Fear is a very normal human emotion.

In fact, it’s probably at the root of almost every negative trait and reaction we have. I’m talking about ‘fallen fears’ – the idea that something or someone can harm us or hurt us, in total isolation from belief in Hashem.

That Hashem is doing everything, running the whole world, deciding down to the very last tiny detail what happens to a person, how and when.

==

Our modern world is built on a huge, towering edifice of ‘fallen fears’.

We saw all that come sharply into focus during the plandemic, where people’s natural fears of falling ill, or being blamed for awful things happening to others, was stoked and manipulated in a very cruel and extreme way.

Me personally, I’ve always had a ton of secret, and not-so-secret fears to deal with, long before Covid showed up.

Some of those fears have been so debilitating, that if God hadn’t sent hitbodedut, trips to Uman and pidyonot with the Rav into the world, I would probably have ended up in a loonie bin.

(Probably, a lot of the people in Shuvu Banim could tell you the same thing ;-))

==

The point is – living in fear is a horrible way to live.

It’s really no life at all.

The problem is – our modern world is built on a huge, towering edifice of ‘fallen fears’.

That’s how they push parents into the vaccine schedule and dosing their kids with ritalin, getting people to stay home and mask-up for three years, scaring everyone, all the time, that they have cancer, and are causing global warming, and are killing all the dolphins with plastic bags, and Iran, Iran, Iran.

The list goes on and on.

==

In one of those strange paradoxes, the more ‘awake’ you are, the more your fears can multiply.

People who still trust doctors, still think their government is benevolent and here to serve them, still think Trump is playing 8D chess and put Epstein in a witness protection program to finally ‘clean the swamp’ (ho ho ho) – those people live in less fear than others.

Because they are still trusting in a corrupt, rotten system that has been carefully designed to drag them down to the very bottom of the world, without them even realising it.

==

Most of my readers probably don’t fit into that category.

(Except, maybe, ‘Jerusalem Resident’…)

Ergo, most of my readers probably worry a great deal, about a bunch of stuff that is objectively concerning.

But here is my big chiddush for this post:

We can’t live in fear.

Because living in fear is no way to live, at all.

It saps all of a person’s joy, their optimism, their strength, their potential to still act, and do and enjoy stuff in the world.

==

Last week, the Rav, who is 88 and just recovering from a 50 day treatment to eradicate cancer, got on a plane with his Rabbanit Tehilla, and tried to get into Uman again.

The plane landed in Moldova, the Rav tried to cross the Ukrainian border, and again, he was denied.

I’m not on the Whatsapp group, so I got all the info second hand, and not in real time.

Personally?

I didn’t think the Rav was going to make it across the border.

Why? Because as soon as that info is on the Whatsapp group, that he’s even trying, for sure the cholkim, who are connected at the State level, started pulling strings to get yet another ‘black visa’ arranged against him.

These black visas can apparently be arranged very fast, when the request comes in from the State level.

And undoing them takes a ton of time, effort and money.

So me personally, I didn’t think he was going to get across, but I still hoped he would, and did some TKs for him.

==

Then I started wondering to myself, why is the Rav, who is 88 and not well, putting himself through this all the time, when he knows, he really knows, that right now, he is still not going to get across the border?

The answer, or my answer anyway, came back to me in hitbodedut:

The Rav is showing us how we’re meant to be living life, in real time, even in our mad, crazy, unjust world.

Not in fear. Not in despair. Not giving up on trying or doing, and just living this pointless hefker life where we stumble through the day like a zombie, until we go back to sleep again.

Bottom line: we still need to LIVE. To do stuff. To try stuff. With God’s help.

And the TRYING is the whole point, not the achieving.

==

I can’t tell you how many times the trip to Uman, to give one example, has helped me overcome a whole bunch of ‘fallen fears’.

Right from the beginning.

(The people who have been know exactly what I’m talking about, and the people who haven’t should really try it for themselves.)

Even before wars and Covid, the Ukraine was not a friendly, welcoming place for Jews. Certainly not in the times of communism, and still not in the early 2000s, when there was no toilet paper and the potholes in the roads were so big they could swallow a coach whole.

The first time I went to Uman, there were continual electricity blackouts, no way of contacting Israel, the most snow and ice I have ever seen in my life (and I lived in Canada for a few years) – and a bunch of ‘fallen fears’ about life in general getting me, in some way.

The point is: whatever stops a person from getting to Uman, that same thing is stopping a person from moving forward in their life, generally.

==

Point is: we can’t live in fear anymore.

We can’t keep trying to peer around corners all the time.

