Myswizard

You Don’t Know What You Got ‘til It’s Gone

Do you find that you appreciate things only after they’re gone? Do you look back over parts of your life wishing you had valued and cherished the things that are no longer there?

This week we have not one but two Zohar portions – Acharei Mot and Kedoshim. When you put the two titles together, they create the phrase “after death they are holy.” The Sages explain that this code reminds us that only after the Light has left do most of us realize that the Light was there in the first place.

As I reflected on this meaning and how it applies to us this week, I was reminded of a story one of our Student Support Instructors recently shared with me. The instructor has a student whose two elderly parents were both diagnosed with different forms of terminal cancer. The mother was given just months to live, but the father’s outlook was more hopeful. The instructor spoke to her student about how to support her parents spiritually and emotionally, and they scheduled an appointment to speak again. But the student never called.

When they finally connected, the student informed her instructor that both her parents passed away - within a week of one another. Her dad’s health took a turn for the worse, and he died unexpectedly. Not three hours later, her mother also become drastically ill and was rushed to the hospital.

On that day the hospital was overcrowded, and they couldn’t find a bed for the mother. “Coincidentally,” the only available bed was the one recently vacated by her father.
Her mother died six days later, in the same bed, in the same room, in the same hospital. Both were buried at the same time.

The fact that they chose not only the same spiritual window but also the same physical portal through which to leave this world told me that these two individuals were soul mates. This is a rare occurrence. According to the Zohar, the chances of two halves of the same soul finding each other in any given lifetime are one in a million.

Here you have two “regular” people living a “regular” life while the whole time they are, in fact, two powerful souls. And it took their deaths for us to see this.

For me, this story reinforces an important lesson: recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary. We have so many blessings in our lives that fulfill our existence, but we’re not aware of these spiritual treasures because our fulfillment leads us to complacency. We take important things for granted. Consequently, we must lose something in order to awaken our desire for it.

Remember, the Light wants to give us everything, but we must have a desire for it. When we experience the pain of losing something dear to our hearts, a desire is awakened within us. But there is a far better way to activate all our desires for Light without having to lose something. It is called appreciation.

Every day this week I encourage you to focus on at least one thing in your life and imagine what life would be like without it. How would you feel if you lost your best friend, or you could no longer walk, or you lost your job? Appreciating them now will prevent you from having to lose them later.

All the best,

Yehuda

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

What’s with us whenever we need it, seems to get us out of trouble, and is unlimited?

Our bag of excuses.

The Kabbalists teach that most of us run away from what we have to accomplish in this life, always finding excuses for avoiding the spiritual work we came here to do.

The Sages reveal that when a person who has avoided spirituality comes before the Creator and is asked why he didn’t change, he will take out his bag of excuses (’I was too busy trying to survive’, ‘I was a good guy’, ‘I didn’t know you really existed!’). God will then tell him, “you have all the excuses, but you did not accomplish anything in this lifetime. Now you must return to the world and do something!”

What is within our human nature that makes us avoid going outside of ourselves? The answer is very simple. When we feel we are helping others – or doing any spiritual action – because we should, we find any way possible not to do them. When spiritual work feels compulsory, we resist it. How do you react when someone says you should do something? Chances are you fight it. The same thing happens when we tell ourselves we should.

We must remember at all times that we’re doing these actions for no one’s benefit but our own. And even more important than that is to remember this: our soul came down here for a very specific reason. Kabbalah says the whole point of us being here is to improve ourselves. It’s not enough to be a good person, we must be a better person.

A speech given by the great kabbalist known as Natziv (he lived 190 years ago) to his students clarifies this concept:

“When I was eleven, I was a lost-cause as a student. One evening, I heard my parents in the next room talking about me. My mother was crying. She said to my father, “What are we going to do with our son? Any day now they will expel him. Then what will become of him?” As I listened to her, I could feel her anguish as acutely as if it had been my own. I promised myself that I would change and work up to my potential from that moment on. I kept my word and grew up to be the scholar you see before you now.

If I had not overheard my parents that day, I would have turned out a good but ordinary person, since it was in my nature to do so. But imagine what would have happened after I left this world and arrived in the place called the ‘heavenly court.’ Imagine what I would have felt when they showed me everything I could have achieved, everything I should have done. Can you imagine the grief I would have felt?

There is no greater hell than to see what we might have done, but failed to do so.”

-(adapted from Becoming Like God)

I use this speech as an example to show that you need to push yourself as far as you can to be the best you can be. And I am not just referring to your 9-5 job. You have a far more important job - the correction of your soul.

I know that after a while of studying and living Kabbalah, some students fall into the trap of becoming religious (“I should do this, I have to do that”). This is a great week to reexamine why you’re studying Kabbalah and to get back in touch with the desire that motivated you to seek it out in the first place.

Remember, you too have your “books” to write. Make it a habit this week to take moments out of your day to close your eyes and ask yourself, “did I do something today to achieve my purpose in this world? Did I extend myself beyond my immediate circle of responsibility?”

