This week I gravitate to the “Law of Attraction”…to see if it makes life better.
I’m what you might call a Third-Way Cherry-Picker. People tend to say, particularly when it comes to the new-agey stuff I discuss in this column, there are two types of people. Sceptics. And Folk Who Buy Into the Whole Package – the books, lecture series and the gift-boxed destiny cards.
But some of us tread a third way. We take on board the message, but do so with a grain (or barrow-load) of salt, cherry-picking the bits that make intuitive sense. We have a foot in both camps, smart enough to know no one can really manifest a Ferrari. And find it kind of gross anyone would try to.
I issue this preface because I’m about to describe how I’ve just attended a Law of Attraction workshop with Esther and Jerry Hicks. Haven’t seen The Secret? Well, the Hicks appear in it prominently, demonstrating how to attract what you want by simply thinking it. Like attracts like; nice thoughts attract nice things. And (just to fire up the sceptics) they do it by channelling a spirit collective known as Abraham. Weird. But then so are gated communities. And sleeve tattoos.
Now, as a salt-tossing, cherry-picking consumer of information geared at making life better, I don’t buy the entire manifesting manifesto (especially those vision boards that women my age took to making when The Secret first came out). But I’ve found the following morsel of Hicks-Abraham insight hit a sweet spot this week.
OK, so change of gear. Recently I’d been feeling things weren’t right, that I was off kilter with myself. When this happens we tend to try to run from this irksome, hollow feeling by doing stuff and ricocheting into frenzied action (or by getting wasted). But you might’ve noticed – the more we run from ourselves, the more things go to the dogs. Plans unravel, mobile phones die and we get stuck in slow traffic lanes.
On this occasion I ran from myself by fleeing to the Solomon Islands to dive with sharks (well, haven’t you?!). The trip was a struggle to organise, but I forced it to happen, convinced the extreme experience was just the ticket to jerk me from my ill-at-ease rut.
It was a dramatic and metaphorical escape. So was the slapdown. All three planes in the region ran to ground, leaving me stranded in rain for four days on a grim island the size of a Domayne bedding department. I went spare. My return flight was delayed and I came home to find my car stolen. And, hey, my comprehensive insurance had expired. If I was reading it right, the universe was telling me to stop moving, stay close to home so I could face up to myself. Or else.
Back to the Law of Attraction. The Hicks say this all happened because I wasn’t in alignment with myself. They explained that all problems – and illness – are indicators alerting us to when our “physical reality” selves have drifted from our “vibrational energy” selves. This vibrational self drives our dreams, calling us forward to our potential. As the French and German existentialists wrote, this self “always already” exists. In a previous column I described it as our “inside people”… a silent, all-knowing sense of being that feels bigger and truer than our physical reality selves. We know it when we sit calmly with it and don’t flee from it. It feels like home.
The Hicks say when we align with our vibration, life flows better. We’re not in a state of resistance with ourselves, and so the Law of Attraction kicks in. We randomly meet the perfect person to help get that project off the ground. Dark, handsome men appear. Old people smile at us at bus stops. How do we align our two selves? Meditate. Or I use this technique: I imagine sitting with my (vibrational) self on a little ledge near my heart space. I don’t think too much. I just hang out and feel my way back to myself.
Tonight I’m meant to go out for a rich, bustley dinner. But my phone has just died and I have a roaring stomach ache. Normally I’d get angry, force myself to go and feel ill-at-ease (as well as sick), but instead I’m seeing these “problems” as lovely indicators of my need to align. If I’m reading the signs right I’m meant to stay home and hang on a ledge with myself.
