here was a period, maybe eight months into the practice, when I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to do and still felt like I was swimming through concrete.
I was writing in my journal every morning. I was doing the SATS. I was reading Neville obsessively, underlining passages in Feeling Is the Secret, trying to hold the feeling of having before I fell asleep. And the money piece, specifically, was stuck in a way that felt almost deliberate. Like something inside me kept rejecting the signal.
A friend mentioned Abraham Hicks the way you mention a movie you saw on a plane. Casually. Without particular urgency. "Have you gone down that rabbit hole yet?" She had not expected it to matter to me.
It mattered.
What I Thought Abraham Hicks Was (I Was Wrong)
The store has products I'd point a friend toward. Honest reviews, no aggressive upsells.
I want to be honest about my initial reaction, because I think it's the same reaction a lot of people have and then quietly reverse.
My first encounter with Abraham Hicks content was a YouTube clip. Someone in a seminar was asking about money, and Esther Hicks was speaking in this calm, slightly elevated register that I immediately clocked as "spiritual teacher voice," which, after years in Manhattan PR watching people perform expertise, I was primed to distrust. I closed the tab. Too much. Too produced. Too whatever.
Then Priya, who argues about semicolons and reads almost exclusively literary fiction and has the kind of precision-first brain that holds spiritual ideas at arm's length until they prove themselves, texted me a transcript of an Abraham Hicks passage about money and resistance. Not the full seminar. Just three paragraphs. "I think you'd find this interesting," she wrote, which from Priya is basically a formal endorsement.
I read those three paragraphs four times.
Because what they said about money was not what I expected. It was not affirmations. It was not visualization. It was a specific diagnosis of why people stay broke even when they're trying to change, and the diagnosis was accurate in a way that stopped me.
The short version: you cannot want money and also fear money at the same time and expect the wanting to win. The fear is louder. The signal you're broadcasting is mixed. And a mixed signal manifests a mixed result, which usually looks like almost-but-not-quite, or brief improvement followed by contraction, or the particular exhaustion of working hard toward a thing and watching it stay just out of reach.
I had been living that pattern for two years by then. The $40,000 in debt I'd been carrying since the worst years at the agency. The way every time money got closer I found a reason to spend or contract or quietly catastrophize. Priya's three paragraphs named the thing I hadn't been able to name.
The Emotional Scale and Why It Changed How I Think About Money Blocks
Abraham Hicks teaches something called the emotional guidance scale, which is exactly what it sounds like: a hierarchy of emotional states from the lowest (despair, powerlessness, depression) up through anger, frustration, hope, positive expectation, and finally what they call appreciation and joy at the top.
The thing that made this useful to me rather than abstract is the specific instruction attached to it: you do not have to jump from the bottom to the top. You just have to move up one or two rungs.
If you're in despair about money, reaching for joy is not your move. Your move is reaching for anger, which is actually higher on the scale. Anger has energy. Anger implies that things could be different. Despair implies they cannot.
This was the first piece of spiritual teaching I had encountered that explicitly gave me permission to feel bad feelings on the way to feeling better ones. Everything else I had read or listened to was oriented toward getting to the high vibration as fast as possible, which, if you're someone carrying $40K in debt and two years of antidepressants and the accumulated self-concept of someone who has spent eight years proving her worth through 70-hour weeks, is simply not where you're starting. You are not starting at hope. You are starting somewhere much lower than that.
What the Abraham Hicks framework told me was: that's fine. Go to anger first. Anger at the debt, at the system, at the version of yourself that accepted conditions you shouldn't have accepted. And then from anger, you move toward frustration, which is softer. From frustration, you move toward pessimism. From pessimism, toward boredom. From boredom, toward contentment.
And here is the thing about contentment that I did not expect: it feels like nothing. It feels almost boring. After years of anxiety and striving and 70-hour weeks and the particular vibration of someone who has been running on cortisol since her mid-twenties, contentment felt like deprivation. But it wasn't. It was the first genuine neutral I had found. And from neutral, for the first time, I could actually imagine having more money without immediately feeling the fear underneath it.
I've written more about the mechanics of this in Abraham Hicks Emotional Scale: How to Use It Daily, if you want to go deeper into the practice layer. But the principle matters here: before you can manifest money, you have to find a way to think about money that doesn't activate your entire nervous system alarm system.
How Abraham Hicks Talks About Money Differently Than Other Teachers
Here's what I noticed after spending several months with this material, alongside Neville, alongside Joe Dispenza, alongside the somatic work I was doing to actually live in a different body while I was trying to think different thoughts.
Abraham Hicks talks about money as energy before it talks about money as thing.
