I just received the email from Esther Hicks announcing Jerry Hicks’ transition to Non-physical. While we all know that our transition is inevitable, it’s a bit of a shock to learn of the transition of someone like Jerry. No doubt, he will continue to influence our lives from his new vantage point.
My own journey with Abraham and Jerry and Esther started with some CDs lent to me by my Reiki Master/Teacher. I later subscribed to the CD program and listened to them for hours, absorbing the energy of Abraham. I must say I’m still a student and still learning even though it’s been a while since I listened to a CD or downloaded recording. As I said in my comment on Jerry’s memorial page, Abraham’s teachings have influenced my life in ways of which I’m not yet conscious and many of which I am aware.
It will be very interesting to see where Abraham’s journey leads now that Jerry has a new perspective from which to operate. Thanks, Jerry, for all your work on this plane and for all you will be doing from the next.
I do a fair amount of selling on eBay. As with any business there are customers involved. For the most part, people are reasonable and things go smoothly. On occasion, however, something happens and it becomes necessary to go into customer service mode.
I sold an item about a month ago. The customer paid promptly, I shipped the item within the 2 business days I promise in my selling policies, and all seemed happy.
Then, last week, I got a message through eBay from the customer saying that a piece had broken off the item and asking if it was too late to return it. My policy clearly states that returns must be within 7 days, but I will make exceptions when it’s appropriate to do so.
So, I responded and said that if the item was returned along with the broken piece, I’d be happy to issue a refund. The customer sent the item back along with the piece that had broken off. I issued a refund for the amount paid for the item less the original shipping, which is also stated in my return/refund policy.
This didn’t satisfy the customer who demanded the return of the original amount paid for shipping as well. My first reaction was annoyance. It’s easy under these conditions to point to policies and blame the customer for my negative reaction and that, of course, was what I was doing. After all, it could be argued that I’m “right” and they’re “wrong” and all that.
From a purely practical standpoint, the amount we’re talking about isn’t worth getting upset over. It would cost way more in my time and good will than the dollar amount if I were to choose to be “right”. Just as a business decision, it makes sense to issue the refund and be done with it.
There’s more to it than that, however. As I drove to work, I realized that this is a situation that calls for the application of love rather than resentment or anger.
Anyway, this is exactly the kind of situation Larry is talking about in his book. I know that Abraham would agree, as well. I could maintain my “rightness” and feel all the negative emotion that would go along with defending that position, or I can simply send this person their refund along with love and feel good.
Someone once said “You can be right or you can be happy, it’s your choice”. They were referring to marital relationships, but when you get down to it, it applies to all relationships whether personal or business.
I appreciate this customer’s reminder of this truth.
The 4th annual Choosing Prosperity experiment is now under way. Subtitled “play your way to prosperity”, this event seeks to raise the prosperity consciousness of its participants. The Choosing Prosperity experiment experiment is a month-long event run by Elyse Hope Killoran, one of the foremost teachers of Law of Attraction.
I’ve decided to participate again this year and have promised myself to stick with it through the entire 30 days, unlike last year. Based on the Prosperity Game described by Abraham-Hicks, the Choosing Prosperity experiment goes beyond the Prosperity Game by having specific energy raising activities each day in addition to the daily play of the Prosperity Game.
For example, Day 2 posed three questions to ponder and answer, either on the blog or privately. Here are my responses:
“What is becoming possible for all of us as we share a focused intention to create prosperity through joy and play?”
As our vibrations raise, all things become possible. Prosperity is about alignment and appreciation, so the more we align ourselves while appreciating that which we are, the more possible prosperity becomes.
“How do you intend to allow this ‘experiment’ to positively impact your life?”
I intend to further my ability to allow by practicing allowing. Simply becoming better at allowing will positively impact my life as that’s all that’s keeping my prosperity from manifesting.
“How do you imagine the wave of energy that we are creating here might uplift the world?”
Positive energy is always uplifting to those who come in contact with it. We are creating a reservoir of positive energy that those seeking may find when they tune themselves to it.
If you’re interested in participating in the event, visit the experiment web site here:
Unfortunately, I missed the original version of “The Secret” which featured Jerry and Esther and Abraham. I have the second version which I enjoyed, but found somewhat lacking in true insight. I’ve expressed my opinion of the pros and cons of “The Secret” before, so won’t belabor that here.
I was very interested to hear Abraham’s recounting of the story of their participation in “The Secret” on one of the weekly CDs some time ago. Consequently, I was happy to find this video on YouTube and I thought I would share it with you in case you haven’t seen or heard the story.
“We don’t attract what we want, we attract what we are” – Unknown
This quote showed up on Twitter, posted by @loa_lover, a student of the Law of Attraction. It struck me as a very profoundly different way of saying what Abraham continually teaches us: if you don’t like what you’re attracting, change your vibration and attract something else!
A friend of mine who has multiple physical issues firmly believes that she couldn’t have attracted her conditions. She believes that her conditions are the result of outside forces and that she’s a helpless victim. According to her, if the Law of Attraction really worked, she’d be well because she wants to be well.
She’s not alone in her confusion about Law of Attraction. Many believe that if they want something badly enough, they can will it into existence, usually through action.
While persistence can result in the achievement of what one wants, it’s not the action that causes the result to manifest. It’s the change in vibration that takes place when one visualizes a goal and holds that vision clearly in front of them, trusting the Universe to provide the means to attain it.
The change in vibration causes the attraction of circumstances and events that are in harmony with the new vibration. Since we are vibration, any change in our vibration means a change in what we are. Because we attract according to our vibration, the key to attracting what we want is to match our vibration to what we want.
This means holding the vision and being the vision, or more precisely, matching our vibration to the vision.
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.
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!
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.
“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.
Awesome in the truest and most accurate sense of that word.
