Category Archives: personal development

‘Brave’ – song with a powerful message

personal development, Uncategorized

 

A couple of months ago, dd19 mentioned a song that she really liked the message of.  I asked her to send me a link so I could listen to it.

 

It turns out I had heard it before but since I didn’t pay attention to the lyrics, I didn’t think much of it.  This time I looked up the lyrics and listened carefully and wow! – it was very powerful.  It was a message that I really needed to hear right then, a few days after having been hit by a car and feeling powerless and victimized.

So here’s the song – Brave, a remake by the Maccabeats of the original by Sara Bareilles.  (Dd wanted to make sure I realized this isn’t a Jewish song, though it’s sung by an Orthodox mens’ acapella group and I’m passing this info along to you.)

And here are the lyrics:

“Brave” – by Sara Bareilles

 

“You can be amazing
You can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug
You can be the outcast
Or be the backlash of somebody’s lack of love
Or you can start speaking up
Nothing’s gonna hurt you the way that words do
When they settle ‘neath your skin
Kept on the inside and no sunlight
Sometimes a shadow wins
But I wonder what would happen if youSay what you wanna say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be braveWith what you want to say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be braveI just wanna see you
I just wanna see you
I just wanna see you
I wanna see you be braveI just wanna see you
I just wanna see you
I just wanna see you
I wanna see you be braveEverybody’s been there,
Everybody’s been stared down by the enemy
Fallen for the fear
And done some disappearing,
Bow down to the mighty
Don’t run, just stop holding your tongue
Maybe there’s a way out of the cage where you live
Maybe one of these days you can let the light in
Show me how big your brave is

Say what you wanna say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave

With what you want to say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave

And since your history of silence
Won’t do you any good,
Did you think it would?
Let your words be anything but empty
Why don’t you tell them the truth?

Say what you wanna say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave

With what you want to say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave.”

 

I have a couple of favorite phrases in this song but the entire message to me is something lots of us need to hear – have the courage to say how you really feel.  Don’t keep everything in because you’re afraid of what people will think of you, or because you’re afraid they won’t hear you.   It takes courage to find our inner strength when we’re not feeling strong.  It takes courage to to take off the mask that we put on because we think that’s what others want to see, be vulnerable and to say how you’re really feeling.

Avivah  

Inner contentment from the alignment of values and actions

homeschooling, parenting, personal development

Most of us start off homeschooling with a lot of trepidation, excitement and a vision of something beautiful, something we think we might be able to have if we make this choice that we wouldn’t otherwise have.  And at first it’s exciting because we can remember how life was before and the contrast makes us grateful.  But then sometimes we get stuck in the day to day and lose sight of our long term vision along with how things used to be.  You begin to take for granted what you have – you doubt what you’re doing, the house isn’t clean enough, the kids aren’t learning enough, you don’t have enough time for yourself and you wonder why you thought this was a good idea!  (Yes, I sometimes have those feelings, too!)  We just lose perspective.

When I recently received a lovely email from a homeschooling mom, I asked her permission to share it with you.  It’s been over five years since I shared a letter like this, so I figured it’s time for another one!  The last one was from a mom in the US, this one is from a mom in Israel.

>>As for homeschooling, in case I needed the validation, my sister told me yesterday that her daughter, who lives here, told her that homeschooling was the best thing we did for our family and ourselves. She said she sees our contentment and inner peace — ours and the kids’ — even though she knows it’s not a perfect utopia all the time. And she’s right; I would describe us the same way.

There are so many things I love about homeschooling, it would be impossible to list them all but at the top of my list would be learning along with my children. Not just learning information but learning about each other, about life, about how to do homeschooling. I love learning with them that the process is at least as important as the product, and this applies to every area of our lives. There is so much more, but if I continued I just wouldn’t stop 🙂

I want to thank you again for your guidance and inspiration. You’ve helped us look at things in a whole new way and opened up a whole world of opportunity to our family.<<

Contentment and inner peace – those are the same feelings I have about homeschooling when I take the time to step back from the day to day busyness and reflect.  It’s not specifically homeschooling that causes this feeling; rather it’s a result of when a person aligns their values and their actions.  Every day we’re faced with choices in different areas of our lives, and when we can align them with our higher values, it’s incredibly empowering and inner contentment is a natural result.

