There's only one question that drives you forward, which is, what's God's will for me? Eventually, we get out of personal development completely, and we start to just ask questions through the ultimate effective lens, which is, what does God want for me? And then walking that walk with faith and trust that your higher power of your own understanding is walking with you. But in order to do that, we have to build a personal relationship with God. A relationship with God is a neurology. It is a nervous system that has been practiced in a conversation with Goddesse. As you build your relationship with God, you are building a new nervous system, and you are evolving into a higher version of a human being that is connected to God in the most intimate way, because it is literally a connection that runs through your entire body.

Welcome to a changed mind, a journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth, to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth, and relationships. To open and honest conversations about pressing global issues, issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture, and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools, and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity, and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside, you're in the right place. Welcome to a changed mind. Hey, it's David. Welcome back to a changed mind. A sanctuary for your spirit. A place where each and every episode I remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. I am your friend, your host, your guide, David Bayer. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you my philosophy on how to develop a personal relationship with God and why it's important to have a personal relationship with a higher power of your own understanding.

A lot of people right now, especially in new age and manifestation and law of attraction, believe in the intelligence of the universe. But what I found, having gone from an atheist to a universe person to a personal relationship with God, is that there's a big difference between having a relationship with the universe and having a relationship with that which created it. What I've discovered as well is that a relationship with God is a neurology. It is a nervous system that has been practiced in a conversation with God. As you build your relationship with God, you are building a new nervous system, and you are evolving into a higher version of a human being that is connected to God in the most intimate way, because it is literally a connection that runs through your entire body. And lastly, what I'm going to share with you is a practice that I've developed, which I talked about in another episode, that has really accelerated my relationship with my higher power. Now, I want to start with a little bit of background. Some people grow up in a religious family. Doesn't necessarily mean they have a personal relationship with their higher power.

I was not one of those people. My family did all the commercial stuff, like Easter and Christmas. My mom was Christian, my dad was jewish. So we also did Hanukkah and Passover, but we never went to church, we never went to temple. And there wasn't a lot of talk about God in my life. So when I got to college, I considered myself an atheist, and I didn't believe in a big bearded guy in the sky or some omnipotent force that way out there would answer your prayers. And it wasn't until my life became unmanageable with drug addiction and alcohol addiction that I started changing my perspective. Now, you may not be an addict or have never gone through the twelve steps, so I want to take a second to explain what that experience was like for me and how it helped me start to build a relationship with a higher power. And so the way addiction works is that people normally get into some sort of addiction recovery program, in this case, twelve step, because they can't stop drinking. They can't stop drugging, they can't stop overeating, they can't stop sexing, they can't stop people pleasing. And ultimately, that's why people come into the program. How you're able to overcome the addiction is a result of allowing God into your life. In other words, developing a relationship with a higher power is the cause. The effect is to stop drinking. And what's interesting about this is you don't actually stop drinking by trying to stop drinking. You stop drinking by working the twelve steps. And the steps start with leaning on a relationship with a higher power. So the first three steps, if I were going to summarize them in the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, are, I can't. He can, I'll let him. And initially, what we're saying is, I can't stop drinking. There is a power greater than me that can alleviate me of my alcoholism, and I will let that power take my desire or urge or compulsion to drink away from me. But what it really starts to do is build a relationship with a higher power that is not just present in your alcoholism, but present in every area of your life. So the desire to drink, for example, for me, and I can only speak from my own perspective, was an attempt to check out of the uncomfortable emotions, the day to day suffering that I was experiencing as a result of unprocessed trauma, unprocessed limiting beliefs, the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelm, the feeling like I wasn't good enough, the feeling that I wasn't as far along as I should be, all of the indecision, the comparing what is really the human experience, I checked out from feeling those negative emotions, utilizing these tools called drugs and alcohol and sex. So what you learn to do in the twelve steps is not only turn your life, turn your desire to drink over to a power greater than yourself, but you're allowing the higher power of your own understanding, whatever that looks like, for you to also start to take over aspects of your life that you can't control and that in the illusion of control, are creating stress, anxiety and overwhelm for you. So as you start to let God into every aspect of your life, youre no longer experiencing the same level of negative emotion or suffering. And that contributes to the capacity to no longer use drugs or alcohol or whatever the addiction du jour is to check out of the discomfort. So this technology of the twelve steps clears you out, so you have the space for the connection with a higher power. Because after those first three steps, you start working