Empowering ideas to lead a successful Jewish life
We have a powerful will, and regardless of whether our goal is something positive or negative, we have incredible power when we are determined. What if we are determined to set goals in our life to have more clarity and calmness, along with the strength to overcome obstacles, to have the insight to identify our calling, a way to heal emotional pain, a path to grow a deeper relationship with Gd, and to seek opportunities to be a light? Obstacles then become anything we come across when we take our eyes off the goal.To the degree our eye is on the goal, with a unified determined will, we are unstoppable in reaching the goals above.
How do we keep our eye on the goals? One of the six constant mitzvahs is that we are not to run after our own eyes and hearts. To understand this, we have to have insight into human thinking and emotion.
The nature of our experience in life is that our experience of life depends on what we think about a scenario and will affect our feelings and our experience more than the actual circumstances. How we experience life depends on our thoughts about the scenario. We can shift our understanding to comprehend that our experience is from the inside much more than from the outside.
Our experience in life has more to do with our thoughts about it than the actual circumstances. My responses are just one of many ways to view the same scenario. At any moment we are one thought away from a different emotional experience! How do we shift from thought to thought? That is not always easy to do. We get stuck in a thought. But, we don’t have to react that way. When we have a strong emotion that overpowers us, we are one thought away from a different emotion! This is life transforming!! It can change our life. If we realize that we are one thought away from any emotional experience, we have freedom and power that most of humanity doesn't know they have.
Most of the time, our reaction is to react emotionally to what happens to us, such as "if he yells at me I have no other choice but to feel hurt, etc." Even if we can’t get out of it, if we know this is not the only way to perceive it, even if we are stuck in negativity, it helps a little bit. .
Our overall awareness that my feeling, my experience of life – e.g. whether I am ready to cry, scream, or laugh - is coming from my thoughts, not the outside. Someone can yell at me and I am going to experience it because of the thoughts I have about yelling. It is my thoughts that generate the emotion. The same scene to two different people can be very different. How I feel comes from the inside out, not the outside in. Humility means rising above the lower self negative reactions and choosing to bring Hashem’s will and light to the picture. We don’t invalidate our feelings but we choose our experience.
How do we choose it? We ask ourselves, is this feeling what I want to be feeling right now? So often we get hooked into a negative emotional experience we don't like. We fall into it. When I walk and fall into an emotional experience, it came from the inside, not the outside! That gives me the power to shift our experience. Even if someone did cause uncertainty in our life, even if all kinds of objective facts are there, how we experience that emotionally is something that can be shifted based on our thoughts. Our experience of life is inside out and we can shift our experience without invalidating it. I have the power to experience life differently!
To understand how to apply this to life, we have to get into a basic understanding of what we are trying to accomplish. We have to understand something fundamental to having a successful Jewish life - what is a successful Jewish life? Success is when we exert effort to contribute to others or work on achieving our potential - when I try to perfect myself, or perfect the world or come close to Gd, I build success. But success does not depend on anyone else – it is just my effort, not my results. With these goals, any human being can fulfill their potential from whatever starting point. How we feel in a moment has to do with our thoughts and we can change our thought. We can shift our experience of life no matter how deeply it is rooted inside of us, no matter how real it is to us, in order to reach for a successful Jewish life.
Learn more at the Clarity Seminar
Categories: G-d Consciousness, Chosen People, Ahavas Hashem, Faithfulness, Free will, Clarity
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