My Thoughts on Abraham

I have to admit that I really like listening to Abraham. They offer amazing answers to really hard questions.

I've listened to a great number of Esther Hicks channels (note that Esther doesn't refer to what she does as channeling, she calls it 'receiving blocks of thought' from a group of non-physical entities which she 'translates on an unconscious level'). Esther Hicks is, in my mind, one incredible lady. She is to be commended for her ability and willingness to channel this powerful group, and to do it in such an engaging and understandable way.

Maybe you're someone who doesn't believe in channeling, or for whatever reason don't resonate with the information from Abraham, and that's perfectly fine. Not all teachers resonate with all students, that's the beauty of diversity. I just happen to like Abraham, and since I will undoubtedly quote them from time to time, I thought I'd be clear about my feelings, and even tell you why I feel the way I do.

I'm continually in awe of how Abraham can meet with hundreds and thousands of people, field questions that are all over the map, and yet never waver in their message. They can't be knocked off guard. They can't be boxed into a corner. They don't waffle and they don't apologize for what they say. They don't get angry. Sometimes I've sensed a little bit of what sounds to me like minor irritation coming through, but it's fleeting. I've wondered if even that isn't part of the process to get us to see something that we aren't being able to see. I'm also open to the possibility that what I'm interpreting might be my own personal bias. Listening to Esther and Abraham, watching them work, is a thing to behold.

What I'm most amazed about though, is how I can listen to them over and over and over again, firmly believe in what they say, work on using their guidance, and still not have life exactly the way I want it. Then again, I doubt I ever will have life exactly like I want it. Life isn't supposed to be perfect.

Even so, my life is pretty darn good. It's been pretty darn good, but it's only been the last couple years that I could say that. Or more truthfully, it's only been the last couple years that I would say that. I've changed an awful lot in a relatively short period of time. I used to be pretty darn good at making my misery every one else's fault. I can still do that. I do still do that occasionally. I admit I fall into that more often than I wish I did. But there's a difference. It's far easier for me now to catch myself and get myself back on track.

Not so long ago I used to be like a lit fuse, ready to explode in a tirade of anger at any moment. My family never knew what would set me off, and neither did I. I didn't want to be that way. It hurt me to spew venom at anyone, and I hated myself when I did it. So I worked really really hard around people to 'keep it together' so people wouldn't have to suffer my temper, so they wouldn't hate me or shun me. There are many people who would never believe that I had that kind of anger seething inside me, because I never let them see it. My family wasn't so lucky. I didn't 'maintain' very well at home no matter how hard I tried. In fact, because I spent so much energy keeping it together around others, I didn't have many reserves left when I was around my family. It's a credit to my husband and my kids that they still talk to me, after the tirades they've endured. But, luckily for me, they do.

Because I hated so much who I was being, I spent a lot of time by myself. I also spent a lot of time by myself because in doing so I didn't have to deal with all the things that would set me off. When I was alone I could control my environment in a way that I couldn't control it when others were around, or when I was around others. I always joked that, left to my own devices, I'd have become a hermit. It's hard to be a hermit with a family, but I came pretty darn close. About as close as you can get and still have a family.

Things are different now. Astoundingly different. I'm not nearly as quick to anger as I used to be, though as I said, I do blow up now and again. The difference is that when I do blow up, I come down from it pretty quickly. I move myself down from it, with conscious intent and mental action, so it generally passes quickly.

I don't think it's a bad thing to be angry, angry is just an emotion. Uncontrollable rage is the far end of anger, and it's what happens when anger isn't expressed before it builds into rage. So what's different is I get angry, but I no longer get enraged. I don't have to work at keeping myself in check anymore. That might not sound like a big deal to you, but it means the world to me and everyone else in my vicinity!

How is that so? What has changed that I'm so much more mellow these days? You'd think, with the downturn in the global economy, with the whole world in turmoil and upset, with the global financial problems and terrorism and natural disasters and man-made disasters and wars and diseases and all the horrible things going on, you'd think I'd be an emotional wreck! You'd think I'd be far worse off than I was 'back when'. But I'm not. I have a completely different take on everything, and that's a pretty amazing thing.

My new way of being isn't solely a result of learning from Abraham, a lot of other study and practice has melded together to allow me to be who I am. But the base, the platform that I've been growing from recently, was built from what I learned from Abraham.

The first thing I learned was: Life is supposed to be fun.

I didn't know that. Fifty-plus years of living on this planet and I never knew that. I never knew that life was supposed to be fun.

I can't tell you exactly what I thought the point of life was, but it certainly wasn't fun. Fun was a reward that you got after you worked really hard, invested well, and then retired. We worked really hard, but we didn't invest so well. That meant we were going to have to keep working hard. For a long time. My husband and I, we aren't real enamored of working hard. We kind of prefer to be free to do what we want. So fun wasn't something we figured we were entitled to.

Don't get me wrong, we certainly had, and have, fun. We just didn't think we were entitled to have fun. That's a whole different feeling. There's a great deal of guilt and personal dislike of self in allowing yourself to have fun when you don't think you deserve it. That's a whole different thing than what Abraham was talking about. Given how I felt about people who have fun but aren't working hard to 'earn' it, I guess it's not surprising that I was so angry all the time.

