he first time I tried to apply Abraham Hicks, I was sitting on my bed in Greenpoint with my laptop open, watching a YouTube compilation of Esther Hicks at one of the workshops, and I was doing the thing where you sort of nod along like you already understand, even though you are very much not understanding.
The clip kept cutting to audience members asking about their divorces and their money problems and their sick parents, and Esther would say something like, reach for a better-feeling thought, and everyone would laugh or cry or write something in their notebooks, and I would think: yes, absolutely, a better-feeling thought, got it. And then I would close the laptop and feel exactly the same as before.
That was 2022. I was thirty. I had already found Neville Goddard through Priya, already had the first weeks of the practice under my belt, already believed, somewhere in the back of my skull, that something was shifting. But Abraham Hicks felt like a different country. One where everyone spoke fluently and I kept ordering the wrong thing at the restaurant.
It took me probably eight months to figure out what I was doing wrong. And it was not what I expected.
The Problem Was Not the Teachings
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I want to be careful here, because I think a lot of people land on Abraham Hicks content and have the same experience I did and then conclude that the material is either too abstract, or too cheerful, or designed for a certain kind of person who can just decide to feel good and then actually feel good. Like it requires a personality type they were not issued.
That was my conclusion for a while. I thought the problem was temperament. I am not naturally a sunny person. I am a person who reads Sylvia Plath and drinks too much coffee and once spent forty-five minutes in McCarren Park thinking about Joan Didion's line about self-respect. I was not the target audience, I decided. Abraham Hicks was for people who could sustain genuine enthusiasm about their desires. I could sustain cynicism about my desires, which is almost the same thing but pointed in the wrong direction.
What I did not understand then, and what I eventually had to learn through a lot of failed attempts and one very patient conversation with Beatriz at a coffee shop in Bushwick, was that the issue had nothing to do with personality type.
The issue was that I was trying to perform the teachings instead of apply them.
There is a difference between those two things that sounds obvious when you say it out loud and is almost invisible when you are in the middle of it.
What Performing It Looks Like
Performing Abraham Hicks looks like this: you decide you want something (let's say money, because that is what I wanted, though I was embarrassed about how specifically I wanted it). You find the Abraham Hicks material on that subject. You listen. You understand, intellectually, that the idea is to move up the emotional scale, to reach for relief, to stop pushing against what is and start flowing toward what could be.
And then you try to manufacture enthusiasm about money. You try to feel excited. You sit with your eyes closed and you imagine having more and you wait for the feeling to arrive, and it does not arrive, and you try harder, and it still does not arrive, and then you open your eyes and feel vaguely fraudulent.
Or, the worse version: the feeling does arrive, briefly, because you worked yourself up to it through sheer will, and then twenty minutes later you are back at your bank account and the original desperation is still there, maybe a little more intense for having been interrupted.
That cycle wore me down. I was doing it for weeks and the only consistent result was a low-grade feeling of being bad at something that was supposed to be natural.
Beatriz, when I described this to her, did not say anything sympathetic. She said: "You're treating it like a performance review."
She was not wrong.
What Changed When I Stopped Trying to Feel Good
The actual shift came when I stopped aiming for feeling good as the destination and started aiming for feeling slightly less bad as the next step.
This sounds like a consolation prize. It is not. This is actually what Abraham Hicks teaches, and I had been either misunderstanding it or skipping over the part that made it real.
The emotional scale (if you have not encountered it yet, the Abraham Hicks Emotional Scale: How to Use It Daily piece I wrote gets into the mechanics in more detail) is not a ladder you are supposed to climb in one afternoon. It is a map of incremental movement. The teaching is not "jump from despair to joy." The teaching is "move from despair to anger, because anger is relief from despair, and from anger you can move to frustration, and from frustration to hopefulness, and eventually, over days or weeks, to something that actually feels like ease."
When I understood that, the pressure evaporated.
Because I could do that. I could find something in me that was slightly angrier than despairing. That is not a high bar. That is a bar I could clear in most emotional states I inhabit.
The first time I deliberately used the scale this way, I was sitting with my bank account open in front of me and I was in that particular flavor of dread that feels like a physical weight on the sternum. And instead of trying to flip immediately into gratitude or excitement or abundance thinking, I just asked myself: what is one step up from here?
And the honest answer was anger. Specifically, I was angry at myself for having taken jobs I hated for eight years in exchange for a salary that had, despite being objectively decent, left me forty thousand dollars in debt anyway. That was anger I could access. I did not have to manufacture it. It was already there.
