I do a lot of things to help make my dreams come true in the physical world. I take a lot of action steps. I do the things I should do. I do the things I’m inspired to do. I seek answers and solutions and I work at achieving my goals many hours a day. I don’t give up. I don’t accept rejection as failure. I ‘m determined. I persevere.

But there are some other things I do, too. These are not necessarily done on the physical plane…or not all of them. They have more to do with using my mental focus to create what I want in my life. Some of you may find these actions, if you will, somewhat woo woo, metaphysical or spiritual, but some of the most successful athletes, businesspeople and creatives I know use these same steps in one form or another. So, today I thought I’d share them with you.

First, I get very clear about what it is I want to create. For some people, this might be a new job or relationship. For others it could be better health or a new car. Because I work with a lot of aspiring writers, I’m going to use a writing example. Maybe you want to create a career as a writer, a published book (a career as an author), a relationship with an agent, an acceptance by a publication, or something else related to your writing. In this first step, write this down in fine detail, but do so in the present tense (as if you had already manifested what you desire). You can write about it in the past tense, too. Create a clear picture of what you want using words.

The second step often is missing from this process. Consider how your creation–your article, book, career as a writer–will serve others? How can you give to others by getting what you want? Will you donate money to charity? Or will your book or article actually help solve an important problem people have? Can you give the gift of support via your writing? Or can you go a step farther than that? Consider how you will share your creation into the big picture of actually creating it.

Third, read this description of what you want aloud. When you do, instil in it all the feeling you can muster. By feeling I mean all the emotion you would have in this moment if you already had what you want. How would it feel to have just gotten off the phone with your agent, to be holding your published book, to see your article in a magazine, to pay your mortgage with the income you make as a writer? Don’t forget to imagine what it will feel like to share your dream come true with others. Muster up these emotions and combine them with your imagined scenario.

Third, close your eyes and consider what actions will bring  your dream into reality. What must you do? More importantly, what do you feel inspired to do? Or what do you feel intuitively that you must do? Create a to-do list and start taking action to help bring your desire into your experience.

I employ these steps all the time. In particular, I use them when bringing my dreams into reality feels difficult, or when I feel things aren’t going as I’d like.

I call this Kabbalistic conscious creation. It’s similar to other deliberate creation processes, but they tend to not include the aspect of giving. When I teach this, I also speak about the four worlds. You can learn more about this in my book, The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation.

Try the process, and then tell me how it works for you. Leave me a comment, and tell me your results.

Over and over again we hear how we must connect our thoughts and feelings to create what we want. Even more important is simply to feel good.

Lately I’ve been having a hard time getting to that feel-good place. Then I watched this video of the Black Eyed Peas singing “I Gotta Feeling” at the kick off of Oprah Winfrey’s 24th season, and I started smiling and feeling pretty good. It wasn’t the singing that did it, though–even though the words of the song are enough to raise my spirits a bit. It started with the lady up front jumping up and down dancing and then the flash mob dance that ensued. Then it was Oprah’s joy and wonder. Wow.

Oprah said it best,”That was the coolest thing ever!” Watch and feel good.

Lately I’ve been feeling stuck. I want to be unstuck. Ever been there?

I’ve tried prayer. I talked to God. I cried to God. I pleaded with God.

I tried counseling. And I got really honest with myself and with others, baring my deepest feelings.

Today in the car I decided to follow Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s advice and sing. I sang along with the songs my son played on my Ipod.

I still felt stuck.

Tomorrow I will get off my butt and start moving my body. I will exercise. No more staying at my desk all day long. I need to get the energy moving.

I also will start doing my own Kabbalistic conscious creation visualization and exercise on a daily basis again.This will help me focus on what I want in my life rather than on what I don’t want–on being unstuck rather than stuck.

Additionally I will implement affirmations into my daily practice–a.m. and p.m. These will help convince me on a conscious and unconscious level of who I truly am and can be.

And I will start using gratitude exercises in the morning and evening, reminding myself of the things for which I am thankful.

And I’ll get one thing knocked off my to-do list each day that gets me closer to my Big Goals.

The point is to change my energy as well as my thoughts and to feel like I am getting unstuck, almost like I’m pushing a car out of a muddy rut.

That’s the problem with getting stuck: All you see is the mud. All you hear is the spinning tires. And all you feel is exhaustion from trying to get unstuck.

You have to do something different. Wait for the mud to dry. Turn the tires. Reverse. Get out of the car and walk…or run.

