Tuning In

Once you are living with a mindfulness of G-d you’ll have a wonderful feeling of security, because you won’t have to worry about or search for the answers to your issues any more. You’ll realize that the answers are all around you and within you, and that all you really have to do is just pay attention. When we have emuna, we relax, because we don’t have to go chasing after things anymore. In fact, “relaxation” is just another word for G-d. When we let go of ourselves we allow G-d in and one way that we experience Him is by being relaxed.

We know that sooner or later, we are going to figure everything out, and that G-d is going to send it to us via our own mental or sensory apparatus. It’s going to come. When we trust that, when we know that there’s a rich environment within us and around us, and that the wisdom is already here, and that all we have to do is to learn how to use it and to draw on it, then we become calm, peaceful people with no worries. We become people of faith, and those people have a beautiful life, both here, and also in the World-to-Come.

All the Divine Providence, is just a springboard for creativity, to help us to be in better touch with G-d. If we’re in the middle of trying to “solve” something ourselves, then any interruption to our thought process or methodology is excruciating. But if we’re problem-solving with G-d, with Divine Providence, then we know that even the interruptions are bringing us closer to a breakthrough, and we’re much more patient and understanding as a result.

If I’m in the middle of something, and the wife calls me with all her concerns and problems, and I feel like I’m losing the thread of my thoughts – and it’s taken me most of the morning to even begin to find the thread of my thoughts – I’m going to get impatient if I don’t have emuna. I’m going to feel like something is about to be lost, and it’s going to be impossible to retrieve it. But if I have emuna, I’m not going to worry about the interruption, because I know that G-d will send me something even better. Thanks to my wife’s interruption, G-d is about to lead me to an even better outcome. It’s simply a springboard to something much better.

If I deal with “the interruption” with a full heart and my full attention, then the task at hand will be a snap, or a breeze. Maybe not the first time that I turn my attention back to it; and maybe not even the second or third time, but it’s going to happen. When we make an effort to solve the problem G-d is actually giving us – like making our wives happy, or giving some time and attention to a child, or giving some charity to the man at the door – then G-d will solve our other problems for us. It could be G-d designed the whole interruption for us, because He knows that we need to switch channels for a bit, and go and do something else. Do we know better than G-d, what’s really good for us? If we can see all the Divine Providence behind our difficulties in solving problems, or dealing with interruptions, then we’ll function much better and faster, and we’ll live longer, stress-free lives.

Estie is a young lady who’s been steadily gaining weight for seven years. Thanks to her weight gain, Estie had been feeling very depressed and isolated, because she’s embarrassed to be out of her house, and her low self-image was also now affecting the way she looked after her kids, and having a very negative impact on her relationship with her husband. She’d already tried all those different, “standard” ways of losing weight, like dieting, programs, hypnosis, etc, but nothing helped her.

Like most depressed people, she was firmly stuck “in the box”, and she was pretty skeptical about yet another approach for losing weight. When we spoke, Estie was still trying to diet and to go on the exercise machine, and she was telling her husband that she didn’t need his support and help with the kids, and that he should just go and learn. She was also not listening to G-d at all, and He was completely out of the picture.  I told her that whatever she was doing, she should start doing the opposite. Switch everything around!

Why did I tell her to do that? Because Rabbi Arush says that you can cure everything with happiness. If you have emuna, you’re happy, but Estie needed some help in the meantime, while she was working on building up her emuna, to start feeling happy. So I told her to go and eat whatever she wanted, but slowly, and to really enjoy it. I advised her to make sure the food was touching all the taste buds in her mouth, and to put the fork down in between mouthfuls, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to just shovel it all in, without really savoring what she was eating.

Estie wanted to know, how was she going to lose weight by not exercising and eating more cake? I told her that she needs to be happy, and that happiness comes before emuna. The advice is good – just eat the food slowly and really enjoy it. Don’t wolf it down; don’t talk on the cell phone while you’re eating; don’t read; don’t do anything else. Just eat, focus on enjoying it, and think about G-d.

She followed the advice, and she had the best week she had in seven years. I’m sure she’s going to lose a lot of weight and turn her life around. Even though the solution seems completely illogical, it’s exactly the sort of “out of the box”, creative answer that Estie needed. By tuning into Divine Providence and utilizing it, that’s how we turn “problems” into “solutions.”