Ki Tetze: Hashavat Aveda

As we go through life, we experience different kinds of things throughout it. We experience hardships like people saying things to us on the street, the feeling of not having enough, etc. Something from the outside, as an external disturbance to life. Those experiences create our feelings. When we have them, they take us down to a part in our heart, to places very deep in the heart. The deep parts of our heart are worlds of their own. They have stories, and each memory has many words. The feelings that you feel are vibrations of new worlds, new levels of thought that you can dive into deeper. You go and find deeper levels of conversations that you have yet to have; schmooze with those suppressed stories and memories that are deep, deep down in those places in the heart.

So when we feel certain things in our life, an amazing thing happens to us: we have the opportunity to re-experience those feelings and bring clarity to this world, deep in the heart. We open up the door of those feelings, and we sink in and go deeper and deeper until all we see around us, the only thing that our mind sees at that time, are thoughts of such feelings. And now it is hard to see the world from a different perspective because we are surrounded by the thoughts of only this specific world. Just as we’d need a good experience to influence us to start seeing only thoughts of good and fun times.

It’s a whole new level that we have to adapt to in order to take ourselves out with the lessons it has taught us. Let’s take Shachris, for example. Davening = Diving. We start thinking about the idea of taking time out of the day to stand by that table and hold up that book in front of our face. Then understanding why we’re doing it and for whom we’re doing it. (And that’s Naseh v’Nishma. You should first start by going to Shul, v’Nishma, and then you’ll start doing all of the things like the “whys” and questioning. First start doing. The questions come at the next step, and that is Naseh v’Nishma.)

So you go to shul, and you decide that you are going to dive-in to Hashem. You go even deeper by starting from the beginning of your creation. As you start with Modeh Ani, then you move on to your personal Mitzvot, and you start understanding how you were made and how Hashem gave you a life. That you are His Jewish child, and with this gift that you received, you will be able to live a good life by following Hashem. Then you move on to the story of the Akedah, and then you read Shema. Then you go on to understand that it’s not just about you; it’s about the community together, as everybody brings sacrifices and everybody works together to keep and do their job properly in the best way they can.

All those thoughts subconsciously go through your mind. Although many times we don’t have all that intention since we forget, we just read it as a script as we memorized the words. We’ve done it so many times, and we just think about other things while standing there. We think about other things the entire time as our lips move, but those words, they go in somewhere. They go into the “needs review column.” It has to be reviewed again. It has to be looked at and said, hey, what’s going on over here? What are the words that were said? What are those prayers and Torah stories that I keep saying? What are the lessons that I’m supposed to learn while saying these words? We have to go back to it in order to be Metakein those old times by saying, I want to go back to those old Tefillot that I said, in order that from now on, I will pray better. From now on, I will know what I say when I say these words.

And then we move on to go even deeper. We go into Pesukei Dezimra, a place of talking about creation. Then we praise Hashem for creating them and continue at the Shira, that Hashem could go beyond nature by splitting the sea. Then we go and speak about the angels, and we climb our way up as we accept the yoke of Hashem, and for the climax, we go and speak to Him personally. We’re going deeper and deeper into this thought until no other thought is important at all during that time. We can’t think of anything else because we are feeling this feeling very deeply after standing there with intention. This is the basics of Davening. It’s a very, very deep, layered, emotional trip. And when you understand its power, you see how it engulfs your entire being and makes that you will now have a transformed point of view in life for the rest of the day.

The idea of this is one big, long, emotional trip, which builds and builds and builds and teaches more and more, as it engulfs your entire psyche around with just pure thoughts. That itself is the key to understanding how anything else must be looked at. We have to go deep into the heart and listen to those words that didn’t have intention. Just like by davening, where we must go back and learn the words in every chapter and song, story and blessing. We go and we review those words, and we elevate them. We take them out of a place of illegibility to a place of legibility. And that is from inside your heart to a place called Al Livavacha, on top of your heart.

The same is done with our emotions. We could go in deeply into the vision of a certain story. We could dive into the feeling of not being happy in life right now, and since this feeling itself has been felt so many times before, the heart will take you to the next thought of it, the next level. The next level is going to be like Birkas HaTorah: the proof of your belief. You will certify your feeling and justify the current reaction. The way we prove that is by taking ourselves back to stories and memories in our lives that have proven our theory for our sad life, right? We establish the egotistical desire for justice.

You remind yourself of times where things weren’t as you wished, things didn’t work out, and every time you tried getting something done, every time you tried to find success, and have been knocked down. And from there, you’ll be able to go back in time to different stories and start jumping through stories in your mind that prove this point. It happened when I was sixteen, it happened when I was twenty-five, it happened when I was thirty-two, it happened, it keeps on happening. Then you realize that there’s a pattern. There’s a very, very deep, unintentional pattern that has been created, which is just like davening without intention, which is an unintentional pattern that was created.

And we have to go and be Metakein all of those worlds and bring them to the light, so that we hear their story, come to accept Hashem’s will in our life, so to live according to the lessons we were taught. We take all of that, and we bring it up onto the heart. We bring all of our deepest unintentional times up and clarify their meaning to become stronger people. Those times bring about the light of intentionality, walking around with confidence that this is the way, and I have to live responsibly to stay out of the hole. I have to pick myself up and out in order to see the light.

So whenever anything happens in life, and it pulls you down, that’s giving you an opportunity to be sucked into this area of thought. You could take this opportunity and dig yourself out of it (not by passing through it and getting hit by everyone and waiting for the week to be over and hoping that “next week will be better,” but) by being in there and seeing the rocks being thrown at you. By hearing the voices of those once illegible stories that hang out in those deep worlds, and by admitting to yourself that there is room for improvement and a possibility for a better and holier life.

How can I deal with it? What can I do about it? How can I become a better person by fighting this and by stopping this pattern? This is the truest sense of Hashavat Aveda, as we return our intention to ourselves. Besides for Hashem creating great Shidduchim through the Mitzvah of Hashavat Aveda.

Shabbat Shalom

David Lemmer

LemmerHypnotherapy.com