As the Spirit Moves Me

I took some time today to go out and look at and appreciate a few trees in my yard. I have a lot of trees because I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. Some of them are very old and tower over our house. Others are small and struggling to stay alive during the hard conditions under which they live.

I did this because today Jews celebrate the holiday of Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish New Year for the trees. This holiday is celebrated on the 15th of Shvat, a Hebrew month that usually falls between mid-January and mid-February.

Originally this holiday served to calculate the age of the trees for tithing. Leviticus 19:23-25 states that no fruit may be taken from a tree during its first three years of life. Fruit from the fourth year was given to God as a burnt offering, and in the fifth year the fruit could be eaten. Trees aged one year on Tu B’Shvat, so in many ways Tu B’Shvat is the birthday of the trees.

The holiday is also celebrated at a time when the sap in trees begins to rise within their trunks unnoticed. The trees, still leafless in most places in the world, are beginning to grow, bud and come back to life. They are getting ready to leaf out and bear fruit once again. (Although here in California some trees, like my orange tee, are heavy with fruit!)

As I looked at the trees in my yard, I thought about these things. How much growth goes on within us unnoticed? When does our creative nature begin to rise up and flow? Is it the same for each person?  And when are we ready to give the fruits of that growth to the world?

I firmly believe we all have a God-given purpose in this lifetime. Our desire to create in the world often comes from that purpose, like my own desire to write. But I think first we must want to create for a higher purpose. The ancient rabbis and Kabbalists would say we must create for God—everything must be done for God, given to God—just as the first fruits taken from the tree in the third year were sacrificed. Only then, when we are clear about the true purpose of anything created in this world can we offer it to mere mortals, thus fulfilling our purpose on Earth.

Does that happen in the fourth year of our life? Probably not. Does it happen when we are forty? Maybe. Can we put an age on it as we Jews do for the trees, I doubt it.

I think , however,  when we become clear about our purpose, how that connects us to something greater than ourselves, and the fact that we want to fulfill it  our ability to create happens as naturally as the leaves burst forth, the blossoms open, and the fruit grows on trees.

What do you think?

February 8th, 2012 | Tags: creation, purpose, Tu B'Shvat | Category: Creativity, Giving, human potential, purpose, Tu B'shvat | Leave a comment

Many of you know that the topic of moving through fear is one have often visited on this blog and that I sometimes broach as a speaker. I think it’s imperative to learn to conquer our fears so we can live our lives fully and accomplish our goals. I rarely publish an interview on this blog, but I felt compelled to do so after reading a free ebook, called The Flinch, by Julien Smith, which is also about moving through fear—or overcoming fear. The Flinch also is about asking people to change, compelling them to change. In that way, Julien is a change agent. So, I was thrilled to get a chance to interview him and to share that interview with you.

Julien is a New York Times bestselling author of two books, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust and The Flinch. He is a consultant and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over fifteen years, from early BBSs and flash mobs to social web as we know it today. He also was one of the first Twitter users and one of the first people to podcast in 2004 (which is impressive to me since I’ve just struggled to get my first podcast up). He has worked with numerous media publications, such as Sirius Satellite Radio, GQ, CBS, Cosmopolitan, and more.

The following interview is part of a three part interview. You can read the other parts here and here. In this part, Julien talks about our bad habit of “flinching” when we expect to experience pain and how to train ourselves to consciously build the strength to get past our fear–to stop flinching.

I just finished reading your newest book, The Flinch, which, I loved. For those who have not read it, could you just briefly explain the concept?

Sure. I guess in a way The Flinch, in a nutshell, is about our pathological lack of courage as individuals. Many of the things we shy away from are, in fact, not painful, not damaging, not bad in any way, but we just sort of shy away from them out of habit. So, really it’s a book about how to break out of bad habits and break into good ones.

That’s something most people need to do. Fear stops people from doing what they want, from writing and publishing a book, trying something new, getting into or out of a new relationships or jobs, creating the life they desire and succeeding. Can you talk about that a bit?

