Closing Your Gap

One of my passions is offering Reiki to animals. I’ve worked with my own dogs and clients’ animals as well as volunteering at Animals In Distress in Coopersburg, PA.

I studied Animal Reiki with Kathleen Prasad of Animal Reiki Source in San Rafael, CA. Kathleen has a wonderful vision for Animal Reiki and is working to spread the practice of Animal Reiki all over the world. She has co-authored the book “Animal Reiki”, formed a Yahoo! group and healing circle and founded the Shelter Animals Reiki Association (SARA), her latest project.

This summer Kathleen produced a DVD on Animal Reiki which will be released in October. Those of us who are Animal Reiki practitioners can’t wait! In the meantime, here’s a preview:

John Sawyer

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I woke up the other day appreciating everything. It’s hard to describe how good that felt.

It’s interesting to note that I have some challenges going on in my life at the moment that I have allowed to become worries on occasion. I know that worry is incompatible with the way Source sees things and I’m reminded of that every time I find myself feeling bad or focusing on what’s not going the way I’d prefer.

I’ve learned that it’s not possible, at least for me at my current stage of being, to completely eliminate all negative thoughts and emotions. What is possible is to gently replace those thoughts with better feeling thoughts and that results in the negative emotions easing and eventually becoming more positive.

I’m getting better at it and I’ve observed that when I’m able to find better feeling thoughts, I can turn things around pretty quickly. As I find those better feeling thoughts, it becomes easier to find even better feeling thoughts and the more of them I can find, the sooner I find myself feeling good again.

In almost every case, the key is to find a way to appreciate wherever I am at that moment. Appreciation is near the top of the emotional scale, so pure appreciation is difficult, if not impossible to reach from despair, anger, frustration or any of those negative emotions. From those emotions, I try to find “relative appreciation”. In other words, find a way to appreciate, however, slightly, the condition I’m observing.

Relative appreciation might be something like “Well, it could be worse” if I’m in despair or frustration. At a higher level it might be “I’m learning from this experience, even though it’s not pleasant right now.” At a still higher level it might be something like “This negative experience does have some positives to it and that gives me hope that I can find more.”

Appreciation takes on different forms depending where you are on the emotional scale at any given time. Practice finding some measure of appreciation no matter where you are and you’ll find yourself having joyful days more often.

John Sawyer

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Anyone who has studied Abraham’s teachings for any length of time has heard over and over that if you are depending on someone else’s behavior changing in order to feel good, you’re in deep dirt! If you’re angry or frustrated by another’s way of being, you’re using them as your excuse to disconnect yourself from your Source.

Disconnecting yourself from Source feels bad and the more disconnected you become, the worse you feel. The worse you feel, the more you look for reasons why you feel so bad and typically the response is to blame someone or something outside of you for making you feel bad.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said “No one can make you feel bad without your permission.” What she meant was that you have control over whether another person’s behavior adversely affects the way you feel.

Most of us were taught the opposite. Society as a whole believes that it’s possible for someone else’s behavior to have a negative effect on us. The logical conclusion to which that belief leads is that if someone’s behavior is bothering you, they need to stop doing whatever they’re doing in order for you to stop being bothered by it.

So, we set out on a course to change behaviors we don’t like. Those who refuse to change we try to force to change through arguing or medication or psychological conditioning or incarceration or the threat of death. If it’s other nations acting badly, we go to war in order to force them to behave as we would prefer they do.

As Abraham has asked many times: “How’s that working out?”

We have all experienced the futility of trying to get someone else to conform to our standards of behavior. Yes, we all generally try to get along, but we are all selfishly oriented and we have our preferences. We will find ways, some subtle and some not so subtle, to enjoy our preferences. It’s just the way we are.

The only real control we have is over our own gap, i.e. the degree of disconnection from our Source. We can all find better feeling thoughts that bring us relief and close our gap, but it does require some effort to do that. While it’s easier to blame someone else for our feeling bad, it’s much more difficult to get them to change than to simply change our own thoughts.

A Course In Miracles says “There is always another way to look at this.” Our work is to look for other ways to look at things that are causing us to feel badly and find a way of looking at it that brings us some measure of relief.

Allowing another to dictate how you feel is giving up your power. Finding another way to look at the situation reclaims your power and puts control back in your hands where it has always belonged. Just as you can’t control anyone else, they can’t control you, either!

Unless you allow it.

