Another Kind of Gap – The Anxiety Gap

I’m currently reading Eckhart Tolle’s “Practicing The Power of Now” which has introduced me to what he calls “The Anxiety Gap”. Tolle defines the anxiety gap as the result of our Inner Being being in the Now while our minds are focused on the future:

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

This is one of those insights that caused me to go “Wow!” when I read it. I’ve often experienced the uncertainty of what the future holds. Until I read that line, I didn’t really know why. I’ve been through some difficult times, as have we all, and can attest to our ability to cope with what’s going on in the present moment. It never seems as difficult at the time as it does in hindsight! I’d always chalked that up to being so busy dealing with the situation that I didn’t have time to think about it and get overwhelmed. There may be some of that in the equation, but basically it’s because our minds can get hold of it once it’s manifested.

By the same token, we often dread the future and come to discover that whatever happens isn’t as bad as we anticipated it to be. In any case, we’re able to cope with it once it becomes our current reality because we can quantify it. Our minds cannot handle that which they can’t quantify.

In other words, unless we are absolutely sure what is going to happen in the future (which is rarely, if ever, the case) our minds cannot get enough of a grip on it to be secure about it. Any variable causes the mind to start exploring all possible outcomes based on the known possibilities of that variable. More variables simply increase the number of possibilities geometrically. And then there are always those possibilities that we couldn’t know ahead of time that cause our carefully considered strategies to break down in the face of a result we didn’t expect.

Despite being a bit late to the Eckhart Tolle party, so to speak, I’m finding Practicing The Power Of Now fascinating. In the short time I’ve been doing the exercises I’ve found that I can change my mood completely by simply returning to the Now and focusing on the present moment.

I’m sure this is what Abraham means by “getting in the Vortex”, or at least releasing the resistance to the present moment. I have to admit that lately I’ve been feeling a bit of frustration when hearing Abraham say “just get in the Vortex”. Perhaps that’s why I’ve attracted Tolle’s work into my “reality” at this time. I’m ready to hear his message now where I was not previously. Once again, the Universe has provided exactly the right resource at exactly the right time!

Closing Your Gap

Abraham

Experience Your Good Now – Louise Hay

Louise Hay has just published her latest book entitled “Experience Your Good Now”, a book dedicated to affirmations. In this book, Louise explains what affirmations are, how to construct affirmations properly for the best results, and provides affirmations for specific situations.

I first learned of Louise Hay’s work some 15 years ago when I purchased a copy of “Heal Your Body”. I found Louise’s story fascinating as I’ve always believed our minds are much more powerful than our bodies. Louise learned to heal herself with positive thought and has since gone on to publish many books on the subject. Louise founded Hay House with the express purpose of publishing books, tapes, and other media that helped uplift people’s lives. Her list of authors is impressive, to say the least, and speaks to the power of her vision.

Much of Louise’s work is based on affirmations. This latest book goes into great detail about affirmations, explaining why they work and how to use them effectively. She clears up many misconceptions about affirmations, among them the belief that only specific thoughts are affirmations. The truth is that all our thoughts are affirmations, so it pays to be aware of our thoughts and keep them as positive as possible.

“Experience Your Good Now” provides affirmations for specific situations, namely Health, Fearful Emotions, Critical Thinking, Addictions, Forgiveness, Work, Money and Prosperity, Friends, Love and Intimacy, and finally, Aging. Written in Louise’s typical approachable style, this book is a worthy addition to her already impressive catalog of work.

ClosingYourGap.com

An Important Reminder

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.

I recently mentioned Larry Crane’s book “Love Yourself And Let The Other Person Have It Your Way”. This wonderful little book is still free in the Kindle edition as of this writing.

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.

John

Abraham – Phrases To Say During The Day

This beautiful video is worth taking 5 minutes to watch:

Make it part of your daily routine and watch your gap begin to close!

John

Appreciation Is The Way To Joy

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

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

Give Up The Need To Control Others

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

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

What Is My Purpose?

“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

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

Look For Things To Appreciate

“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

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

The Healing Crisis

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

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

Mind Over Matter

A fairly well known bit of humor goes like this:

“Age is just mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

Actually, when you think about it, that applies to pretty much any subject, not just age. Some people really get upset when reminded that they are approaching a certain age. People find plenty of other ways to be offended, as well. Usually by something they’re insecure about or afraid of, age being a good example.

How often do you get upset by something and later realize there was no reason to be upset? We tend to have knee-jerk reactions to things that are really no big deal upon further examination. Unfortunately, by the time we realize that, it’s sometimes escalated into a much bigger thing to have to deal with.

As with all things, the key is to be in touch with your emotions and understand them. If you feel negative emotion, stop and think why you are having that feeling. This will take some conscious effort until it becomes second nature, but it is well worth it. When you have a good handle on your emotions, you can deal with them much more effectively and keep small issues from becoming big ones in many cases.

This doesn’t mean to suppress your emotions. Your emotions are there for a reason. They are your indicator of your present alignment with Source or the size of your gap. A broader gap feels much worse than a narrow one, and the broader it gets the worse you feel. By the same token, the worse you feel, the broader you know your gap has become. Once you realize that your gap has widened, you can start to work to close it and improve the way you feel.

Closing your gap consists of finding thoughts that feel better, thoughts that bring forth emotions that are less negative (or more positive) than the emotions you’re currently experiencing. Gently find thoughts that make you feel better than you did before. Don’t try to get all the way from full negative to full positive at once. That can’t happen. Your thoughts need only bring you relief, however slight it may be. Once you find a better feeling thought, the work is to find one that feels a little better than that one, and so on. Within a relatively short time, you can get to feeling pretty good and once you feel pretty good, you won’t mind any more, so it won’t matter.

John Sawyer

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog