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In Sufficiency Thrives the Soul
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I love books by people who’ve really been there. Lynn Twist is such a person. Thirty years ago, she was a more-or-less typical housewife. Her world revolved around her marriage and her three young children. Money was just something she and her husband obtained in order to provide for their family. The Twists provided plenty, yet somehow, the more they provided, the more time their kids spent with babysitters. Lynn and her husband Bill were just too busy earning, and spending, their money.
In time, she felt called to help the less fortunate. So she helped coordinate a small fundraiser for a then-new group called The Hunger Project. She designed pledge cards and sharpened pencils in preparation for the meeting. She felt good about helping — so good that she pledged $2,000 of her young family’s money.
“I got in my car to go home and had barely pulled into traffic when I went into total panic,” she recalls in her new book. “What had I done? I had no idea how I was going to get that kind of money. And how would I tell my husband?”
In the two-and-a-half decades since, Lynn Twist has raised more than $150 million in charitable donations at more than 20,000 fundraisers in 47 countries. THE SOUL OF MONEY: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life (Norton, $25) tells the story of her remarkable transformation. Gracefully coauthored by Teresa Barker, the book also suggests a route by which others might let go of the notion that money is a necessary evil and begin relating to it as an expression of heartfelt values.
“One of the unexpected gifts,” Twist writes, “was that in taking a stand to end world hunger I came to recognize, and had to address, my own inner hunger, and the inauthentic and inappropriate way we were living.”
While row upon row of financial self-help books offer simplistic formulae by which one can earn more or spend less, the profound yet practical idea at the heart of The Soul of Money is that every one of us already has enough.
“This mantra of not enough...becomes a kind of default setting for our thinking about everything, from the cash in our pocket to the people we love or the value of our own lives,” Twist writes. “It’s the same in the inner city or the suburbs, in New York or Topeka or Beverly Hills or Calcutta.”
Having worked in each of these places, Twist learned the hard way that even severe hunger is caused not by a shortage of food but by a chronic misallocation of resources. And she watched firsthand as even the wealthiest individuals fretted over not having enough. These real-life experiences led her to understand that “scarcity is a lie,” and that in order to begin honestly appraising her relationship with money, she had to stop believing in what she now calls the “three toxic myths of scarcity.”
Myth number one is the idea that there’s not enough. Belief in this myth drives us to compete with one another, and to value people on the basis of their wealth rather than on their intrinsic worth as individuals.
The second toxic myth is that more is better. Belief in this myth drives us to live like hamsters running on a wheel, forever chasing outward achievement rather than discovering our inner selves.
And the third myth is that’s just the way it is. This is they myth by which those of us living in North American affluence justify doing nothing for the literally billions of fellow souls who suffer all around us.
“We say we feel bad about these and other inequities in the world, but the problems seem so deeply rooted as to be insurmountable and we resign ourselves to that’s just the way it is, declaring ourselves helpless to change things. In the resignation, we abandon our own human potential, and the possibility of contributing to a thriving, equitable, healthy world for all.”
The antidote to these myths is a belief in sufficiency.
Twist introduces sufficiency with the story of her visit to a desert village in Senegal where the local oasis was drying up. Shortly after her arrival, the men of the small Muslim village explained that if more water could not be obtained, the tribe would have no choice but to leave the place they regarded as their spiritual home. Twist and her team then met with the village women, who believed there was an underground lake beneath their feet. They had seen it in visions, but could not convince the men. Twist and her team persuaded the men that there would be no harm in letting the women dig. It took more than a year of hard labor, but the women finally found water. A pumping system and water storage tank was built. Seventeen villages in the area now have access to the water that was there all along.
The story is true. And it’s a parable. For like the men of that dusty village, too few of us are able to see the sufficiency in our own lives.
Something I’ve noticed in my work as a coach is that when I say the word “sufficiency,” many listeners — especially women — seem to hear instead the words “just getting by.” That’s a profound misunderstanding. Sufficiency is not merely having enough. Sufficiency is about thriving.
Twist provides this example: If you have a garden and it does not have enough sunlight or water, it will fade. Likewise, if it has too many nutrients or too much water, it will also fade. There’s an optimal amount in the middle, where the garden blooms. That thriving is sufficiency. Anything less is mere survival. Likewise, our souls thrive when we are engaged in making a contribution that reflects our deepest values.
In order to move beyond surviving, one of the principles I share in my work is the power of being willing. Just as the women of that village were willing to risk the ridicule of their partners and commit themselves to hard labor, we must turn our attention away from discomforts and personal complaints and be willing to do what we are most afraid of doing if we are to thrive.
Twist has thrived because she’s been willing. She’s escaped the myths of scarcity and spread the truth of sufficiency throughout the globe. And her book has the soul of the world behind it.
Maria Nemeth is author of THE ENERGY OF MONEY: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment (Ballantine). At the Academy For Coaching Excellence she trains coaches to find excellence with ease.
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