Are you rich?
What does it actually mean to be rich? Most of us have been taught to answer that question from the outside. Money. Success. Freedom. Possessions. Travel. Relationships. Experiences. Status. But what if there is another kind of wealth that cannot be measured that way?
What does it actually mean to feel rich?
I have been exploring this question through the I AM RICH podcast, and the more I explore it, the less interested I become in defining richness as something we can simply acquire. I am much more interested in richness as an inner experience: how much of life we are actually available for.
A person can have very little externally and feel deeply rich. Another person can have enormous resources and still experience profound scarcity. The difference can lie in the relationship we have with ourselves, our circumstances, our energy and our capacity to receive life.
So, are you rich?
Here are five ways I have started thinking about that question.
Richness is having access to yourself
Richness is the ability to receive
Richness is having range
Richness is where you invest your life force
Richness is capacity
1. Richness is having access to yourself
One of the first things I associate with richness is the ability to use yourself as your own reference point. What is rich for you? What is enough for you? What genuinely makes your life feel alive? What matters to you? That sounds simple, but it requires a certain level of sovereignty. When our definition of a rich life is constantly being shaped by what other people have, what society tells us we should want, or where we think we should be by a certain age, it becomes very difficult to know what richness actually means to us.
Richness begins to become much more interesting when the reference point moves from “Do I have enough compared to them?” to “Does my life feel rich to me?”
2. Richness is the ability to receive
Having something available to you and being able to receive it are two very different things. You can be surrounded by love and struggle to let it in. You can have opportunities and immediately shrink away from them. You can have money and still feel fundamentally unsafe with abundance.
Receiving is an active capacity. It asks: Can I allow something good to come toward me? Can I stay present when I am appreciated, loved, supported or seen? Can I let myself experience pleasure without immediately moving on to the next thing?
Sometimes the richness we are looking for is already here. Our access to it is what needs to change.
3. Richness is having range
A rich life does not necessarily mean feeling good all the time. In fact, I think richness becomes much more interesting when we include more of the human experience. Can you experience joy and grief? Pleasure and pain? Certainty and uncertainty? Love, anger, fear, curiosity, beauty and mystery?
Perhaps richness is partly about range: how much you can experience, feel, hold and navigate without needing to shut parts of life out.
This is very different from the idea that a rich life should always feel positive. Richness can include difficult experiences. It can even include the capacity to meet your own darkness, recognise your patterns and return to yourself when you lose your way.
4. Richness is where you invest your life force
We are constantly investing our energy. Into relationships. Work. Worry. Creation. Love. Fear. Control. Possibility. Old patterns. New ideas.
What we repeatedly invest in tends to grow. So another interesting question is not simply “How much energy do I have?” but “Where is my energy going?”
Sometimes depletion comes from investing our life force in places that don't return life. The same reaction, the same relationship dynamic, the same story, the same fear.
Richness can therefore involve becoming more conscious of your investments. What are you feeding? What are you nurturing? What are you ready to stop investing in? And what might happen if you moved some of that energy somewhere else?
5. Richness is capacity
This might be one of the most important pieces for me. You cannot necessarily become richer than what you have the capacity to hold.
How much love can you receive? How much success can you tolerate? How much visibility? How much money? How much uncertainty? How much intimacy? How much joy? It is one thing to have something available. It is another thing to receive it, hold it, metabolise it and actually live it.
That is why richness is not only about what exists in your life. It is also about how much of it you have the capacity to experience.
And perhaps this is where the definition I keep returning to becomes useful: Inner richness is the depth, range and aliveness available within you, your capacity to experience, receive, hold, create, express and navigate life from a place of awareness, sovereignty and choice.
Or, more simply: Inner richness is how much of life you are available for.
That is what I mean when I say I AM RICH.
Not I have everything. Not my life is perfect.
But: I am available for life.
And that, to me, is a very different kind of wealth.
If you want to explore this idea further, I go much deeper into richness, life force, capacity, comparison, receiving, energy, play, embodiment and what it actually means to live a rich life on the I AM RICH podcast. You can find it on Spotify and other major podcast platforms.
