he first time I heard the phrase "get into the vortex," I was sitting cross-legged on my apartment floor with a mug of coffee going cold beside me, and I really thought the person on the recording had lost the plot.
This was sometime in the spring of 2022. A few weeks after the kitchen floor. I was in the phase where I was consuming anything that seemed related to the ideas Priya had accidentally unlocked for me at 3 a.m. when she sent me Neville. The phase where you follow one thread and find yourself three YouTube rabbit holes deep at midnight, blinking at your screen, wondering how you got here.
Abraham Hicks was one of those threads.
And I almost dismissed it immediately.
What I Actually Heard, the First Time
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Esther Hicks channels a group consciousness she calls Abraham. That is the premise. She sits in front of a live audience, shifts into something, and then speaks in a distinct cadence, a kind of unhurried authority, answering questions about everything from relationships to money to death. The recording I found first was from a cruise workshop, probably the early 2000s, and the audio quality had that slightly warbly quality of old cassette transfers.
I want to be honest with you about my reaction, friend. My reaction was skepticism so thorough it was almost reflexive. I had a comparative literature degree. I had spent eight years in PR rooms where language was weaponized and every claim was scrutinized. Channeling felt like the thing I was supposed to roll my eyes at.
But I kept listening.
Partly because I had nothing better to do at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday in a March that had destroyed me. Partly because something in the actual content, stripped of the framework, kept snagging on something real.
The core teaching, underneath all the vocabulary, is this: you are a vibrational being, and you have an emotional guidance system that tells you, at every moment, whether your thoughts are moving you toward what you want or away from it. Good-feeling thoughts are alignment. Bad-feeling thoughts are resistance. The work is learning to care about how you feel as a practice, not as a luxury.
That part I understood immediately. I had spent 70 hours a week, for years, in a state of constant low-grade dread dressed up as ambition. I knew exactly what misalignment felt like from the inside. I'd been living in it.
The Vocabulary Problem (and Why It's Worth Pushing Through)
Here is the thing nobody warns you about when you start with Abraham Hicks. The vocabulary is dense and specific and self-referential in a way that can feel exclusionary at first.
The Vortex. The Grid. Downstream. Upstream. The LOA. Contrast. Momentum. Inner Being. Source. Segment Intending. The Emotional Guidance Scale.
If you come in through a random YouTube clip or an old workshop recording, you will hit these terms constantly and without much scaffolding. The assumption seems to be that you are already inside the framework, already speaking the language, already nodding along.
It took me probably three or four weeks of fairly consistent listening before the vocabulary stopped being a barrier and started being useful. And it does become useful. That is what I want you to understand. These are not arbitrary terms. Each one is pointing at something precise.
"The Vortex" is basically Neville's concept of the wish fulfilled, the state in which your desire already exists, from a slightly different angle. "Upstream" is the feeling of pushing against what is, of efforting and straining and fighting. "Downstream" is the feeling of ease, of allowing, of moving with your own desire rather than toward it by force. "The Emotional Guidance Scale" is a 22-point spectrum from joy and knowledge at the top to fear and grief at the bottom, and Abraham's argument is that you cannot jump from fear straight to joy in one move. You move one or two rungs at a time.
That last concept I found really revelatory. I had read enough at that point to understand that the feeling of the desire already being real was the goal. What I kept running into was the gap between "I feel terrible right now" and "I feel like a person who already has this." The Emotional Guidance Scale gave me a practical bridge. Don't try to feel abundant when you feel desperate. Try to feel angry first. Angry is a higher rung than desperate. Then try for bored. Then for hope. The ladder is real and you can climb it.
What Abraham Hicks Has in Common with the Other Threads
By the time Abraham had my attention, I was also deep in Neville. And I was starting to circle Joe Dispenza. The three traditions felt almost like translations of the same thing into different languages.
Neville comes from a Christian mystical tradition with deep roots in William Blake and the New Thought movement. His teaching is about the consciousness behind all experience, the understanding that your imagination is God, and that what you persist in assuming becomes your reality. The language is mythological and beautiful and sometimes opaque.