What do you do when you get stuck? What gets you stuck?

As I wrote in yesterday’s post, we must give as well as receive. The two are integrally connected. Indeed, when we give, we open ourselves to receiving. We also become “like God,” since God is the Giver and we are the receivers. We, therefore, move closer to God, reducing the separation we tend to feel or to believe exists between us and the Divine.

Yet, as I explained yesterday, if we only give we don’t fulfill our Divine purpose, which is to receive. So, today we go on to part two and learn how to be both givers and receivers.

Receiving and then Giving for the Sake of Giving God Pleasure

We are supposed to develop a will to receive in order to give pleasure to our Creator. Of course, we are personifying God, but bear with me. We accept gifts from God, because it makes God happy. That’s all we have to “do.”  The giving is simply in accepting the gift.

Plus, since God wanted to give to us for the sake of giving us pleasure, we achieve true affinity of form with God when we do the same in return. Prior to this, we do, indeed, become givers and “like” God but not in the total sense of what I’m talking about here.

Okay, so the fact that God receives pleasure seems a bit far fetched, I know. This takes us back to this idea of God as a “man” or “woman” with feelings. I don’t really want to go there.

If, however, we simply say that the formula involves a Giver and a receiver, by not accepting what we are given we don’t complete the formula. To better understand how the process works, think of God like a power source and humans like electronic pieces of equipment. If we (the pieces of equipment) don’t receive (allow in) the electrical current, we short circuit the system. We send the electricity back to Source where it goes “ZZZZT!” Now, that probably wouldn’t feel too good at that end, would it? Plus, the flow of electricity would be stopped at our end and sent back. Our equipment wouldn’t run well, if at all, nor would we receive what we need. At the other end, the Source remains unlimited and the energy can be resent, but the circuitry along the way could eventually become damaged if we continued to only give or not to receive. Plus, by only giving and not receiving, eventually, we’d run out of power. Like a battery-run electric item, our battery would eventually run out of juice. We would find ourselves lacking what we need most.  I think you get the idea.

We want to transform our receiving into giving because this “gives pleasure” to our Creator or fulfills the purpose of Creation. As written in In the Shadow of the Ladder,” In Kabbalah, giving to each other is likened to giving to God. By using the will to receive in order to give, we become in affinity of form with the Source. We become one with the Creator. This is a new and complete form of vessel that did not exist prior to the creation of the worlds. This vessel now fulfills the ultimate purpose of creation in that it enables God to give pleasure to His creatures without leading to separation between the vessel and the light.”  In other words, we can receive all that we desire including oneness with God.

And at the end of the day – at the end of our lives – we can’t take any of the “stuff” with us. What we will want more than anything at that last moment is to know we are one with our Creator.

And What About Giving to Others?

So, how does all of this relate to what we Jews call tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and tzedakah, or charity?  Here’s how I understand it.  First we must heal ourselves. The healing (tikkun) we must do on ourselves revolves around manifesting a new desire – the desire for a higher consciousness. This consciousness is one that actually sees or experiences receiving as giving.  In other words, in our minds and in our experience the two acts must become one and the same.  When we accomplish this, we truly become one with God. We tap into the Divine flow of light or energy or “gifts” that constantly flows forth, and enable God to fulfill the purpose of creation. This purpose revolves around God giving us pleasure -desires granted, needs filled, fulfillment in whatever form we conceptualize.

And when we give, we become channels for God’s light and energy. We become that very same constant current of electricity, that ever-flowing river of abundance, that very same Source of all that is, ever was and ever will be.

If that’s not good enough reason to give, I don’t know what is.

If you liked these two posts, you might enjoy The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation.

One of the major premises in my work, both my writing and teaching, revolves around the need to give as well as to receive. The two are integrally connected. Indeed, when we give, we open ourselves to receiving. Yet, we don’t want to give in order to receive.

When we give, we make room to receive, for something else to move into the space we have created. In the Kabbalistic story of creation, God contracting to make space for all of Creation. In the void that was created, God sent a beam of Divine light or energy. From that, everything we know of as the world in which we live–including ourselves–come into being. Each time we create space by giving, Divine light and energy in all its many forms fills the void we create as well. This becomes a constant flow of giving, receiving, giving, receiving, giving, and so on.

In my current work writing The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation in its full length, I have been trying to fully understand the true nature of giving – at least as put forth by Rabbi Yehuda Lev Ashlag. Relying on In the Shadow of the Ladder, a wonderful book on his teachings, as my primary source, I’d like to grapple a bit with this idea here and to ask you to try and implement the concept of giving on a deeper level in your life.