You start to notice as you speak to a lot of people who are trying to make change in their life that there are two kinds of people. One is a general optimist who knows at the end of everything they’ll end up fine. The other kind doesn’t explicitly say so but often feels like they have a lot of anxiety around life, let’s say quitting a job or something like that. The feeling is, ‘I’ll be broke and then I’ll die,’ or something like that. That’s the kind of sentiment that they have around change, even though they’ve never verbalized it that way. What I tried to create in The Flinch is a feeling, through a number of exercises, that you can do painful things and survive and be better as a result of them. I think that’s a series of habits that you need to develop.
Any time they feel something is difficult, many people just quit. I know I just quit often. That was a terrible habit of mine until I broke it.

That’s a pretty common habit for most people. You suggest that people should get in the ring, like a fighter.

Exactly. The reason for the title of the book, The Flinch, is because I spent a lot of time around athletes and self-defense professionals and officers and so on.  I noticed that the people who understand these things the most are the people who feel it in a visceral way. Some of the best reactions from people about the book have been from swimmers, for example. Swimmers are like, ‘I feel exactly like this every single time I’m about to do an open-water swim.’ And you have, of course, boxers and people who do Muay Thai. Athletes naturally understand this.

I think most people find it really hard to create change. Why do we not change even when we say we want to? Is it a fear of change?

Let’s talk in a more specific manner to try and sort of make this more concrete for people. They get this impression, ‘Oh, why is it so hard for me.’ We have no faith in our ability to reconstruct, and we have no faith in our own ability to make things better for ourselves. Some of the simplest things that you can do are to put yourself in situations where there really are no sort of negative social or psychological or physical consequences for what you do, but you feel this anxiety—what I call the flinch.

 

So try exercises in meeting strangers; you know, strangers are something very new in our lives. A hundred years ago there were no cities, or very few…Ninety-nine percent of the people we see every day are strangers, right? So this is new and in a way a sort of anxiety creating thing. We don’t feel that we have the ability to walk up to these people, but the reality is that there are no social consequences for walking up to a stranger at all.

 

I would say that one of the best things you can do is find hard things and do them over and over again. Before you can find them, you have to feel that sentiment inside of you, and most people just ignore it. Learn to train yourself in feeling that, and going, ‘I know what I need to do when I feel that feeling,’ and then go forward with it.

Talking to strangers is a great tip. Do you have others?

There’s a million of them, you know.  I spoke to this guy who’s one of the lead speakers in regards to the stuttering community, and he said, ‘You know, some of the exercises that you present in [your book] are the same exercises that stutterers do.’ It turns out that [they are] some of the same exercises that people who have PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, or people who have anxiety attacks use. I’ve, sort of, without really thinking about those problems, have created something which really works for them and also works for the population at large.

 

I’ve been building homework assignments, and I plan to release them later in some capacity. One of them is to stutter on purpose. It’s this amazing thing you can do maybe four or five times in a day, and then just go about your daily life. Everybody knows how to do this, but it’s an exercise they make stutterers do so they can gain control of something they normally would not be able to control at all. If you go over to someone, especially someone who’s paid to talk to you, like a clerk in the corner store or something like that, and you stutter through what it is that you want to do, and then feel that embarrassment—it’s almost like purposeful embarrassment—to realize that when you get past the embarrassment you’re totally fine.Something else I would do to feel it physically is to do something like begin weightlifting at the edge of your capacity.

 

Most people when they go into the gym, they’ll go and they’ll do weights, like twenty five or thirty reps of some insignificant weight. Instead of doing that, do something like put it up to what weightlifters call your five-rep max, and put up a weight that is almost impossible for you to lift. Stare at it, and then go ahead and do it. You’ll feel in your body this extremely hard not only physical thing but psychologically taxing thing. Even weightlifters say if you squat three times a week at that kind of ability you become psychologically drained from how difficult it is, but it also carries forward into other parts of your life if you’re able to do it.

Let’s say we don’t only want to create change in our personal lives, but we actually want to be  change agents in the world. We want to make big change, or affect change. Do these small things you’re talking about doing, these exercises you’re giving us, help us learn to make change in the world?

