Get Off Your Butt and Dance!

I find it too easy to get caught up in work, sitting at my desk with shoulders hunched, my back, my legs, my neck screaming for relief. I'll stretch every now and then, but at the end of the day my body feels like a contracted ball of fatigue. Every muscle is twitching with eagerness to get up and move. Exercise is sooo very important in our every day lives. Doctors and scientists are telling us the benefits of exercise as if they are just discovering this, but in fact Jewish people have known about the importance of physical movement for over thousands of years. In the second century, Rabbi Akiba taught that there are "248 postive Mitzvot in the Torah, corresponding to the number of parts of the human body. Each and every part of the body shouts to the person: 'Do a mitzvah through me; the benefit will be that we will live and you will have a long life'." (Midrash Mechilta, Ki Tetze). Rabbi Akiba was a very active man and did not spend all his time sitting at the desk studying Torah; he went out and taught and interacted with life.
Take a walk. It doesn't matter how fast you go. Feel the blood pumping through your heart, bringing that life-giving blood into every cell in your glorious body. Open your eyes and ears to the beauty around you. Let your arms swing, knifing through the breeze, creating your own power wave. If a butterfly's beating wings can effect change on the other side of the world (according to quantum physics!), imagine what your swinging arms will do. Think of all the mitzvot you can perform with your arms, legs, eyes and ears. Get out and dance!

Everything Happens for a Reason

On this list, we deal with joy as well as suffering. Our prayers bring comfort to our loved ones, and we hope the fact that we are all joined in this together helps to ease their suffering. Our work is healing work, and that brings me to mention a book I have been reading about healing, called Everything Happens for a Reason by Mira Kirshenbaum. She is a psychotherapist from Massachusetts who has helped many people find the meaning in their pain and suffering. It has always been my belief that inside one's greatest pain is one's greatest gift. Perhaps you grew up with "less than ideal" parents, or in a horrible living situation. Or, you're dealing with a health crisis right now, or some other life-changing event has occurred. How we face such circumstances can make us stronger, wiser, happier, and closer to realizing our soul's true purpose in our lifetime. It reminds me of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and how he managed to survive and thrive during the Holocaust by finding the meaning in his suffering. Kirshenbaum's book provides many questions to ask of yourself to see which of the 10 meanings might fit your present circumstances. She asked hundreds of people many questions and discovered that their responses fell into 10 basic meanings; feeling at home in the world, self acceptance, letting go of fear, uncovering hidden talents, and living with a sense of mission are just a few of the reasons she uncovered.What it boils down to is this: you have been given the gift of a life. Don't squander or waste it. The experiences and trials that test you are there for a reason. The people or events that have been difficult in your life can teach you something very important about yourself if you open the door to them and give them a meaning for your life. Your soul is on a journey to return ever more purified and refined, and the meaning you make of your circumstances can help bring that purpose to light, to be even better and more evolved than you were before the moment when your life changed.

Flex Your Soul Muscles

I came across a thought that I saw on a greeting card: "All times are good times. Difficult times help us grow. Happy times help us enjoy." How true that is. So often we greet the challenges with a heavy heart, plodding through them, without an end in our sight. Then, we come through the other side and look back, with our 20-20 hindsight, realizing how far we have come, and how much we have grown in the process. But, what if we just looked at the difficult times in a different way? If we looked at these moments in our lives as a chance to flex our "soul" muscles? That it doesn't matter how long it takes us, we are growing all along the way. I go to a gym to flex my physical muscles and use them so that I stay in shape and keep the juices flowing. The same goes for our mental muscles/capacity; we keep our brains active by staying engaged in life. Why not approach keeping our soul capacity strong by looking at how we view those challenges and changing our behavior. Embrace those moments when they seem insurmountable by reaching out to others, praying, eating well, sleeping enough, and being in nature to find the comfort we need as we meet those difficult times. The Psalms offer many opportunities to pray and ask for HaShem's help; all the better done under a tree, listening to the birds as they carry our prayers upwards.
Lighten your heart by shedding your burden, a little at a time.

Body & Soul

The body is the home of your soul in your lifetime. It is the place where a part of the soul that is you right now resides. It's always amazed me that the conatiner for this soul is a finite, breakable vessel and doesn't last forever, where the soul is eternal. Does that mean our souls have occupied other physical bodies at other times? There are Jewish people who believe that. Kaballists believe in reincarnation, and that the part of our soul we need to "work on" to perfect will return in another physical vessel until our souls are perfected in each lifetime, and we then reside in the Eternal with HaShem and All That Is, in the No-Thing-Ness.
How can we keep our soul containers in the best shape, even when outside forces may harm our bodies? Besides eating well, resting, exercising, and all that, we can keep a positive frame of mind, deal with the things that seem to prevent us from progressing, dance, laugh, and spend time in nature. Every moment, even the unpleasant ones, is necessary for our souls to grow and reach perfection. Flex your soul's muscles, express yourself, move, sing, shout your joy. And don't forget to express your thanks for all that is in your lifetime.