You wave your magic wand, and bada bing bada bang, a little magic dust, and you have a miracle.

Or you take a little pill, and you wake up beautiful, slim, sexy, and rich.
Or you pray that God gives you a miracle
Or you meditate
Or you buy that get-rich-quick scheme that promises overnight money with no work at all
Or you play it over and over in the theater of your mind… You feel it… you appreciate everything… still…

But all these don’t cause a miracle.

No matter how skillfully you wave the wand, or how fancy (and expensive) the little pill is, how passionately you pray… etc. etc. etc.

No. none of them work. Sometimes, just so you get more confused, it seems to be working.
Or it seems to be working for others. Typically people you see on TV, or who write books you buy, or you pay to listen to. One in a million, or two, three, four million?

So what is wrong with this picture? Why are we filling our minds with such nonsense, stuff that doesn’t work?

I have an answer for you that you won’t like: because believing in someone else making miracles for you allows you to stay the same.

Because for the ego, changing is the hardest.

And because what causes miracles is going to involve changing. Giving up what the ego is interested.

And at tha price the ego would rather that you don’t have miracles.

I just finished reading the book “God doesn’t make miracles, you do.” by Yehuda Berg.

Obviously I like Yehuda Berg. He seems to be living and breathing what he writes and speaks about. and obviously he is doing the work.

So I had this dilemma. Shall I just copy my favorite paragraphs from the book, and be done with this article?

If I did that, I would be like the thousands and tens of thousands of people who pout other people’s words, because they don’t have anything their own to say. Nor the experience.

That is not my way.

Back in 1991 November, I formulated the purpose of my life, probably channeled it, with the following words: “Living on the edge, generating distinctions of transformation for humankind.”

I am just starting to get what the heck I meant. Really, I just got something important about that today.

You see, I used to think (and I had 17 years to think about it) that living on the edge was an outside thing… like a circumstance. Like getting poor, or in trouble, or sick, or being evicted… and I manifested all those circumstances in my life.

What I got today that going to those edges is quite useless for humankind, but was very useful for my ego. It was all about me, my life, my troubles, me distinguishing, my gift to humankind.

It never “bought me” anything. Not even a tiny miracle. Bummer.

The past few months on the other hand, (there were quite a few turning points, or cross roads, significant defining moments) mostly quite insignificant in this very moment.

What is significant is that I finally married Landmark and Kabbalah, and have been consciously, greedily generating miracles. Not big ones. It seems that kaizen is my signature style… small steps, small changes.

Back in 2000, one night I was particularly bothered by something, and asked for coaching from a Landmark Center Manager.

She said something quite whimsical: “You think that it’s a bowl of wax, but in fact it is a ball of yarn.”

That arrested me in my tirade of martyrdom.

“What on earth does that mean?” I demanded to know. “You’ll figure it out…” the center manager said, and left the room.

I have figured it out.

If a bowl of wax blocked your way to happiness, you would have to melt the whole darn bowlful to get rid of the wax (your roadblock). But if it is a ball of yarn that’s blocking your way, you can snip away little threads of the yarn, and soon enough the whole ball becomes cushy, and give way.

And so is the way of transformation.

Most of us are waiting for the magic bullet, while continuing doing what we have always done… but some of us are snipping away diligently at the ball of yarn… and transform our life, our business, our health.

That is the way of the kabbalah.

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.

Yehuda Berg writes:

There are people in our lives who don’t want to receive what we have to give them. …

… we invest efforts into keeping some relationhships burning in our lives that we’d be better off letting burn out.

… life is all about circuitry. When we share our Light with people who don’t want to receive it, it’s like trying to fill a bottle when the cap is still on. Try as you might, with all of the love, intention, and desire to share, your energy simply cannot penetrate. And as with our favorite spiritual illustration, the lightbulb, if the negative pole is blocked, the circuit cannot be completed, and the energy cannot flow.

It’s not about judging people as worthy or unworthy. It’s about discerning who is ‘open’ to receive, and willing to use what we have to offer – wisdom, love, time, concern – no matter what flavor!

No doubt, if you go through your relationships, in your mind, one by one, you are going find several that fit the above description: Your desire to contribute to them is not received with an equal amount of desire to receive from you.

Some people, including my older self, make it our life’s purpose to give where it is not appreciated, or even not wanted. But everyone, at one time or another, decides where to give, by their own concepts, instead of looking where there is the most reception.

At the same time, one may fall into the opposite trap, the bottomless pit, or the bottle with the cap off, but cracked.

I used to have a client (or two, or three,… grrr) where we would have great conversations, I would be able to express all the light the Light wanted me to channel, but nothing would stick with the recipient.

This particular client, let’s call him Matt, was hungry for solutions, hungry for light, hungry… insatiable. What he wasn’t hungry for is making changes in his thinking or in his actions.

My style of coaching is to leave the client with a set of practices or action that they must complete in order for the session to make any real difference. Matt never did any of the actions, any of the practices. Instead, he came to every call as if the previous one had never happened.

He remembered them all right, but remembering is the booby prize… not much value there. His life didn’t notice he had that session.

I “fired him” from my practice.

I noticed that there was a certain co-dependency developing: it gave me a sense of accomplishment and an experience of being very bright to channel the Light. And he came to me like an alcoholic goes to the pub.

I needed to restrict my addictive tendencies and ask him to get his daily fix someplace else.

Result? I started to channel the Light into my writing, into my business, into my garden, and into my own well-being. All areas were parched… and all those areas are now starting to blossom.

The point? There is an abundance of Light available for you to channel. But channel it to someplace where it can make a difference, someplace where it will cause abundance. OK?

One holiday, a few years back, a bunch of students were up late (about 2 o’clock in the morning) celebrating. Some were getting tired and started to sit down. My father and teacher, Rav Berg, spoke to us for a second,

“Think about people who drive or fly many hours to go to Las Vegas. They arrive in Las Vegas very tired, but when they’re in front of the table they don’t think for a second about being tired until it’s morning. If they can be so energetic until the next morning, and have so much power when it’s total stimulation for the self-alone, can’t we bring ourselves to that state with such enormous connection with the Light?”

Yesterday I spoke about laziness and the Rav’s point is our laziness is conditional. When it comes to doing things for the self-alone, we’re super-motivated. But when it comes to things that require stretching outside of ourselves, there’s going to be resistance.

Today, act with passion, energy, and enthusiasm. This is how you break the laziness! All the different reasons we have for not taking risks are just intellectual tricks our dark side plays on us. Don’t accept those thoughts — push back!