So there we were, my husband and I, in our mid fifties, having to shut down our 8-year-old, online animation software company after pouring our entire life savings into it. Seeing our money gradually disappear during those years was like squeezing honey into hot tea and watching it melt away. The reason I use honey as an analogy is that we really loved our business and there was a certain sweetness in giving all we had for something we believed in so dearly.

I will never forget the feeling of letting our staff go during that last year, little by little... and moving out of our space... and closing down the websites... and turning off the phones. Can you imagine what it was like for my husband and myself to have nothing but credit cards left... at the age where we should begin winding down to retire?

Yesterday I heard on the news that President Elect, Mr. Obama, is inheriting one and a half million people having lost their jobs in the U.S. My heart goes out to these people because I personally know the terror of having nothing, not knowing where the rent money will come from and continuing to borrow, borrow, borrow to pay all the credit card bills.

Obviously, this huge provocation in our lives was cause to rise to the truth of who we really are, and to what is truly important. Our efforts doubled to wipe out whatever unknown, unseen resistance to abundance was holding us in this pattern of not "having," although we were applying all of the teachings about "allowing" from Abraham, "scientific prayer" from Ernest Holmes, and many other teachings from amazing, awakened beings like Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Ramana Maharshi, Pujya Deepakbhai, Lester Levenson and more. But why was "The Secret" not working for us, not to mention for so many other people we knew who were also applying these teachings? Something was missing. We were in the dark, but the dawn was breaking...

Finally, the Light has begun to fill our lives with Its Presence. Of course, It was always there, for It is who we are. But now we are waking up to our own divine presence. I don't claim this as a boast about my husband and myself; what I'm saying is that we are examples of a higher consciousness that has inevitably become more alive in our culture today. What has happened is an Awakening, and I see it wherever I turn. Tens of thousands of people are awakening to some degree, all over the planet. For my husband and I, it has been a very long journey.

We are discovering through experience, which heretofore was intellectual understanding or a deep sense of knowing, that everything we could ever want is already here, within us. So our so-called struggle to make money, to allow abundance, to prosper, to get rich, to have abundance consciousness, was all affirming that we did not have that which we very much desired. An element of this awakening, that we are discovering as we are gradually "waking up," is that our attachments (and aversions) are losing their potency and we are becoming more neutral about whatever is happening. We are also losing our attachment to any outcome.

The magic of all this has been such a surprise for us - it is that as we become less attached, this is creating an "opening" for having. It is dissipating the resistance that we have been unconsciously creating by being so very attached to wanting. And so the miracle that we have discovered is that the less we want, the less we are attached, the bigger becomes the opening to "allow" abundance to land in our laps. Now, instead of spending so much time worrying, we are spending more and more time letting go, surrendering to the truth of our Being, which is where abundance and freedom live. And that is our highway to abundance consciousness.