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Discover the Gift explores the fundamental reality that there are Gifts in each one of us, and in every circumstance, that await your discovery. The more you nurture and allow the miracle of your Gift to develop, the more you will experience joy, power, fulfilment, freedom and unconditional love.
This remarkable book shows how to discover and nurture your Gift. To help you in your quest, it also contains teachings from the large number of spiritual leaders and transformational teachers who have participated in this work (including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mark Victor Hansen, Barbara De Angelis, Jack Canfield and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar). Discover the Gift is a complete life-plan which will give you the means to find happiness and peace by living the life you were meant to live.
Demian Lichtenstein and Shajen Joy Aziz’s personal journeys of awareness and spiritual growth have fueled their desire to reach out and share what they have learned in the hope that it can help others to heal and connect to the fullness of their lives. They explain how all universal spiritual laws work together, with integrity, to form a unified field of consciousness that can change your life – and can, in turn, transform our entire world.
DEMIAN LICHTENSTEIN began his career as a child actor. While still at university, Lichtenstein won an MTV award for Best Independent Music Video and went on to produce and direct over 250 others for artists including Sting and Eric Clapton. He made his first feature film, Lowball, for the Showtime Network and then wrote, produced and directed 3000 Miles to Graceland for Warner Brothers. Lichtenstein is currently CEO of Equilibrium Entertainment.
SHAJEN JOY AZIZ has a Master’s degree in education and is completing her Ph.D. in human development and organizational systems. Her passion is improving the lives of children through the education of parents, adults, educators, and communities. In pursuit of this she has used her twenty years of experience in various aspects of education to create her own company, Alternative Education Systems. Her motto is Learning for Life ~ Empowering the Future. As Director of Operations for Equilibrium Entertainment, Shajen strongly believes in using all forms of media to advance our highest ideals and create a sanctuary for the creative mind. For more information about the film version of Discover the Gift, visit www.discoverthegift.com
Our gratitude goes out to:
Fonda Joy Segal, our mother, for being the vessel that provided us life, love, nurturing, and clear guidance to support us along our journey. We are honored to be your children.
Richard Lichtenstein, our father, for being the most amazing man and artist we know. You have been a constant stand for our greatness and it is because of your unconditional love and support that our Gifts have emerged. We love you deeply and thank you. We couldn’t have done this without you.
Cherif Aziz for exemplifying what it means to have courage to step through one’s fears and go for his dream and stand for the distinctions of husband, father, brother, son, partner, and friend. You are the force behind us. We love you.
Maya Joy Aziz for being an amazing being and the loving energetic force behind the creation of this project and the never-ending presence and reminder of why Discover the Gift matters: the children.
Peter Miller for being a constant lionlike force and believer in Discover the Gift by ensuring the people in the world have access to the possibilities of their own Gifts.
Sonia Powers and Rick Mars for your friendship and unyielding belief in and support of this project, our family, and the power of self-discovery.
Michael and Sydney Cresci for your friendship, partnership, and your example for the rest of the world discovering their Gifts. Thank you for being the first people, outside of our family, to financially support this project.
Dave Hagen for helping us to clearly articulate the principles and laws and for being a constant sounding board and creative force for this entire project.
Susan Newell for your never-ending dedication to this family, this project, and beyond. You are a silent force behind the curtains making sure everything is well-oiled and working.
Jessie Megali for your warm heart and endless listening abilities, your honesty and friendship, all the late nights with Maya, and all you are and are becoming.
Alex Wood for your amazing friendship and all the bricklaying you did at the beginning of this book and for supporting us constantly in numerous and loving ways.
Erica Martinez for believing in us and our message and helping to light the pathway.
Melissa Burns for being a rock whenever we needed one in all aspects of our project—we are grateful.
Jenna Pollock for your eternal love and belief in our family, our souls, and our potential.
Michael Bernard Beckwith for your everlasting teachings on the nature of existence and your insight that everything is a Gift. We also acknowledge your profound stand for global consciousness and the recognition of all beings as divine. We thank you for your courage to speak the truth and the depth of your authenticity is an inspiration to us all.
Adi Da Samraj for the giving of conscious light. You have our deep gratitude and love.
Maria Garcia Crocker for creating the pathway to many of our honored speakers and leaders and thus the road for Discover the Gift to flourish.
