A short video for Rosh Chodesh Adar
Starting the New Year, 5781, with one of Rebbe Nachman’s short tales, one about sadness and joy, spiritual growth and the cosmic physics of kedusha and joy, and developing your innate holy awareness, understanding, and self-knowledge.
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Rebbe Nachman of Breslov tells us that anger is an overbearing obstacle to psycho-spiritual growth and understanding. In Likutey Eitzos (Collected Advice), the Rebbe says:
Anger and unkindness arise when people’s understanding is limited. The deeper their understanding the more their anger disappears, and kindness, love and peace spread. This is why the study of Torah, which deepens the understanding, brings love and peace into the world and banishes anger.
Anger finds it’s roots in a variety of flawed beliefs and feelings about God, the World, other people, and yourself.
To find joy is the hardest thing of all. It is harder than all other spiritual tasks…Put all your energy into being happy. — Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
The Rebbe tells us that, if need be, we should force ourselves to be happy.
Of course, this advice is not politically correct. From today’s psychological viewpoint, forcing yourself to be happy is wrong. It’s denial. Better to be miserable.
At a Jewish wedding and other happy times, while the band plays an upbeat melody, the guests form a circle and dance.
Once in a while they might spot a downcast person standing in the corner, perhaps unable to chase her personal troubles from her mind. The others will reach out and grab her, pulling her to her feet and forcing her to join them in their joyful dance. As her feet move faster and faster, she claps her hands and begins to smile at the other smiling faces. She’s transformed.
♥
It is very good to set one’s dark bitterness and suffering aside and be happy, even for awhile.
But Rebbe Nachman of Brelsov tells us there is something even greater than setting our sorrow aside (although this is indeed an admirable achievement): Pursue and grab hold of your “sadness and sighing”. Bring them—against their will—into the circle dance of happiness and “introduce them to joy” so that they are actually transformed into joy.
Gloominess and depression are persistent tricksters, rooted in the side of evil, but happiness is holy. So if you want to lift those stubborn shysters up into the side of holiness, you may have to force them, dragging them with you into the holy dance of happiness.
Based on Likutey Moharan Tinyana (II), Lesson 24
I don’t actually know any woman who doesn’t like to shop at least some of the time.
If you can’t stand shopping for clothes, you might like shopping for food.
If you loathe shopping for furniture, you might like trying on shoes.
If handbags are boring, what about books? Jewelry? Make-up? Food processors? Cars? Tchotchkes?*
The Shopping Drug
Shopping, window-shopping, browsing—whatever you call it—can be a drug. We have the ability to immerse, no, lose ourselves in that adorable clutch with the bead work or those sweet little striped espresso cups or that cute little bargain thingy—even if we don’t need it or want it.
Have we ever asked ourselves: Why are we shopping when we have a closet full of shoes or a perfectly good carpet in the living room?
It’s a great mitzvah to be happy, always. — Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
Women are more spiritually attuned than men. (It says so in ancient Jewish teachings). We are more understanding, often quick to grasp someone else’s mood or feelings, and more apt to be profoundly moved by the little things in life.
But sometimes, that spiritual sensitivity has another side, a darker side. We’re also more apt to take things hard, struggle with sadness, and a sense of “what if?”
Can you legislate happiness? Can you command it? Perhaps not. But what you can do is train your mind and heart to be joyful. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov gives us the tools to make this life (and the next) a happier one.
There are so many creative, intelligent, and sensitive women who would like to live life with less pain, more optimism. Rebbe Nachman’s teachings help us do this. Just come along for the journey.