on resentments, you start working on judgments, you start working on your limiting beliefs, you start working on character flaws. It's really a personal development structure. And as you start to pull the weeds and heal the misunderstandings, the natural byproduct of that is a relationship with God. And again, the God of your own understanding, whatever that looks like for you, this is not necessarily a christian God, an islamic God, this is an eastern philosophy God, a hindu God. This is the God of your own understanding. And that's why so many people are invited in to participate in the twelve steps, because it doesn't set a strict judgment around the relationship with God. And I'm not setting a strict definition around what God needs to be for you. But again, my experience was in my introduction to a relationship with a higher power was I couldn't stop drinking on my own. And so I had to start believing that there was a power greater than myself that could alleviate me of my suffering. But more importantly, as I started building a relationship through the technology of the twelve steps with my higher power, I started to apply that letting go in the rest of my life. And so, by learning to let go, you begin to flow with life more. And as you flow with life more, rather than being resistant to life or checking out of life through whatever ways that you may be checking out of your life right now, binge consuming Netflix, eating too much sugar, drinking too much caffeine, compulsively looking at your phone and scrolling through social media is you stop doing those things because you're able to heal the underlying traumas and limiting beliefs that are creating the emotional discomfort. And you start to flow with life more. You start to see the miracles that unfold. And as you're able to see, as the twelve steps promise that God is doing for you what you cannot do for yourself. Not just in your ability to stop your addiction, order to reduce the friction in your personal relationship, in order to help you find a soulmate, in order to heal your body of your chronic pain condition or your autoimmune disease, in order to eliminate the financial insecurity you've been experiencing in your life

And start to pour prosperity and abundance into your bank account, in order to get a business that has been stagnant for so long, to start to grow again, as you start to see that God is doing for you what you cannot do for yourself, both in terms of eliminating the addiction and in terms of the day to day stressors, that's when everything starts to change. And so that's where I first built a relationship with my higher power. And then I got into personal growth. And personal growth started to help me understand again how I could heal myself at a deeper level. But it always felt like there was something missing in my journey of personal growth. Personal growth was a lot about how I could achieve more, I could do more, I could be more, I could have more. As I started going deeper, this idea that I'm creating my own reality and thoughts are things is articulated in Napoleon Hill's book think and grow Rich. And that's been now translated into so many different forms of teachings through all the great modern personal development teachers and those same teachings that came earlier with greater teachers than Napoleon Hill, frankly, he just became very, very popular, who understood metaphysical principles and the laws of consciousness and how they worked, going all the way back to what I think is being communicated in scripture, in particular in the Bible, in terms of understanding how this relationship with our higher power functions. And as I went deeper and deeper into personal growth, I was able to make more money, and I was able to eliminate even more of my suffering. But it always felt like there was still something missing. And at this point, maybe you can relate to some of my story, all of my story.

You've been searching for a relationship with a power greater than yourself, or there are aspects of your life that have felt unmanageable, but you haven't been able to feel a connection as consistently as you'd like to. Whether you grew up in a religious family, or you grew up, like me, in a non religious family, or you've gotten into personal growth and there's this promise of living in a powerful state, but you find it hard to do. And there are still a lot of times when you move into fear, you move into uncertainty, you move into doubt. So just stick with me, because if you're still experiencing suffering, the answer is actually not trying to end your suffering. The answer is forging a next level of relationship with God. I had this conversation with one of my private clients recently. I said, personal growth only gets you to a certain point. Personal growth is about pulling the weeds, becoming aware of the old programs that were installed in you by your parents and by other people, and learning how to start to uninstall some of those programs. But if you continue to do personal growth, then you continue to be a weed puller at some point in time. In my own experience, what I realized was I didn't want to be in the conversation of pulling weeds and changing my limiting beliefs anymore. I wanted to be in a different conversation. One of my clients, as we were in Guatemala together at an event shared with me, he said, you know, I've been finding myself comparing myself to a lot of people and putting people like you or Tony Robbins or other people on a pedestal. And it's been holding me back, and I've been feeling like I'm not good enough, but I realize that I am good enough. And so placing myself on the same pedestal as you and Tony Robbins, and I'm thinking to myself, if you're putting Tony Robbins on a pedestal, it's a pretty big pedestal. He's a. He's a giant dude. I mean, I'm six seven, but the guy's built like a tower. And so I said, hey, look, that's a better way to look at it. Rather than not being good enough. You're as good enough as other people, but you're still pulling weeds. And he said, what do you mean by that? I said, well, you get to a point where you stop playing the good enough, not good enough conversation, and rather than debating with yourself whether you're good enough to do things or comparing yourself to other people. There's only one question that drives you forward, which is, what's God's will for me? But that question can only come as you've built a personal relationship with God. And so personal