Some of the criticism of this book comes from people who are like, ‘What the hell. This is so trivial.’ You know, Victor Frankel wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. He was in the Holocaust; he was in a concentration camp, and he was one of the few survivors. He wrote something which is a famous phrase: ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a moment, and in that moment lies our freedom.’  Basically, you have a stimulus, and you have an ability to react instinctively or an ability to think out a reaction to that stimulus, whatever that stimulus is. He claims the reason he survived the concentration camp is because he was able to stay psychologically strong. He could watch people and see that once they had psychologically given way, their bodies would begin to wither away after that.

 

To me, the biggest strength is an internal strength. No person can give you a job that will give you this strength. No individual can ever take it away from you once you have it either. To me it’s an internal strength that you build. It is built with a conscious sort of construction that comes from the mind and from the psyche, and then, thereafter, builds out into the world. And you’ll see that when you do this, when you become a more conscious person as a result of these supposedly trivial acts, that people will see you differently, and doors will open as a result of it.

What does it take to really accomplish something and to create something that affects change in the world?

I’ve already written a few books. To write is actually is not a big deal at all. You just have to sit there and do it. A girlfriend of mine used to say, ‘People respect travelers so much; but really all you have to do to be a traveler is to get on a plane. It’s an easy thing to do.’ In the same way, being a writer is a very easy thing to do. It’s the ability to sit down every single day and do it over and over and over again and to have the humility to destroy things that you once thought were good that you now think are bad because your standards are higher. This is really what makes someone excellent. That’s a great internal change which is really effective in the world.

Julien spoke to me about writing books, making them bestsellers, and being a change agent via your writing. You can read this part of the interview here. He also spoke about blogging and affecting change with a blog. You can read this part of the interview here.

I highly suggest you read The Flinch;  you can download it for free for your Kindle (a free version of this program is free for your laptop). I’ve told all my family members to read it. I have a personal interest in the subject of moving through fear to achieve your goals. I wrote a short book, which will one day become a full length one on the topic: Navigating the Narrow Bridge.

Do you “flinch” often, avoiding fear and not moving toward your goals? Have you found ways to change your habits or thoughts about fear? Tell me about this with a comment.

If you are interested in writing and blogging, read the other parts to my interview here and here.

If you aren’t a subscriber to this blog, please consider actually hitting the RSS button at the top of the page or subscribing by email using the form below. Then you are sure to never miss a post.

February 5th, 2012 | Tags: change, courage, fear, Julien Smith | Category: achieving success, change, consciousness, creating change, moving through fear, narrow bridge | Leave a comment

I spend so much of my time doing things to try and get noticed. Promote, promote, promote. With my new book coming out soon, I feel the pressure to make myself seen and heard all the more intensely.

Yet, truth be told, most days I feel quite alone. I make the effort to reach out and to connect, but I don’t hear or feel the response.

And here’s the truth of the matter: If I were to just focus on the real purpose behind what I do, I wouldn’t have to try so hard at all.

A few weeks ago I interviewed Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents and author of The Flinch (which you can get for free on Kindle). He told me that you shouldn’t have to share links to your blog posts on social networks. Your readers should simply share them for you because they like them so much.

That’s actually the truth. And if you are on purpose, if you are writing, working, speaking, networking, whatever,  from your heart, doing what you are meant to do–and doing it well, your message will touch people in a way that makes them want to spread the word. You will get heard and noticed.

You won’t feel like you are working in a vacuum. You won’t feel like you aren’t really communicating.

So, the big question becomes: What’s the real purpose behind what you do? In other words, why do you do what you do? Do you feel a sense of mission? Do you want to help others? Would you like to provide a solution to a problem?

If all you want to do is earn money, accrue a huge amount of cash in the bank, no one will probably listen to you–or share anything that you have to say. You’ll still be all alone at the end of the day.

If you do it just to get more people to like you or to buy your product, you’ll still be alone at the end of the day.

But if you want to give to others, to share your knowledge, to help in some way…that’s different.

The Kabbalists tell us that’s the real purpose of being here–to give, to share. Everything we create should be shared in some way.

