For the last two years, I have been in an intensive personal study of the Law of Attraction. It started when I went to the bookstore with the intention of finding my next teacher in book form. I needed something to help raise my thoughts and energy level, something in the personal improvement slash metaphysical slash consciousness-raising realm. So I wandered the aisles, lightly gazing at the titles, waiting for one of the books to jump out at me. This usually works, and it did again.
A midnight blue book called The Vortex caught my eye several times. It had an illustration of a swirling mass of clouds and gases forming a funnel against the dark backdrop of starry outer space. Since it spoke to me, I picked it up and bought it. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that it contained a CD in back – a gift within a gift.
The Vortex is written by Jerry & Esther Hicks with “Abraham,” which is the plural name of a group of non-physical intelligences that have been speaking through Esther since the late 80’s. Frankly, I have never been troubled by the concept of channeling, and am completely open to the possibility that there is much more to the world and this time-space reality than meets my little eye.
Now I have yet to finish the book, or even the first chapter of The Vortex. But I have listened numerous times to the CD, spent an entire weekend on the Abraham-Hicks website listening, viewing and taking notes from the generous free assortment of excerpts of the Abraham-Hicks live lectures. I have purchased, listened to and/or viewed about 10 other DVDs and CDs. They are all brilliant. I’ve also been to a couple of their live events.
I thought I understood about the law of attraction, the most powerful law in the universe. The hit DVD The Secret creatively encapsulated law of attraction with lots of accessible examples. But there are nuances of this unchanging law that have been unknown to me, keeping me from reaching the levels of happiness and manifestation I have long been seeking.
Here’s some of what I have learned thus far. When we think about the things we want, we energetically attract them to us like a moth to a flame. When we think about the things we don’t want we energetically attract them to us in just the same way! But the habit of thinking about what we don’t want – beating the drum as Abraham puts it – is pretty well ingrained in us.
Does this sound familiar? We think about what we don’t want, why we don’t yet have what we want, who’s keeping it from us, how much we hate not having what we want, how much we envy other people who have what we want, how long its been since we’ve had what we wanted, how inadequate we feel about not having what we want, how its almost too late to get what we want. We talk about it to our friends, write about it in our journals, pray incessantly about it, replay it over and over in our heads, join support groups to complain collectively about it, and even blog about it. (Hmmm.)
You get the picture? I sure did. It was a picture of me! All of it is still focusing on what we don’t want, stirring it up inside us, and keeping us stuck right where we say we don’t want to be.
But the most liberating part of the marvelous law of attraction is learning how to make the change from this compulsive replay of negative thoughts to ones that invite and allow all that I want to show up in my life.
It’s almost too easy, but here it is: I can follow my feelings. My feelings! I’ve got plenty of feelings. I’m swimming in them. Now when I’m beating the drum of something, I catch myself by tuning in to how I’m feeling about it. Then I can purposefully turn my attention into, and not against, the stream of life. If the feeling associated with what I am saying or thinking is despair, anger or frustration, I have only to think of something – anything will do – that fills me with happiness or pleasure and I begin to feel sweet relief.
Relief is what I am after. Relief means that I am raising my internal vibration rate to match the good I am seeking. It may not get me all the way there, but it is a turning toward, a start. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been happier more of the time, and often for no reason.
When my thoughts or reactions turn upstream, I find as many reasons as I can to be happy, no matter how small. I list them, chant them, repeat them, and write them. I saturate myself with them. When I do that, like putting my boat in a powerfully coursing river, I’m naturally turned in the right direction and the act of going with the flow easily takes care of the rest.