development, what I would call 1.0, is an essential part of the process. And I want to create this frame for you in case you're in it right now. But eventually, we get out of personal development completely, and we start to just ask questions through the ultimate effective lens, which is, what does God want from me? And then walking that walk with faith and trust that your higher power of your own understanding is walking with you. But in order to do that, we have to build a personal relationship with God. And as I started getting into personal growth and then getting into the spiritual teachings, one of the things that I noticed was a desire I had to have a relationship with my goddess like David had with his God in the Bible. I'm not super well read on the Bible. I've never read the thing cover to cover. I've read a lot of metaphysical interpretations of the Bible. But my favorite story is when a young shepherd boy is able to stand up to a Goliath and with the strongest faith in the world, speaking it so powerfully in front of everyone to see. He says, I know that I will win this battle because I have God on my side. And it doesn't matter how big you are, how small I am, it doesn't matter what weapons you have. And the fact that I just have a sling and a stone. Today all of the world will know that there is a God in Israel. And what he was saying was that there is a God with me here today. And I'm going to illustrate that by the taking down of the Goliath, something that was impossible to do, because I am not doing it. God is doing it. And I wanted to have that faith of that small shepherd boy against the Goliath is of my own life. And so for the last 18 months, I've been asking and asking and asking for a personal relationship with God. I've just been asking. And it's felt like a strange ask, to be honest, because while I see miracles in my life, I just don't feel the presence of God. I haven't felt that relationship. I do feel like I'm asking out into that void to that big bearded guy in the sky. That's how it feels to me. But nonetheless, I've been asking because scripture tells us there's a metaphysical principle asking ye shall receive. And we know that we create our own reality and we know that we can place requests and that in oftentimes indirect and very miraculous and mystical ways through other people, through circumstances and situations, the answers come to us. So I had been asking for a personal relationship with God and I had an intuition over the last several months that I should start waking up and journaling. And Ive struggled with my sleep for many, many years. And so oftentimes its like from 03:00 a.m. to 08:00 a.m. that I finally get my best sleep. So the idea of waking up early and journaling, which is what the intuition or the inclination was, was not particularly attractive. But I had this hunch. And then one day as I was complaining about my sleep, not taking my own coaching advice and not complaining about anything, my wife said to me, hey, why don't you get up earlier, it might help your sleep. I'm like, okay, that's number two. I've had this inclination to get up early and journal, she's saying, why don't you get up earlier, it might help your sleep. I'm using my sleep as a reason to not get up earlier. And then I went into a transformational breath session. So I work with a woman named Alia Whitmore or Alia Sivi, depending on how she shows up on the interwebs. Alia comes to my big annual event. The powerful living experience takes everybody through a deep transformational breath practice. And I try to breathe with about once or twice a month. And this breath practice consists about 60 minutes of intentional exertive breath. It's not forceful, but it's active breathing. And so I had this breath session with Aalia and oftentimes as a result of these sessions, towards the end of it I have some sort of a mystical or psychedelic type of insight or experience. And in this one I saw a variety of things peeling back, different layers of David, me being stretched out like one of those old animal hides, being dried in the sun and then relaxing. And I'm like well that's kind of like my experience over the last ten years, feeling stretched and then being more expansive. And then I saw a vision of myself with my skin literally being charred off and flaking off in a new David underneath me. I'm like, yep, that makes sense too. So this vision went on and on and once the vision stopped, all of a sudden I felt a tingling in my body and I noticed my body wanting to sit up and so I sat up and then my left hand started to shake and then it formed into the form as if I was holding a pen. And it started writing. And I could feel this energy unlocking throughout my whole body, going up my left arm, into my heart center, down all of my, you know, down my right arm, down my legs. And I felt energy that had been stagnant, moving. And so I got out of that breath practice and I was like, okay, I don't need to wait for the universe to drop an anvil on my head. And it's time to get up in the morning and start writing. And so I made my own hero's effort to wake up at dawn. I've been doing it almost every day over the last, I'd say six weeks to two months. Sometimes if I decide to sleep in, I don't beat myself up. But I get up and I go into my, this podcast room and I journal. But almost every day I write. And the writing process that unfolded the first time started in a really surprising way. I just put the pen in my hand and I started writing. And what came out was, dear father, thank you. And I just started writing for all the things that I'm grateful for in my life. I was like, dear father, thank you for my mind, thank you for my body, thank you for my spirit, thank you for the inspiration to start writing and communicating with you. Thank you for the beautiful wife that you've delivered to me in miraculous ways. Thank you for my extraordinary son and the joy and the smile that he brings on my face every single day. Thank you for my community. Thank you for this work that you've asked me to do in the world. Thank you for being with me every step of the way. There was stuff that started pouring out of my writing that really wasn't even conscious. It was just like a rant. And what was so interesting about this is I've done gratitudes before. And again, I talked about this in a previous episode. I won't go into a tremendous amount of detail around it, my journaling practice, but by writing to God and