So, I’m rethinking what I’ve been doing lately. Getting quieter. Going back to the core purpose behind my actions…trying to fulfill my purpose. Doing what I was meant to do in the way I was meant to do it…and sharing as I go.

It’s easy to get off track in this harried world we live in where we are tethered to our phones and social media, never wanting anyone to forget where we are, what we are doing, where we are going, or what we might be thinking. They might forget us. We might end up alone. We might end up with less friends or followers than someone else. No one might see or hear us. That’s not a good enough reason to keep doing what we do.

What about you? What’s the real purpose behind what you do?

January 29th, 2012 | Tags: getting noticed, Giving, kabbalists, purpose | Category: achieving success, Giving, purpose | Comments (2)

Every day I feel like I”m being pushed to grow bigger than my former self. No one has made me grow; I started the process myself. I wanted to grow. I added the fertilizer and the water. The problem is that now I can’t stop the process. The process has begun, and I no longer have a choice.

Maybe growth is simply a natural process over which we have no say. I’ve heard that said. However, when we have goals and dreams and we take action towards them, sometimes we do, indeed, cause growth to happen.

The other day I stood  in my driveway prior to going for a walk and looked up at the redwood trees that grow all around my house. They towered over me reaching seemingly to the sky. I wondered how tall I could grow. That tall? As tall as those majestic trees? How big or wide? In my backyard there is a redwood tree that is absolutely huge–bigger and wider than most I’ve seen. And it continues to grow.

I had a dream of who I could become. And I took action to make that dream come true. To stop myself from growing into that person, I’d have to stop nurturing my growth, my dream. I’d have to allow myself to wither up and…well…to fail.

Some days, success feels scarier than failure. But failure at this point would disappoint more people than just me.

I’ve watched the redwood trees go through phases at different times of the year. During the drought of late summer, they drop an enormous amount of needles. It’s as if they draw back into themselves and get rid of what they don’t need to conserve energy. They don’t stop growing, though. Like them, at certain times I have to pull inward and drop things–activities–so I can accomplish what I need to do to keep growing, keep moving forward toward my goals.

At other times of the year, such as in the winter, the trees produce fruit, small cones and berries that drop onto my patio and stain it when it rains. I can hear the birds and insects in the trees eating. The redwoods seems to be sharing what they have to offer, giving away the fruit of their work. At times, I do the same, freely and willingly as I reap the benefits of my progress.

Always, though, I am stretching upward, still growing. And I’m trying to allow my roots to grow deeper, keeping me stable, grounding me. Like the redwoods, I’m also hoping to create a circle of friends around me–a cathedral of those that know me, support me, appreciate my growth, my work, my progress, that encircles me. There the sacred giving takes place…

The giving of what we gain as we grow really is the sacred act. And what better place than in a cathedral? Call it a tribe, a circle, a fan group. It really doesn’t matter.

But as the cathedral grows, I’m pushed to continue growing. And I have to ask myself, “How big, how tall, how wide am I willing to grow? How large am I supposed to grow?” I know there is a Greater Plan for me and I’m just following it, fulfilling my purpose. I wonder if I can fulfill than plan, that purpose.

So I continue to water, to fertilize, to push myself to grow.

How about you? How big, tall and wide are you willing to grow?

January 27th, 2012 | Tags: dreams, goals, personal growth, soul purpose | Category: achieving success, Divine Purpose, human potential, purpose, soul's purpose | Comments (2)

A lot of religious people talk about “hearing” God’s call or getting messages from God. Other people say they get gut feelings or their intuition “tells” them things. Still others claim angels and guides advise them. And then there are those who see messages all around them in their day to day life–the words spoken on a phone call, the fact that the phone call even occurred and the person who made the call at that particular moment.

What does it matter how the messages arrives and from whom or from what as long as you receive it? The importance lies in the reception of the message.

When I attended the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University as a magazine journalism major, we were taught that for communication to happen there had to be someone broadcasting a message and someone receiving it. If no one hears what you say or write or show–or understands it–then communication doesn’t happen.