Joe Dispenza comes from neuroscience and quantum physics, or at least from a synthesis of those fields. His framework is about breaking the habit of being yourself, rewiring neural pathways through meditation, and changing the body's emotional chemistry. The language is clinical and procedural. If you want that approach, the Joe Dispenza for Beginners: A Practical Starting Point piece goes into that territory in more depth.
Abraham Hicks sits somewhere in between. The metaphysical scaffolding is more explicit than Dispenza and more accessible than Neville's densest work. The focus on emotion as navigation is something all three share, but Abraham makes it the center of everything. Not the visualization, not the neural rewiring, not the SATS. The emotional tone. Just: how do you feel right now, and can you find a better-feeling thought?
That sounds simple. It is not simple. Practicing it is one of the more demanding things I have done, because it requires you to take responsibility for your emotional state in a way that cuts against almost every social script you were handed.
The Parts I Had to Wrestle With
I want to be careful here, because I think the impulse to either wholesale embrace a teaching or wholesale reject it is one of the ways people cut themselves off from things that could really help them. I did not wholesale embrace Abraham Hicks. I also did not dismiss it.
But there are real tensions I sat with.
The first is what I will call the contrast bypass. There is a strain in Abraham's teaching that can, if you are not careful, lead to spiritual bypassing of the most complete kind. If negative emotion is just "guidance," if all unwanted circumstances are "contrast" that is meant to help you clarify your desires, there is a risk that you start using the framework to avoid feeling things that need to be felt. To reframe grief as "contrast." To call anger "misalignment" and suppress it.
I do not think this is what Abraham actually teaches. If you listen carefully, the teaching is that you should acknowledge what you feel and then move from it, not skip it. But the culture around Abraham Hicks can veer into toxic positivity in ways that I find really harmful, particularly for people who are doing real grief or trauma work.
Bessel van der Kolk's work on trauma, which I came to through Beatriz and the somatic layer she introduced me to, was important for me here. The body keeps the score in ways that affirmations and better-feeling thoughts cannot always reach. The emotional guidance system Abraham describes is real. And it sits in a body that may need more than cognitive reframing to shift.
The second tension is the framework itself: a channeled entity. I am still not sure what I think about this. I have landed somewhere in the position that it does not matter. The ideas are useful or they are not. The practice works or it does not. Whether "Abraham" is a non-physical consciousness, a deep aspect of Esther Hicks's own wisdom, or something else entirely is a question I have stopped needing to answer before I can use the material.
That is not a dismissal of the question. It is a genuine pragmatism. I sat on a kitchen floor in March 2022 in a state of complete collapse, and some ideas helped me get up. Where they came from is secondary to whether they were true.
How I'd Actually Suggest You Start
If you are new to this, here is the honest guide I would have wanted.
Do not start with the books. I know that sounds counterintuitive. The books, particularly Ask and It Is Given and The Law of Attraction, are good, but they are also dense with the internal vocabulary in a way that can feel like learning a new language without a Rosetta Stone. Start with the recordings.
Abraham Hicks has an enormous archive of free workshop recordings on YouTube, many of them decades old, and watching Esther channel in real time is a different experience than reading the transcribed teaching. You hear the cadence. You see the audience's reaction. Something lands differently.
Start with a "hot seat" clip. The hot seat is the portion of each workshop where a single audience member sits across from Esther and Abraham responds to their specific situation. These are accessible and concrete in a way that broad lectures are not. Find one about something you are actually struggling with right now.
Then, when you hit a concept you do not understand, look it up. There are really good explanations of the core concepts scattered around the internet, written by people who have spent years with the material. The Emotional Guidance Scale in particular is worth sitting with.
And if, after a few weeks, you find yourself wanting a more systematic framework, the store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, including things built around the emotional and self-concept layers that Abraham and Neville share.
The other thing I would say: you are allowed to use what helps and leave the rest. I use the Emotional Guidance Scale almost daily. I think about "downstream" as a physical sensation, a loosening in my chest, that tells me I have stopped fighting. I use Abraham's concept of the "grid" (basically: you lay the grid of a desire in your imagination, and things start filling in) in a way that maps almost exactly onto Neville's "revision" and "living in the end."