John Sawyer

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I have to admit to a bit of a pet peeve with the overuse of the word “awesome” in today’s society. Granted, I’ve probably done my part in the beating death of “cool”, and “awesome” is apparently the new “cool”. My parents probably cringed every time I said “cool” just as I do when I hear “awesome.”

So, I spent the day today at the Abraham gathering in Philadelphia. It was awesome. Awesome in the truest and most accurate sense of that word.

This was my second Abraham gathering. The first was a couple of years ago in Philly, as well, but at a different hotel and I was accompanied by two friends of mine. I came away from the first one thinking it was pretty cool, but it didn’t have the effect on me that I wanted or expected. It would be easy to blame my friends, one of whom spent a good deal of the day telling me how she’d decided that Jerry and Esther were putting on a good show, but that’s all it was. I was annoyed about that at the time, but as I’ve since learned, that’s about the vibration present in me, not about anything she said.

I went to this one alone and was able to focus on the teachings of Abraham the entire day. Given that I’d gotten less than 5 hours’ sleep the night before and driven an hour and a half to get there, I was actually surprised at how alert I was all day.

I was open to the energy of the gathering and in fact spent a good deal of the day physically vibrating from the intensity of it. I hadn’t experienced that since my first Reiki attunement 14 years ago. It was actually quite delicious.

It’s interesting how hearing Abraham live is almost like hearing the teachings again for the first time. I listen to the bi-monthly CDs in my car constantly, rotating the last 7 or 8 of them until the next one arrives. I hear Abraham virtually every day and it’s not like I haven’t heard the words before, but things I’d heard hundreds of times took on new meaning for me today.

I made several pages of notes as Abraham spoke with the friends in the hot seat and will be expanding on those here over the next week or so. In the meantime, if you are a student of Abraham, or even just interested in Abraham’s message, and you haven’t yet attended a gathering, I highly recommend that you do so. It must be experienced to be fully understood.

John

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“Your work is to go forth into this physical environment looking for things that are a vibrational match to joy, connecting to Source Energy, and then following with the inspired action.” - Abraham

It really is as simple as that. Find what makes you happy and let it inspire you to the necessary action.

We all have a tendency to make “our purpose” way more complicated and difficult than it really needs to be. We’re taught from very young that everyone “should” have a lofty purpose to save the world in some way. The implication is that any other purpose isn’t important.

What this does is pile heavy responsibility on people that causes them to focus on what other people want and expect from them instead of tending to their own joy. Surely, it can’t be “okay” to want to do what makes you happy!

In reality this would be a much happier world if everyone did what made them truly happy. Being joyful is what it’s all about. Being joyful indicates a connection with your Inner Being.

People who are disconnected from their Inner Being are unhappy people lashing out in any number of ways and harming themselves and others. It makes sense when you think about it.

The gap that we talk about here is the disconnection between you and your Inner Being. The more disconnected you are, the wider your gap and the worse you feel. Conversely, the more connected you are, the better you feel.

You get connected by finding things that bring you joy. It doesn’t matter what it is, only that it brings you joy.

You are the only one who knows when something makes you joyful. Nobody else can get inside your experience and know what makes you feel good. Therefore, everyone else’s opinion is irrelevant.

The key to joy is to focus on what makes you feel good. That’s your purpose in this life.

John Sawyer

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Upgrading WordPress blogs just got a whole lot easier! If you’re a blogger using WordPress, you know how the manual upgrade process can be a bit of a challenge. The problem is not so much that it’s difficult. It’s not all that hard to do, however, since it’s a manual process, it’s got great potential for disaster if you don’t do every step exactly right.

I have more than a half dozen blogs now and upgrading them all used to be a chore. I’ve found a way to make it much easier and safer and I’ve documented that method in a free e-book that you can download here:

John The Geek’s Upgrading WordPress Guide

Namaste,

John

Around the first of this year, my wife talked me into ordering an identity theft prevention kit we saw featured on TV. It’s not something I generally concern myself with, but she insisted, reminding me that some years ago one of her credit cards was compromised and had to be cancelled and reissued. The price was good, so I ordered one for each of us.

A couple of nights later, before the package arrived at the house, I got an email from my bank. Not a phishing email, but a real alert that the bank had detected fraudulent activity on my ATM debit card. I called the 800 number in the email and confirmed that the transaction of which they were suspicious was indeed bogus. They cancelled my card and said they’d send a new one out right away. In the meantime, I was to stop by my local bank and get a temporary card so I could continue to use the ATM and make purchases until the new card arrived.

