Abraham Gathering – Philadelphia, 6/14/2008

Posted by: John

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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What Is My Purpose?

Posted by: John

“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 Easily and Safely – A Step-by-Step Guide

Posted by: John

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

Credit Card Fraud – Did I Attract It?

Posted by: 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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Look For Things To Appreciate

Posted by: John

“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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The Healing Crisis

Posted by: John

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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Healers Can’t Care

Posted by: John

“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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Mind Over Matter

Posted by: John

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

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Nothing Secret About “The Secret”?

Posted by: John

It would seem that most of the world has seen “The Secret” by now, or read the book, or seen the stars on Oprah or Larry King. If you haven’t, I recommend getting a copy of either the book or the DVD and checking it out. I’m fascinated by peoples’ reactions to it, especially those who have been on a spiritual quest for some time and blow “The Secret” off as superficial and “nothing new.”

I believe that they miss the point of “The Secret” on several levels. First, if you haven’t heard something before, despite its being known to others, it could be considered a secret to you. At least it was a secret up until you heard about it! I completely agree that calling the Law of Attraction (which is what “The Secret” is ultimately about) a secret is like calling the Law of Gravity a secret. Things don’t fall up just because you haven’t heard it called the Law of Gravity before. By the same token, whether we know it as Law of Attraction or not, we’re affected by the Law of Attraction all day every day.

Second, “The Secret” isn’t intended to be an in-depth examination of the Law of Attraction because its target audience is the mass of humanity who has no idea that such a law exists, nor how it affects them on a daily basis. The purpose of “The Secret” is to make people aware that the Law of Attraction exists and to offer evidence, however anecdotal it may be, that it works. It does a brilliant job of that, IMO.

Third, there seems to be the assumption among those who are already aware of the Law of Attraction that they’ve “been there, done that” and they have no more to learn about Law of Attraction and no reason to be inspired by the fact that it is being presented to and embraced by so many people. Some even shrug off Law of Attraction as simply Positive Thinking in yet another guise. During a discussion on the Yahoo! group AnimalReikiSource, a member pointed out that Sikh yogis say that as soon as I say “I know that” I cut myself off from the flow. IMO, that says it all. The most that we know is that there is more to everything than we know.

The cynics among us will likely say that all those millions of people currently viewing and reading “The Secret” will maintain their excitement about it for a week or two or three and then fall back into the same patterns of life they had before. While I agree with that view somewhat, I don’t believe anyone can view “The Secret” and be inspired at all by it and remain unchanged. Whether they ultimately study Law of Attraction and apply it fully in their lives remains to be seen, but if only a small percentage of people do so, that’s enough to make a huge positive difference in the world.

John Sawyer

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The Process of Closing Your Gap

Posted by: John

This site is about closing your gap. So, what’s my gap and why would I want to close it, you may well ask. Your gap is the distance between where you are, i.e. what is, and where you want to be in the spiritual sense. We all have a gap. Some people’s gaps are wider than others, but even those who appear to have everything they could possibly want have a gap. You will never stop wanting and desiring so there will always be some distance between where you are and where you want to be.

As you get better at closing your gap, you’ll find it closes faster and you get where you wanted to be quicker, but once you get there, there will always be something beyond that that you will want. You didn’t know you wanted it until you got to where you could see it.

The Universe is about evolving and expanding and becoming more. The purpose of this exercise here in the physical plane is catching up to that expansion which we have created, in other words, closing the gap.

I hope you’ll join me in exploring that process. I will be providing thoughts, comments, and resources that I hope will assist the process of co-creation that attracted you here. Hopefully, you will be providing thoughts and comments and resources, as well. That’s what it’s about, co-creating our realities.

Namaste!

John Sawyer