I do not spend a lot of time thinking about whether the channeling is real.
The Thing That Actually Helped
Whatever you're going through, the store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward.
About six weeks into the Abraham material, something shifted in how I understood what I was doing.
I had been, without fully realizing it, approaching every practice as an act of acquisition. I would do the SATS or the visualization or the scripting, and the underlying energy was get this thing. The desperation was very slightly dressed up in technique. And the desperation was doing exactly what Abraham says it does: holding me in a frequency that was a match to wanting, not to having.
What Abraham hammered, over and over in those early workshop recordings, was this: the desire is already in the Vortex. It exists, fully formed, waiting. Your job is not to create it. Your job is to close the gap between where you are emotionally and where the desire already is. The desire is not the problem. Your practiced resistance to feeling good is the problem.
That reframe hit me somewhere specific. I had spent years, and I mean years, believing that the suffering was the price of the wanting. That if I wanted something enough, badly enough, the badness of the wanting was somehow the appropriate cost of entry. Catholic guilt wearing a productivity disguise.
What if the suffering had never been required? What if the feeling bad had been holding me in place, not moving me forward?
Sit with that for a second.
I know it sounds simple when I write it like that. It was not simple when I was sitting with $40,000 in debt and a severance check and no idea what came next. It was the most terrifying possible reframe: that the way I had been going about this was making it harder, not demonstrating sufficient commitment.
But over the months that followed, as I started treating my emotional state as the actual work and not as a side effect of external circumstances, things shifted. The debt cleared. The freelance work came. And eventually, after a year of different kinds of inner work, Daniel.
I am not saying Abraham Hicks did all of that. I am saying I cannot entirely separate the threads. I do not think any of us can.
The Version of You Who Is Already There
There is a phrase Abraham uses that I have come back to more times than I can count. The idea that the version of you who already has what you want is not a future you. That version exists now, in the Vortex, and the practice is about closing the gap between the self you are being right now and the self you have already become in the non-physical.
Neville says it as: the wish fulfilled, live in the end. Dispenza says it as: become the person in the brain scan before the event happens. Abraham says it as: stop looking at what is, and start tending the Vortex.
Different vocabularies. Same instruction.
The version of you who already has it is not a metaphor to comfort you. It is a description of how consciousness works, from at least three independent traditions that arrived at the same place from different directions. And that convergence, honestly, is what made me stop needing any single tradition to be the whole truth.
You can hold Neville's beauty and Abraham's emotional precision and Dispenza's neuroscience rigor (and if you want that framework in more depth, the Joe Dispenza for Beginners: A Practical Starting Point piece is a good companion to this one) without any of them canceling each other out.
That is the thing I wish someone had told me in the spring of 2022, sitting on that floor. This is real. All of it is pointing at the same door. You do not have to pick one key.
The store has products I'd point a friend toward. Honest reviews, no aggressive upsells.
Where Abraham Actually Fits in a Serious Practice
After four years of this work, here is where I have landed: Abraham Hicks is one of the best entry points I know for people who are in the specific kind of pain that comes from chronic striving.
If you are exhausted. If you have been trying so hard for so long that you have lost the thread between the desire and any positive feeling about the desire. If the wanting itself feels like a wound. Abraham's emotional framework is useful in a way that purely intellectual or purely somatic approaches sometimes are not, because it meets you in the middle. It acknowledges that you feel what you feel. It gives you a ladder. It does not ask you to leap.
What it is not: a complete trauma-processing framework. What it is not: a substitute for somatic work when the body is carrying something. What it is not: a replacement for the depth and specificity of Neville when you are working on a concrete circumstance.
But as a daily practice for maintaining the emotional conditions under which everything else works better? It has been worth every minute I spent skeptical of it on a Tuesday night in a Greenpoint apartment, wondering if the person on the recording had really lost the plot.
She hadn't. Or if she had, she lost it in exactly the right direction.