saying, dear father, thank you. And being really, really clear, having reflected upon my life, that anything great that I've ever created really had far less to do with the action that I took, more with the synchronicities, the coincidence and the miracles that God had delivered through other people and circumstances and situations, I felt the gratitude like I've never felt it before. Like it would be as if you had given me everything that I valued most of my life. And I was writing you a letter. That's how it felt. And so I didn't have to fake it. I don't know if you've ever done gratitudes, and you're like, all right, let me do a list of ten gratitudes. Dear Father, thank you. And this practice, it was very real for me. And then the really interesting thing about that is that I felt like I was getting into what I would describe as the God frequency. I felt like I was really connecting with God, just like you. And I would really connect if you were writing a letter to me or I was writing a letter to you. And we had been together our whole lives and had all these experiences together, and we were thanking each other for it. We would get into each other's frequency. And so what occurs in this process for me is I'm tuning my nervous system towards a relationship with Goddesse. The second thing I do is I get into asking for things. Hey, this is what I want. Sometimes it's. I want a continued clearing of my mind. I want you to make me more patient. I want you to take frustration away from me. I want you to give me discernment. And then sometimes it just goes into, I want you to help me get my book to a million people so we can impact more people. I want a private jet so that my family and I can travel with comfort and ease. I want all of these things, like a spoiled child, just like I, my son Gabriel just says, baba quiero. I want this, I want that, I want that, I want that. And just like a good father does, I give my son the things that I believe are good for him. And I don't give my son the things that, with my greater level of insight, I know are not good for him. And so I trust, as I'm writing out all these things, that if it's God's will, I'll get it. You know, Neville Goddard talks about this, about acting as the wish fulfilled, acting as if it's already done. I always had a hard time with that. How do you act as if it's already done when it's not already done? Well, you act as if it's already done. And it's not even an act when you know that the person you're asking is the creator of heaven and earth and the cosmos and the universe and the cells of your body and the systems of the planet and everything in existence. And when you are in that frequency in relationship, and you know that if it's something that is within God's will, he will give it to you because he's a loving father, then you feel as if it's already done. And what was really interesting as I was writing these things out that I wanted is many of the things I asked for weren't for me, but to further the relationship that God is seeking with all of us, and that all of us are seeking with God, doing it for God. And that's a really important thing. If you can start to do your work for something that is greater than you, then all of the personal insecurities, they have a harder time clinging to anything. If you don't take credit for your successes, then you don't take credit for your failures. So I asked. I asked for a lot of things, and I know it is done because it's God who I'm asking. And then the third piece of my practice was, I pray for others, and I pray for others in God's name, because I know if it's in God's will and I'm asking, then it will be done, and it's done. And if it's not God's will, then it won't be done. And so this practice has been transformational for me. Like, it's changed the way I feel throughout the course of the day. There are some important points around this practice. Right as I mentioned before, God is a neurology. If you want a nervous system built for God, you practice being in relationship with God. Just like anything else. If you want a nervous system built for basketball, you practice basketball. If you want a nervous system built for playing music, you play music. If you want a nervous system built for a deep relationship with God, you practice being with God, you practice that relationship. And so this practice has given me exactly that, a practice. What I also realized in doing this, and this is really important, is this relationship that I'm building through this practice and this awareness and everything that I've shared with you so far, this relationship is the relationship that I had been seeking with my dad that I never got. I don't know how your relationship is with your dad or with your mom, but I know that I was always seeking approval from my dad. There were a lot of things that I felt like were missing in my childhood, and I've done the work. I don't blame my dad anymore. I don't even think there's a reason to forgive. My dad gave me exactly what I needed to have in terms of an experience in order to become the David bear that I become today. And I'm very grateful for my dad for that because I know he carried a lot of trauma that he never let go of in order to be that trauma for me, so I could transform the trauma into this extraordinary person that I'm becoming. But what I also realized was I wasn't supposed to have that relationship from my biological father. I was meant to have it with my divine father. And so this practice is helping me really build an intimate relationship. There's intimacy here. I feel like God is seeing me and I feel like I'm able to feel and see God. And that's really the amazing thing about God, because on one level, God is working in this omnipotent, omniscient orchestration of all of us to interact with each other in order to, each of us become tools for each other towards our transformation and our greatest evolution. And returning us to a relationship with God. Like God is using all of us to bring us back into relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with God. So it's a very macro operating system. But at the same time, he's available for a very personal relationship, the personal relationship that he had with David in the Bible and the personal relationship that he's building with David on this podcast. Another thing is that you bring this practice into everything that you do. What I found naturally begins to occur is I'm having conversations with God