The last few months, it’s no secret that I’ve been (trying to…) process a lot of ‘stuff’.
Probably, I’m not alone in that. Just, most people don’t talk about these things, so we all go through life thinking that “only that weirdo blogger, Rivka – and me – have these internal mountains to climb, while everything is hunky-dory for everyone else…”
It’s not.
Believe me, it’s not.
We’re all having a lot of ‘stuff’ to process and deal with at the moment, just many people are so disconnected from themselves, they have no idea what their soul is whispering to them to fix, work on, recognise, acknowledge.
Instead, they have a rising sense of anxiety and panic, which leads them to smoke more weed, up the prescription for the anti-anxieties, lose themselves more in ‘work’, or surfing, or increasing the daily glass or red wine to 2-3. Or four.
Or the whole bottle.
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Point is, we’re all going through ‘something’ quite intense, quite profound, quite challenging at the moment – internally.
Where no-one else can really see what’s going on, or understand it.
I see it in my kids, in my husband, in my extended family, in my small circle of friends, in my acquaintances.
And of course, I’ve been dealing with it in myself for months and months, already.
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There are many aspects of this journey we’re all on, at the moment.
Maybe soon, I’ll write more about the ‘narcissistic klipa’ aspect, and how each of us is being tasked with the job of smashing it to pieces in ourselves – so we can then move away from it’s external manifestation in others.
For as long as we ourselves are indulging our ‘narc’ tendencies to judge others harshly and ourselves not at all, to ‘project’ all our problems on to others, to accept no responsibility for the difficulties in our lives and always shift the blame to someone, or something else – God will ensure that we still have those external narcs to deal with.
But each little step we take to smash the narc klipa within ourselves, creates another key to ‘freedom from external narcs’.
But my oh my, it’s a long, difficult, stressful process.
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Anyhu, today’s post is actually about a book I read a month ago, called ‘Take off your glasses and see’.
(You can find it on Amazon HERE.)
To briefly recap, around six weeks’ ago I realised I can no longer keep up the gruelling pace of writing and researching that I have been busy with for years.
Not just here on the blog, in other areas of my life, too.
God sent me that message by making my eyes go so ‘funny’, I was literally having difficulty driving with my glasses on, and I couldn’t read stuff online any more.
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As we learnt from THIS post from the Rav, God just sends us sicknesses to get us to stop the merry-go-round for a moment, and to re-evaluate our lives, our situation, our relationship to Hashem, etc.
So that’s what I tried to do.
I did some serious hitbodedut about what was going on with my eyes, read two books of the Rav’s prayers for shmirat eynayim (that really helped, btw), paid a smallish pidyon, re-read Meir Schneider’s book Vision for Life, started sunning / palming / other eye exercises…
And all that helped a lot, to start bringing me closer to the why of why are my eyes going funny?
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Bottom line: I’d been using ‘work and research’ as the escape line from dealing with real life, my real feelings about it, my genuine upsets and hurts about a whole bunch of stuff.
And because I’ve been doing this for years, it was totally off my radar, as being a ‘problem’ that perhaps needs addressing.
So, God slowed me down, made it that I couldn’t so much as look as the computer for two weeks, made me spend a couple of hours a day walking, sunning / palming etc – which is when we get to the next part of this story.
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Suddenly, I was offline and had way more time.
Suddenly, with the kids BH married and out the house, I started to realise how much of a ‘crutch’ I’d been using the internet for, to kind of feel ‘connected’ to others.
And of course, I also started to realise what an ersatz, fragile connection that really is.
That was pretty challenging all by itself.
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At this point, I met a good friend for lunch, for the first time in a year, because God had finally slowed us both down enough to make it happen, and she told me about this book she’s been reading called Take Off Your Glasses and See.
It deals more with the emotional reasons why people’s vision goes ‘funny’, and is written by Jacob Liberman, a former optometrist who started to realise his profession was harming more than helping, back in the 1990s.
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Sidetrack for a moment:
The 1990s was that optimistic time when people could feel we were on the cusp of something new, something hopefully better, something different, and that was reflected in thousands of books by people who had experienced what can best be termed a ‘spiritual awakening’ of some kind.
All of a sudden, the soul-mind-body connection to health started to be written about; there were loads of books about near death experiences, reincarnations, how the planet was moving into a new, higher, better phase…
In Jewish terms, there was a lot of talk about geula really coming Moshiach being a real thing, moving to Israel, world peace…
And then.
It tanked.
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What tanked it?
9/11 was a big ‘glitch’.
But by far the bigger ‘glitch’ was the rise of the internet and, especially the smartphone.