Avivah

When to stay with something and when to move on

homemaking, homeschooling, marriage, miscellaneous, personal development

It’s interesting how comments and questions on certain issues seem to often come as groups.  This has happened recently with the topic of making a change – I was asked the same question by three different people in close succession: when is moving toward change positive and when is it running away from a problem.  Interestingly, all three were in situations in which a change would be beneficial, which made me wonder if it’s the people who have a tendency to stay in difficult situations who phrase the question in this way.

The most recent person to ask me about this was my dd17 when she was home for Chanukah vacation.  She’s living with an elderly woman which provides her with a place to live and a salary and she’s studying in an Israeli seminary – where she lives and where she studies are both difficult situations.  She’s not happy but told me she’s not sure if she needs to stick this out.  I told her, “If you’re a member of this family, your issue isn’t going to be running away from problems but staying in a non-suitable situation too long and trying to see the positives.”

Being positive and looking for the good in life is important, but you can’t let that keep you from acknowledging when a situation needs to be changed.   I suggested that first step is for her to be honest about how she’s feeling, not to rationalize or justify staying where she is because she doesn’t know how it can work out financially to do something different – just to acknowledge to herself how she’s really feeling and be willing to say, ‘I’m not happy’.  Then after getting in touch with that feeling – which doesn’t take too long once you clear away the mental clutter – to ask herself: “Is this situation supporting me and the life I want to have?  If not, why not?  What would be more supportive of my needs?”

So she did that and we talked quite a bit about what this means for her.  This week she gave notice to the family of the woman she works for that she’ll be leaving in a month, is interviewing with another family as a possible place to stay, and contacted the principal of an American seminary here in Israel to see if a mid-year transfer is possible.  I asked her how she felt and she said it all feels good.

It seems to me that most people get stuck on one side or another of this question when they have to ask themselves the question about if their current life situation serves them or not.  Many people stay with situations that aren’t supportive for too long, not believing that anything better is out there, thinking that they don’t deserve for things to be good or blaming themselves for the way the situation is.

Others go to the other extreme, moving from place to place, job to job, relationship to relationship, always blaming others for their situations and searching for that elusive happiness in the next place.  When a person is having a hard time in life because of who they are, they carry that with them wherever they go.  Someone who hosts a lot of people checking out her community told me she can tell right away who is a good candidate and who isn’t by asking why they want to move.  She said when people start complaining about everything that is wrong with where they’re currently living, she knows they’re going to miserable in her community, too.

So how can you tell when you objectively would be better off in a different life situation?  When are you running away from something instead of putting in the effort and time to make things work, and when are you moving forward towards a better and more fulfilling life?

This is a really individual situation and sometimes for the same person, it can look very different in different situations.  If you’re in an abusive situation, generally the faster you get out, the better.  Aside from that, we have to remember that all beginnings are difficult and time takes time.  Don’t give up on your current situation too soon – think about what specifically is missing for you, and what you can do to make it work for you.  If you’ve put in time and effort and after a reasonable amount of time things aren’t improving, you probably are seeing the reality of the situation and it’s time to think about making a change.  Don’t blame yourself for being where you are right now; it is what it is, you learned something from where you were and now you can move on.

Since we can’t be objective about ourselves, it’s very valuable to get feedback from someone outside of the situation who is willing to listen to you without projecting themselves onto the scenario.  At times when I’ve grappled with choices of this sort and spoken to friends, it’s been interesting how obvious the answer to my question was to them!  People outside the situation can often see things more clearly since they aren’t fixated on all the tiny details that our minds can get tangled up with.

If you’ve determined that change would be beneficial for you, have courage.  Trust that life is meant to be good, that you are worthy of good and that you will overcome the initial challenges the new situation is going to present you with.  Making a change like this is an act of self-value and self-love; we can’t have better things in our lives until we recognize that we deserve better in our lives.

If you’ve grappled with decisions of this sort, please share how you recognized when it was time to make a change or stick things out!

Avivah

Planning your week based on your higher values

homemaking, homeschooling, parenting, personal development

I’ve been thinking about different aspects of time and life management lately, precipitated by a discussion with a man who is starting his own business, in addition to a full time supervisory position at work.  I asked him about how he’s finding time to start a new business when he comes home exhausted after a long day,  and he pointed to the bulletin board in his office that was separated into four equal quarters.  He was about to explain when I nodded and told him I understood.

I was really grateful for this reminder of a principle that is so important but I’ve let it slide out of my life.  That’s the principle of organizing your life around what is known as the four quadrants.  (This is some of Steven Covey’s teaching, who is one of the two most insightful and far reaching authors I have read.)  I thought this was too complicated for a blog post but I briefly explained it to dd17 who has already started implementing it and has been finding it very helpful.

In short, every activity in life can be categorized in one of four quadrants.  The first quadrant is for things that are urgent and important.  The second quadrant is for things that are important and not urgent.  The third quadrant is for things that are urgent and not important. And the fourth quadrant is for things that are not urgent and not important.

You have no choice but to spend time in Quadrant 1 (Q1 from now on).  These are things that can’t be ignored, serious issues that leave you no choice but to deal with them.  Crisis falls into this quadrant.

The second quadrant is super powerful but the most neglected.  The more time you spend here, the less time you need to spend in Q1.  This is the quadrant of planning, reflection, spiritual growth, personal renewal – eating well, exercise, meditating.  The kind of things you never manage to find time to do because you’re too busy and one day you’ll get around to it.

The third and fourth quadrant are time wasters.  Q3 is filled with things that seem important because they’re so urgent and that’s why it takes up so much of our time.  Phones ringing, people knocking at the door or insisting they need something from us leave us feeling that this is a really important thing to do right now.  But they aren’t.

Q4 is non important, non urgent activities – time wasting activities that people overuse with the stated purpose being to relax from their stressful lives.  If it’s a meaningful relaxing activity that leaves you feeling recharged, it goes in Q2.  If it’s mind numbing and excessive, you’re looking at Q4.

So the first thing you need to do is assess what roles you play in your life, what activities they involve, and determine where each of these items are on the quadrants. The first two quadrants are where you want to spend most of your time but most people are spending the majority of their time in Q1 and Q3, the urgency quadrants.  We live in an urgency culture.  We can get addicted to the feeling or urgency because it makes us feel important to be so busy.  The problem is that urgency and importance aren’t the same, so all of this activity can leave a person feeling empty.

The goal is to move towards spending more time in Q2 – this is where quality of life comes from.  Where does the time to do that come from?  Q3 and Q4, the quadrants that will suck out all your life energy and leave you with nothing to show for it.  The more time you spend in Q2, the smaller the number of burning items in Q1 will become.  The man I mentioned at the beginning of the post told me when he first took this job, everything was urgent, rush, rush, rush.  After a month of putting practices based on these principles into place, things were running in a much calmer way.

Categorizing your activities is individual – an activity that one person experiences in one way can be experienced totally differently by someone else.

I used some of my resting time the day after my accident to do some quadrant planning.  I’d been thinking about it since last week and was planning to find a chunk of time to do some uninterrupted thinking so I took my opportunity when it presented itself!  After some reflection and writing, I took out my planner and scheduled in the Q1 and Q2 activities for the week.  This is the idea behind something I wrote about a long time ago, putting in the big rocks first.  (You’ll have to look it up if you’re interested.  :))

After you write down your important quality of life type activities for the week, then you schedule everything else around that.  You can spend your days doing little things that need to be done all day long, and get to the end of a day feeling as if you have nothing to show for your efforts.  When you prioritize your activities and execute around them, you can get lots of the smaller things done in between the big things and at the end of the day feel a sense of satisfaction that you’ve done things that really mattered to you.

Though I’ve just started doing this again, it’s been really good.  Even when things happen to throw off my time schedule that would have previously left me extremely frustrated, I still had a clear idea of what was my priority for the day and that kept me focused even when everything else about my day changed.  I made time for some deep thinking, time to write out some of my values and priorities, time to spend with my mom, time to speak to a relative in the US who I rarely talk to (great aunt).  I got all my homeschooling paperwork written up.  I went through 2000 digital photos on my camera and chose out about 10% to print out; I haven’t printed out photos in over two years though our family enjoys being able to look at albums to remember our experiences.  Now I can delete everything from my camera.  (Getting rid of clutter is a Q2 activity.)

My house wasn’t clean at the end of the day, since physically I’m more limited than usual right now.  I like when things look neat, but I was still able to feel a sense of accomplishment because the things that really mattered to me (and these will be different for each person) things it’s so easy to be too busy for – were done.

This is an incredibly powerful way to live life if done consistently.  I hope I haven’t made it seem to obvious in my effort to simplify a lot of material.  Please let me know if this sounds helpful to you!

Avivah

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

personal development

Today I began reading a book that I’m really enjoying – ‘Get Off Your “But”: How to end self-sabotage and stand up for yourself’.  The author is Sean Stephenson, born with a rare bone disorder.  When he was born, most of his bones were broken because his bones were so brittle they couldn’t withstand the stresses of being born.  It’s hard for me to even comprehend that – his parents weren’t allowed to hold him because the force of that could break more bones.  Can you imagine?  This disorder led to many, many broken bones over the years – he said he and his parents stopped counting at 200 – things that we could do without thinking would break his bones.  It also affected his growth and ability to walk – his adult height is 3 feet and he is in a wheelchair, since his bones aren’t able to support him standing up and walking.

In this book he shares about a difficult situation he experienced at the age of 10, and when he was screaming in pain and asking his mother why he had to go through all of this suffering, her response was very striking.  So much so that I copied it down for myself and want to share it with you as well since it really resonated with me.  What she told him was, “Pain is inevitable.  Eventually, it touches us all.  Suffering, however, is optional.”

This encapsulated my thoughts on the subject of living through difficult times in such a pithy way!  It also clarified a point that I’ve been trying to keep clear for myself, that of acknowledging one’s pain to oneself, not denying it but also not getting lost in it.  It’s very easy to turn off and pretend that everything is fine.  I was talking to a friend about this topic and she said she had recently read a book about codependence, and it said that’s what codependents do.  It’s also very easy to talk a good game and say how everything is fine.

But in my opinion, it’s much harder to feel your pain and at the same time, make the choice that you’re not going to wallow in it or allow it to run your life.  Feeling your pain is, well, painful!  And we try to avoid experiencing unpleasant feelings.  But it’s really important to be able to touch the vulnerable and tender parts of ourselves.  This past week I’ve been consciously working on giving my kids space to feel their sadness, not rushing to reassure them when they express some distress.  Here’s the example that made me realize I needed to be more in touch with this.  Last week my ds14 was supposed to pick up ds5 from kindergarten, and forgot.  When he realized this, he felt really badly and said, “Oh my gosh, I forget everything!”

Now, this son has been an unbelievable help in the last month.  He’s taken over all the laundry, he and dd16 cleaned the house for Pesach together and kept everything running throughout me being gone at hospitals and then being sick; he’s changed his morning schedule so that he can take ds5 to school every day, and he helps out in many other ways.  I responded, “You’ve been an amazing help in this last month and I really appreciate all that you’ve been doing.  We all forget things sometimes, it’s okay.”  I actually thought that was a good response; I didn’t express annoyance or frustration that he forgot something important.  But when I shared this with an advisor, she pointed out to me that I wasn’t giving him a space to be sad.  This was extremely astute of her to pick up on.  What I should have said was, “I see you feel really badly about forgetting to pick up ds – that must be a horrible feeling.”  And let him say what he wanted to say before going on with what I said, rather than smoothing things over without acknowledging his sadness about not doing something that he should have.

When this situation was pointed out to me I realized that I do this pretty often, thinking that I’m being encouraging or supportive.  So that’s something I’ve been working on this week.  I don’t want my kids to have to pretend that everything is okay when it’s not, and I don’t want to cut off their opportunities to express their negative feelings even though I’ve been doing it with the best of intentions.

It might sound a little strange to say that it’s a positive feeling to feel the sadness of things not being the way you want, but it’s been a good growing experience.  As small as these little changes were that I made when listening to the kids, I realized tonight that it had a positive impact on me in deepening my ability to be in touch with my own feelings.   That was a pretty nice side benefit!

So back to the quote.  Yes, we all will go through tough things in life.  And it will be painful. But that doesn’t mean we have to be miserable about it.  I met someone at the supermarket before Pesach who was picking up a huge order of meat, and I asked her why she was buying so much. She told me she would be cooking for thirty people every day of Pesach.  I commented that it sounded hard, and she said to me, “It’s not easy but it’s sameach – happy.  And when you’re happy, then nothing is too much.”  I agreed with her, with the caveat that I shared above – that a person be honest with themselves and not just put on a superficial mask of happiness.

Today someone told me that I’m a strong person.  People often tell me that, but I’m not so sure.  Maybe, maybe not.  But what I did tell her is that I really believe that everything that happens is for the good, even when I don’t see it, and that helps me deal with a lot of what happens in my life.  So much of our suffering is in our mind, in the thoughts we think about what we go through.  I try to be aware of my thinking, since our thoughts determine our emotions, but recently I felt so snowballed that I got off keel and was thinking in a negative and besieged way.  I caught myself doing this so now I’m working on being conscious of my thoughts and actively replacing negative thinking with thoughts that are more productive.  This is where I think the idea that suffering is optional comes in.  We can’t control what happens to us, but we can choose our response.

Avivah

Dh gone for a four month trip

personal development

My husband left last night for a four month trip to the US to be with dd18.

I don’t feel very cheerful about this so I’d rather just not mention it, but it’s a very very very huge deal for our family so I can’t not say anything.  I’m sad about that for many reasons – like my husband is my very best friend in the entire world and is an integral part of my life- and I could hardly say goodbye to him because I was so choked up.

On the other hand, we’re both grateful that we’re able to find a way for one of us to be there for dd18.  When I was telling someone in the States I was worried about the impact of me being gone for months from my family (since at that point the plan was for me to go), she gave me a really positive perspective.  She said, you’re showing your children how far you’ll go to be there for their sister when she needs you, and that will give them a confidence in knowing that no matter what you’ll always be there for them, too.   This was really good to help me shift from worrying about the possible impact of the trauma or things our children would miss with one parent being away for so long.

So this is what we’re focusing on; we don’t say that dh went to the US but that he went to be with dd18.

I really want to think that somehow we’ll be able to go there after a couple of months and we can all spend the summer together, but that’s not currently part of our reality.  A friend today said to me that we’ve gotten clear direction about who needs to be where, and when, and that as time goes on it’s likely to become obvious about the next step.  I know she’s right.  It’s just that I like to plan ahead and be organized, to minimize stress and problems by being proactive.  But in this past month, there hasn’t been one tiny thing I’ve been able to plan for, to feel like I have any control over.

I get tired of feeling so darned powerless.  Really, I do.  I also get tired of feeling humbled.  And I’m tired of not having so many things that I want.  Sorry to disillusion anyone who may have thought the gentle beatific smile of acceptance never leaves my lips and my halo stays in place when I sleep.  🙂  I would be doing a disservice to you all if you were to think that I’m always able to calmly and easily put everything unpleasant to the side, without any feelings of resentment or negativity.  I’m not.

And I don’t think you have to, or even that you should.  I try to be honest with myself about how I’m feeling, since you can’t get to a good place emotionally by pretending to yourself that everything is fine.  Sometimes I can find perspective easily and maintain it even when it’s hard but generally this is something I consistently actively work on.  Sometimes I need to sit with my unhappiness and allow myself to be unhappy without telling myself all the reasons I should be happy or shaming myself for not having a better attitude.

And it may not be impressive or inspiring, but it’s real and so it has to be just as okay as all the warm and fuzzy stuff.

Avivah

Learning to accept what is and find happiness in every situation

homemaking, personal development

When I got out of the hospital with Yirmiyahu on Sunday afternoon, my intention was to spend every bit of time together with our family possible before the upcoming four month separation.  (I was going to go to the US for an extended period but after Yirmiyahu’s hospitalization we changed plans, and my husband will be leaving right after Pesach to be with dd18.)  But man plans and G-d laughs.

We had a lovely seder, though I really felt dd18’s absence. The next day I began to have difficulty breathing. By the evening it was very, very hard to breathe and my husband mentioned that he was also starting to have trouble breathing. That was the beginning of the worst virus I’ve ever experienced in my life – every possible symptom you could have except ear pain, I had.  Coughing, runny nose, stuffed up nose, chills, feverish, shaking, nausea, vomiting, pain in every part of my body, inability to eat, gastrointestinal upset and lungs that feel coated with phlegm.  The first two days in bed I wasn’t aware of much that was going on around me; I had this weird feeling of seeing four dimensions of my mind opening at one time while I was tossing and turning (I know, it’s very weird and I don’t even know that that means but that’s what I felt).  I woke up with my entire body sweating late Friday afternoon – did you know that your legs can sweat?:) – with my clothes and blanket damp, and it was like something broke – and was able to get up and light Shabbos candles.

I had to go right back to bed but was picturing being better by the next day.  However, that was much too optimistic.   (Dh went to the doctor and was told that it’s a virus and there’s nothing to do but wait it out.  Of course all my home remedies are packed away for Pesach.)  Right now it’s the fourth day and for the first time I can sit up and focus somewhat.  I’m still very weak and it looks like I’ll be in bed for at least another day.  I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to be up at least somewhat for the last day of Pesach.  Dh has also been really sick but not as bad as me, so we’ve been bonding together by being sick together.  🙂

Dh was able to read when he was sick and was sharing with me some things he read.  One article was about what to look for in a marriage partner. The article stated that you should look for a compatible life direction and life philosophy. He said that he thinks that what’s most important is a spouse who can roll with life’s punches and understand that things won’t always go the way you want, the way you plan, the way you expect.

I agreed, though I do think you have to start with the commonality of a shared life vision.  You learn to deal with the twists and turns of life by going through them and you can’t really know how you’re going to handle a situation until you’re in the situation.

I’ve said this before: every single person is going to go through very difficult things in their lives.  You can be as proactive as you can to take care of your health and invest in your marriage and your family and be financially responsible and interact with everyone in a respectful way – and you can avoid some problems, but there’s no way to avoid all of them.  Every single person was put here in this world with a unique mission, and part of your mission is to be tested in some significant way to bring out something in you that easy times can’t bring out.

But that’s really an academic matter until you face it.

It’s natural to want to kick and scream ‘Unfair!’ when something  bad happens to us.  But at a certain point we have to move past that and find acceptance.  When we get stuck insisting that life should be different, we make things so much harder for ourselves.

I want to share with you something very powerful that I love so much that I carried with me in my wallet for a long time.  (Hmm, what happened to this when I moved?)  I often read this to myself when I felt frustrated about something that wasn’t going my way in the course of the day and it always helped recenter me.  It’s from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, a book that focuses on practical spirituality; a good friend of ours who was a mashgiach ruchani in a major yeshiva in Israel told my husband that he was amazed how totally in line with Torah the principles of this book are.

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism (I substitute whatever word is appropriate for my situation), I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.”

Isn’t that beautiful?  I hope you find it as helpful as I have!

Avivah

“Mommy, when will I die?”

health, parenting, personal development

Yesterday I was sitting next to ds5 on the bus on our way home from our shopping trip, when he suddenly asked me: “Mommy, when will I die?”

I looked at him and said, “When you were born, Hashem (God) gave you a neshama (soul) that has a special job.  You’re going to be alive as long as your neshama has a job to do, and hopefully that will be for a very long time.”

He was satisfied with that answer and didn’t ask anything else.  But that jolted my thoughts.

When Yirmiyahu was taken to the hospital and even more when I was told how he nearly didn’t make it, I was wracked with guilt.  I kept thinking over and over, ‘Just a few more hours, what if we hadn’t taken him then, why didn’t I take him sooner?  Why didn’t I pay more attention to my gut feeling that something was wrong?”   Over and over.  I kept thinking: ‘I have to let go of this, I did the best I could, I was far from negligent about the situation…’  But still my mind would start playing, ‘what if, what if, what if?’

Then I heard those words come out of my mouth to answer ds5 and they gave me a burst of clarity: Yirmiyahu didn’t die, not because we got him to the emergency room on time.  He made it because his soul has a purpose and he needs to be here. That means that Hashem made sure he’d get there on time.  And if it hadn’t been us taking him for medical care, He would have sent another messenger to make sure that Yirmiyahu got the medical help he needed.  Because Yirmiyahu needs to be here, not just as the light of my life, but as part of God’s plan.

I can’t tell you what a gift and relief this was, to have peace of mind and let go of this huge emotional weight on me.  I don’t know if I’ll ever  totally let go of that fear of ‘what if’ or wipe out every vestige of guilt that I didn’t do something differently.  But this reminded me that God and His plan aren’t part of the picture; they are the picture.