I often say I receive messages. Where do they come from? Sometimes they are gut feelings–a kind of intuitive knowing. However, I’d define intuition as being tapped into my higher self or my soul and then being able to sense what it is telling me. That part of me is connected to what I would call Source or God. So, I guess I could say at those times I’m actually getting messages from God.

Other times I get messages from the world around me; I suppose these could also be seen as messages from God, the Universe or Source. Or I could just be reading into them what I want to see–need to see. It’s all in your perspective.

Just this week I received a few messages in this manner. I’ve been trying to figure out how to cut back and to focus more on the work-related things that are important to me and to find more balance in my life. I’ve let spirituality and religious practice fall by the wayside over the last few years, as well as human potential and self-improvement study. I want to make time for these. At the same time, I need to increase my activity in several areas of my professional life. I’ve said, “I need to cut back and gear up.”

Interestingly enough, on Friday night I received a call just before Shabbat from a rabbi acquaintance of mine. I’d call him a friend, but we don’t spend time together. We’ve never socialized. I’ve studied with him, and I have spoken with him about a variety of things on numerous occasions. Out of the blue, he called just to say hello because we hadn’t spoken in a long time, and he wanted to wish me a “Shabbat Shalom,” a good and peaceful Sabbath.

I told him about the vision map I’d made for this year, describing how for the first time in many years the professional section was smaller than the personal section. To my surprise, he not only knew what a vision map was, he said, “When I make one or anyone I know makes one, I advise them to put the Hebrew letter ‘hey’ in the middle to represent God. Everything we do always comes back to God.”

Ah. What a great reminder of something I already knew but had forgotten–something I could apply to help me bring spirituality and religious practice into my life fully. Everything–even my work–comes back to God. It flows from God and back to God. My whole life can be about spiritual practice if I have that focus.

A wonderful message. You know what? This rabbi had never before simply called me to chat. Never. Not once. Yet he offered me just the message I needed to hear. I put the hey on my vision map.

The next day I had to do an interview with a best-selling author. I read his book just before the interview and found myself inspired by the message. We had a great conversation, and at the end I told him how I planned to publish different parts of the interview in several places. He asked me, “For how many different places do you write?”

“I have three blogs of my own and two on-line columns,” I replied, actually leaving out two of my blogs.”Then I also write for one magazine at the moment.”

“How do you do it all?” he asked.

“Well, it takes a lot of time, but I’m thinking of cutting back to focus more on my own blogs,” I replied, voicing a thought that had been running around in my head and that had been “feeling” more and more right to me.

“I can see why,” he replied. “That sounds smart.”

Ah. Confirmation? Another message–this time from a complete stranger?

Interestingly, I’d heard the same thing from a colleague earlier in the week–someone who was supposed to help me market my new book (How to Blog a Book). When she found out what all I do, she said maybe the best thing she could do to help me market the book was to help me consolidate what I was already doing.

Hmmm. Twice in one week the same message from people outside my daily life. By the second time, I was really listening. And my gut–my intuition–was agreeing.

I can ask myself questions, too. I receive answers. Is it just me answering? I don’t know. If I intuitively sense that the answers are right, I trust them.

What about you? Do you get messages? How do they show up? Are they in the words or numbers on the license plate on the car in front of you in traffic? Are they visions while you sleep? Are they in links emailed to you by a friend? Or does God speak to you?

It doesn’t really matter as long as you receive them…and heed them. But I’d still like to know about your experience. Leave me a comment.

January 16th, 2012 | Tags: getting answers, gut feeling, Intuition, messages | Category: God's hand, Intuition | Comments (4)

2012. The world was supposed to end, some said. (We knew better.) But things were supposed to change–the energy was supposed to change, at least.  A whole week has gone by. We are being flooded now with the light of the first full moon of this pivotal year, which is supposed to affect our consciousness on every level. Something is supposed to be changing. Or it should be getting easier to create change, right?

I wrote my vision and my goals. I created a vision map or board. I set out with good intentions. Nothing. Same ol’, same ol’.

