Loving The Process| EP 62

0:08So good to see familiar faces. Those of you that I'm meeting for the first time, good to meet you. The premise of this format, very casual. As you can see, it's meant to be just a conversation. Jeff and I will share a little bit of consciousness, but then we want to open the floor to questions, things that you're learning in your Kabbalah classes, things that are happening in life. But the idea is that really anything that comes to mind, feel free to share. So the way it's work consciousness then we're going to open the floor then we're going to do meditation and then we're going to do a little bit of a workshop uh so jeff you want to kick it off on the uh evening and the topic of the night yeah welcome so um the subject we're going to talk about first i'm going to read an excerpt from a text from the director of the kabbalah center michael berg and it's it's introduction to what we call tle 10 limon inseminations and that's the foundational teaching of Kabbalah from the Ari, which is sage from, you know, 15th century.

0:59And, you know, it's really the foundation of everything we learn at the Kabbalah Center. The Ari quotes, this is the meaning of her feet go down to death. Her feet indicates conclusion. And the verse is talking about the feet of Malchut, which is the aspect of the desire to receive pleasure that exists in the extending of the light of the creator. Eventually, what evolves from her is the aspect of death to the other side and those who nourish from and follow the other side. So again, that's deep. What does that mean, right? So Michael is going to break it down here so we can understand what the Ari is talking about.

1:37So the concept, her feet go down to death, is very important. It tells us that the end result of the desire to receive for the self alone is that it leads to death. Just a side note, when we talk about death here, we're not just talking about physical death, we're talking about death to a relationship, death to a business, death to anything in the physical realm that you may be working on in your daily life. Every time we are about to act in a way that is of the desire to receive for the self alone, which means in a way that is selfish, in that moment we probably know in some way that although we will enjoy this, it is not the right thing to do.

2:21However, what we do not see and do not have awareness or consciousness of is that the only place that this action can lead me to is disconnection from the light of the creator into pain, suffering, and death. The reason we allow ourselves to do actions of desire to receive for the self alone, actions of selfishness, is because we do not have a true understanding of the concept, her feet go down to death. That the only path we can go on when we act with desire to receive for the self alone is towards death, towards a disconnection from the light of the creator. Therefore, next time today when we are about to do an action of selfishness, we stop and ask ourselves, remember, although right now this might seem like a good and enjoyable thing, it will only lead me to a place of her feet go down to death.

3:09It can only lead me to the disconnection from the light of the creator, to pain, suffering, and eventually death. so I like to use so we can really understand in a practical way I like to insert the term instant gratification so when we talk about desire to receive for self alone usually it's something we grab for instant gratification we want something, we want it now instead of looking at the big picture in short-term fulfillment versus long-term fulfillment. And another way to look at it, from my perspective, again, when everything is me, me, me, it's all-consuming, whatever we're dealing with, and all we're thinking about is ourselves.

4:00And just to be clear, this is not about perfection. It's an incremental process. I want to make it clear when we're talking about transforming a desire to receive self-assurance, own. It's a lifelong process because body consciousness, by definition, is the body is selfish, right? So it's a constant fight to transform it. So we also want to be realistic and, you know, think about it as a process. If we can get better every single month, that's huge progress. This is not about perfection. um so we'll dive into examples you know david and i'll share some practical examples and then we'll open up with you guys but first yeah totally so just to echo on that i was um talking to jeff actually last night and i had a sort of really big thing at work that i was that i was pending for months for like six months we were at the one yard line basically for non-football people here you're at the finish line and something came out of nowhere a challenge came up that almost sabotaged the entire deal and so for six or seven hours yesterday I thought not only the work that I put into the company I just had a startup for 18 months now if this had gone wrong the company wouldn't exist and after 18 months of all the work after 18 months of thinking that I finally got to a place where like now we're going to grow something happened and everything looked like it was going to fall apart and I called Jeff and I was like there's nothing that I can do in this situation for the first time in my life I actually felt sick from stress like I felt like I was going to physically throw up which I never experienced in my life before it was that it felt like it overtook my body right it was like there was nothing that I could physically do I felt out of control I felt like all my work was not doing anything and I had to surrender and I called Jeff last night after I was leaving the gym and I was like Jeff why does business have to be so hard and then Jeff's like that's anybody who's successful and we hear this cliche all the time goes through the most challenges in life.