Yes, stay awake, do hitbodedut, don’t be fooled by this awful, evil corrupt ‘system’ – but also, don’t focus on it 24/7.

If you need to play the game enough to move forward in life, then that is what you have to do.

Without putting yourself in unnecessary danger.

But also, without trying to live in your duvet 24/7, scared to leave the bed.

==

I give us all a bracha that Hashem should help us to keep on enjoying life in a kosher, holy way – to the max!

And that we should understand that really, God is all there is.

And all these fallen fears we have are the main motivator driving us to establish a relationship with our Creator, so He can make all those fallen fears disappear.

Amen.

 

I was doing some talking to God, about why I reacted so badly yesterday, when someone pushed in the queue.

At the head level, I know everything is from God, everything is for my good, it’s just mamash a message for me to explore something on my side of the equation, that I need to acknowledge and try to rectify.

At the heart level, when that woman pushed in so aggressively and unfairly, I suddenly got ‘flashed back’ to that horrible feeling of powerlessness I had when I was a child, and people used to bully me.

==

I got bullied a lot.

The only Jew in school… Going to a posh school where people had regularly ski-ing holidays and I had holes in my socks that had me living in fear of ever taking my shoes off in public… I had a knack of attracting attention, even without trying to, and saying or doing things that set me apart, and set me up to be bullied.

A lot.

Even by the teachers.

And that was just at school…

==

Point is, the last few months since I’ve been unpicking another layer of all this old, old stuff from childhood, I feel like I’ve got sensitized now to any hint that someone is trying to bully me.

It’s part of the process.

You have to swing from one side to the other, to find the right balance.

The problem is, if you stay ‘on the other side’ too long, or think it’s OK to turn into a rude, bullying old bag yourself, because at one point you were a ‘victim’.

At that point, the ‘victim’ becomes the aggressor, and they cycle starts up, all over again.

==

So where I got to yesterday, is I was having a flash-back to when I used to be bullied, a lot, and I couldn’t get away from it, or really fight back.

Now, I’m an adult, so I could walk away, and perhaps God arranged this whole palaver yesterday, simply to bring it to my attention that I am now an adult, and I have plenty more tools available to move away from being bullied.

That’s a very helpful insight.

It’s moving me forward a lot in this process, of trying to figure out how I can deal with yucky people in the world, with emuna, and without getting ‘flash-backed’ into a negative mochin de katnut state.

==

Something else that come up, is that I feel as the world is getting more and more ‘controlling’, in a billion different ways, the human need for freedom, to have ‘free choice’ is welling up more and more.

This is another process that has been going on for a while, and really ramped-up during Covid, with all the deep state enforcement and masks and lockdowns, that people just want to live freely.

Without a whole bunch of the laws of Sdom to contend with.

I only want to be subservient to Hashem and to His Torah, and to nothing and nobody else.

==

Rebbe Nachman teaches that free choice is the only reason God created the world.

All of us, from the youngest to the oldest, from the richest to the poorest, from the cleverest to the dumbest, from the ‘biggest success’ to the ‘biggest failure’ – all of us have a need to be able to express ourselves, and to choose for ourselves, without being controlled, bullied and manipulated from the outside.

Sometimes, that control and manipulation comes from parents, siblings, friends, the school bully, the yucky boss or teacher.

These days, we are also getting a heavy dose of it at the State level, reminiscent of communist times in the former Soviet Union, when everything was manipulation and lies to keep the population quiescent and controllable, cowering in fear.

But deep down, and also not so deep down – the human soul was built to be ‘free’, to be free to choose to serve Hashem, or not. To do good, or not. To think for itself, or not.

==

So, this is where I’ve got to in unpicking more of this ‘bad middot’ onion I’m currently still working through.

Ad 120.

I apologise, if anyone got offended that I called rude, selfish old narcissists names.

That’s very bad middot on my part, I’m working on it.

Ad 120.

But in the meantime, I also want to encourage us all to stop taking things too seriously, to lighten up, slow down, and understand that we are all down here because we have some serious work to do, to develop some real emuna and recognise our own bad middot.

==

The problem is not so much that we have bad middot.

We all have bad middot, and God gave them to us and created us exactly that way.

The real problem is that not enough people are admitting that yes, I also have this problem… I’m sorry I’m acting this way…I admit I’m also having unhelpful ‘flashbacks’ that cause me to react in less than optimal ways…

Instead, they take a page out of the NPD playbook, and turn into holier-than-thou hypocrites who severely criticise everyone else for their bad middot, but can’t admit that at least sometimes, they also aren’t perfect. They also hurt other people. They also do stuff wrong.

