{"id":7,"date":"2008-07-30T21:07:16","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T21:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/?p=7"},"modified":"2017-04-08T07:55:23","modified_gmt":"2017-04-08T12:55:23","slug":"write-kabbalah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/7\/","title":{"rendered":"Who am I and what gives me the right to write about Kabbalah"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"left\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/images\/sophie1982.jpg\" alt=\"kabbalahchick is Sophie Benshitta, aka Maven Sophie\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"5\" \/>Good question, right? You were just about asking that&#8230; Gotcha!<\/p>\n<p>OK, simple question, simple answer.<\/p>\n<p>First I tell you what I am not:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I am not a Kabbalist. Kabbalists study, practice, and teach Kabbalah full time, for many many years. It could be even said that being a Kabbalist is like an insider&#8230; you need to be appointed.<\/li>\n<li>I am not a teacher of Kabbalah<\/li>\n<li>I am not a guru<\/li>\n<li>I am not someone who knows a lot about Kabbalah but doesn&#8217;t live it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OK, then what am I?<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Well, I was first introduced to Kabbalah by a friend of mine (who is accidentally out of my life&#8230; but more about it later.) My introduction happened by way of the book &#8220;72 names of God&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>She called me that must come, right away, to Borders&#8230; (for those of you that don&#8217;t know, Borders is a big book chain with excellent coffee and lots of room to read while there.) At the time I was new to Syracuse, so it took me a long long long time to get to the store&#8230; 7 or so miles in an hour&#8230; how is that for speeed.<\/p>\n<p>I liked the book, I liked the idea that everyone has a &#8220;god-name&#8221; according to their birthdate, mine is 34. The letters, lamed-hey-chet losely mean &#8220;Forget Thyself&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t think it applied to me, but you&#8217;ll notice, no one does. It has something to do with your soul&#8217;s tikkun (more about that later.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I bought the book, went home and did a search on the internet, found the Kabbalah Centre&#8217;s website, ordered their free (shipping only) book The Secret (not the &#8220;famous&#8221; movie). Then in a few days I got a call from the Kabbalah Centre and they sold me a set of 23 books, called the Zohar. I opted to pay in payments. It came in a huge box. I picked it up at my mailbox and in the next 10 minutes it saved my life.<\/p>\n<p>What sold me to buy the book is that it is said to have an energy connection to &#8220;The Light&#8221; and it protects the space it is located. The story said that a shipment of a pallet of Zohars in Iran survived a warehouse fire. The only thing that survived, unscathed, was that one pallet. After how my life is going, I believe that this is true.<\/p>\n<p>I bought the Zohar 5 years ago and since then I haven&#8217;t had a scratch on my body&#8230; which is a miracle, especially if you take into consideration that I drive like a maniac, and my history was lots of accidents&#8230; not since March of 2003.<\/p>\n<p>The other amazing thing that happened right after I bought The Zohar is that I suddenly found the courage and energy to leave an abusive, going-nowhere, dead-end, soul-deadening relationship&#8230; which I&#8217;d wanted to do for about 3 years at the time. By the end of July I was out of there, found an excellent apartment, and had more energy to live than in the past 10 years. Yaay.<\/p>\n<p>Two years later I got my own &#8220;student support&#8221; person\/teacher, Sivan Bramli. We have been studying Kabbalah together ever since, I have gone to several big holiday events, watched screencasts of others, and read lots of books.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from Kabbalah, I was active in Landmark Education for 20 years, am a trained axiologist\/ Value Profile consultant, studied with different transformational teachers (will compare the teachings in other articles&#8230; ok?), am an avid reader (read about an hour a day in spite of my dyslexia and add).<\/p>\n<p>But more important qualifier than anything: I am a thinker. I am a right-brain thinker. I am in touch with that hidden dimension where all is known.<\/p>\n<p>So, here you are, this is what gives me the right to write about Kabbalah.<\/p>\n<p>If you want people closer to the horse&#8217;s mouth, go the the <a title=\"The Kabbalah Centre The Rav P. S. Berg, Karen Berg, Michael Berg, Yehuda Berg\" href=\"http:\/\/kabbalah.com\" target=\"_blank\">Kabbalah Centre&#8217;s website<\/a>, or find the many orthodox kabbalah sites, or the sites that teach the mystical aspects of the Kabbalah. I, personally, subscribe to the Kabbalah Centre&#8217;s interpretation of what the Kabbalah and The Zohar say, and I see it work in my life, and in the lives of people that I coach&#8230; oh, I forgot to say that I have been a transformatinal coach for 22 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good question, right? You were just about asking that&#8230; Gotcha! OK, simple question, simple answer. First I tell you what I am not: I am not a Kabbalist. Kabbalists study, practice, and teach Kabbalah full time, for many many years. It could be even said that being a Kabbalist is like an insider&#8230; you need &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/7\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Who am I and what gives me the right to write about Kabbalah&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[25,2047,1523,1573,1634,2101,248,1815,2110,453,1635,1636,456,1615,1633,667,1863,1931,1637,1638,18,4,16,21,24,20,131,321,1590,1630,1536,777,368,454,19,1632,1521,642,1822,1591,1631,468,23,463,1792,34,17,74,455,47,177],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-personal-story","tag-72-names-of-god","tag-answe","tag-apartment","tag-blog","tag-borders","tag-cat","tag-courage","tag-dd","tag-ears","tag-energy-connection","tag-few-days","tag-full-time","tag-god-name","tag-good-question","tag-guru","tag-image","tag-images","tag-img","tag-insider","tag-iran","tag-jewish-mysticism","tag-kabbalah","tag-kabbalah-centre","tag-kabbalah-student","tag-kabbalahcom","tag-kabbalist","tag-landmark","tag-landmark-education","tag-lent","tag-long-long-time","tag-loser","tag-lt","tag-miracle","tag-names-of-god","tag-orthodox-kabbalah","tag-pallet","tag-pee","tag-people","tag-ra","tag-relationship","tag-simple-answer","tag-sophie","tag-student-support","tag-syracuse","tag-target","tag-the-light","tag-the-zohar","tag-tikkun","tag-warehouse-fire","tag-yehuda-berg","tag-zohar"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kabbalahchick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}