5:58Not only do they go through the most challenges, it never gets less challenging. So you become successful at one stage. Now there's equal challenges. You become more successful. The challenges grow. But what he told me, what we spoke about today, which was fascinating, there was a time in this world, and this is TLEs or TETA luminous nations, where the world, you could receive things without going through pain. We had that for many, many lifetimes, for many, many years. But for those of you that are maybe in later stage Kabbalah classes, at some point, we stopped appreciating. And so the appreciation went out the window.

6:26and the blessings left with it too. But even though we live in a world today where you can't just receive things without putting in the work, we can get to a place where these challenges aren't as, where these processes aren't as challenging. And the way that that happens is when you say to the creator, okay, I don't see the full picture, but what I do know for sure is that this is not all that there is. We're not confined to what's in front of us. The deal that I thought was going to sabotage the company isn't the end all be all. There's something beyond that. And when we get out of that reality, then everything can change.

6:52And so today everything did change. The thing that I thought was the demise of the company turned out to resolve itself practically overnight. There obviously were more variables to it, but it involved another person in my company. And long story short, it all kind of worked out. But had I just gone yesterday and stepped out of my office, stepped out of the situation that I was in, and I do this and I was sharing this with Jeff, like I oftentimes when I'm in immense stress, I'll go out of my office and I'll look at the street and see somebody walking their dog or I'll see like kids playing in the sand.

7:19When you look at like simple things that are happening in life, all of our major problems that are existing, they don't really seem as big of a deal anymore. So tonight, and maybe Jeff, you want to kick off sort of the first initiation of the workshop, but we want to get everybody here to a state of like, what's something in your life today that's either a friction point, a stress point, that seems like it's just consuming everything around you. And maybe we can sort of unpack that and get out of it. Yeah, exactly. And I just one more thing to add to what Dave was saying. So, you know, this is what we learned Kabbalistically, you know, we call it, you know, direct light.

7:49Like we no longer receive direct light. let's use the word instant gratification, right? It's called returning light. We have to go through a process to draw down that light, right? And that process is transforming desire to receive for self alone into the desire to receive for the sake of sharing, right? When it's not just about me, we're thinking about other people. We're thinking about the big picture. We're thinking about more than our self-absorbed little me. so that transformation process is you know is is the process that we go through so um how we want to do this is we want we want to unpack it is for people to share okay what's what's one area of life where you feel pain you know business relationship health and you know we can unpack you know how to transform that the creator is simple so like that's that's like a the one thing you need to always remember the creator is simple when we think about things complicated yeah that's not the creator so understanding why what's going to happen like the building a company analogy is the best one you start a company the first thing you need to do is just build a product when you have a product then you get customers when you get customers then you raise money then you but if you're like if you start a company thinking about how are we going to sell this company in five years it's never going to sell you're never going to have your first customer you're never going to have your first product like you need to be narrowly focused so in a relationship right now all you have to think about is am I open to somebody showing up in my life that's it not am I gonna have somebody who's gonna be my soulmate and we're gonna spend our can am I open to being with somebody and can I is there energy for them to come into my life is there an opening that's it and then everything else the fears the doubts the worries like you don't don't even think about it don't think about how do I deal with the fear when it shows up how do I deal with the pain like am I open to somebody showing up in my life and just keep on every time the doubt comes up just keep on saying that over and over again and eventually the pain won't even matter anymore and you'll just be focused on that and we talked about in the beginning right the desire to seek for self alone when we're acting from that place we're we're bringing pain why is that because we're blocking the light right so you why when we want to manifest things in our life let's go back to the root level of what we're talking about so let's give some examples of desire to receive for the self alone.

10:08So we want to try to transform that because as we transform that, we create an opening. The portal opens for light to flow. And when light flows, the relationship shows up, right? The business opportunity shows up. The pain in a relationship, right? It opens up a little bit, right? So it can be from as simple as, right, you're in an interaction, whether it's, your business partner, someone in your relationship, someone on the street, right? Getting angry. That is just a C-level of desire to receive for alone. So just restricting getting angry about anything. Already there is major transformation, right?

10:51Speaking to somebody rudely, right? That's coming from desire to receive for alone because that's ego, right? It's about me, so they're hurting me, so I'm going to attack them, you know, right? So, you know, you can drive in. Let's talk about some of these simple examples. Totally. These things, these, you know, they're not little. They're major things, but just these little shifts here. And I'm speaking from experience because I'll just share. I'll be vulnerable. Like I, you know, starting as a kid, I came in as well. I'm a very fiery personality. I have a lot of anger inside me, you know, and I operated from anger in all areas of my life.

