Asheville and Abraham-Hicks

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, NC

From November 21-22, my daughter and I attended a two-day Abraham-Hicks conference in Asheville, North Carolina. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time and this year, it was held at the Grove Park Inn rather than the Biltmore because it has a much larger conference room.

Megan and I got there early – but not early enough. Our seats the first day were to the left of the stage, where Esther Hicks does her thing and various participants occupy the “hot seat” and converse one-on-one with the group of souls that calls themselves Abraham.

This was the third conference I’ve attended with Megan, but the only time the conference has spanned two days. It made a difference. More on that in a moment. When Megan and I were seated, I was curious about how many people had attended. So I counted the number of rows in our section, the number of seats in each row, and then counted the sections. I estimated that nearly a thousand people had attended. I heard later it was a lower number, in the 400s, but I have my doubts.

At any rate, the workshop began with Esther talking briefly to the group, then asking the audience what they wanted to discuss, that nothing was off limits. Hands shot up throughout the conference room. Many of the people selected for the hot seat are repeats, which comes out in their discourse with Abraham. One of my favorites was an enthusiastic young man ho is the pitching coordinator for the Houston Astros baseball team. His job is to select the best pitchers for his team and his passion for what he does was certainly conveyed. He was concerned about how he could make the best selections.

Abraham’s advice was interesting. He shouldn’t read the applicant resumes, just glance at their names. And at night, as he was falling asleep, he should request a dream in which the best applicants are revealed to him. This young man had a great sense of humor and engaged with Abraham/Esther in a way that left the crowd in stitches. He was so upbeat and positive that I could feel myself being swept up in his joy.

All of the conversations that workshop participants bring to the hot seat are invariably personal. One man who looked sort of goofy in his torn jeans and wool hat sat down in the hot seat and said something to the effect of, “Okay, I’m a writer and I’m worried that what I’ve written is going to be criticized and ripped apart by critics even though I know it’s a fabulous novel.”

“That’s not a good belief,” Abraham noted, and asked what the book was called.

It was entitled, Being a Bisexual Christian in a Bipolar World. He laughed and the crowd burst into explosive laughter. Yeah, okay. Esther rolled her eyes and replied, “You’re right. They’re going to nail you up.”

Abraham gave him some solid advice about writing and he left the stage a happy camper.

There are many similarities between the Abraham-Hicks material and the Seth material, more than 20 books channeled by author and mystic Jane Roberts. But both tenets are founded on the notion that we create our own realities through our beliefs, emotions, thoughts, that our worlds are created from the inside out.

The difference is that the Abraham material is focused on how to and that Seth provided the philosophical foundation for this belief system. Abraham’s venue is about finding a way to feel good about whatever you’re doing. It’s about appreciation for everything that works in your life and turning your thoughts toward the positive rather than the negative. As Seth said, You get what you concentrate on…there is no other main rule. And that’s pretty much what Abraham says, too.

It sounds simplistic, and yet, if I hadn’t discovered the Seth material in 1973, I might still be teaching Spanish to hormonal seventh graders. I might have 40 manuscripts stacked on my closet floor that had never seen publication. In 1984, the year I sold my first novel, I decided it would be great to travel to Elmira, New York, where Jane and her husband Rob lived, and attend one of her ESP classes. Then I opened up Fate magazine one day and discovered she had died. I immediately regretted not having taken the initiative to have gone to Elmira earlier. So when Megan discovered the Abraham-Hicks material and I read the books, I decided I wouldn’t make the same mistake and would attend at least one of the workshops.

The Abraham message, like that of Seth, is powerful and positive. I’ve read a lot of channeled books over the years and many of them – most of them – are trite and silly. But neither Abraham nor Seth fall in that category. This point was driven home during the Sunday workshop, when a young man in the row in front of us was selected for the hot seat.

I had noticed this man that morning when Megan and I sat in our great seats in the middle of the room, seats she’d chosen because she’d arrived well before I had. He looked…well, kind of lost, his dark eyes haunted. I pegged his age at about thirty. When he went up to the hot seat, the first thing he said was, “I can’t sleep. I talked to you about this the last time I was here. My problem hadn’t gotten any better. It’s gotten worse.”

It turned out this man lived on “an island” with his parents and absolutely hated his life there. Every tine Abraham said something positive about his life, he countered with something negative. The island didn‘t have the shoes he needed with the proper width, the island didn’t have this or that. He told his parents he had a job interview in Asheville so they would pay for his ticket. He admitted that he was suicidal.

Abraham spent 25 minutes with his guy, talking him through why he felt as he did and how he could change what he felt. But this young man was so resistant, so entrenched in his negativity, that Megan and I could feel the collective energy in the room bottoming out. Finally, Abraham ushered him off the stage and even then, the man hung around, trying to talk privately to Esther.

Abraham/Esther apparently sensed the collective depression of energy in the room and when hands shot up, she chose the pitching coordinator again. Twice in one workshop. The crowd applauded. We understood he was the right person for the hot seat after this depressing foray into the island dude’s problems. The pitching guy asked, “So how can I find my soul mate?”

Abraham: “You can have both professional and personal happiness. You don’t have to deny yourself one to have the other.”

Pitching dude: Wow, this is so cool. Can I just hang out here in the hot seat for awhile?

This got a good laugh from the crowd and Abraham, rolling Esther’s eyes, said, “Yeah, sure.”

And then Abraham wound up the conference and the pitching dude jut sat there grinning, happy, pleased.

Lunch was served both days after the conference and we met some interesting people. It’s weird and refreshing to be sitting in a huge eating area and overhear people talking about law of attraction and Seth and creating your own reality. This is NOT normal lunch conversation in my world.

I came away from this conference with some of my beliefs utterly intact and other beliefs in flux. Why, for instance, do some of us choose catastrophic illnesses or abject poverty as our baseline contrast? Why do some of us choose unhappiness over happiness? We humans are complex beings connected at some fundamental level so that what affects me affects you and so on through the more than 7 billion souls on the planet.

I don’t know if Esther Hicks is fully in trance the entire duration of the workshop. But does it really matter? She’s channeling something, translating something from a nonphysical realm that is important, significant in how we live our lives. And when Megan and I left the conference, we were feeling very good about where we are in our lives and how we live our lives and perhaps that’s the real takeaway.

Abraham-Hicks has knowledge and insights that are helpful in our navigation of life. But the skeptic in me, the left-brain Gemini, is always humming along in the background, murmuring, Show me. Prove it to me. Maybe it’s not about showing or proving so much as it is about trusting the process.

We come into physical life because this is where we can grow and evolve. And whatever helps in this process is valuable. So I say try an Abraham-Hicks conference, see how it fits you, how you feel. Some of my friends are turned off by it and find the workshops bizarre. Others are uplifted.