Richard Sarnoff for believing in us from the very beginning. Thank you.
Tina Constable for your unyielding support and leadership.
Betsy Hulsebosch for the 1,000 times you saved us (and those are just the ones we knew about). You are a gem! We are deeply grateful for you and your unwavering dedication and management of this project and this message, and us. We treasure you.
Michael Palgon for creating the structures that allowed an unprecedented motion picture, book, and online social movement to exist.
Andrea Adler for your great listening.
David Rensin for being a dream come true and a real Gift to us. Your guidance and ability to move us forward when we were stuck was instrumental to our mission and this book. With much gratitude.
Richard Guzzardi for finding a structure we could all relate to.
Gary Jansen for your high level of compassion, clarity, communication, and belief in this book and its message.
Peter Ferentinos for being our friend, our mentor, our benefactor. Without our Poppa Pete, none of this would have happened. With much respect to a man who walks his talk and listens to his heart, we love you, we thank you.
Janet Bray and Chris Attwood for being amazing friends full of love and support and for constantly reminding us that our time is now. We love you!
My brother, Demian, and I were mortal enemies.
It’s not because we didn’t once love each other, as siblings do; we just hadn’t connected to that love for so long that it felt as if it no longer existed.
Let me be clear: This wasn’t the normal brother-sister angst. Ever since we were teenagers, Demian simply couldn’t find anything he liked about me: my looks, my friends, my attitude toward life—you name it. We fought and yelled at each other all the time. He was embarrassed that we were related, and he did whatever he could to not be with me. Instead, he was drawn to his friends, who always seemed more important, more special, more beautiful—more everything than I was.
Meanwhile, I suffered, knowing deep in my soul that I would never be good enough for him. To me—and I’m sure to Demian—our relationship was like a comatose patient, in a vegetative state, near death, no possibility of survival, as good as gone.
And even if some tiny spark of life had endured, we had no idea at the time how to fan it again into a sustaining flame.
To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. For so long, the family had been mired in turmoil. Early on, Demian and I were victims of sexual abuse from people outside our family. We survived, but this pain created a rift in our hearts, and the cumulative damage of anger and feelings of shame only reinforced the hopelessness of our estrangement.
When I was twelve and Demian was fourteen, in rapid succession, we lost our stepfather to drugs, alcohol, and another woman. Then our beautiful home on a Vermont hilltop burned down. And shortly after that, our beloved mother perished in a car crash.
The negative emotional and psychological repercussions were unavoidable. Our hearts broken beyond repair, Demian became filled with cruelty and rage, and I was drowning in self-doubt and uncertainty.
Looking back, I realize that if we were older and had had more life experience, in the wake of all these events we would have realized that what felt like a really big disconnect between the two of us was actually a powerful—albeit negative—connection. Had we understood more about the universe we lived in, we would have realized that no such thing as separateness existed. Our problem was that we were caught in an emotionally toxic feedback loop.
As they say, there’s a thin line between love and hate.
And yet … and yet, one day a few years ago, Demian called me out of the blue. I didn’t know why. I didn’t care why. We had rarely spoken since our mother’s death—and when we did, it was painful. You couldn’t put us in a room together without a fight. So why speak now? The only reason I took the call was fear that he might have some bad news about our remaining family.
“Is Dad okay? Is Tata okay?” I asked.
“Nobody’s dead,” Demian said. “Not Dad. Not Grandpa. But I want to talk to you.”
“Well, I really don’t want to talk to you,” I snapped.
Typically, Demian, the relentless overachiever and force of nature, wouldn’t back off. “I really want to talk,” he insisted. “It’s important. I …” And he began to sob. “I need to ask for your forgiveness.”
My heart cracked. “Demian …”
“Nobody has died,” Demian repeated, “but something has died. The anger in my soul toward you has died. I realize that all along it was really anger at myself for abandoning you as your big brother, and blaming you. I am asking for your forgiveness.”
I was stunned. For a long time, everyone who I had thought was solid and real in my life kept leaving me. I lived adrift from my family and learned to create my own tribe where I felt safe and protected. And I didn’t know what to do with Demian’s request, because it was, frankly, the last thing I’d ever expected to hear him say. I couldn’t imagine what had happened in Demian’s life to cause this unbelievable transformation. Yet I could hear something truly different in his voice.