11:30I mean, I, everywhere. And it really ruined my life. And just studying this wisdom and transforming it, it's unbelievable the miracles that happen. It's unbelievable how the lights flowed. I mean, I get the chill. Just talking about it, I get the chills, right? So this is not just, you know, I'm not just sharing this from a textbook. I'm sharing this for you from life experience, you know? Just transforming anger will bring tremendous light to your life, right? And you can go to any negative emotion. It's not just anger. It's jealousy. It's hatred. It's, you know, I mean, we can go down the line.

12:07Everybody can share. So just just working on that, you know, that's transforming your desire to yourself alone. Yeah. And to echo that, we spoke a little about challenges before. For me, whenever I'm like completely stuck on one thing, the first thing I'll do is like something completely irrational that's out of myself. So, for example, today and even right now being here, I have maybe six to seven hours of work that I have to do before the morning tomorrow. but I stopped for lunch with my cousin who I don't see very often. And then I came here and I'm here tonight, which I'm very happy to be here.

12:36But if I thought logically, it's like I need to work right now. I'm going to be up till three o 'clock in the morning. That's not feasible, but that's what's going to work for the business. And I probably won't even have to be up till three o 'clock. Like some of the challenges that I have to figure out and resolve will resolve themselves. I've seen this time and time again. I'm so focused on trying to figure out a problem. I spent six hours, can't figure it out. I leave. I take my little sister for ice cream. I come back, it worked out, right? It's like the craziest thing. So I just say to just one, it's like when you're in your desire to receive, which is just me, me, me, there is no room for the light to come in.

13:07And then you can literally completely detach from it. You come back and you're like, oh, it got all resolved. The creator came in and fixed it for me. Right. So that's another one. It's just sharing. Right. So we talked about transforming the negative emotions and then going on the positive side. Instead of focusing on you all day, what can you do to put somebody in front of yourself? Right. I mean, that again, major transformation, major transformation. So selfishness, you know, desire to be selfish, it's a consciousness, right? It's not about the physical action, right? It's not about whatever you do.

13:37Because something I've learned, one person could do one thing, two people can do the same action, and for one person it could be selfish and one person would be completely unselfish. So that's what I mean by it's a consciousness, right? It's, it's, so that's for you to determine, but from, you know, it can be completely unselfish. I mean, you're, you're bringing a child to the world and you're going to give all your energy and love to take care of that child. There's nothing, I mean, I have five kids, so I know there's nothing more unselfish than raising a kid. I would say like every time I'm not sure about something, I, you know, I ask the creator every single day and then I also explore it.

14:19like I would go all the way to exploring it till literally the day you do it and then you'll know you know what I mean like explore it ask the creator and explore it like take all the steps necessary to see you know and then the day of you know you can pull out you know what I mean and because you keep asking the creator and look and also that they say you want to ask the creator but the creator wants to know that you're taking action but we also have to take action in the physical world. And then the creator is going to give you the answer. If you just sit back and just don't do anything about it, it's going to be very hard.

14:54But when you take action, you know, the answer will come. And I think it's very brave that the fact, you know, again, from my understanding of the study and my life experience, the fact that you're grappling with, should I do it? Should I not do it? You're already moving beyond the selfish realm, right? Because you're you're engaging in the process. Your self-interest would be just to do something without, you know, just, I'm going to do this, right? Without, you know, having consciousness about it, right? So you're already moving beyond that realm. Even if you were coming from that place, which I don't think you are, right?

15:32So just to share with other people, when you grapple with something and you go back and forth with it and you think about it, and you're already one step ahead of the game of transforming the desire to receive self alone. Yeah. And also the fact that you're sharing it out loud. Yeah. That's your point. That's one of that. My dad says two best ways to manifest. One is to be embarrassed, but this is, I don't think you're embarrassed, but to be, okay. So that's amazing. That's amazing. They say that when somebody gets embarrassed, the creator grants them whatever they ask for. So that's amazing. The second thing to Jeff's point.

16:03And because we're diminishing, the embarrassment diminishes our ego and diminishes our selfishness. It creates a vessel for the creator to come in. but so on that point to go deeper I was in what I thought was a serious relationship and it's kind of similar but not related I was like maybe she's my soulmate maybe she's not and I asked my dad who was my spiritual guide and I said is she my soulmate he said it's I can't tell you that now but go through the process and say to the creator every day which is what I would say to ask if this is for me show me right away that she's for me if it's not for me then pull her very far away or show me that she shouldn't be there and eventually I got that clarity so to Jeff's point it's like daily ask yourself that question is is this child for me should i have a child and then every single day as you get closer as you get closer if the desire is still there then you should continue to pursue it but if the desire diminishes then that's also the way of creator letting you know so the only thing i would say is like sometimes we ask the creator something and he gives us all these signs but then we don't really listen to them so the desire going away is a sign like if things not working out could also be a sign but just continue to ask so i think that's that's yeah and then continue to just explore what that looks like having a child going through that whole process.

