The two sources that helped me define what life could mean to me are Wallace D. Wattles and The Zohar, the definitive book of Kabbalah.

According to Wallace D. Wattles (of The Science of Getting Rich fame) is that life wants more life, and your job (YOU! Human Being) is to align yourself with that. More life means being able to have all the tools that you are capable of using, being on the cutting edge of thinking, etc. This has been really very inspiring to me.

I have worded this MY WAY: our job is to be God’s self-expression. God doesn’t have a thumb, but we do. And we are causing full self-expression to God when we use what we were blessed with, our bodies, our minds, our emotions.

Kabbalah is similar, in a way, saying that human beings are a part of the vessel the Light created (eons ago) to receive all its blessings, but (unfortunately and unintentionally) the Light’s desire to give got transmitted with the light that was giving fulfillment to the vessel, and at some point the vessel said: I don’t want to eat bread of shame any more, I want to be able to earn the light I receive, and be a giver, not just a receiver.

That is what caused the physical universe to spring into place, so that the vessel, (that broke into chards into the billions of souls) can earn its light in an environment of seeming scarcity, by becoming like god: giving of themselves.

Of course, physicality and scarcity are powerful forces, so it is not easy for the souls to “tame” their physical hosts… and only very few people in every generation elevate themselves much on the scale of 0-1000 (100% scarcity/ego to close to godliness).

So, in my life, this moment to moment to moment transformation of the selfishness and the full expression of what’s god (without being religious) is the purpose of living, i.e. the meaning I give to life.

And by selfishness I don’t necessarily mean material selfishness: generosity of heart is the opposite: I want for everyone what I want for myself. But I won’t give it to them and I won’t do it FOR them. I inspire them… by MY ACTIONS.

Now, this is a full blog-post… where is my blog… darn… when I need it? lol

Sophie Benshitta Maven

Regrets, I’ve had a few … .How many of us are stuck in ruts because we cling to past slights, traumas, missed opportunities, and betrayals? The best way to let go and move forward is to acknowledge and accept those negative things you did (or had done to you) as steps on the path that brought you to where you need to be today.

Today, recall the pain of your past. Allow yourself to get to the point where you can accept that they were blessings; the perfect things that helped you build a new you. If you can release your grip on the anger, sadness, and regret, then it will be easier to spot the Light in the darkness. (quoted from daily kabbalah tuneup)

Interesting that this would come up just now.

I am working with a client/friend, let’s call her DD. She has been doing great. She has gotten in touch with the light in herself and her power to choose.

She is severely overweight and it’s effecting her overall health, but more than anything, her self image.

This past week she has gotten hungry twice while she was doing errands, and she didn’t give in to the temptation to get a quick supersized meal at the many fast food places on her way… instead she drove home and ate what she had planned to eat that day. Major victory.

The effect on her self esteem, self image was dramatic. She suddenly could see the light at the end of the tunnel, both in regards to regaining her health, and in regards to making a living, being a good parent, loving herself.

Her capacity to face what she didn’t like about herself increased to a point where accepting those as facts, and taking responsibility for them became a real possibility. … and you know that until you can accept something about yourself or about life, or about another, there is no chance to change it. It just won’t change, unless it has permission to be exactly how it is. (or how it isn’t…)

Until yesterday she was moving on the path. Yesterday her daughter yelled at her and told her that she’d rather live anywhere than with her, even foster parents would be better than her. That she learned to be bad from DD.

I asked DD how she took that, and she, in a very quiet little voice said that she could see her point and that she was a bad parent. But you could hear, this crushed her. It put her back to where she had no future. Where she was incorrigible, bad, worthless, and undeserving of love or care from anyone, especially not from herself.

Which takes me to my point. When you get better, when you put yourself on the path to become who you were meant to be (not that puny little thing that can only complain, and regret, and resent) Satan will “hire” your best friend, your spouse, your children, the radio (!) to take you off the path. And Satan’s method is to make you react.

Without my assistance, DD would have slipped back to where she was 10 days ago and hang out there maybe forever. In a complete sense of worthlessness. Not worthy enough to be taken care of, be fed good food in normal quantities.

From her tone of voice I actually deduce that she had already violated her new “order” and had indulged. I’ll ask her next time we talk.

When you react you can’t look. When you look you won’t react.

Reaction, physiologically, expresses itself in a tightening, in a closing down, in a blockage. The light can’t get in.

When you can force yourself to look, you open yourself up, and the Light can come in and support you to look and accept and forgive and change, if necessary.

Two steps forward, one step back… that is how everyone grows. Don’t worry, I’ll help DD back on the path in no time. As soon as she can accept that this little backslide is normal… Got it?

Your blessings are trapped … in other people.