And sitting with that anger, just letting it be present without spiraling into blame, felt like something shifting. Not dramatically. Not like a movie scene. Like a door that had been stuck finally moving a quarter inch.
Why Forcing High Vibe States Backfires
Here is something that took me longer to understand than it should have: when you force yourself into a state you do not actually occupy, your nervous system knows.
I had been on antidepressants for two years by then (from 2020 to 2022, which was the right call at the time, and I say that without any drama about it). Coming off them, I was relearning what my emotional baseline actually was without pharmaceutical assistance. And one of the things I noticed, in that period, was how clearly I could tell the difference between a feeling I was really in and a feeling I was reaching for.
The genuine feelings had weight and texture. The performed ones felt like holding a pose.
And when you are holding a pose, your body is in a kind of low-level stress state. The effort of maintaining something that is not real activates the same systems that activate under threat. Which means you are trying to attract from a place of effort-based stress rather than from a place of ease, and Abraham Hicks is very clear that attraction works from ease. From the place of already being okay. From what the teachings call the vortex, which is not a mystical location but a description of the state you are in when your energy is coherent rather than contradicted.
Beatriz explained it to me once using an analogy I have never forgotten. She said it was like trying to fall asleep by trying very hard to fall asleep. The trying is the thing that keeps you awake.
That is what I was doing with Abraham Hicks for months. I was trying very hard.
The Pivot: Appreciation Instead of Visualization
One of the Abraham Hicks techniques I had the most resistance to was the idea of scripting or visualization. Not because I disagree with it (I use SATS from Neville Goddard regularly, which is a related practice), but because every time I tried to visualize having what I wanted, I would get about forty-five seconds in and then my brain would offer the counterpoint.
I'd be imagining financial ease and my brain would say: but what about the credit card statement.
The practice I found that actually worked for me, at least as the entry point, was appreciation. Not gratitude journaling in the conventional sense, which can slide into performance the same way everything else can. More like what happens in the opening scenes of You've Got Mail when Kathleen Kelly is walking through the Upper West Side in autumn and the whole sequence is just about her noticing what is already good. There is no striving in it. She is not trying to feel something. She is just seeing.
That is the version of appreciation I was after.
I would sit with a cup of coffee in the morning (the first cup, before anything else, before the phone, before the laptop) and I would look around my apartment and find specific things that were really okay. Not things I was supposed to be grateful for. Things I was actually, in this moment, glad to have.
The morning light through the kitchen window. Vesta, who is deeply committed to sitting on whatever I am trying to read. The particular way the apartment smells in the morning.
Small, specific, real. Nothing manufactured.
And what I noticed was that ten minutes of that shifted something in me that forty minutes of forced visualization had failed to shift. Because I was not performing. I was just noticing what was already present.
From that place, it was much easier to extend the feeling forward. To say: and I can imagine more of this. And more of this feels possible from here. The movement was lateral before it was upward. And that made all the difference.
The Segment Intending Practice (and Why I Kept Forgetting It)
There is a practice Abraham Hicks calls segment intending. The basic idea is that before you move from one segment of your day to another (getting in the car, starting a meeting, sitting down to work, making a phone call), you pause and set an intention for how you want that segment to feel.
When I first read about this, I thought it was too simple to do anything. I also thought it would require a level of presence that I, a person who once walked into a Midtown coffee shop so deep in work anxiety that I ordered someone else's name, did not possess.
What I eventually found was that the simplicity is the point, and the forgetting is not a failure.
Let me say that again, because it took me a long time to actually believe it: forgetting to do the practice is not a failure. It is just information about where your attention lives by default. You notice you forgot, you set an intention for the next segment, and you continue. There is no accumulating debt of missed practices.
I was terrible at segment intending for the first month I tried it. I would remember to do it once in the morning and then forget entirely until I was lying in bed at night going through the day. And then I would feel bad about having forgotten. Which is obviously the exact opposite of what the practice is for.
The shift was small: I stopped treating each instance of forgetting as a data point about my character and started treating it as just a gap in the loop. Like a dropped stitch. You pick it up where you find it and keep going.
Now it is something I do, imperfectly and inconsistently, before the parts of my day that tend to carry the most charge. Before a call with a client. Before sitting down to write something difficult. Before a conversation I am not sure how to have. Not every time. Often enough that it actually does something.
On Not Believing It When You Start
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The biggest barrier to applying Abraham Hicks without it feeling forced, I think, is the requirement to believe something you have not yet experienced.
Neville Goddard asks the same thing, in different language. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Walk as if. Live from the end. The Abraham Hicks for Beginners piece I wrote gets into this specific tension (the gap between intellectual understanding and embodied knowing), but the short version is this: you do not have to believe the whole system to start.