So along comes this Abraham collective saying that life is supposed to be fun. I had to sit with that one for awhile. At first I couldn't believe it. Frankly, I didn't want to believe it. It put everything I had ever thought, everything that I believed, into a blender and liquified it. That's how mixed up I felt. I didn't know what to think.

So I sat with it for awhile. I pondered that statement, that life is supposed to be fun. I put it together with other things they were saying, like about how we are all already deserving. Like how we are already entitled. That we are extensions of Source energy, capable of creating our personal reality. They talked about how Source becomes what we want, and its our job to get into vibrational resonance with that in order to manifest it in this reality. They said that our emotions are our indicator, letting us know in any and every moment, whether we are heading toward what we want or away from it.

I looked at a lot of different experiences in my life, both what I considered to be positive experiences and what I considered to be negative experiences, and I began to see some truth in what they were saying. I could see, in my own life, how focusing on what I didn't want brought me more of what I didn't want, how the worse things were the worse they got. I saw the other side too, how the already good things in my life kept getting better. I spent a lot of time looking at how my thoughts correlated with what was happening to me and around me.

It made a lot of sense to me. I have a whole library full of self-help books, I've done uncountable numbers of personal growth seminars, I've studied psychology and metaphysics and spirituality and the nature of being. All of that was helpful, all worth doing. It still is. I don't regret the things I've learned, and I know there's a lot more there to be learned. But none of it, not even all of it added together, had the impact on my life that the simple statement "Life is supposed to be fun" had. Abraham said it in such a way that I believed it. Or maybe I was just ready. In any case, for me, that statement was key. I began wanting it to be true, and then I began to believe that it could be true.

Once I started to believe it, to believe that despite what I'd done in my life—or not done—that I was entitled to be happy, well .. that opened the door for everything to change. I figured if Abraham could convince me that my whole life of believing that life is hard, that life is inherently unfair, that you have to work hard to be deserving, that you have to earn what you get, that if you don't earn you don't deserve to get .. if they could convince me that in all those beliefs I had been wrong, well gee! if they could do that, they might actually know how I could go about changing it.

As I continued reading I learned that you could actually create a life that was fun, even if you'd spent a half-century going in the other direction (toward misery).

So the second most important thing that I learned was: Focus on what you want and not on what you don't want.

That's such an incredibly simple concept that I found it hard to accept. How could it be so easy? Surely there's a catch! Every book I'd ever read, every class I'd ever taken, every 'expert' I'd ever listened to, had a system that was touted as simple and easy. My experience had told me that the systems that were simple and easy didn't work. The ones that were hard and complicated were too hard and complicated for me to want to follow them. That dichotomy is why, I believed, I was still mired in all the problems that my life was still mired in.

So I was kinda stuck. Either I believe that, finally, after all this time, someone had an easy system that worked, or I had to believe their system was more complicated than it sounded. I had no experience of something simple working, and I wanted this system to work, so I set about trying to make it complicated.

I spun my wheels for a good long while trying to make this system complicated. But it wasn't. In thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of hours of tapes, CDs, and DVDs, the bottom line of all the messages from Abraham is the same: Focus on what you want and not on what you don't want. Similar to a compass that tells you if you're moving in the right direction or not, the indicator to whether you're focused correctly is your emotions. And that's really simple too: if you feel good, you're on track with what you want, if you feel bad you're off the track. All there is to do is get back on track, in whatever way you can.

The third thing then, that I learned from Abraham, was: Emotions are an indicator. If you feel bad, work to feel better. Work to feel relief. Care more about how you feel than anything else.

Armed with those three concepts: • Life is supposed to be fun, • Focus on what you want and not what you don't want, and • Be aware of how you feel—if you feel bad, do whatever it takes to consciously work with your thoughts until you feel relief, I was able, in a very short period of time, to move rage completely out of my life.

I wasn't trying to move rage out of my life, I was just trying to feel better when I felt bad. Not to say that I don't still get angry, I do. But even that is loosening its hold—it doesn't occur as often and its expression isn't as strong. I put effort into feeling better when I feel bad, but it isn't hard work, and the more I do it the easier it gets. Best of all, I continually and immediately see results for my efforts. I think it's worth doing—feeling good is way more fun than feeling bad!

An interesting side benefit to moving rage out of my life is that I can far more easily handle other people's rage. Used to be I'd get enraged myself when I was around someone flying off into rage. Now I either don't, or I pretty quickly become aware that I'm getting heated up and can talk myself down from it. Sometimes I just remove myself from the area. Getting up and leaving doesn't necessarily meet with a lot of approval, but I'm not real interested in getting someone's approval, especially when they're all fired up. I'm far more about not going to that rage place with them. So I've become a lot better at staying calm in the storm of someone else's rage, and I simply leave if I find myself getting 'sucked in'. That's a new feeling for me, and a wonderful one. It's very freeing not to be swept along in other peoples' rage.

Have I achieved personal perfection yet? Hardly. Not even close! But that's not what's important. What's important is that I have easy-to-use tools to help me get wherever I want to be, and that's a pretty cool thing.