That’s the real problem here.

==

My supermarket is full of those people.

They are really yucky to be around, or even just to stand next to in line, by the till.

You can feel all their anger, and hakpada, and projected self-hatred shimmering around them, like a malevolent force-field, just waiting for the next poor sod to put a foot wrong and get ‘zapped’ with their wrath.

God forbid, I don’t want to turn into one of those people.

God forbid, I don’t want anyone else to, either.

==

So, I will continue to share what’s going on with unpeeling my own ‘bad middot onion’, here on the blog.

I know, I know, everyone else is perfect, and ‘normal’, and simply don’t have these issues (God bless the weed, wine and meds!)

But what can I do?

I don’t smoke, drink or take prescription medications.

So, I am stuck experiencing my bad middot in full force, and trying to figure out how I can really deal with them, with God’s help, and overcome them, mostly by following Rabbenu’s advice.

Ad 120.

(And then, plus another 800 reincarnations…)

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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?

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.)

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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.

==

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:)

==

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.

==

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.

==

[1] Except for when I’m driving, or working on the computer.

Anyone out there still think the orange man is the ‘tuv she be Esav’?

Apparently, even the BBC is now sharing details that seriously, seriously challenge that narrative.

Oh, and throw Elon Musk in there too, because he was also palling around with Epstein on the infamous island.

And apparently, Mamdani’s mum was also a friend of Epstein…

Who can make this stuff up?

==

Kipaadu has more details, if you really want them.

==

Meanwhile, I was wondering why SOTT had gone full ‘Pizzagate’ this week, posting up a whole bunch of ‘Flashbacks’ from six years ago, and more, detailing that side of this sickening story.

Because, it’s all connected.

Anyone who is ‘allowed’ to be in a position of real power in our world, is part of this same club, all evil puppets who are so corrupted and easy-to-blackmail, for a million different reasons, that the idea that they would ever actually do something good and helpful to really serve the working people they were ‘elected’ by is a very bad joke.

==

THIS is why I no longer waste my time, or my energy, ‘debating politics’.

Or even, really following ‘the news’, especially not political news involving politicians or dear leaders of any stripe, who if they don’t start off serving the machine are quickly disposed of and got out the way.

==

Seven years ago now, when Epstein started making the news, and was still alive, I had such a hopeful feeling that finally, the truth was going to come out, about the lowly state of our dear leaders, and all the corrupt institutions they’ve created and funded.

Then he got ‘suicided’, apparently, and I have to say, I was inexplicably very depressed about that for months and months…

Until Covid 19 began shortly afterwards, and then that took my mind of it for a while.

==

Even with all the redacting, enough material is coming out to show:

The world is being run by a group of satanic pedophiles, who apparently all know each other.

Those satanic pedophiles are just puppets following orders from the Evils at the back, to keep the world lurching from one manufactured crisis, one manufactured war, to another.

To keep God hidden, and keep people stuck, running on a treadmill fuelled by panic and fear.

==

I found out yesterday that my SIL just left the country again over the weekend, off to Cyprus, because she started panicking about ‘Iran, Iran, Iran’.

We were meant to be meeting up this week, so I couldn’t understand why no-one was calling us back.

Now, I know.

Her reality and my reality are so different.

In my reality, I barely have given two seconds thought to ‘Iran’, it’s not even been on the radar, mamash.

Meanwhile…. she packed up and left the country.

Again.

==

Really, the main difference between us boils down to this:

I believe in God.

I am trying very hard to stay off the news.

==

That’s basically it.

But man-o-man, what a huge difference it’s making day to day.

==

Tov.

I hope you enjoy today.

I hope you turn off the internet for as long as you can, go for a walk, read a book, bake a cake, say a TK, maybe do some hitbodedut, something useful, that fills up your soul and makes you feel calmer and happier.

The ‘earthquakes’ seem to be picking up in more ways than one…

I’m waiting to see what’s going to start ‘shaking things up’ in our small, holy patch of the Middle East now.

In a good way.

Dutchsinse just put up a new video.

The biggest earthquake on the East coast in the last 10 years struck next to Trump’s golf course last year…

And everyone ignored it.

Just now, Trump’s golf course got struck again…

And also, a bunch of ‘military locations’ in the USA.

If you believe that God is doing everything, and that the US has been engaged in a whole bunch of stuff that hasn’t been helping the world to become a holier, better place – putting it mildly – well.

It’s kinda interesting.

And definitely something to keep an eye on, going forward.

Yesh din, v’yesh Dayan.