While I’m acquainted with a number of people to whom this sort of thing has happened, this was a first for me. We had the aforementioned experience with my wife’s card, but since then it’s been clear sailing until this little incident. More recently, an online payment processor with whom I have an account cancelled the debit card they’d issued because they “were notified that the card may have been compromised”, as they put it.

So, the question is: did I attract the credit card fraud by ordering the identity theft kit? After all, the Law of Attraction says we get what we think about, right?

While there’s no question I attracted it, as we all attract everything that’s in our lives at any given time, these events were in what Abraham calls my “vibrational escrow” long before the identity theft kit showed up on the tube. In other words, that’s a vibration that I’d had going on for a while and wasn’t aware of until it manifested.

It’s difficult to live in this world and interact with people without hearing about the hot topics of the day. If you’re at all aware, you’re going to be receiving what’s being broadcast even if you hardly notice it. My wife is constantly amazed at how much I absorb even though we don’t watch popular TV, nor listen to the radio except in the morning as our wake-up alarm. I don’t read the newspaper except to skim the sports and comic sections. I don’t surf the Net looking for news. In short, I have as little contact with popular culture as possible and yet I have a pretty good handle on what’s going on in the world.

It’s all about vibration. We are vibratory receivers and interpreters and the vibrations are being broadcast constantly. We receive the ones to which we’re most closely tuned, which is either the good news or the bad news depending on where you’re tuned at the moment.

In this case, I had allowed myself to be tuned to the Credit Card Fraud Channel, so to speak, long enough to develop a vibration around it that eventually manifested as two separate incidents. I simply need to clean up my vibration around that issue and I believe I have for the most part.

The lesson here is that we need to become aware of our vibrations and clean up the ones that don’t quite resonate as we’d like them to. This one wasn’t huge for me, so it’s not surprising it got by me. The manifestations were annoying, but hardly critical so it’s obvious the vibration wasn’t a big one.

We tend to notice the larger vibrational issues more, which makes sense. What we don’t do is recognize them for what they are and work on cleaning them up before the manifestations occur. That’s a discussion for another time.

For now, just be aware that if you’re not feeling good, your guidance system is trying to tell you something. What it’s telling you is that you’re headed toward a manifestation that you’re not going to like when it happens. Recognize that, identify the bad-feeling vibration and work on tuning yourself to a frequency that feels better.

John Sawyer

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“If all you did was just look for things to appreciate you would live a joyous, spectacular life.” - Abraham-Hicks

Appreciation is the key to closing your gap. As you find more things to appreciate in your experience, you more closely emulate how your Inner Being views the world. Your Inner Being appreciates everything because it does not judge anything. Your Inner Being sees only the positive aspects of anything.

We as humans are judgmental, rating everything as good or bad or some combination thereof. We tend to focus on that which we judge to be bad. Rather than amplifying the positives about any situation, we amplify the negatives by focusing on them.

We’ll say something like, “That would be perfect except for .” We are raised to believe that nothing or no one is perfect. Because we hold that belief, we know there are flaws in everything and if we don’t see them right away, we conduct a search for them!

We have the choice whether to focus on the positives or the negatives in any given situation. We have the choice to see the positives and feel good, or see the negatives and feel bad. It’s impossible to feel bad and be joyful, so if we want a joyful life, we must focus on the positives.

We must focus on the positives to the exclusion of the negatives. It’s not sufficient to focus on the positives with a big “but…” hanging over them. It’s not possible to focus on positives and negatives at the same time. We have to choose one or the other. Choosing positives is the path to joy.

John Sawyer

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As a Reiki practitioner, one of the first things I learned about was the concept of the “healing crisis.” It was explained to me as a situation where someone receiving Reiki (or any other treatment, for that matter) will often get worse before they get better. Since this is a fairly common occurrence, our Master wanted us to be aware of it so that we would know how to deal with it when it happened with one of our clients.

I had noticed this phenomenon occurring in my own life when I had contracted an illness of some kind and sought treatment for it. It seemed to me the longer the illness lasted, the more likely a healing crisis was to occur. At least that has been my experience with my own illnesses over the years.

So, I had experience with the healing crisis, but had never heard a name put to it until my Reiki I class. I still didn’t know what caused a healing crisis, but I now knew it was a known phenomenon and actually had a name!

