Need Therapy? Just Passover.

I love therapy. It’s great. It’s important to take incremental steps in our emotional and spiritual growth. But sometimes we’ve got no time for patience. And must grow by leaps and bounds. Now.

Every one of us have had moments of unbridled growth, a rocket-boost out of nowhere. We didn’t read a book. We weren’t meditating. We didn’t seek advice from a guru.

Where does this power come from? And can we tap into it more regularly?

The power comes from within and is always available to us. But as we move through our daily routines, stuck in the same frame playing itself on repeat each day, it’s hard to consciously make anything but incremental shifts in our habits, in our thinking, in our feeling.

And so, the results are incremental. We are slaves to today’s progression of yesterday.

Passover comes once a year to add fuel to our rockets. It’s freedom in concentrate. A potent eight-day retreat into selflessness. A breaking down of our daily routine, our daily diet, our daily fix of inflation and infatuation.

We take out a roadmap to freedom (Haggadah) and walk right through your own personal sea. The sea is vast and it is concealed, representing the enigmatic and uncharted waters of our psyche. There are all sorts of creatures teeming beneath the surface. We are afraid to wade in, scared of our own deepest thoughts.

It would take lifetimes of therapy to properly explore all the dark and distant ridges of our subconscious mind. And even then, would we ever find our way back? Would we ever be able to re-emerge on the surface to utilize the new-found depths to our advantage? To living and navigating life on the waves of our life or on the dry shores of our existence?

There is a time for deep-sea exploration; a time for incremental exposure to our deepest motivations and self. But then there is a time for jumping right in: for massive momentum forward, for taking leaps and bounds, for splitting your sea right in half. And walking through on dry land.

This year, when you crunch into that matzah, don’t be ashamed to flatten your ego and to become somebody new. Don’t be afraid to break from the rules of society, which say that you can’t change overnight, that you can’t break free of your demons in a moment.

This year, don’t wrestle with yourself. Don’t leave yourself broke and broken, unraveled on the therapist’s floor. When you hit an obstacle, when you come face-to-face with some of the ugliest ugliness in yourself or others, don’t consider it. Just pass over.