Have an incredible Pesach and keep these thoughts close to your heart.

All the best,

Yehuda

Weekly Consciousness Tune-Up
January 29th – February 4th, 2006

I Am More Than Enough

Last week I wrote about not holding others accountable for our own shortcomings and problems. Yesterday I received an email from a student who responded:

“When I began my Kabbalah studies I was loaded with hatred and anger towards my family for the way they raised me. But after going through the Power of Kabbalah Level 2 course, I took ownership and realized my soul needed those experiences. So, now that I am no longer blaming, how can I apply the Tune Up to my life?”

I thought it would be appropriate for me to share my response with all of you:

“Stopping to blame others is only the first step. To truly release blame from your mindset, you need to stop blaming yourself. The same voice inside you that screams, “I hate my mom, I can’t believe what she did to me all those years” is also the voice that says, “I hate myself, I screwed up again, I’ll never finish this project, I’ll never make this relationship last” and other such defeating thoughts.

The gift of this week is the increased ability to recognize how ineffective beating yourself up is. If you tune into your internal dialogue, you’ll become aware of how often you are blaming yourself for one thing or the other. It’s essential to have this awareness because the kabbalists explain the most important focus is the mind. It controls everything.

The quality of your thoughts determines the quality of your life.

Imagine hearing a good friend talk badly about himself. When someone I care about comes to me and says, “I am not good enough,” I immediately disagree and point out their good points. I patiently give them love and help them see that, despite their shortcomings, they contain the spark of God within and, therefore, can do anything.

Why can’t we do that for ourselves?

This week the Light of the Creator is nudging us towards a finer awareness of our stinkin’ thinkin’. This week we can turn ourselves into our own best friends. This week we can give ourselves a warm embrace and say, “I am more than enough.”

We are so used to convincing ourselves why we’re not skinny enough to meet our soul mate, strong enough to stay connected spiritually, smart enough to make more money, that we stop trying.

Repeating in your mind “I AM MORE THAN ENOUGH” twists the downer thoughts to the upside.

Before you leave this tune up and dive back into your hectic life, please, please, tattoo these words onto your brain and repeat them every time you notice the negative loop running again: I AM MORE THAN ENOUGH… I AM MORE THAN ENOUGH… I AM MORE THAN ENOUGH…

All the Best,

Yehuda

Weekly Consciousness Tune-Up
January 22nd – January 28th, 2006

The Blame Game

I want to begin this week’s Tune Up by thanking everyone for their heartfelt responses to last week’s email and video. I read through your countless well-wishes, and I felt your prayers. Your empathy and compassion reminded me, yet again, that at the end of the day we are all united by a common bond – the Light within.

Some of you wrote to me about your experiences with your own parents. Many were moved to open up about their own pain from childhood, but a different kind of pain. I read about memories of emotionally absent parents, abusive relatives, and all the many things that go wrong in childhood.

Very few of us can say that we lived a blissful childhood. As adults sorting through the wreckage of our formative years, we blame our parents, our teachers, our friends, and our enemies for setting us up for failure, low self-esteem, and drug addiction. The list of emotional ailments can go on forever.

One of the key concepts we learn early on in our Kabbalah studies is we live in a world of cause and effect - the Light is the cause, and we are the effect. We are here on this earth as vessels trying to become more like the Light. But being in the state of blame is being the effect. The question at hand is: how can we transform those marring childhood experiences into causes for the revelation of Light?

Rav Isaac Luria (The Ari), one of the greatest kabbalists of the 15th century, wrote that we literally choose our parents. Difficult as it is to believe, our souls gaze down from the heavens watching for the perfect moment of conception. We see the movie that will play out in the household - the crazy aunt, the annoying brother, the absentee father - and we enter our mother’s womb fully knowing the childhood ahead of us.

The Ari goes on to say that our childhood experiences equip us to deal with our soul’s correction process (tikune). Each incarnation we begin, we bring with us aspects of our soul that need to be corrected. If we didn’t have the negative patterning and challenging experiences of childhood, we would never develop the characteristics, the personality traits, or the idiosyncracies that manifest as tikune in adulthood.

So we look for the perfect household that will cultivate our positive traits and talents as well as expose us to the emotional molding that enables us to tackle the issues we were incarnated to correct.

For example, a person who came to correct abandonment issues may very well be born into a home in which the father skips town. If that person didn’t experience being left behind, they would never be able to face the fact that they need to overcome the victim consciousness that has been chasing them for lifetimes. Sure, right now it might be ugly and painful, but if they could step back and watch themselves lifetime after lifetime living out the same patterns, they’d be grateful to have gone through that process and been able to rise above it - once and for all.

In other words, the whole reason we are upset and blameful is because we just can’t see the agony of missing the point, which our soul has endured lifetime after lifetime.

Any time we find ourselves playing the victim card, we need to remind ourselves that we are just pushing back the resolution, prolonging the suffering, and requiring the same song to play again and again and again…

And you know what? Our soul gets tired of hearing the same old song.

All the Best,
Yehuda