Thanks, Jerry

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.

Closing Your Gap

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

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

Abraham Explains The Secret Behind “The Secret”

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.

I’ll be interested to read your comments.

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

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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

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Abraham Gathering – Philadelphia, 6/14/2008

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?

“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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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

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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

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