Today, I will give you one part of the equation:

God is the Giver, We are the Receivers

Let’s begin with the idea the God’s nature is to give. The Creator is a Giver and we were created as receivers. Typically, our will has us focused on receiving for ourselves alone. I know that sounds terrible, but it’s true. Most of us are focused on our own desires, and with good reason. First of all, it’s our nature as pure receivers to desire things for ourselves, and in this physical word we often feel we have unfulfilled needs. We need to receive more.

Our goal, however, lies in becoming not only a receiver, but a giver. As I said, giving opens us up to receiving. Ah, the ego, says, “That’s great. I can get more.” However, we want to aim for a more spiritual reason to give. Yes, we want to get more, but not necessarily more material things. We want more spiritual things. You see, as long as you are a receiver and God is a Giver, a separation, albeit possible a perceived separation, exists between you and God. Most people – at least those on a spiritual path – would like to draw closer to God. What we actually want to get from giving is a connection to our Creator.

Giving for the Sake of Giving

So, we begin to place restrictions on how we use our will to receive. Even though it is our nature to receive for ourselves alone, we try simply to give instead of to receive.  We give for the sake of giving. We receive in order to give to others.  This makes us givers. And if we are givers, we are like God. We achieve something called “affinity of form” with God, and the separation between us and our Creator diminishes or disappears. Thus, we feel our Divine connection, and we receive what we desire – a relationship and a connection to our Creator.

However, there’s one problem with this scenario. We aren’t fulfilling our end of the cosmic bargain. God created humans for the purpose of giving us pleasure. Pleasure comes in the form of receiving Divine gifts. (That’s right, the fulfillment of our desires.) God was supposed to give, and we were supposed to receive. If we only give, we can’t receive. If we don’t receive, God receives no “pleasure.”

For today, just consider this concept. Think about how you give and how you receive. Consider if you give more than you receive or if you receive more than you give. Think about the idea that you are born to receive. How does that make you feel?

Tomorrow we will go on to part 2.

Two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco Writing for Change Conference. There I met an amazing woman: Cami Walker. She authored the book 29 Gifts and started 29Gifts.org. Cami lives with the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. While she suffers from many of the symptoms and for a while could hardly walk, she now mostly walks on her own, manages to work several days a week and even goes to conferences and meets people like me. And she claims this is because she changed her attitude by giving 29 gifts in 29 days. This opened her up to the work of gratitude, the link between giving and receiving, and the fact that God exists in all things.

Pretty amazing stuff, huh? Knew this stuff already?

Either way, Cami’s challenge is worth taking. I started giving my 29 gifts three days ago. If you want to take the challenge you can read about it Cami’s story here or about the origins of the 29 day giving challenge here. You can read the book, you can log in at 29gifts.org and blog about your experience, or you can simply start giving gifts. I’ve read the book and I’m blogging about my experience on the site.

I suggest you read about the challenge and what types of gifts to give. They don’t need to be big gifts. They simply need to be conscious gifts. Even a prayer for someone counts as a gift. A helping action can count as a gift. A kind word a small deed…these count.

I decided to take the challenge not only because I thought it was a great idea, but also because I was intrigued by Cami’s story–both the turn around of her medical condition and the publication of her book. I also was interested in the dovetailing of her book and mine: The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation. In this book I talk about giving from a place of soul purpose. People have a desire to manifest their desires. When our desires stem from our soul purpose and we manifest those desires  with the intention of sharing them — giving them to others — we tap into the Divine flow of giving and receiving. God is the ultimate Giver. We were created as receivers. However, to draw close to God, we must also act as Givers. Then we can be one with the Source.

Cami says basically the same thing in much simpler terms. When we give, we receive. The two acts are part of the same continuum. And when we participate in acts of giving, we feel gratitude and closer to God.

I don’t care whose work you read, the point remains the same. Give. Don’t do it because you want to receive. Just start giving and watch what happens. You’ll be amazed.

For those of you who know nothing about The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation, or the coaching programs I offer in conjunction with this booklet, I’ve decided to begin offering a monthly audio coaching tip here. This gives you a chance to experience what Kabbalistic conscious creation coaching is all about.

This month we will start at the beginning. This coaching tip discusses why discovering your soul’s purpose is important to manifesting your physical and spiritual desires. It also touches on the need to share what you create. These are two steps not include in most other Law of Attraction tools or models. This also allows for spiritual manifestation–getting close to God.