17:08I would also say that they don't usually contradict. I think oftentimes we think that spirituality and monetary success are two separate things. They oftentimes overlap. So I'll give a real life example. Even just think about you come to the Kabbalah Center and you take a class and you pay for the class, but you're coming for the wisdom. But if there wasn't a price point there, you wouldn't appreciate the wisdom maybe. There would be bread of shame. You're getting all of this light, but what is being given in return? so you can use that same mentality with your clients. It's like, if I give this service to them for free, maybe they'll transform their lives.

17:38Will they appreciate it? Will they appreciate how they've changed? Will they see how they've changed? So just like reframing, like, yes, I'm giving them a great service. I love what they're seeing from it, but if I don't charge them for it, I'm actually hurting them. And that's when you can start to get really excited about it. And you'll see opportunities to both give and also receive from it. Like in my business, with my employees, with my team, I always try to instill spirituality. But if somebody steps out of line or somebody asks for something that's unreasonable, I don't just say, you know what, I'm a sharing person.

18:05So you want a 500K salary for being, you know, not a salary where you should be there? Like, I'm not going to go ahead and give it to you within reason, right? So those are the two things that came to mind for me. Yeah, and I would add, I think also, you especially, you know, I'll just share with you when we're on the spiritual path, right? And there's sometimes this, and I don't know if it's for you, I'm just checking and there's this guilt feeling about making money. And I think, you know, I've learned from my teachers too, it's similar with Dave saying, we need to move beyond that. There's nothing wrong with making money, right?

18:36There's nothing wrong with it. It's so, you know, desire to receive the self alone if it was just for you. Like, is this all about me? Like, again, it's a consciousness thing. And if your intention, which you just said, is to be of service to others, then that's it. You're allowed to make all the money in the world, right? And still be spiritual, still transform your desire to receive the self alone and feel good about it. Don't feel ashamed or guilty about making money. Like it, like David said, it doesn't contradict. It's more about the consciousness. It's more about when everything's just about me, me, me.

19:06We all, we should be very intentive about what we want in life, but the road to getting there is what's, is where we shouldn't be intentive. So you can say, I want my soulmate, but don't try to think, okay, well, if I go on this many dates and I, like, I was talking to somebody, I don't know how many people you can raise your hand if you do this. they had an Excel sheet of all the people that they've dated. And given the laughter, I don't know if everybody does this or if this is, but, and they literally had like, you know, personality check. Okay. Looks no. And then like they would rank all the dates they went on.

19:35And the one with the most sort of alignment was like, okay, well maybe I should try to make this one work. Like that's, that, that's definitely not how you find your soulmate. You might get lucky and just with the odds. Um, so I, I think like the, the, the reality can be misguided of how we think we should get there. But definitely like I want the business to be successful. I want to sell it for a billion dollars. I want my soulmate. Like all of those desires should be really clear, but we should never be attached to the path to getting there. That's the difference. First, it's a beautiful story.

20:01We were talking about before the class. So thank you for sharing that. Many people probably don't know this. Around 70 years ago, my grandparents who started the Kabbalah Center, when they started, I think it was five or six years in, they had around 100 teachers, maybe a couple hundred students. One day, the teachers decided that they didn't want to be a fart anymore, and all the students, all the teachers left. And so they, you know, put in five, six, seven years of work into building a structure of community. Overnight, it all disappeared. Then 10, 15 years later, again, built at this point, it was in multiple cities, multiple countries.

20:34Same thing internally, there was some of the teachers decided they wanted to leave. All the students left with them, and the entire community and everything that was built fell apart. Several years after that, my grandmother was handing out za 'ars in in a community there at the time for those of you maybe that know the za 'ar even just kabbalah was not something that a lot of people wanted to be sharing with the world it was meant to be in like really confined communities they didn't want people outside learning it and so my grandmother she that's always her personality she never cared what the sort of you know way it was supposed to be and she was handing out za 'ars in the community and somebody came behind her and took a baseball bat and hit her in the back of the head yeah and she she fell with all the books in her hands picked them back up and just and the person was yelling at her and the crazy thing is that she came back to the same place the next day and continued to hand them out and and now all of me jeff like all of us here only exist because she decided that just because that happened to her she wasn't going to give up right she was going to continue um and that's like just like one example right out of a thousand stories out of a thousand stories right and so i to that my dad reminded me of that story when i was talking about a challenge that i was dealing with and i said like when does it get easier like i understand And you have to work, right?

