“Abraham,” the story goes, “my lover left and now I’m sad.”
I have no idea how many times I’ve heard this Abraham-Hicks example now. I subscribe to the glutton version of their downloads–the complete unedited versions of workshops as they’re done. Next best thing to being there! But if you listen to a lot of their material, particularly back-to-back workshops, you’ll hear some of the same examples used over and over, especially the really good examples.
One that comes up frequently is the story of a woman who was looking for relief through a consultation or workshop with Abraham and explained that she was sad as the result of her lover’s leaving–to which Abraham replied that no, she was not.
The conversation goes back and forth several times with the woman insisting that she’s sad because of the absent lover and Abraham insisting she’s not. The lesson is that she’s sad because she wants to feel the way she did with the lover, not because he left (I’m paraphrasing and interpretting in my own way here).
It’s a lesson that I’ve sort of breezed past since the very first exposure to it. I’ve had at least one lover leave since the first time I heard it. Maybe two if you count my kicking one to the curb. Honestly, I’ve been inclined to agree with the woman. My lover left, and dang it, I was missing him!
I finally got it over a beautiful weekend’s visit to Jasmine Hill Gardens in Wetumpka, Alabama. I was there to officiate the wedding of one of my favorite people, my “adopted littled sister.” I had a few hours before the ceremony to walk barefoot through the gardens and ground myself against the chaotic energy of the day.
While there, I was thinking about love and being in love and those feelings. I’ve been in love enough times in my life to know exactly how it feels. I think that when we are very young and feel it, we believe that that’s how it will always be. We don’t understand “new relationship energy” in our first bloom of youth. When we’re older, we realize that those early feelings of joyous discovery and frantic tenderness ebb and flow through the long unraveling of a journey together, and if we find them later in life, we know how rare and precious those feelings are.
I was recently asked how many times I’d been in love. I grew up thinking that it would happen only once in a lifetime, not half a dozen or a dozen or some magic number. The fact that we can and do fall in love more than once in our lives is truly a blessing. If we can remember those feelings and be open to having them again–not with any one person but simply open to the feeling and letting the Universe provide the person who shares them with us–then we can be blessed again.
When asked why you’re in love with someone, do you usually give a long list of their admirable qualities? What it really comes down to is more in line with Abraham’s insights. The answer isn’t about the attributes of the beloved but about the way you feel when you’re with your beloved.
The woman in Abraham’s story is sad because she’s not feeling that feeling anymore, not because some guy went poof on her. When she finds–ahem, when she is open to allowing that feeling to reappear in her life, her new lover will come and she’ll maybe think of her absent lover with a shrug if she thinks of him at all. As much as we’d like to think it’s about the person we’re with who brings in that wondrous feeling, it’s about the feeling, and then letting the person who embodies that feeling arrive in our lives to take that sweet spot.
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