Neville Goddard, who is my primary practice and who I will always credit for the foundational shift, is oriented toward the version of you who already has it. You persist in the assumption. You live from the end. The imaginal act is the work.
Abraham Hicks adds a dimension that Neville does not foreground as explicitly: the feeling tone you are broadcasting moment to moment is constantly creating, and most of us are creating more of what we already have because we are constantly practicing the vibration of what we already have. You look at your bank account and feel dread. You practice dread. You manifest more conditions that produce dread. The loop is self-sealing.
The practical intervention Abraham Hicks offers is what they call pivoting. When you notice you are practicing the vibration of lack, you don't force yourself to feel abundance (most people can't make that leap convincingly, and a fake feeling does nothing). Instead, you reach for the best-feeling thought you can really hold. Not a thought about money specifically. A thought about anything. Your cat. A conversation that made you laugh. The coffee Daniel made this morning, which was, perfect.
(I'm aware that sounds small. It is small. That's the point. Small genuine feelings compound. Large performed feelings dissipate.)
What I found, practicing this alongside the Neville work, is that they address different layers of the same problem. Neville gives you the target: the state of the wish fulfilled, held in imagination until it hardens into assumption. Abraham gives you the path management: how to move your emotional baseline toward a place from which that assumption becomes possible to hold.
If you're new to any of this and trying to figure out where to start, the piece I'd point you toward first is Abraham Hicks for Beginners, which works through the core concepts without assuming prior familiarity.
What Actually Changed for Me (The Specific Part)
Here is what I want to tell you, friend, because I think the most useful thing I can offer is not the conceptual summary but the specific practice and what followed.
By early 2023, I had been doing the work consistently for about a year. The freelance contract that had appeared six days after my layoff had evolved into consistent client work. The debt, which had felt like a permanent condition of my life for so long I had stopped thinking of it as something that could change, was moving. But I was still contracting. Still hitting invisible ceilings. Still, when I checked my numbers, feeling that low dull fear that I had been feeling about money since I was a kid watching my mom worry about it in a way that had nothing to do with the actual amount and everything to do with a story about scarcity that went back generations.
The Abraham Hicks piece that cracked something open for me was a specific teaching about the difference between wanting and knowing. Wanting, as Abraham describes it, has a reaching quality. A gap quality. There is an implicit acknowledgment in wanting that the thing is not here. Knowing is different. Knowing has arrived quality. Knowing says: this is mine. This is already done. The work is to find knowing.
That is structurally identical to what Neville teaches about assumption. But hearing it in the Abraham idiom, with the emotional scale underneath it as a ladder, gave me a practical answer to the question I had been sitting with: how do I get from where I am to where I need to be emotionally, so that I can hold the assumption cleanly?
The answer was: slowly. One rung at a time. And the rungs were real emotional states, not performances.
I started spending five to ten minutes a day doing what I can only describe as deliberate emotional climbing. Not toward money specifically. Just toward a better-feeling general state. I would start wherever I actually was. Sometimes that was frustration. Sometimes it was boredom. Sometimes, on good days, it was something that felt like quiet confidence. And I would reach for the next thing up: a memory that made me feel good, a small piece of evidence that things were already improving, a moment of genuine appreciation for something real and present in my life.
Vesta knocking my journal off the table at 6 a.m. qualified. I am not being precious about this.
Within about three months of this practice running alongside the Neville work, the debt cleared. Fourteen months total from the layoff in March 2022. I was not expecting it to go that fast. I had been expecting years. I had been, without realizing it, practicing the timeline of someone for whom financial recovery takes a long time, which is a vibration, and vibrations inform outcomes.
I am not telling you this to imply a formula. I am telling you because the specificity matters. Fourteen months. $40,000. The emotional scale work began when I was stuck and ended when I was not. I cannot prove causation. I can tell you what happened.
The Vortex Teaching and Why It Matters for Money Specifically
Abraham Hicks has a concept called the Vortex, which I want to spend a minute on because I think it is one of the most practically useful ideas in this entire body of work, and also one of the most misrepresented.
The Vortex, as Abraham describes it, is not a spiritual spa. It is not a special state of elevated bliss you reach after enough positive thinking. It is the energetic field of everything you have ever wanted, held in vibrational escrow. Every time you have had a desire, even a small one, it goes there. The money, the relationship, the work that feels meaningful, the health, all of it is in the Vortex, waiting. Your job is to be a vibrational match for it, which means raising your emotional baseline to the frequency at which those things exist.
The instruction sounds circular until you understand the specific mechanism. The Vortex is not asking you to be happy about your current conditions. It is asking you to stop practicing the vibration of your current conditions. Those are different requests.