To listen to your Kabbalistic Conscious Creation audio coaching tip, just click on this link:  Kabbalistic Conscious Creation Coaching Tip#1

For more information on Kabbalistic Conscious Creation Coaching, click here. To read the book, The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation, 7 Steps to Mystically Manifesting Your Physical and Spiritual Desires, click here.

This evening begins the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Jews all over the world will go to synagogue and pray, beginning the yearly cycle of teshuvah, or return.

Return to what? To God and to our best selves. We review our lives and behavior over the last year and we make amends with God, with ourselves and with those we have harmed along the way. We set our intention to be better people over the course of the coming year. We set new targets and promise to try harder to hit the mark, admitting we may have missed the mark this past year.

In the process, we rededicate ourselves to our relationship with God. We deepen our bond or our relationship with the One who is within and without, We aksi ask for forgiveness and for another year of life as well as for our personal prayers to be answered during the course of the year.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi teaches that the High Holy Day period—from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance, all the way through until Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles—our prayers, rededication and teshuvah build the “God-field” for the coming year.  This God-field, which is the permeable membrane between the Infinite and finite, is not the Divine itself but rather the form in which the Infinite comes to us.

Rabbi Marcia Prager recently wrote about this teaching of Reb Zalman’s and explained that it’s important to pray with love and inclusiveness, allowing your human consciousness to attract the flow of Divinity and then to return the flow with love and dedication to its Source. By becoming an open channel for Source energy in this manner, we co-create the God-field, Reb Marcia explained. In this way, we create loving harmony with one another, becoming better stewards of the earth and healers of the environment and society. “Then we will see our prayers work and produce the goods results we pray for,” she says.

I found this teaching from Reb Marcia and Reb Zalman quite striking, since it is much like what I write about in The Kabbalah of Conscious Creation. When we create from the place of wanting to give as well as receive, our desires (prayers) become manifest.

However, it’s important also to connect with God, to feel the permeability of the membrane we call the God-field. When we can feel that the Infinite and the finite, Creator and created, Giver and receiver are not separate at all—in fact are one—then we do indeed, find our prayers answered.

May we all have our prayers answered this Rosh Hashanah and in the New Year…and may we all feel our connection with Source.

L’shana  tova. Happy New Year.

Much of the time, we are consumed with desires. We want to have something different than what we now have. We want to be something different than what we now are. We want to go somewhere different than where we now exist.

Although God created us in such a way that it is natural for us to have strong desire, it’s also important for us to learn to accept where we are and what we have in this moment. We have to learn to have desires and also be in the moment—and feel okay in the moment. If we are constantly longing for something else, this causes us to “future” in a negative way. We constantly creatively vision about the future and create negative thoughts and feelings that go with those visions because we don’t have what we desire.

Thus, we must learn feel good about our desires and then to move into acceptance. We must feel “okay” with where we are and with what we have despite the fact that we possess as yet unfulfilled desires.

If we remember that God is in the moment—not in our futuring and dreaming and visioning. That’s why creation happens in the moment. We create our desires in the moment. Knowing this helps us learn acceptance.

Simply be with God in the moment and know that as you connect with God and feel good about that connection, your desires are being fulfilled. Let God know about your desires and then let them go: Let go and let God.

While it is all well and good to want “things” in the physical world, and it is part of our nature as physical beings to want and to need material stuff, the Kabbalists teach that such desires — and even the fulfillment of those desires — will never make us happy.  Additionally, they will never open us to the flow of goodness and pleasure that God is waiting to give to us.

Thus, we must change what we want.  First, we must want a new attitude or way of approaching life and all it gives us — or doesn’t give us.  We need to find a way to simply be okay with our current situation.  This doesn’t mean we don’t want to change it for the better or take action to accomplish this. Until we manifest this desire, however, we choose not to suffer. We learn to be in the now, in the moment, okay with what is, with what we have. We learn to see what we have in a different light — with gratitude.  We must feel good where we are while acknowledging that we want to be somewhere else, we want to receive something different.

Secondly, we must develop a desire for something different. We must want a new desire.  We have to want to manifest a desire to receive not for ourselves alone but for the sake of giving unconditionally to others.  In affect, the Kabablists tell us that what we should desire is a new consciousness.  Only when we manifest this new consciousness will we truly be happy.  And only then can we open ourselves fully to the flow of Infinite goodness and pleasure.

If these concepts interest you, you can learn more here and here.