I could blame it on the fact that my daughter is here visiting. That clients called. I had things that got in the way..projects, the need to learn to podcast, interviews to conduct, old work to get handled and out of the way, bills to pay, shopping to do, emails to answer, social media to attend to, etc., etc., etc.

It felt l like 2012 came in with a rush, driving me forward at breakneck speed. That’s how 2011 went out. Why would the new year be any different? I don’t seem to have brakes on this car I’m in. I’m not sure I’m driving. I’m trying to get control.

Here’s the fact: In the first eight days of 2012, I  didn’t keep to the schedule I set as part of my plan. I didn’t do even one of the things I said I would do. Well…I take that back. I did do one thing. I took a bit of time off to spend with my daughter. I relaxed with family. That is on my vision map and in my goals–to find balance in my life between work and personal.

Yay! I made one change. I made it consciously.

Changing habits can prove difficult. Yet, to achieve some new degree of success we must change our old habits. They’ve only gotten us the degree of success we enjoy right now.

Anything can get in the way and become an excuse. For me, getting up early to complete my client work first is a new goal, a new habit, I’d like to form. It’s easy to say I went to bed too late and simply not get up early. It’s easy to answer the phone when it rings during that time period, or to schedule an activity anyway (like walking with a friend, since that’s a goal, too), and to say that’s why I couldn’t meet my goal, make the change, create a new habit.

I find myself saying all too often I just don’t have the time to change, the energy to change. I’ll do it tomorrow or next week.

Well, a week has gone by of this new year…this year that everyone said would be one of such awesome change…when we could affect change in ways heretofore not possible. I, for one, have not found this year much different. It still remains up to me to make the change. (I hear the refrain of some song…I can’t quite put my finger on it…)

Ah, well…the Kabbalists must right. We are simply in transition. We have a long way to go before the predicted time of peace on Earth or the World to Come. (They say not until the year 6,000 on the Hebrew calendar.) Actually, many other people also say we are simply in a time of transition. And it’s likely our consciousness is changing. We can affect change and do so faster, more effectively if we do it in a conscious and focused manner. We don’t need a new year, a new era, a new anything for that.

The trick is to put that lesson–an old one really (and no “secret” either) to use now to create the desired change. For me, I’m starting small–in my life, with my habits. This helps me achieve what I need to achieve and then has a ripple affect, allowing me to affect others through my work.

I’ll go back and focus again on my vision, my goals, my vision board. I’ll work every day to keep on track, making those little changes that end up in new habits formed. By year’s end, I may have achieved a new level of success based upon those new habits.

What about you? How’s it going after the first week of the New Year? Does the energy of 2012 seem to be supporting you? Is change happening in your life or around you?

January 8th, 2012 | Tags: 2012, consciousness, habits, Kabbalah, vision | Category: achieving success, change, conscious creation, consciousness, creating change, creative visualization, Deliberate Creation, focused thought, goals, Kabbalah, new year, visioning | Leave a comment

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.

December 29th, 2011 | Tags: 2012, conscious creation, Deliberate Creation, dreams, Kabbalistic Conscious Creation | Category: conscious creation, creative thought, creative visualization, Deliberate Creation, Desire, focused thought, Giving, Kabbalah of Conscious Creation, Law of Attraction, manifestation | Leave a comment

Chanukah celebrates miracles–the miracle of a small army defeating a large one, of a small jug of oil that should only have burned for one day lasting eight days instead.

This year Chanukah and Christmas fall during the same week. Christmas is about miracles,too–the miraculous birth of Jesus.

It doesn’t really matter if you believe either of these stories are true. Our wisdom teachers–the Kabbalists in particular–tell us that this is a time when we can access the energy of miracles.

As we soak in the light of the Chanukah candles–or any candles–we can become receivers of miracles. Like the oil put into receptacles used to create light, we can make ourselves receptacles for God’s goodness.

Light has always been associated with God. And the Kabbalists say God created us as receivers. We need only open ourselves to that light, allow it in…make room for it in our lives and with ourselves.

How do we do this? I suggest we spend eight days considering the miracles in our lives already. Gratitude is the strongest prayer of all, so why not consider the miracles we already have in our lives, and be thankful for them?  Each night, thank God for a small or large miracle you now experience or have experienced over the last year.

