I met Elisabeth Husserl, a descendent of the famous philosopher and extraordinary coach for personal sustainability, in the Bay Area last year. She has started her own website and reports on a discussion between two very important concepts: sufficiency vs. abundance.

Elisabeth:

“Last Wednesday evening I had the privilege of attending the opening San Francisco launch of the Global Sufficiency Network, a network dedicated to bringing the conversation of sufficiency to a global scale. Guest speaker Lynn Twist (the author of the Soul of Money) reminded us that as we enlarge and expand the conversation of sufficiency, we plant seeds for the radical truth that there is enough to go around.

Lynn made an important differentiation between the word sufficiency and abundance, two words that commonly used in the contemporary ecological movement. She emphasizes that although their noble intention is to help guide people out of a paradigm of scarcity they are not the same thing.

In her words abundance can be defined as the flip side of scarcity- having more than you need out of the fear of not having enough, while sufficiency is not an amount or quantity but rather an experience of a radically surprising truth of “enough-ness” that you can’t see if you are chasing money and have your gaze on what’s not there.

In my own practice I have come to understand that in fact money is not one to be “chased”. As Lynn suggests above, as we chase money, even in the cases of development, right livelihood, non-profit work, we are chasing after the prospects of the future (and more specifically fueled by a very natural need to feel secure in the future), but at the cost of not fully living out the present.

It is common knowing in many spiritual traditions that the gifts of life are revealed by paying attention to what it occurring in the present moment. These gifts can be venture and growth opportunities, authentic connections, or a moment of silence and stillness- they are infinite, and usually meant to satisfy what you truly need.”

For more information about the principles of sufficiency, see also the following book: Thomas Princen. The Logic of Sufficiency. MIT Press, 2005, which is reviewed here by Dave Pollard.

For me the value of sufficiency is best expressed by the motto, ‘together we have everything’, i.e. creating security not by fighting to have more reserves individually, but by relying on our human networks. As utopian as this may sound to many westerners, this is exactly what is still functioning in many societies who have maintained important traditions of solidarity, within or beyond the family.

While in the Bay Area during the time I met Elisabeth, I also got the opportunity to produce this ‘p2p value statement’, with the aid of a Taiwanese shamanic film-maker Akasa: