Likewise is it written, “And be ye not like those who forget God, and whom He hath therefore caused to forget their own selves. These are the wicked doers.”  Baha’u’llah The Four Valleys

One of the ways I have learned to look at the above quote is to substitute the qualities of God for the word God.   When you do that it means that when you forget the qualities of God within you such as love, compassion, honesty, joyfulness, courage, or determination,  then you are forgetting who you are.  You become ego and then the cause of negative action.    It stands that the corollary is also true.   When you remember your positive qualities, you remember who you are and then you can do positive in the world.

It is difficult to imagine being able to do positive action in service to the world unless and until our positive memories of our gifts are cemented in our minds.   When we access our positive memories until they become strong and fortified,  then we are propelled into the present tense with a lot of positive energy.   But getting there isn’t always so easily.

One of the ways that we lose our memory of our gifts is by feeling abandoned.   For me abandonment is like being in a dark pit with no support, no encouraging voices, just the alone feeling.  I am sure that others have other images like being stranded or marooned.    I have a hard time not going for the blame frame when I get to the feelings of abandonment.   I can pick out any number of targets, but one thing is for sure.   Blaming keeps me in the hole.   It may feel good for a couple of minutes so I usually partake, but long term it doesn’t work.

The surprising thing that gets me out of the hole is to start making a list and then picturing what my positive gifts are.    God has placed an abundance of gifts in each of us, and it is when we access are memories of them that we started feeling encouraged and then acting with them.

Abandonment can have another darker side than just blaming.   It can start in blaming,  hold the negative memory of how you were abandoned, and then act in gradually increasing harmful ways that are both self-centered and destructive.   It seems like the worse the abandonment is within someone, the darker their actions become.

The key to getting out of abandonment is to first recognize that you are feeling it.   Then you can it describe usually metaphorically.    This does not help the feelings go away at all, but at least it gives you a starting point for taking responsibility for the issue.    The best way to describe abandonment is to think about it as a state of not having access to the memories of your gifts.     When you can access your gifts in memory, then you don’t feel alone anymore.   It is that simple or that complicated.

So the simplicity is to find pictures in your memory of your gifts.  It is as if you are walking into the positive past and picking out all the positive feelings that you want to feel.   Then when you have the memories inside of yourself,  you can walk back into the present and do some incredible things that are beneficial in nature.

The difficult step is to let go of the dark pit or stranded island feeling of being alone and abandoned because it is easy to get attached to someone else getting you out of your pit as if someone else should do it because after all they left you alone.   However, expecting someone else to rescue your abandonment just doesn’t work.   So it is best to give it up and start taking the walk in the positive past.    The dark pit is a mental state, not an actual one.

You cannot have been abandoned by someone unless they are already abandoned themselves.   This is why it is so not good to take things personally.  Easier said than done I suppose.   So let’s get out of our pits and start remembering our gifts.