Bask in the glow of miracles.

If you want, you can also imagine the miracles you’d like bestowed upon you in the coming year. Offer gratitude for them–as if God had already graced you with them.

Bask in the glow of these miracles as well.

Eight days of miracles…When you spend more than a week considering miracles, you’ll realize you live a miraculous life all the time. You’ll appreciate the miracle of life and the miraculous nature of God.

That’s the miracle of truly observing Chanukah.

December 20th, 2011 | Tags: candles, Chanukah, Hanukkah, Kabbalah, miracles | Category: Chanukah, creative thought, creative visualization, Hanukkah, Hanukkah, manifestation, miracles | Leave a comment

Do you ever question your beliefs about Your religion? Do you question God’s word, the value of the commandments, the teachings of the forefathers, the meaning of the rituals and prayers?

They say the Jewish people are God wrestlers. We don’t always accept God’s word or anything to do with our religion without questions, without wanting to understand why, without pondering the value, the validity, the truth of what we are told or asked to do.

Yet, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or some other religion, sometimes we get stuck in fear—fear that if we don’t listen to God’s word, believe every single word we hear and do as those words command—something bad might happen. We might be struck down by lightning, fall from grace, not live another year, not receive God’s goodness. Then we stop wrestling with God.

It takes a lot to move out of that fear and to begin questioning again, wrestling again.

I was pleased this week to find a current example of someone who moved through that fear and began God wrestling—and did so in the public eye. I read in a JTA article that Chassidic reggae musician and singer Matisyahu publicly shaved off his beard and peyes and uploaded a picture of himself clean shaven on Twitter on December 13. Along with it, he posted this message:

“This morning I posted a photo of myself on Twitter.

“No more Chassidic reggae superstar.

“Sorry folks, all you get is me…no alias. When I started becoming religious 10 years ago it was a very natural and organic process. It was my choice. My journey to discover my roots and explore Jewish spirituality—not through books but through real life. At a certain point I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity…to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person I needed rules—lots of them—or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission.”

The next day, December 14, the JTA ran another story. In it he explained this decision in more detail during an interview WNYC’s Soundcheck. He began growing his beard when he became religious. The decision not to shave was based on a teaching from Kabbalah that the beard is a manifestation of the 13 divine attributes of mercy, he explained. (Learn about the 13 Attributes here.) He feared that if he were to shave the beard, he would no longer be privy to those blessings of mercy.

Recently, however, he asked himself, “How can [God’s mercy] possibly be connected to me shaving or not? And I began, over the last few weeks, I went through a pretty major transformation, probably bigger than any in my life, due to several things, but a lot of revelations and a lot of realizations started coming clear to me, and I realized just like these fears that I have, the idea that God’s mercy is connected to whether I shave or not is ludicrous. And I just need to trust myself, and that if I’m deserving of God’s mercy, I’ll get it regardless.”

That’s a big jump…to trust your own goodness and to trust God to be merciful whether you follow His commandments or not. Orthodox, or observant, Jews, live within the confines of God’s laws, God’s mitzvot. They offer structure. They offer a way of life. They offer a means by which to be a good Jew, a mensch.

Yet, here we see someone coming out of that world and saying, “I think I can be a mensch, I think I can be a good person, a spiritual and religious person deserving of God’s grace and mercy without observing every single mitzvah—every commandment.”

And haven’t those of us who are not that religious wondered what would happen—in the reverse—if I suddenly became more observant? Would God be more gracious, more merciful? Would my prayers be answered?

But maybe it’s simply about being a good person, about being deserving—beard or no beard.

What about you? Do you wrestle with God? Do you question your beliefs? And do you occasionally shave  (or have you ever shaved) your beard—metaphorical or real—to see what might happen?

December 16th, 2011 | Tags: God wrestling, Matisyahu, religious beliefs, religious practices, shaving | Category: consciousness, container for receving, Jewish mysticism, Judaism, Kabbalah, moving through fear, religious practice, spiritual path, spiritual practice | Leave a comment