Take back the Light! Go to one person today, with whom you’re having trouble seeing eye to eye, and tell them (in a proactive manner) something they are right about.

The more difficult it is to confront the person, the more Light you will reveal. Now, go get back your Light that you are giving to other people!

This is a Kabbalistic way to say: you’ve been giving away your power to everyone you are “incomplete” with.

Incomplete means that there is some charge on something that happened, they did, they said, or didn’t do, didn’t say. The bigger the charge, the more of YOUR light is trapped there.

And only YOU can release it. Bummer.

OK, but how do you do that?

There are several ways to release the light, and one of them is what Yehuda Berg is saying in the above quote. I tried that yesterday, and the moment I could think of something they did right, the process began. I sent off the email, and the answer came almost instantly with a lot of light.

Here is how it went, I am sharing it because it was profound.

She: (paraphrasing for brevity) Your site is a mess, hard to find anything, too much junk, spam, I can’t even find my ad… blah blah blah.
Me: (first firing off… ) I have the spam there so I can pay my bills, because you sure don’t pay them for me.
(then here comes the definining moment: I realize that I am hooked… not good. so I add two sentences in the beginning:) I love you, but you are a little too cranky for me today.
She: Thanks.
I love you too, that was nice.
Sorry.
Yeah, cranky can’t believe you saw through the email.

Result: Light fully released, love reestablished, both directions.

So, the method works, all I needed to do is stop for a moment and imagine how my email would feel when it lands.

The next method is a little trickier, but works very reliably on long-standing hurts.

This is how you resolve it:

1. You observe that there is some energy trapped with a person (or event)
2. You have a story about what happened, and what they did/didn’t do, etc. but we’ll say that the story is an illusion, and something simpler happened that is all in your hands. Excellent, this way you won’t even have to talk to them. How sweet life can be!
3. You find something that you can be responsible for in the whole story. Example of what you COULD take responsibility for:

• You may have a standard and/or an ideal that they “fail” to conform to
• You may find that you have an unfulfilled expectation with them
• You may find that there is something you haven’t said
• You may find that you have a “thwarted intention” which simply means that you had an agenda that never got fulfilled.
• You say that there was an agreement that they broke (an agreement that was never spelled out and was assumed by you.)

The moment you find a way to be responsible for the trapped light, you can fully take responsibility for your standards, your expectations (often called a setup for disappointment), say or what you haven’t said (not necessarily to them) or acknowledge that having an agenda is a lot like an expectation, you pay for it through  and through. So what there is to do is acknowledge it and give it up.

You will never believe that there is nothing, I mean no situation, past or present, that cannot be resolved the above way.

For example, many people find relief from a lifetime resentment with a parent that did or didn’t do something.

The culprit in this situation is (almost always) an agreement that is assumed. Like parents are supposed to love their children. Or parents are not supposed to do this or that. If you look deeper into it, no parent has ever said that they agreed to such condition. (Some did, but they are the minority and the exception.)

Once you can acknowledge that you have been resenting your parents for not conforming to an agreement that they never made, you reclaim your light… i.e your blessings.

The Zohar teaches us desire is a vessel that holds the Light. The idea is attaining blessings and good fortune is not enough to keep them. We must also maintain our desire for what we already have.
Not always an easy thing to do seeing as how our habit is to focus on what we don’t have.

Today, get in touch with the desire you first felt when you started studying Kabbalah, or dating your husband, or working at your dream job. Crave your life!

I had something happen today that was an interesting aspect of this same thing.

Diana and I are partners in our quest to create a business that would benefit both of us.

We have created seven projects, and all seven flopped.

Two days ago I came up with the eighth idea, and it was the simplest, and we have gotten further in this project in two days that with the other seven in a month or so each.

I suggested last night that we stop and celebrate. Diana said yeah, yeah, and started to ask about all the things we should add and do more, and are unfinished.

I stopped and noticed.

She had an impossible time to acknowledge accomplishment, to celebrate. And if I hadn’t noticed it, her life has been consistent with that. Downward spiral. Accomplishments have been mostly limited to averting catastrophy.

The divine purpose of our relationship, Diana and me, is to compensate for my blindness. Everything I notice in Diana is something I am guilty of, just couldn’t see it in a regular mirror.

Diana has been a total distortion free mirror for me, and I have grown in this relationship more than in the previous 60 years altogether.

It also helps that we live far apart, she is a Southern gal, I am a New Yorker… we have never met. But we have accomplished feats of true soulmates.

Hallelujah. And thanks for the Kabbalah. Without that I would run from the kind of people like Diana. I would stay in “blissful” ignorance and never grow.

I learned that maybe, just maybe I haven’t stop often enough, celebrated joyfully enough, appreciated what got done, the successes, the effort, the right direction, the whatever, enough.

A Kaizen second… I am so lucky.