By: Yehuda BergDecember 7 - 13, 2008
Farewell to Arms
“...people who appear to have the thickest skin, are the most sensitive.”
A quick note for all you regular readers:
Last year we started something called Best Kept Secret, a lecture tour traveling the U.S. delivering many of the life enhancing lessons you read here each week. I'm bringing it up now because we recently added new locations - including overseas. If you see shifts in your life as a result of Kabbalah, and wish to share, these lectures {no charge} are a great landing place for those seeking to enter the wonderful world of Kabbalah. Please do copy and forward this link to your friends: http://www.kabbalah.com/lks/register.html?cid=20081207d.
Now, on to this week's lesson...
What usually goes on when we feel wronged by someone? What is our thought process? We avoid them. Or we mentally investigate all of the ways they're wrong and we're right. Or we take our case to our friends and prove to them how correct we are. Or we experience self doubt, and think there must be something wrong with us. Or we plot some good old fashioned revenge.
When we're seeking to be on a higher spiritual level, when we're working to connect to and remain connected to the 99% as much as possible, we have to ask ourselves higher questions about this type of behavior. Our old methods for handling problems and situations, although habitually easy and seemingly correct from our old point of view, do not benefit anyone, especially ourselves.
Answers for any type of conflict can be found this week, including those that may have been waging for decades. We can find it through empathy.
When we find ourselves in conflict, let empathy be our default reaction. Let us ask what is going on with the person. Remember, we're all human and we all have difficult experiences. When we make the effort to shift the situation from one of confrontation or avoidance to coming from a place of genuine help, we experience a total shift in the forces at play in the situation.
Often times the people who appear to have the thickest skin, are the most sensitive, but we'll never get to see that side of them, never gain the insight we really need, if we don't create the opening in our thoughts.
This week, think of someone you have considered hostile to you, an enemy so to speak, and do the following: get inside their skin.
If it's your landlord calling for the rent, imagine being in her position and dealing with you. Simply feeling her will put the right words in your mouth. The same goes for every possible interaction this week.
Erase yourself for a moment and ask the Light to show you what the other person sees, what she feels. This slight shift in seeing and sensing will have a wonderful impact.
Trust the process.
All the best,
Yehuda
72 Name of the Week
Hei Bet Mem
14. Farewell to Arms
Just as the light of a bulb banishes darkness from a room, conflict on every scale-between people arguing about a parking space, or between nations arguing about an oilfield-is brought to a peaceful end through the Light of this Name.
