By Colin Bondi | WarIsCrime.com

I love the word prosperity. Prosperity represents a fulfilling life encompassing not only material wealth but happiness and genuine fulfillment. I think of it as a state where abundance is free to flow uninhibited through all areas of one’s life.

I think you could say most people long to live in such a state but few people actually do. What is it that obstructs living in a sustained state of true prosperity? True prosperity being grounded in abundance and growth oriented experiences. True prosperity is not achieved by cheating people, doing work that makes you miserable or defining prosperity solely by material wealth.

There are plenty of wealthy people who are miserable and I would not call them prosperous because key parts of their lives are unfulfilled if not a source of serious pain. I set out to discover true prosperity for myself nearly 7 years ago and its been a painful, wild but enlightening journey.

As much as I’ve struggled over the last few years trying to realize prosperity some have repeatedly told me I should just go get a job. Many points on my journey have been characterized by poverty and near homelessness. These people are well meaning in their advice and from a practical perspective it makes sense.

However after leaving a high paying corporate job in 2005 I became disgusted with the whole concept of work which is part of what led me to start this journey.

To begin with, I got another job working for a non-profit that helped the homeless and when that wasn’t fulfilling I found a job working for a large Buddhist organization. I thought for sure doing work for a spiritual organization would be fulfilling. It wasn’t.

In fact neither of these jobs felt any better to me than my corporate job. That’s because they all had one primary thing in common, expending a large amount of effort doing something I didn’t like for money, to survive. It ended up not mattering that it was for a good cause because in the moment my time and effort went into activities that were not fulfilling or nurturing to me personally.

For me something seems wrong about that and I’ve reached a point where I literally cannot do it without major physical, emotional and spiritual consequences. I slowly realized that part of my life purpose was to find a way to achieve true prosperity no matter what I had to go through in order to do that.

One of the major realizations I’ve had over the years is that we as a society and as individuals have become conditioned into lack and scarcity which is the opposite of abundance and prosperity. Part of this conditioning ties our natural survival instinct to money where money becomes synonymous with survival.

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