with curious minds; the potential to think, speak, and create something new; and open hearts that are willing to trust and believe in the seemingly impossible. Try telling a child that she can’t possibly become a princess in a castle and she’s likely to roll her eyes at how unimaginative and foolish you are. Much too quickly, we lose our ability to believe that we can live a life of opulence and luxury.

Look around at our world, lush with life and filled with strange and extraordinary creatures who remind us that the “impossible” is possible. (I once read that honeybees aren’t supposed to be able to fly according to the laws of aerodynamics, but they do it anyway!) Think of the millions of microscopic creatures and countless leaves on all the trees in the world. What makes us think there isn’t enough abundance to go around? Human beings in the most primitive living conditions have created art, music, tools, and new ideas and found resources to draw upon. The Divine gave us the ability to conceive and create, to think and to dream. So why don’t we believe we can manifest what we desire?

As a goal-achievement coach, I’ve met many people who are held back from creating the lives of their dreams because of their strong negative feelings that actually block them from manifesting and receiving the riches they deserve. They generate the emotions of lack and guilt and lose faith that the Universe is there to co-create with them all that they long for. Their bodies actually create an energetic vibration that attracts people and situations that mirror their belief they’re lacking. They readily give up their birthright of abundance and creativity, as if it had no value, and leave behind their childlike willingness to dream and believe. Their resourcefulness slips away, and they can’t recognize the wealth that’s inside and all around them, just waiting to be claimed by them.

When my son, Michel, was 12, he would often take apart broken skateboards that he found in the garbage at a skateboard park. What another person saw as junk he had the creativity to view as a source of wealth. He would clean up the pieces—the wheels and such—and sell them as replacement parts to the kids at school. He then exchanged the money he made for fishing gear or accessories for his mountain bike. He, like so many children and young people, hasn’t lost his ability to see the gold inside the Buddha. He recognizes the wealth around him and the resources he has within, such as his knowledge about skateboards and his cleverness. With the eyes of a child, he can recognize riches when he sees them and claim them for himself, without guilt or embarrassment.

You, too, have this ability to reclaim your birthright and start living a prosperous, abundant life. All you have to do is let go of the negative thoughts and feelings that have been blocking you and open yourself up to the gifts you were born with.

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A shimmering, golden fortune is mine.

Wealth flows into me like a fertile river, nurturing me, enriching me, and helping me produce all that I desire.

Inside me is sheer opulence. I am filled with riches, teeming with possibilities. My tremendous wealth is flowing forth, nourishing my life and everyone around me.

I have always had all the wealth that I need. I savor the riches that are my birthright.

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