I had a thousand questions, but before I could ask one, a profound truth hit me: all I’d ever really wanted—no matter how deeply buried—was to regain my family. I wanted to say yes to his request. I had to say yes. And when I opened myself to that possibility, I instantly understood how much I needed what he was offering.
“Yes. Yes. Of course. I forgive you, Demian. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “And I’m really, really sorry for everything.”
Then Demian made me a promise. “From today forth, I will never, ever raise my voice to you again. From now until the day I die, when you want to know what that bright light is on your shoulder, it’s your brother, baby, and I’ve got your back.”
My eyes welled up and we cried together for a long time. I just wanted to travel through the phone line with my words and tears and be close to my brother—this new person—and to embrace this moment of forgiveness and this miraculous opportunity to move forward.
“Let’s be a family again,” Demian said, as if he could read my mind. “I want to be connected.”
“Yes, me too,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for this. I’m so excited.”
This was the happiest day of my life.
Life has not always been easy for Demian and me, but it was while living through and then emerging from our darkest hours—and through the process that followed—that we discovered our greatest Gifts. Together we decided to devote ourselves to sharing what we learned during that time (and continue to learn). Discover the Gift is the result of several years of hard work born out of Demian’s and my desire to spread the word about what had helped him discover a way to create a huge vibrational shift in the energy between us, and what I had to do to respond.
The result is the story of this book.
In short, Demian had begun to discover his Gift. In turn, his Gift allowed me to discover a new depth in myself, and with that discovery even more miraculous Gifts arrived. We had gone through an incredible ordeal that shook our relationship to its core. But now we entered into a new journey, one that ultimately would reunite us with our faith, and from that place of light and inspiration a brand-new life was about to begin. A world filled with Gifts that were there all along, awaiting our discovery.
There are so many ways to talk about the Gift. Every day I find a new way to think about the Gift and to express the Gift. Life is the Gift. Consciousness is the Gift. The people in your life are Gifts. It is all the Gift. Every circumstance that you experience is a Gift, both the good ones and those in which you think, “How can I ever get over this? How can I ever get through this?” They’re all a Gift because they’re available for us to take the opportunity to learn from them, to grow from them, to transform, to be aware of our surroundings and how we affect everyone and everything in our world.
—SONIA POWERS
Everyone has a Gift to give. It’s the essence of who they are.
—JACK CANFIELD
Throughout this book it is our intention to illuminate a fundamental truth that so often goes unexplored: We each possess a unique Gift, a purpose in life that always seeks to express itself. By uncovering, studying, nurturing, and allowing the miracle of our Gifts to flourish, we have discovered how we can experience joy, power, fulfillment, freedom, and unconditional love.
We know that you can, too.
This may sound like an extravagant promise, but we have seen the power of this discovery in our own lives and in the lives of countless others. This is what we hope to show you, not by introducing you to some exotic practice, telling you to believe in a supreme being, or asking you to simply repeat a magic phrase.
None of that is necessary.
In fact, you will be astonished at how simple it is to find the path that will lead you to your true self, the place where your true Gift dwells.
Whether or not you know it, you already have the Gift. You don’t have to search for it outside of yourself. It has been with you and within you for your entire life, just as it has been a part of every person on the planet since before the dawn of recorded history.
And yet even though the Gift is something we all share, your Gift is also completely and exclusively specific to you.
The Gift can be described in many ways: It’s your true nature, your purpose and reason for being, your authentic self in harmony with the universe, your passion, your highest vibration, your calling, the joy and love you share with the world. What we mean by the Gift is finding, identifying, and realizing the authentic you and then giving that Gift to others. To live your life from that space, to discover your Gift, you must journey into the depths of who you are: the unique and divine essence incarnated on this planet as you. In fact, long before you picked up this book, you were on that journey. Even though you may not have been consciously aware of it, you have been diligently working to live your Gift. You can’t help yourself.
It is why you are here.
Discover the Gift is a journey of self-understanding and self-appreciation of that divine essence. So here is the “secret” before we even begin:
You are the Gift. The Gift is you.
Congratulations.
A great deal of attention in recent years has been focused on the law of attraction. We believe it is also vital to recognize that there are other equally important laws for personal growth that govern or affect our existence—and, unfortunately in the past, have often been ignored. It is our intention to show that all these universal principles need to work together for a life of harmony and balance.
