My career as a writer, teacher, singer-songwriter, and radio co-host was a long time in the making. While attending college at SUNY Buffalo and earning a B.S. in Quantitative and Computational Systems Analysis, I did not see it coming!

My search for a deeper meaning to life than what I saw around me began with an exploration of the faith I was born into; that is Judaism. That search led me to spend a year in Israel working in my profession at the time (computer programming) as I studied and tasted Orthodox Judaism. After returning to the States in 1983, I moved to Boston, dropped my Jewish practice, and immersed myself in the blossoming New Age movement. I continued to work in high tech, first for major corporations, then through my own consulting business. I fell in love with Tai Chi Chuan and studied it intensively for 5 years under 2 masters of the art. Meditation, yoga, and conscious eating became additional mainstay practices. A vision I received one crystal clear sunny day on the docks of the old naval ship yard in Charleston, Massachusetts, led me to attend MIT and receive a master’s degree in economic development in 1989.

One day, a friend mentioned seeing an advertisement for a Kabbalah lecture at a local synagogue in Cambridge. Attending that lecture changed my life. For the first time, I heard someone speak about Judaism in terms of energy, divine light, and how I could connect to God without getting bogged down in rituals that made little sense to me.

I moved to Israel in late summer of 1991, and soon after settled in Jerusalem. In 1996 under the guidance of Hadassah Ben-Yishai, I learned to use Kabbalah’s Tree of Life to help strip away the blocks that prevented me from having my own strong connection to the Divine. It also set me on the path of moving into my life’s work, encapsulated in the phrase, “Speaking for a Wiser Life.” While working with Hadassah, I changed my name from Larry Blieberg to Levi (“Lay-vee”) Ben-Shmuel, my Hebrew birth name.

I married my teacher in 2001 (that is a story for another time. She is now called Matananda). While living in Israel, I co-created Sulam Chi. We moved to the States a few months after our marriage. For 5 years, I was co-host of Transitions Radio Magazine. Currently, I am a Tai Chi and Kabbalah teacher, a musician, writer, and a featured blogger on The Huffington Post. We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico with our son, Jacob.