You can be in a difficult financial situation and still find, in any given moment, something to really appreciate. The appreciation does not require pretending the situation is good. It requires finding something real and present that is good, and practicing that instead of practicing the situation. For ten minutes. For five minutes. For the length of a cup of coffee.
And over time, practicing the better-feeling thing more than you practice the worse-feeling thing tips the baseline. And a tipped baseline changes what you move toward, what opportunities you notice, what you say yes to, what you say no to, how you carry yourself in rooms where money is being discussed.
I am not willing to call this magic. I am also not willing to call it coincidence that the fourteen months in which I went from $40,000 in debt to zero were the same fourteen months in which I was, for the first time in my adult life, deliberately and consistently practicing a better-feeling emotional state. Something changed. I have theories about the mechanism. Some of them are Neville. Some of them are nervous system. Some of them are Abraham Hicks. They are not mutually exclusive.
If you want to go further into the Vortex specifically, I've found The Vortex by Abraham Hicks: What It Means and How to Get In to be one of the cleaner explainers of the concept in practice.
The Difference Between Abraham Hicks and Neville Goddard (And Why You Might Need Both)
People ask me this a lot. Often the question is framed as if they're competing. They are not. They are addressing overlapping problems from different entry points, and understanding where they diverge helps you use both more precisely.
Neville Goddard's primary instruction is: change your self-concept and persist in the assumption of the wish fulfilled. The imaginal act is primary. The inner conversation is primary. What you hear in your head about yourself and your life is the script that materializes. Change the script, persist in the new script, and the outer world rearranges.
Abraham Hicks's primary instruction is: tend to your emotional state moment to moment, because your emotional state is the signal you are broadcasting, and the signal you broadcast determines what comes back to you. The emotion is the indicator. The emotion is also the adjustment tool.
The place where they functionally converge is the felt sense of the wish fulfilled. Neville calls it "feeling is the secret." Abraham calls it vibrational alignment with what's in the Vortex. Both require you to find the emotional reality of having the thing before the thing arrives. Both warn against the trap of practicing the absence, which is what most people accidentally do when they focus on how much they want something they don't yet have.
Where they differ, and this matters for people who get stuck: Neville assumes you can find the feeling of having. Abraham builds you a ladder to get there. If you are someone whose emotional baseline is low enough, or whose nervous system is activated enough around money specifically, that you really cannot access the feeling of having (the Neville instruction) without first clearing some of the static (the Abraham instruction), then you probably need both. You need Neville for the target and Abraham for the path to the target.
That is how I used them. Still do.
There is a third layer I added, which is the Bessel van der Kolk / Joe Dispenza somatic layer: understanding that the body stores the old patterns and that changing beliefs without also changing the physiological experience of those beliefs has a ceiling. But that is a longer conversation. The point here is that Abraham Hicks gave me the emotional mechanics that Neville, on his own, assumed I already had.
If you're looking for structured support alongside this kind of practice, the store has a small catalog worth looking at.
What Abraham Hicks Says About Money That Most People Miss
I want to end with this, because I think it is the most counterintuitive thing in the entire body of teaching, and the thing that actually changed my relationship to money at a structural level.
Abraham Hicks says, in various formulations across many years of seminars: you do not want money. You want what you think money will give you. Freedom. Security. Ease. The ability to choose how you spend your time. The feeling of not having to calculate every decision through the lens of scarcity.
Sit with that for a second.
Because if that's true, and I believe it is, then the work of manifesting money is actually the work of manifesting the feeling underneath the desire for money. And that feeling, whatever it is for you specifically, is accessible right now. Not in full. Not in the material sense. But somewhere in your present life, there is evidence of freedom. Of ease. Of moments where you are not calculating. And if you practice the feeling of those moments, you practice the vibration that money is supposed to deliver, and you become a match for more of it.
This sounds impossibly simple. It is also, in my experience, the instruction that requires the most sustained attention to follow. Because every time I practiced freedom or ease or the feeling of more-than-enough, there was a part of my nervous system that said: but look at the numbers. And I had to choose, repeatedly, to feel the feeling anyway.
That is the work. It is not passive. It is not positive thinking. It is a daily choice to practice a different emotional frequency than the one your circumstances are handing you. And over time, with enough practice, the circumstances change.
I cleared $40,000 in 14 months. I ended up in a life that looks nothing like the one I was living on that kitchen floor in March 2022. I am not pretending that the only variable was this emotional practice. But I am also not pretending the emotional practice was incidental.
This is real. It was real for me. And I think, if you're reading this, some part of you already knows it's real for you too.
The store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward, with honest reviews and no aggressive upsells. If you're looking for tools that complement this kind of work, that's the store.