When we recognize the combination of forces at work in our lives, we can better connect with the unified field of consciousness that underlies everything, in a process we call the infinity feedback loop of creation. Much like the workings of what Eastern spiritual practices call karma, what you put into the world is what you will in turn receive from it. Or, as the Beatles sang, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” This truth has been said in many ways throughout history.
Our goal with Discover the Gift is to take you step by step through this journey of discovery, showing you how your mind, emotions, and conditioning can sometimes slow down your spiritual growth, and what you can do to reverse the process. In the pages that follow, we will explain more fully what we mean by your unique Gift, as well as how to discover it and why it is so important to share your Gift with others. We will also talk about the relationship between energy and adversity and why they are so important in this process of discovering your Gift.
Now maybe you’re wondering why you had to buy a book to discover that you have a Gift that you’re already longing to share with the world. Perhaps it concerns you to read that you have a Gift when you believe from clear evidence that your life is not working out the way you imagined it should. Possibly you think that when the blessings of universal generosity were distributed, you somehow missed out. Maybe you have questions like “If I discover my Gift, is my life forever changed? How will discovering my Gift affect the people in my life? Will my Gift bring me wealth? Security? Love? Do I only have one Gift? What if I get sick of my Gift? What if my Gift gets sick of me?” Or just maybe you are stuck in a life that used to feel like your Gift but doesn’t any longer.
The journey in Discover the Gift will allow you to understand that you already have all you need, and that you can use what you have to manifest the fullness of your life. Our culture tends to focus on what people do wrong. We want to focus on what you do right. We want to support the talents that have been yearning to emerge from within you.
No matter what anyone may have told you about yourself, about what life is or means, no matter what you may have endured thus far, no matter how removed from love you may feel at this moment, the Gift that you are—the special, never-to-be-repeated walking miracle—is patiently waiting to be discovered and unfolded.
The Gift is not something that magically appears. It is not about wishful thinking. Instead, it originates both in our passion and our pain, in victory and adversity. Some people have already found their Gifts. Others have moved beyond merely finding it and are now living it, affecting huge changes on our society and our planet. There are those who have spent their entire lives knowing their Gifts and walking that walk. But all of these people will tell you: to stay on that path takes effort and discipline. It requires a commitment to follow your heart. Not just listening to it. Not simply hearing it. But actually going wherever your heart leads you and doing the work to bring your Gift to life. We are all capable of expressing many Gifts, and as author Janet Bray Attwood shares, “What you love are the bread crumbs that lead you to your passions.”
At this point, we just want you to understand that living your Gift is just that: living it. So we ask that you allow yourself to accept the possibility that you are the Gift. That’s all. Just stay with that idea. Yes, you might find yourself enthusiastically thinking ahead to the specifics of your Gift; perhaps you already have a sense of them, or maybe you don’t. But we don’t want you to focus on that just now. For the moment, just give yourself time to appreciate that you are unique, that you are meant to love and to be loved, and that you are something special that wants to give back to the universe.
Also, it’s worth taking a moment to remember that:
Many of these roles and activities are, and could be, wonderful parts of your life. But as so easily happens, you can become lost in these shifting identities and lose sight of how you can make the best contribution to our world. That understanding is important because, as you will realize, your Gift is not only for you, but for the whole world. Your contribution to others is revealed in living your Gift. Living your Gift not only makes you happy, it also brings you into harmony with everything and everyone else. Living your Gift provides a sense of contentment and belonging and at the same time magnifies the Gifts of others.
No one needs to sacrifice for you to thrive.
If you discover and share who you are, you automatically inspire others to do the same, setting a transformational cycle into motion (remember when we mentioned the infinity feedback loop of creation? It’s going to come up again, and again, and again). In this way, everyone becomes an active player in the planetary shift in consciousness and in the creation of a compassionate world. By discovering and sharing our Gift, we cocreate our own world and our own destiny. When we are bonded to our Gift, then the fundamental truths of the universe become apparent.
Once you fully connect with your rich combination of loves, talents, strengths, and experience—including circumstances that may have been painful for you—you will find your most complete happiness.
We all have talents that we might call our “core genius” or unique abilities. We believe that each of us has the responsibility to develop those Gifts and to express them fully into the world.