Avivah

Appreciating what you have before it’s gone – but when it’s gone, trust that it will be back again

homemaking, parenting, personal development

A number of months ago, I was going to write a post about the importance of appreciating each day as it is, as imperfect as it is.  Because wherever you are today, however hard it seems, you don’t know what the next day holds.  It’s important to actively appreciate each day for all that is good, and appreciate all the bad that hasn’t happened.  Like that all your kids are in bed at night, and no one has broken an arm or had to go to the emergency room.  The day after I mentally wrote this, one of our children was taken to the emergency room, and I remember thinking how glad I was that I had focused on what I had before I didn’t have it.

You don’t want hard times to be a wake up call that force you to see in retrospect that you missed out on enjoying the days you had because you were too busy looking at what was wrong.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  As much as I try to actively look for the good in each day, I can see so many things I didn’t appreciate.  I didn’t appreciate my baby’s wet diaper, him moving his limbs or having the strength to make sounds.  There are a lot of other things I didn’t appreciate until I didn’t have them.

At the hospital, I asked a nurse who was sighing heavily what was wrong, and she told me that things were hard.  I asked her why, and she told me that she has to get ready for Pesach/Passover and that we women have hard lives.  I said to her, “I hear what you’re saying, but right now I’d be very happy to be at home getting ready for Pesach.”  Three weeks ago Pesach preparation seemed like something significant to deal with.  Now it’s hardly a minor blip to me.  I wasn’t preaching to her or saying her reality wasn’t valid, because of course it is. I was just sharing my perspective from my vantage point right now.

Yesterday I was feeling overwhelmed about the sequence of events lately, like everything in my life was shattering all around me.  Thinking about all the things in my life that were good that I hadn’t appreciated enough made me feel even worse.  I wanted the reassurance that this was as bad as it was going to get, that I had hit rock bottom and the only place to go was up.  But if there were still good things left, I didn’t have that reassurance.

I’ve watched my life and the lives of others spiral down very quickly, frighteningly quickly.  We want to feel like we’re in control of our lives and if we do the right things, life will proceed in a predictably pleasant way.  We don’t want to think that despite our best efforts, things can shift in the blink of an eye.  But today I was comforted when remembering this fact of life is two sided: it can always be worse, but it can also always be better.  And just as things can get bad very quickly, they can also change for the better in an instant.

That thought gave me a lot of hope and perspective.

Avivah

The value of tears of sadness

miscellaneous, parenting, personal development

In his Power to Parent series, Dr. Gordon Neufeld teaches about the significance of frustration.

Frustration is an emotion you feel when something in your life isn’t working for you.  When faced with frustration, there are several ways that this can express itself.  The most healthy options are to 1) change the situation that frustrates you, or if you aren’t able to do something to change what is bothering you, to 2) accept that you can’t change the situation.  In order to accept the situation as it is, it requires feeling the futility of the situation, feeling the sadness of wanting something and not having it.  This is something that many of us find difficult because we have become defended from our emotions, meaning that we’ve hardened ourselves to a degree so as to not feel painful emotions, sadness about unmet desires being one of those painful feelings.

What happens when a person becomes emotionally defended?  Since they don’t allow themselves to feel the sadness of the situation, when faced with frustration it manifests as aggression (towards himself or others).  Dr. Neufeld teaches about how to help a person who is emotionally hardened find what he calls ‘tears of futility’; this is necessary for them to constructively deal with tough emotions and grow emotionally.  He talks a lot about how to do this, and one possibility is to carefully touch on painful situations to bring them to tears.  These tears are a sign of adaptive behavior and get something that can turn foul out of our systems where it can’t harm us.

Yesterday morning I was very anxious about Yirmiyahu being so sick, and as I started thinking about the possibility he’d need to be hospitalized began to tear up.  I don’t cry often, but this past week and a half I’ve had my share of tears.  I thought, “God, what do you want from me already?”  And suddenly it occurred to me, maybe He isn’t demanding something of me but giving me an opportunity.  Just as a loving parent may touch on painful topics in order to help a child experience his futility and grow, God is pushing me to find my tears.  Tears of futility (this can also be the feeling of sadness of futility without the tears) release tensions, help us come to peace about all that we are going through, and increase our emotional adaptability.

Fully feeling our sadness is an important and powerful step in  breaking down the internal barrier that separates us from our deeper selves, from others, and from God – so this is my impetus to embrace rather than resist the discomfort of the challenges I’m feeling right now.

It’s not fun but it’s good.

Avivah