In mainstream finance, abundance is often imagined as something static, a state to reach, secure, and hold. Money is saved, protected, and managed to stay put. That stability is most welcome and it can bring real comfort, but when accumulation becomes the only measure of success, money loses its pulse and its key dimension: flow.
Across cultures and disciplines, wealth has aptly been understood less as possession and more as process, something that comes alive through movement.
Anthropologists since Marcel Mauss have shown that communities thrive through exchange and reciprocity, not hoarding. In The Gift, Mauss described how generosity and obligation bind societies together, and later thinkers such as Annette Weiner, Maurice Godelier, and David Graeber expanded this idea to include time, knowledge, and attention. The core insight remains: value arises in circulation, not in storage.
Neuroscience echoes this principle. Dr. Tara Swart, in The Source, explains that abundance mindset is not wishful thinking but a neural and energetic principle. The brain learns what to attract through experience in motion. Flow trains the brain to recognize possibility. What we repeat becomes familiar, and what feels familiar becomes believable.
Behavioral research by Elizabeth Dunn and Sonja Lyubomirsky confirms that giving, sharing, and circulating resources generate greater and more lasting well-being than keeping them.
In every field of study, movement is what makes wealth alive.
That truth recently unfolded across three circles I am honored to be a part of:
At the Women’s Million Dollar Conversations (WMDC) Collective, I moderated a panel where three super successful women, Lori Spencer, Lori Z. Love, and Jennifer Kelly, traced their paths to the first million with unguarded honesty. Beneath their stories of grit and growth ran a shared current: comfort with change and care for community. Each woman described how motion, staying open, adapting, beginning again, was the real source of their success.
At the same time, in New York, another circle gathered for ZanaAfrica’s Cocktails & Conversation during UNGA and Climate Week. Leaders explored what becomes possible when we invest directly in girls’ health, rights, and futures. The evening reflected abundance in practice: energy moving where it multiplies, generosity expanding through alignment rather than extraction. When resources flow toward women and girls, entire ecosystems shift.
While the NY conversation unfolded, I was in motion too, on a flight to Zagreb. Returning to caregiving and preparing to welcome another circle, our Rest and Receive® retreat in Croatia, where women will explore the deeper layers of wealth: health, well-being, presence and connection.
Three circles and three expressions of flow: financial, social, personal. Together they reveal a universal pattern that modern science, ancient culture, and lived experience agree on: we grow what we circulate. Money, ideas, care, and courage all expand when kept in motion.
References: Marcel Mauss, The Gift (1925); Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions (1992); Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (1999); David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011); Tara Swart, The Source (2019); Elizabeth Dunn & Michael Norton, Happy Money (2013); Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness (2007)