Instead of tapping into their higher selves and becoming more spiritual, 99.9% of the population opted to put their soul-power into watching TikTok and Instagram shorts… Hundreds of them scrolling by a day…
Each one removing another fine layer of critical thinking ability, focus and ‘presence’ from the poor viewer’s brain.
OK, sidetrack over, back to the book.
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The main premise is that eyesight goes ‘funny’ from stress / emotional disturbances that are too big to handle, or really process.
Liberman said he’d helped hundreds of people go ‘glasses free’ or to at least severely reduce their prescription, simply by making the connections between what had occurred in their lives that they didn’t want to see, or deal with, before they went to get a new pair of specs.
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Long story short, he said that people use their specs as another ‘crutch’, to keep the world at bay, and them more distant from it.
He also explained that wearing specs deadens a person’s emotions, because when we retrieve and process memories, including feelings, the eye moves around as part of the brain’s ‘processing’ work.
(EMDR is based on this principle, btw.)
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When you stick your prescription lenses on your face, you are suddenly forced to focus very narrowly, on that point in the lens where your eyesight got ‘fixed’ and you can ‘see clearly’.
And in the process, you kind of get ‘stuck’ unable to really work through or process emotions properly, fixated on that one narrow point ‘out there’.
This ‘narrow focus’ affects the brain, until the person’s viewpoint, their mind, narrows-down to join their impaired vision.
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This blew me away.
I took my glasses off a month ago[1], to see if he was right.
Here is what I’ve been noticing myself:
The first week, I was quite the mess for a lot of reasons.
I couldn’t see so well (my eyes were still pretty bad), so I was doing stuff like nicking my fingers cutting onions, bumping into my furniture when it was dark at night and in the morning, and feeling quite ‘unprotected’ and vulnerable, now I couldn’t peer around the proverbial corner, to see what was going on.
A lot of emotions started coming up, too.
Old, old stuff.
Stuff I thought I’d dealt with a long time ago, but clearly, I’d just been muffling them with my specs and my work-a-holism.
And also joined by some newer worries, about what was going on with my eyes.
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But by week two, my eyes started to feel so much better and ‘lighter’.
My vision went back to the bad-normal I’d had before all this, and I found I could see the computer screen again, and read stuff online.
But, I increasingly started to spend less and less time doing that, not least because I realised how much ‘over-working’, ‘over-surfing’, ‘over-internet-ing’ has been a crutch, to get away from some heavy, difficult unprocessed feelings.
Up until now, I could spend 10 hours a day glued to my desk ‘researching’, to get something finished, or done.
Now, I don’t want to work like that any more. I am trying to shorten the time I spend at my PC, and take as many breaks as possible, to sun / palm/ walk / answer a call / see my kids and husband, spontaneously – whatever God sends me.
Instead of seeing these breaks as a problem stopping me from doing my stuff, I am learning to see them as a gift.
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Another strange thing started to happen, with my glasses off:
My stress started to radically reduce.
I stopped worrying so much, and let God lead me more. I have done long hikes in the desert now without my specs – and it was fantastic.
I literally feel it’s changing my personality, and calming down that ‘control freak’ side of me that’s always been scanning for danger on the horizon, or trying to figure everything out.
Now that I am less ‘focussed’ in so many ways, I have a lot more time and space for the people I really care about, and I’m also noticing those ‘gaps’ in my life that the workoholism and internet have been filling, with an ersatz, fake sensation of meaningfulness.
That’s also quite challenging and unsettling.
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The last insight, for now, is that taking my specs off is also helping to lead me out of the impasse of ‘all or nothing’ thinking.
(BTW, that’s one of the sure signs of mental illness… And not just for people with an official diagnosis:)
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Instead of ‘always wearing my glasses’ VS ‘never wearing my glasses’, God is forcing me to be in that in-between space, where sometimes I am externally focused, when I really need to be – but other times, I’m now also internally focused.
And I am way more gentle and ‘accepting’ with my glasses off.
And way more feeling my reality, instead of critically examining it through a magnifying glass, and noticing all the flaws and ‘issues’.
I am finding this to be a much better way of being, going forward.
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Tov.
That will do for now. If I get more insights from this experiment, I will try to share them, with God’s help.
But, if you are a glasses-wearing, smart, critical, super-nerd, I highly recommend doing this experiment yourself, to see if a) your eyesight improves b) your stress levels reduce c) a lot of the ‘sharp’ edges that may be keeping other good people away from you disappear, all by themselves d) you finally find yourself able to slow down and to smell the roses more, instead of always rushing ahead.
It just takes a small investment of patience and time…. But the pay-off could be tremendous.
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[1] Except for when I’m driving, or working on the computer.