If we don’t give the Gift, we are killing ourselves. We are atrophying our heart and our soul and living life on a survival level, which has a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear attached. Fear-based living leads to terrible decisions, destruction, hurt, anger. Long-lasting happiness can only come when we are sharing our Gift. Practically speaking, we have to wake up every single day asking, “What’s trying to emerge in me today? What Gift is trying to activate itself in me today? What power is trying to become itself in me today?” If the question is sincere enough, and the love is real enough, the universe will reveal its secrets.
—MICHAEL BERNARD BECKWITH
If you’re holding back the Gift, then what you’re asking is for other people in the world to hold back their Gifts from you. The more you give your Gift, the more you participate and make a difference in the world, the more the world will make a difference for you.
—SONIA POWERS
Just a few words about how Discover the Gift is laid out: This book is divided into two sections. In Part One, we—Shajen and Demian—share our journey from trauma to triumph, from a dark past to the light-filled present moment, in which we are finally able to live our Gifts. Our wish in sharing our story is that you may begin the work of discovering your Gift with the example of where we came from in mind. We want to help you arrive at a place of deep reverence, with an open heart and the motivation to go fully within your own journey so that you, too, may discover your Gift.
In Part Two of this book, we distill for you the lessons we’ve learned over the years and guide you through the practical aspects of your journey. Discover the Gift, in all its incarnations—the book, the movie, the social movement—is designed to lead you to your Gift on a path based on eight universal spiritual principles that we came to understand as we took our own journeys. We regard these principles as foundational steps and essential to the process of discovering the Gift. These ideas have always existed, whether or not anyone is fully aware of their existence and how to utilize them. Think of it this way: Albert Einstein did not create relativity. It has always existed. But Einstein intuited relativity, and after much work and dedication he was able to describe it mathematically and to put the concept into words.
The more you understand how these eight principles, which in this book we call the eight steps, work for you, the easier it is to access your Gifts and to find a world filled with possibilities, a world that is receptive to you and conducive to your dreams.
Discovering our own Gifts fueled our desire to reach out and share what we have learned. Our intent is to provide an opening for others to heal and to continue to evolve by finding their Gifts. We don’t pretend to be spiritual masters or to have some exclusive insight on existence. What we do have is a distinct relationship to the Gift itself and an ability to see the Gift in all things past, current, and yet to be.
And we know that you have this ability, too.
Along the way, you will receive both practical direction and support from a wide range of people who live their Gifts and who have made it their purpose to help you do the same with your Gift. Among them are His Holiness the Dalai Lama; His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series; and Michael Bernard Beckwith, one of the featured teachers in the film and bestselling book The Secret and also the author of Spiritual Liberation. Other inspirational speakers and educators, such as Janet Bray Attwood, John Castagnini, Dr. Barbara De Angelis, Stewart Emery, Bill Harris, Cheryl Hunter, Mary Manin Morrissey, Sue Morter, Niurka, Sonia Powers, Terry Tillman, and David “Avocado” Wolfe, are part of an amazing cast of accomplished spiritual teachers who have contributed their experience and wisdom to this book (to read more about our contributors, please refer to “Contributor Biographies” at the end of the book).
They will speak to you directly, in their own voices—as will we—in the “Transformational Wisdom” and “Personal Practices” sections in each of the Part Two chapters. We hope these two very personal sections will help you to see new possibilities in your life, to step through your fear, and to create forward momentum as you inch closer and closer to the Gift within.
Moreover, each chapter contains a section called “Growth Opportunities,” in which we offer simple and practical advice and practices to help support your overall progression. This section also includes journaling exercises, so we encourage you to get a journal or create one of your own that you can use to record your thoughts and chronicle the history of the voyage to your destiny.
Please be aware that although we often use the word “spiritual” throughout the book, Discover the Gift does not ground its framework in any particular religion or dogma. It is an aggregation and expression of truths inherent in all the world’s great teachings—wisdom passed down throughout the ages, from the ancient Sumerian creation texts to the Vedic texts of India, to the insights of Kabbalah, Christianity, and Islam. These great truths are part of the world’s religions, myths, folklore, and legends and are also endemic to remotely situated ancient tribes that have never heard of Buddha, Christ, or Muhammad.