Editors Reads Verdict
Ask and It Is Given is the foundational text of the modern law of attraction movement — a spiritual framework for aligning thought, feeling, and action that has influenced millions, and whose practical tools have genuine psychological merit regardless of the metaphysical claims.
What We Loved
- The Emotional Guidance Scale is a genuinely useful practical tool
- The emphasis on emotional alignment before action has sound psychological grounding
- The 22 processes in the second half provide concrete, varied practices
- The writing is unusually warm and non-judgmental
Minor Drawbacks
- The channelling framework — Abraham as entities — requires significant belief to accept literally
- The law of attraction as a literal mechanism lacks scientific support
- Can be used to blame people for circumstances genuinely outside their control
Key Takeaways
- → The Emotional Guidance Scale — from depression to joy — provides a framework for understanding and improving emotional state
- → Feeling better incrementally is more sustainable than trying to jump immediately from negative to positive
- → Resistance — the habitual patterns of thought that contradict what you want — is the primary obstacle to change
- → Appreciation and gratitude are not platitudes but genuine state-changers with measurable effects
- → The focus of this work is emotional alignment, which has merit regardless of the metaphysical framework
| Author | Esther Hicks and Jerry Hicks |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Hay House |
| Pages | 336 |
| Published | October 1, 2004 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Self-Help, Spirituality |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Readers drawn to spiritual self-help, the law of attraction, and emotional wellbeing practices — particularly those open to a non-mainstream spiritual framework. |
The Abraham Teachings
Ask and It Is Given presents teachings that Esther Hicks describes as channelled from a group of non-physical entities called Abraham. The framework — which Esther and Jerry Hicks have developed across dozens of books and hundreds of workshops — is one of the most influential in contemporary spirituality, providing the philosophical foundation for The Secret (2006) and the modern law of attraction movement.
The core claim is that the universe operates on the principle of attraction: thoughts and emotions that you consistently hold attract corresponding experiences. What you focus on expands. And the key to directing this principle is emotional alignment — choosing thoughts and perspectives that shift your emotional state toward wellbeing, which then creates the conditions for desired experiences to manifest.
The Emotional Guidance Scale
The book’s most practically useful contribution, regardless of how you feel about the metaphysical framework, is the Emotional Guidance Scale. Hicks identifies a spectrum of emotional states from depression and powerlessness at the bottom, through various intermediate states, to joy, appreciation, and freedom at the top.
The insight — which has genuine psychological grounding independent of the law of attraction — is that you cannot jump from profound negativity to joy in a single step. But you can move incrementally: from depression toward anger (which is actually an improvement), from anger toward frustration, from frustration toward hope. The goal is not immediate positivity but consistent incremental movement up the scale.
The Twenty-Two Processes
The second half of the book provides twenty-two concrete exercises for improving emotional state and clarifying desired outcomes. These range from visualisation practices to appreciation journals to mental scripting. The exercises have genuine practical utility regardless of whether you accept the channelling framework.
Our rating: 4.2/5 — The foundational text of the modern law of attraction movement, with practical tools that have merit independent of the metaphysical claims.
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