With the Sefer Hachaim, we are journaling our way to a purpose-driven and fulfilled life. The Sefer Hachaim gives us the opportunity and ability to upgrade our knowledge, our emotional pulls, and our rituals and practices. It gives us a formulated way of navigating the important areas of life so that we come to live with love, honesty, strength, and unity.

To do this, we break up the Sefer Hachaim into 10 to 12 fundamental life categories that we ought to be enroute to mastering. For most people, the idea of such focus, evaluation, and self-work is a completely foreign concept. The majority of people leave most of life’s fundamental categories on the sidelines where they remain weak and underdeveloped.

On each subject that we are going to cover, we begin by asking three questions:

What do I know about the subject?

What do I feel about the subject?

What are my standards and rituals now?

The human experience revolves around the mind, the emotions, and our habits.

When we align these three areas of life, we live well and feel fulfilled. An important beginning place for this journey is to be real about where you are presently with each aspect of yourself and your life that you plan to be working on.

The first stage of the Sefer Hachaim is to go through all the pillars of the Arba Yesodot and ask yourself what you know about each pillar in the present moment, what you feel about it in the present moment, and what your rituals are concerning this area of life in the present moment.

Once you’ve gone through all the pillars, now ask yourself another set of introduction questions about them and journal the answers come up for you:

The Real – Where am I now?

The Ideal – Where do I want to be?

The Process – What are the steps I need to implement in order to go from The Real to The Ideal?

1- The Real: In a sentence or two, sum up everything you’ve written previously. Now ask yourself: What do I believe about this topic? What’s my premise? What beliefs do I need to clear out that are holding me back in this area of life? Journal your response.

2- The Ideal: Now ask yourself: What precisely do I want? What’s my ideal vision for this area of life? How do I want to be living it in the most ideal way? Journal your response.

3- The Process: The process is broken up into three stages…

The ‘Why’ of the Process: Why do I want this? What’s the purpose of having it, What do I gain by achieving it? What do I lose out if I don’t achieve it?

The ‘How To’ of the Process: What exactly I need to do? What are the exact steps I need to take in order to get to this ideal?

The Obstacles to the Process: What can get in the way of me achieving this ideal? What are the challenges I may face? And how am I going to deal with those potential challenges?

Upon journaling your answers to all of these introductory questions, we journal about the categories included in the Arba Yesodot:

Physical and Financial Health

Physical Health breaks down into five different aspects – breathing, hydration, sleeping, eating, and exercise. Financial Health refers to my career and my relationship with money.

Relationships

Our numerous Relationships include one’s self, spouse, children, parents, siblings, friends, community and God.

Wisdom Wisdom refers to creativity, imagination, thinking, development of our ideas and our emotional life

Guidance Guidance means searching out a mentor (or mentors), making sure to be in touch with him or her regularly, valuing their time and instructions and implementing their advice appropriately.

As mentioned above, all of this is written out in “Question and Answer” form. First we ask a set of questions. Then we educate ourselves and develop healthier emotions. We clear out whatever needs to be done away with as we move towards whatever it is we are looking to achieve. We do the work of each question. The whole process takes about six to seven weeks.