You have to believe a single step.
Do you believe that how you feel influences your perception of your circumstances? Because that is true even before you add any metaphysics to it. Joe Dispenza has spent years articulating the neuroscience version of this (the way the brain filters reality through the emotional state it is already in, the way chronic stress literally narrows what you can perceive), and if you find it easier to come in through that door, come in through that door. The teaching is the same.
You do not have to believe in the vortex as a cosmological fact to notice that when you are in genuine appreciation, you see possibility that you cannot see when you are in despair. That is not woo. That is just how perception works.
Starting there, with what you can actually verify in your own experience, and then building slowly, is more durable than trying to swallow the whole framework at once.
What I could verify, in March 2022 on my kitchen floor, was that how I was feeling had something to do with what I was able to see as possible. That was enough to start. Three weeks after Priya sent me the Neville Goddard audiobook at three in the morning, I got laid off with $8,400 in severance and a six-month freelance contract appeared six days after that. I did not understand the mechanics of why that happened. I still do not, fully. But the pattern was clear enough that I stayed with the practice.
Abraham Hicks came later, as a layer on top of what was already working. And it came easier once I stopped trying to use it as a performance.
What Applying It Actually Looks Like Now
Four years into this practice (four years, which still surprises me sometimes), the way I use Abraham Hicks is much quieter than I expected.
I listen to clips when something specific is bothering me. Not to find the answer, but to find the angle I am not seeing. Esther Hicks has a way of reframing a question that is really useful for the moments when you are too close to something to see it clearly. It is a little like how Priya will ask the question that reorients the whole conversation, except Priya does it in real time and sometimes with a raised eyebrow.
I use the emotional scale as a diagnostic, not a prescription. When I notice I am feeling something I do not want to be feeling, I try to identify where on the scale it actually sits, rather than bypassing it. If I am in frustration, I am not going to get to joy today. But I can probably get to hopefulness, and hopefulness is a much better place from which to make decisions.
I use the appreciation practice in the morning, usually while the coffee is brewing. Specific, real, small. Not a list of what I should be grateful for. What I am actually glad about right now, in this body, in this apartment, with this specific quality of light.
And I use the The Vortex by Abraham Hicks: What It Means and How to Get In as the conceptual north star, not as a destination I am supposed to have arrived at by some particular morning. The vortex is not a state you earn and then maintain perfectly. It is a state you return to, repeatedly, from wherever you have been.
Daniel is in my life now, and I will say this without making it a fairy tale: the people and circumstances that have arrived in the last four years have not felt like reward. They have felt like resonance. Like things that were always possible becoming visible once I stopped blocking the view with performed enthusiasm.
That distinction matters to me. Reward implies you did enough. Resonance implies you became clear enough. Those are very different things to aim for.
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The Part Nobody Tells You About
Here is the thing that the workshops and the clips do not spend much time on, because it is harder to make exhilarating: the practice is often boring.
Not in a bad way. In the way that any real practice is boring. Showing up on a Tuesday when you are tired and you have a deadline and nothing is feeling particularly aligned, and doing the two minutes of appreciation anyway, and not having a dramatic experience as a result, and doing it again the next day.
That is the practice. The exhilaration, when it comes, is a byproduct of the consistency. Like how Anne Lamott writes about writing, about showing up and making the small thing because the large thing comes from the accumulation of small things, not from waiting for inspiration to arrive.
I had to learn to be okay with undramatic practice. With the appreciation that does not feel like much in the moment but is building something over time. With the segment intending that I forget to do and pick back up without guilt. With the emotional scale as a daily calibration tool rather than a dramatic ascent.
The dramatic ascent does happen, sometimes. There are days when something shifts in a way that feels almost physical, when the clarity comes in and everything looks different. But those days are not the goal. They are not even where the work happens.
The work happens on the Tuesday mornings.
If you are new to this, or if you have been trying and it keeps feeling forced, the store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, including some that address the nervous system piece that I think is often the missing layer for people who are intellectually sold on the teachings but cannot seem to get them into their bodies.
The body piece is real. I learned that the hard way, and I would send anyone who is stuck in the performance trap toward somatic work as a companion practice before anything else.
Because the reason it feels forced is almost always this: you are asking your mind to generate a feeling that your nervous system does not feel safe enough to inhabit. The mind can understand the teaching in forty-five minutes. The nervous system takes a lot longer.
Go slower than you think you need to. Find the step that is one degree better than where you are. Trust that that is enough.
It is enough.
