My Journey with Kabbalah

Note:  Links have been removed from this post because payment by Emily Olsen of Perennial Relations was not made and emails requesting fulfillment of their obligations were not answered.  

If emily@perennialrelations.com does respond and pay for this blog post as promised, I'll gladly restore the links and remove this notice.  I made this agreement with Emily in good faith and expected it to be honored.  It has not been honored. 

I did like the content of this blog post and have great respect for the Kabbalah Center even though I lost a tremendous amount of followers for posting it.

(Sponsored post by Kabbalah Center)

Kabbalah means different things to various students, but it has been nothing short of a total life transformation for me. I have practiced as an attorney in New York for more than a decade now, and I have been fortunate to have all the financial security that I need to provide a comfortable life for my two children.

However, it only took about three years of practicing law at a major law firm to find myself completely underwhelmed with my circumstances. Even though I had landed a prestigious career and had all of the comforts of an impressive salary, my life felt empty and almost meaningless. The birth of my children forever changed my life for the better, but outside of my interactions with them, I was a shell of a human.

In my neighborhood and surrounding community, there are actually a large number of people who study Kabbalah. I actually first learned about it from a friend who had been practicing Kabbalah for about seven years before introducing it to me.

Even though I felt overwhelmed at first with the magnitude of some of the initial teachings, I came to embrace the reality that this type of study would take years to fully immerse myself in. I approached it with serious vigor and a commitment to uncovering at least the broad scope of the hidden secrets of the universe.

Although I did not fully understand everything that I was reading and learning, I knew that this was only the beginning of opening my eyes, ears and brain to the spiritual knowledge that could fulfill my life in the way that I had been yearning for.

After just six months of study, I felt my body start to react to the spiritual knowledge it was receiving. I even started to stand taller because it felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. I was more present in all of my interactions with my children, and I found myself less stressed about my position at work. I even found the inner peace to rekindle some strained relationships with family members.

All of this would not have been possible for me without the sound teachings of the Kabbalah Centre. This wonderful center has been teaching Kabbalah to all kinds of students since 1965. I was concerned that my lack of knowledge about the Jewish religion and Hebrew would make the studies too advanced for me, but this was not the case at all. In fact, my lack of hardly any religious knowledge was not an impediment to my learning at the Kabbalah Centre. I found that I was embraced just as I was and received instruction that was specifically tailored to my circumstances.

One of the things that the Kabbalah Centre emphasizes in its teachings is that they are not incompatible with religion. Instead, these teachings are more of a supplement to religion and serve to help connect us with the unknown universe. The Kabbalah Centre allows students to explore all of the mysteries of the universe without having to arrive at a precise answer for all of the larger and incomprehensible things around us.

The universal principles taught at the Kabbalah Centre apply for all types of people throughout all walks of life. I have connected with a diverse and welcoming community of students, which has allowed me to pursue my studies at an even deeper level and appreciate the all-encompassing nature of the principles taught at the Kabbalah Centre. The openness of the students at the Kabbalah Centre to engage in meaningful discussions has certainly augmented my personal growth.

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This has been a sponsored post by the Kabbalah Centre (click here).

Please visit their site for more information. https://www.youtube.com/user/kabbalah

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Evolved Beliefs

When our beliefs become how we see the world, it is time to question these beliefs. While many in our country and throughout our world give lip service to this concept, many fall short.

Growing up, I remember being taught many beliefs by my family, the church and society. Many of those beliefs no longer serve me in my life because as I have grown and evolved.

Here are a few examples of the beliefs I grew up with which were challenged in a very difficult way.

1) The family that fights together does so because they love one another.
2) Boys that cry or are sensitive need to grow up and be a man.
3) Give 80% in marriage and expect only 20% in return if that much.
4) Daddy does these things to you because God tells him to.
5) Do what your father tells you to do without question.
6) You just have to suck it up and move on - feelings are for wimps.
7) Don't do as I do, do as I tell you to do.
8) Dancing and drinking are sinful (except when we do it in private).
9) Family secrets are best left in the closet.

This list could be endless for me. These beliefs were ones that we were taught that you neither questioned, nor disobeyed. Disobeying meant you were not only disrespecting your father but you were turning your back on God. Turning your back on God, meant you would suffer throughout life and end up in the fiery place called hell.

As I have grown in life, it has taken me some very difficult moments to learn that most of these things were rules and beliefs dreamed up by some adult to fit me into the mold they wanted me to be. It had nothing to do with how I would discover who I was as a person. It was more about control, manipulation and adherence to a set of derived vantage points.

We've all got our beliefs and teachings we grew up with. While some of these may serve us well in our life, we need to be careful. If our beliefs control us, than we not evolving in life. We did not come to this world to leave without becoming more evolved and aware. Unfortunately, far too many in this world do just that.


Further Reading:
1) Beliefs Often Are Regurgitated Rhetoric
2) Truth That Is Now Foolish
3) What Do You Believe?




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http://www.donshetterly.com

If any part of this post is used or shared, a link back to this site is required.
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Beliefs or Chains

I was recently at a seminar and got chatting with another participant. In the course of our conversation, he steered the chat around to the bible and the scriptures. I was a little shocked at first because I didn't see that coming. So anyway, we were discussing various topics and in a very emphatic and forceful manner, he said, "I don't believe that. The scriptures say that is wrong". While I don't want to get in to specifics of the conversation, we were talking about various healing modalities and enlightment concepts.

What struck me as odd though is that this person was here in this seminar to learn, just like I was. Yet, their beliefs were almost holding them back from even listening to what was being taught. Don't get me wrong here because people who have beliefs are valid and their beliefs can be valid. The part that caused me concern though was just how dead set against this person was to anything outside of his realm of learning or experience in life. Maybe he has something figured out that I don't have and maybe neither of us have anything figured out. Who knows? It may take until the end of our lives to know for sure.

So when do beliefs about something becomes chains that tie us down? Maybe one could suggest that they become chains when they allow ourselves to put limits on what we hear, listen, observe or attempt to learn. You just never know when someone is going to share something that may just be a major piece in the puzzle of learning for your life. Of course, if we immediately exclaim with force that we are opposed to anything different than how we view things, the piece of the puzzle may go on by and never come our way again.

One of the things that I found when I was paralyzed and breathing my last few breaths was that so much of what everyone worries about in life, really doesn't matter. Your perspective changes and priorities are different from that point forward. You tend to evaluate everything you were told or taught, trying to find ways to actually prove or disprove it. We are taught so many things in this world and especially in our own cultures. Yet, we often can not see through the fog to see the tree that stands in front of us. We have become so mesmerized by the fog or what we are bombarded with each day that the fog is what we hold on to as if it was our last breath.

Again, I'm not saying that what I have to share with others is the absolute truth. There are many things we do not know. Everyone has their own views and opinions which is often cloaked in the true fact of belief, but none of us truly know if these things are absolutes.

So I challenge each person reading this, to evaluate life from the standpoint of the observer. See all that it has to offer and try not to only see what it is you want to see. Try looking with clear vision into that which you don't want to see because in doing so, you may just discover much more than you already are aware of. Life has so much to offer and let's make the most out of each of our days and our experiences by embracing every tidbit of experience we can. Only then, do we have the hope of becoming all that we can be!