If you are a regular reader of this site, you know that over the past few months I’ve become a big fan of the teachings of Abraham-Hicks.

While I’m not so sure about the channeling (I figure it’s possible) and I often have a hard time referring to a human female (Esther Hicks) as “Abraham” (but I’ll call her what she/he/they/it wants to be called), I can’t deny the good that comes out of her mouth.

Combine this with the kindness and lack of dogmatic thinking of the people I’ve met who also follow the Abraham teachings (especially Vickie of Contemplate This and Pamm of My Secret Spiritual Dance), and it looks to me like the majority of the fruit that is being produced by this particular tree is good.

I’m subscribed to the Abraham-Hicks daily quote, and sometimes I get something that really challenges my thinking, like the following that came in yesterday (Sunday, July 8, 2007):

“You’ve trained yourself to face reality. You’ve trained yourself to tell the truth. You’ve trained yourself to tell it like it is. So in the beginning, these fantasies feel a little inappropriate, because it’s like you’re fooling yourself. Sometimes people will say, “Well, isn’t this just denial?” And we say, we hope so! We hope that you are denying the absence that you do not want [emphasis mine]. And we hope that you are embracing the presence of what you do. But somehow the idea of denial has become a dirty word to you; like it is virtuous to face the reality of the horror of your own lives. And we would be ignoring anything that did not please us. We would get our eyes on what feels good.”

Excerpted from the workshop in San Rafael, CA on Friday, March 9th, 2001

Denial has become a dirty word for me. Since my beginnings in personal development centered around 12 Step programs – mainly Alcoholics Anonymous (some of which I still use, some I’ve left behind) – I immediately associate denial with a person saying “I don’t have a problem” when they obviously do – in other words, not being able to (or not wanting to) see what is really going on around them. So when I read things like “We hope you are denying the absence that you do not want”, red flags fly up all over the place.

But wait… read that again.

“We hope that you are denying the absence that you do not want.”

It’s not about denying the presence of something we don’t want (poor health, financial scarcity, a destructive addiction), it’s about denying the absence of what we do not want.

There’s an important distinction there (and some wacky use of the English language). I think that is why I’ve taken to them (him, her, it?) so well. They don’t encourage us to yell “Did Not!” or “Nu-Uh!” to what we’ve created up to this point, but rather to stop focusing on it, and to shift our focus to what we do want.

Now that’s something I can accept. “OK, it’s there. Now what do I want?”

One of my favorite Abraham quotes is still “We don’t encourage you to see that your gas gauge is on empty and to stick a smiley face over it.”

I appreciate hearing your own thoughts on this. Thanks!

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[This article was included in two blog carnivals - The Personal Development Carnival - July 15th, 2007 and Live the Power Unlimited Volume 2]

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