The Art Of Feeling Abundant
Delight in the elements.
by Judith McAdam
Manifestation coach and spiritual teacher Judith McAdam is one of our much-loved regular collaborators, and we greatly enjoyed her piece in our Autumn 2026 issue on ‘the art of feeling abundant’. Check it out below! Alternatively, you can head to your local health shop to pick up your copy of the mag, or have a copy delivered to your door each season at positivelife.ie/subscribe <3
We came together to consciously live the elements and the laws of the Universe. What unfolded surpassed everything we expected.
I found myself sitting in a stone farmhouse in the Asturian hills, not far from the sea. Outside, a lemon tree hung heavy with fruit. Valley cows grazed nearby, their bells marking a slow, unhurried rhythm. On the table in front of me were the remnants of a shared meal, olive oil, good bread, a fresh crisp salad. Around the table sat the seventeen of us, some of us strangers just five days earlier, now something else entirely. And I thought: this is it. This is what abundance actually feels like.
We had come to Asturias for The Alchemist’s Journey. This was a retreat I had been building in my mind and heart for years, structured around the Hermetic laws and the four classical elements. What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how Mother Earth herself would become our greatest teacher. Asturias is one of the greenest, most unspoiled corners of Europe. It is a place where ancient mountains meet the Cantabrian Sea, where you can stand on a beach and smell the eucalyptus forest behind you. From the first morning, something began to shift in us. Not because of anything I said or taught, but simply because we had stopped rushing past life and started living inside it.
“Abundance is not a destination. It is a frequency, one the natural world broadcasts constantly, if we are tuned to receive it.”
We talk about abundance constantly in the spiritual world. We set intentions around it, journal about it, recite affirmations. But what I witnessed on that coastline was something far more visceral. It was what happens when human beings stop treating abundance as a concept and start experiencing it as a felt reality. The Hermetic principle of correspondence tells us that the outer world mirrors the inner. In Asturias, surrounded by the eucalyptus forests, the wild beaches, the mountains rising behind us and the vast Cantabrian Sea stretching out in front, something in each of us quietly recalibrated. It became harder to believe in scarcity. Not because we argued ourselves out of it, but because the land kept contradicting it, moment by moment.
We worked with the four elements as living vibrations rather than symbolic concepts. Mother Earth was not a metaphor for groundedness; it was actual sand beneath bare feet, actual soil in the eucalyptus forest, the eucalyptus kernels we collected as we walked, breathing it in deeply. Water was not a symbol of flow; it was the Cantabrian Sea and the de Sella River, which we kayaked. We learned firsthand how futile it is to go against the current, how much easier life becomes when you move with the flow. Fire was a ceremony at dusk; under the Flower Moon on the night of our arrival, we gathered around a shared flame and chose, together, to release what no longer served us. And Air, Air was the sea breeze that came each morning like a gentle instruction, moving through the eucalyptus leaves, clearing everything that had gathered overnight.
Working with the elements this consciously, this physically, is a completely different experience to reading about
them. It was abundance in its most original form. It really is the planet giving everything it has, all the time, to anyone paying attention.
“The Earth was teaching what no workshop alone can fully teach, that we are already surrounded by more than enough.”
What struck me most was how quickly genuine appreciation became effortless. Not performed appreciation, not the kind you write in a journal because you’ve been told to. Real appreciation, the kind that gives you butterflies before your mind has caught up. A woman helping another as they hiked the Ruta de las Xanas. One of the men sitting each morning at dawn, composing a song he would later sing to us all. Another participant lighting up as new friendships formed around her, finding herself at the centre of a group that simply, quietly, filled her with love.
The HeartMath Institute has spent decades researching what happens physiologically when we enter genuine states of appreciation. The heart’s electromagnetic field expands. Coherence between heart and brain increases. The nervous system settles. What I noticed in Asturias was simpler than any of that science, and also its living proof, it was people cracking open. Becoming more receptive. The earth doing the work, and all we had to do was show up and let it.
Florence Scovel Shinn wrote that the game of life is a game of boomerangs; what we send out returns to us. At
Covadonga, we stood looking out at the sheer magnificence of the mountains, and something became very clear: we were seeing our own magnificence being mirrored back to us. The experience of life that came back was so rich, so layered, and so generous that we began to realise we hadn’t known we were allowed to feel this good. That is the real poverty most of us carry, not lack of money or resources, but the belief that this quality of aliveness isn’t available to us. Slowly, our intentions began to shift. ‘I want more’ was igniting inside of all of us. More of this. More of nature’s unlimited abundance.
You don’t need to go to Spain to access this. You need to go outside. You need to slow down enough to register what
is actually there. A single tree in full leaf is an act of immeasurable generosity if you look at it long enough. Rain on a roof. The smell of the earth after it. The way the light arrives differently each morning, as if it has made an effort especially for you. The natural world is in a constant state of abundant giving, and most of us are too busy, too scheduled, too inside our own heads to receive it.
The Alchemist’s Journey reminded me—again, because these things take repeated learning, that abundance is not something you acquire. It is something you tune into. It was never being withheld. It is broadcasting on a frequency of extraordinary richness, all the time. Our invitation is simply to become the kind of people who can receive it. To let the elements in. To feel Mother Earth. To watch the water. To stand in the wind and understand, in your body rather than
your mind, that you are part of something wildly, extravagantly alive.
Richness, for me, was sitting at the top of the mountain in Casa Generosa in Pedroveya. That legendary little restaurant at the end of our pilgrimage hike on the Ruta de las Xanas, the seventeen of us around the table, plates of traditional Asturian food in front of us, experiencing the friendship, the love, and the laughter. Plenty of laughter.
With an abundance of love,
Jx
Judith McAdam is a manifestation coach and spiritual teacher with 28 years of experience, bridging ancient wisdom with modern science through workshops and retreats in energy healing, heart-brain coherence, and manifestation.