on the regular. I had a meeting with someone who came to my house. We were looking at doing a business partnership together. And I was thinking about, how do I start this meeting? And it made perfect sense to me. We start in prayer. We start in praise, in glory to God for bringing us together, for giving us these extraordinary ideas, for creating all the relationships that I and this other individual have. And now this opportunity to combine all of those assets to make a greater impact in the world and to create more prosperity and abundance for so many people and to be creative and to have fun, all of that is in praise of God. It's not us. When you get really, really clear on it and you deepen that clarity as a result of a practice, a practice of building a deeper relationship with God, then the way we used to look at things makes no sense anymore. It only makes sense to start a meeting in prayer and worship around God. And I think worship is important. I think praise is important. If you want to be one with God, to have a relationship with Goddess, then you talk to God and you praise God. Just like my son praises me, tells me he loves me, tells me thank you, at the same time that he's asking for all kinds of stuff. So when you do that, right, when you talk to God. When you praise God through whatever practice works for you, I'm just sharing with you mine. I've also started to be able to do it more in my head, kind of when I'm on the road and I don't have my journal, but the writing really, really helped me. But when you do that, when you have a relationship, and when you have the relationship with your higher power, that relationship is inside of you. Because as I talked about before, it's in your nervous system. It's a neurology. So a lot of people talk about the Christ consciousness, and we could do a whole other episode unpacking all of that. In fact, I talked about this in an episode entitled the Jesus Question finally answered that I did early on with the show. But everything I'm sharing with you in this episode is about activating that consciousness inside of you, that Christ held, that unconditional faith, that unconditional love, that unconditional trust, that in every instance, in every circumstance, God is with us, and God is working for us, building that inside of you and making that who you are. That's the Christ consciousness. And so what this has allowed me to do, practically speaking, is relax into the challenges as they show up, because I know that nothing is ever going wrong. It can't have a relationship with the creator of the universe. And so everything that's occurring within that universe is in an answer request to what I've asked for, even though it may not be what I expected or is a mechanism for my growth and my evolution, that's required in order for me to become the person that God has planned for me and to have the boom and the prosperity and abundance that goes along with it. And so this has allowed me to start making decisions from a place of trust instead of fear or desperation. We make so many decisions from a place of fear or desperation. This podcast has really grown a lot over the last year. And so we have a lot of people who are jumping over to the website, subscribing to our newsletter, buying my book, coming into our community, who want to get into our business, coaching programs, or a high level mastermind or attend our events. And so I've been in the process of hiring a senior sales manager and rebuilding my sales team because I had a sales team in the past. Then I got rid of the sales team. It didn't make sense. I didn't have a lot of new clients coming in, and now we have a ton of them. And in the past, I would have been operating, given the fact that we have so many people buying our digital courses and coming into our world, there's so much opportunity out of fear or desperation or feeling like I need to hurry and find someone or I'm leaving money on the table. More importantly, I'm leaving impact on the table. That's how I would have been thinking about it. That's how I would have made bad choices. But because I'm in a place now where I have a personal relationship with my higher power and I trust divine timing, I'm not rushed. I still notice the rush. It still flickers in my nervous system. But God is greater in my nervous system right now. And so that has allowed me to say no to candidates who in the past I may have said yes to just because I felt rushed, just because I felt pressured. There's no pressure when you have a personal relationship with God, because you know that everything that is happening is happening for a reason. And in that you can relax and trust, you can have good discernment and judgment because you're running your life in partnership with a higher intelligence rather than running your life in partnership with fear. So I hope you found this episode valuable. If you're joining me on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, subscribe comment if you have any questions, I try to read all of them and respond to as many as I can. If there's somebody you feel needs to hear this episode today, definitely share that. Share it with them. If you're listening on the audio platforms, subscribe. And if you haven't yet, would you please, please leave me a rating? That would be so fantastic. We can get this work out to as many people as possible because I think personal development is fantastic. I mean, look, I'm a personal development teacher, but there's also a time when you need to go beyond personal growth and just start building that personal relationship with the creator of the universe. Because when you do, it makes everything else make so much more sense. And I highly encourage you to check out my other episode on my journaling practice a couple of episodes ago if you want to go deeper on that. I love you very much. Thank you for giving me the opportunity, opportunity to be here with you. And I will see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.davidbear.com. you can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter a couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released, along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to to my free mindhack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies, and the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people established a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode. On over to the site, and I will see you in the next episode.