I was listening to an Abraham-Hicks CD recently and it occurred to me that a healing crisis is a wonderful illustration of how our vibrational gap affects our physical being. Illness is an indicator that our gap is widening, i.e. our physical being is resisting its natural well being. The more resistance we have, the wider our gap and the more severe the illness.

If you picture your physical being on the left and your Inner Being on the right, the distance between them is your vibrational gap. Your Inner Being is constantly calling you toward it, sort of like a magnet calls metal to it. The difference is that the further away you get from your Inner Being, the stronger the pull is and the worse you feel. That’s how you know your moving in the opposite direction from your Inner Being, but the fact that you don’t feel good!

If you’ve been sick a while, you’ve gotten somewhat used to not feeling good and your gap has probably settled at a certain distance so that you’re accustomed to the pull being exerted by your Inner Being. When healing is offered, whether it be energetic like Reiki or allopathic in the form of drugs, it typically provides some hope to your ailing physical being. This hope causes the calling of your Inner Being toward well being to get stronger.

Unless you are completely aligned with the treatment and less resistant as a result, it’s not likely your physical being will turn immediately and move toward well being. Therefore, the stronger pull against the “normal” resistance you’re used to makes you feel worse. As you maintain your feeling of hope, or knowing that the treatment will be effective, your resistance subsides and you begin to move toward the calling of your Inner Being. In other words, you become less resistant to your natural well being and you “get better.”

Vibrational alignment with your Inner Being and the subsequent absence of resistance to your natural well being is what always causes your illness to be healed. This is why different treatments work for different people. The treatment has to be something the patient can align with, i.e. believe in. The stronger that belief, the more effective the treatment will be. If the patient can reach that alignment immediately upon receipt of the treatment, no healing crisis can occur because there is no fluctuation in their vibrational gap. That’s the exception rather than the rule which is why the healing crisis is fairly common.

John Sawyer

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“Nothing is more debilitating than to care about something you can’t do anything about.” — Abraham

One of the most important things I’ve had to learn as a healer is to detach myself emotionally from my clients’ healing or lack thereof. I think all healers start out with the idea that they can cause another to heal and if the other doesn’t heal, there must have been something wrong with the healing technique, or the application thereof, or that the practitioner is inadequate in some way.

Those beliefs place the responsibility for the client’s healing everywhere but the one place it belongs…with the client. Have you ever wondered why a given treatment for a particular condition works for some people and not for others? The obvious answer is that the ones who healed were ready to heal. Those who did not heal were not in a vibrational state that allowed their healing.

We in the West are raised to believe that medicine is something to be applied to our condition to cause us to heal. By extension, the same mindset is applied to alternative modalities. Healers, whether traditional Western practitioners or alternative practitioners, hold themselves responsible for their clients’ healing.

There’s a reason why they don’t let surgeons operate on family members - they care too much! The responsibility for a positive outcome is so great that the likelihood of error goes up considerably.

I often tell my Reiki students that the most difficult part of Reiki is getting out of the way. What that means is that Reiki cannot be forced. Trying to force it will only pinch off the flow of energy. The “trick”, so to speak, is to be an open channel and allow Reiki to flow freely. One can’t do that if they’re emotionally invested in the outcome.

To be truly effective as a healer, one must trust the modality completely. If the practitioner trusts their method implicitly, this offers a vibration of confidence and well being to the client. This is the single most important thing any healer can do for her client. People heal because they are a vibrational match to their own well being. It is much easier to come into that alignment if the healer is aligned first.

I have learned to trust completely in Reiki and the Universe to deliver to the client exactly what they need in exactly the right amount. I understand that what the client wants and what they need may be two very different things and I further understand that the ultimate decision to heal belongs with the client.

The best I can do is offer Reiki and hold my client in a vibration of well being. After that, they’re on their own. In other words, while I can influence them, I have no direct control over them. That knowing frees me from the burden of their healing (or not) and allows me to flow Reiki the best way I can.

Obviously, I wish for my clients the most positive of outcomes, but I understand that I can’t see the big picture of what is in their highest good. That’s between them and their Inner Being. I simply have to trust that whatever the outcome, it is in their best interest.

If I allow myself to be drawn into judging their outcome, I reduce my effectiveness as a healer and facilitator of their well being. As Abraham puts it, my work is to feel good because if I don’t feel good, I have nothing to offer anyone anyway.

John Sawyer

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