21:42It's like, we all work, right? Like, okay, at some point, like, it looks like there's, like, when do you have the yacht? And when is like life, when is life caught, right? He's like, I hope for you that it never does. And he was giving me a blessing in disguise because he said, as soon as it becomes easier and less challenging, then you're not living your life's purpose and you're not doing what you're meant to do in this world. The more challenging things become, you're not revealing light. And he's like, you should pray that every year your life is more challenging, but you have more happiness because if you have happiness through challenge then you can handle all the challenge in the world what is a challenge because the challenge is your experience of a situation yeah like me and you could have the exact same day and for you was challenging but for me i loved it yeah so was it was it a challenge yeah so that's like it's how you respond to the scenarios in your life challenge right so you could have a blissful life that that's what I don't know what you've been hearing, but from my understanding, I'm assuming a challenge-free life means a blissful life, meaning you're not reacting to whatever circumstance that's happening to you.

22:48I think that's the point. Look at a businessman who, any business that was built or any family that was built, anything of substance that was built was challenging at one point or another. but a mother who goes through child labor and experiences pain she doesn't experience that as pain for her it's joy because soon after she has a child a person who builds a business for seven years and then sells it for a billion dollars and now has financial freedom they don't even they don't feel those challenges so it's it's not that life's ever going to get easy but our entire perception of things and the way that they manifest is what we want to get to with Kabbalah because without Kabbalah you then you are angry at why did I have a painful childbirth and why is my business painful and why do I wake up and why am I yelling at people and why am I aggressive so that's a non-spiritual person.

23:30A spiritual person goes through the same challenges, but they awaken with joy. They smile at the secretary when they walk in. They're kind to other people. The challenges might still be there, but their experience of it doesn't exist. Yeah, I think the word perception is like the key thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll just give you an example in my business, right? I used to react to every challenge, right? Every problem was a stress, right? It's just, it's, and that was, right? who wants that but and i thought okay yeah like like i thought i'm kind of looking at from your perspective with david's okay well that's how business is what i mean it's just going to be like i learned from my dad it's going to be stressful it's supposed to be that way it's supposed to be hell but you make money but no i mean now that i have the kabbalistic tools the same things happen the lawsuit that this guy does that this problem happens but i don't let it affect me it's part of business right it's it's it's it's how i react to it so i come home at night and a completely different place than I did in the past.

24:30So that's the difference. It's the consciousness. We're just thinking about me, me, me, and all my problems. It's very constricting, right? The body's tense. It's, you know, energetically, your thoughts are all over the place. You're worried. You're fearful, right? And then when you transform the desire to see for the Cephalonides, C for the sake of sharing, there is more of an expansive feeling, right? Just think about when you help somebody with something, how it makes you feel, right? There's an expansive feeling about it. It feels good to help somebody when you share and you put yourself out there and you give something to somebody.

25:12There's an expansive feeling, right? So experientially, we're already doing the work experientially. we can shift that energy as we're going about our day and not being so heavy and energetically, you know, feeling me, me, me to just feeling more about, wow, like David said, there's more to the world. There's 8 billion people in the world. Look at there's nature. There's, there's, there's so much more than just me in the world, right? That's an expansive feeling. So we're going to go through this process just to, just to get to feel what that feels like more of an expansive versus a constrictive feeling.

25:54So let's start with three deep breaths. We're going to take a deep breath in, deep breath out. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Deep breath in. deep breath out.

26:24Now we want to settle in.

26:29We want to try to, you know, have our consciousness move to the present moment. And we're going to use the breath as a mantra. And it's going to be a natural breath that we're focusing on in and out. We're not going to force the breathing in and out like we just did, we're just going to feel the breath naturally go in and out of the nostrils. And every time our mind goes somewhere, bring it back to the breath. And I'll tell you, I've been meditating for 35 years. I can tell you what meditation is not. Meditation is not trying to stop thinking. I have that mistake and most people make that mistake in the beginning we think meditation is stopping your thoughts guess what, we can't control we can't stop our thoughts so the whole idea is to just catch ourselves when we're in a loop of thoughts and come back to the present moment

27:42so gently feel the breath

27:48there's a sensation as we breathe in through our nostrils feel the sensation as we breathe out through our nostrils