Enter Label: an ode to the invisible world, high holidays, Amanda Gorman, and lessons from saving coral

Dear companions,

In This is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Lew, a Zen Rabbi, writes that when R Fuller was asked to name the most important figure of the Twentieth Century, he replied swiftly: Sigmund Freud. The explanation was as follows:

Sigmund Freud introduced the single great idea upon which all the significant developments of the twentieth century has rested: the invisible is more important than the visible.

You would never had Einstein if Freud hadn’t convinced the world of this first. For all Freud’s animus again Judaism, his idea was an extremely Jewish one.

Whether through chronic pain, or religion, you know about that big invisible world. Whether you study Dr Sarno or Rabbi Lew (and thanks to my sister for giving me his book!), you know the invisible world has its own demands on your soul.

There are those people at religious services who begin to take on the shape of coral in murky waters. Eyes closed, swaying heavily, teetering, squeezing their prayer books, faces twisted downward. When I was younger, these people appeared strange, inaccessible. But as I get older, I looked at them with curiosity.

It seems there are two ways to reach that state. One is through rapture. And the other is through grief. For the first time, grief took me to such a place on Yom Kippur, and through a livestream no less. I was hesitant to join the Central Synagogue’s Livestream for Yom Kippur, but thankfully, it was sent to me by my friend M who said:

First of all, you can’t “miss” Yom Kippur. It’s our day of atonement and remembrance, you can do both of those from a bed, couch, house.

In minutes, my face was drenched in tears listening to the songs I knew by heart. The walls of my room— Wailing Walls. I went on for two hours, by the time we got the shofar, I was in a kind of freeing meltdown. I don’t know if I was pleading for my life to return to normal, my health, or connecting to Jewish suffering, or human suffering generally, or simply remembering my youth, but I was doing the Coral Hora—praying, swaying, eyes clenched, tears streaming down my cheeks.

I walked into this holiday thinking about forgiveness. I was obsessing, from a therapeutic standpoint, as to whether it is more important to forgive oneself or forgive others. During Avinu Malkeinu, a prayer asking for forgiveness, I received a reprieve from all those questions. I was the one asking for forgiveness, removing the onus to mete it out. It felt liberating to plead. If you can, listen to Barbara Streisand’s beautiful edition of Avinu Malkeinu. Jewish or not, religious or not, do you feel anything?

Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You.
Our Father, our King, we have no King but You.
Our Father, our King, act [benevolently] with us for the sake of Your Name.
Our Father, our King, bless us with a good year.
Our Father, our King, a good year.
Our Father, our King, remove from us all harsh decrees.

I was also moved by the Rabbi’s speech during the livestream service, which reminded me to try to take a bigger view on the recovery process. In essence, he said:

Judaism has no patience for futility. We are asked to look beyond the moment, even beyond a lifetime. We are asked to recalibrate our sense of long term with the mindset of moving millennia, not moments.

The gains we made in the world are generational, working through time, and progress was not always linear. The next generation didn’t always get a better world, but that doesn’t stop us from doing everything we can with the hour that lays before us. Sometimes our lot in life alongside our defeat plant the seeds for tomorrow’s great victories.

We can see this play out in an unlikely place - the ocean. Unparalleled bleaching events are decimating our coral and the life that depends on them. Scientists warned of this, in 2014 saying all wild coral would be dead by 2050. But a few scientists took a G-d’s eye view, and they pioneered a future for coral reef, imagining solutions for 2350, so that maybe our descendants can swim with coral. These scientists pursue century-long solutions, not decades, and this is the perspective we must bring to any solution we care about.

Once we know we have a calling, to fulfill that purpose, then our G-d’s eye view graces us with most important tool for obtaining optimism- courage, courage to do what is right, whether what is right is easy or self interested. 

We have one calling, not to make a name for ourselves, but to become a blessing.

All of these thousands of years old traditions are in line with newer Mind Body / TMS, and neuroscienctific findings. How many times have people in the Mind Body community told me to throw away the calendar tracking my progress, or get rid of specific timed milestones which might get in the way of cultivating indifference to my pain.

How many mind body and self healers urge those in pain to find spirituality, to help others, and gain a bigger vision, and begin to pursue it, even if still experiencing pain. All of these actions are more likely to teach the nervous system you are safe, letting your body heal and reaching a pain-free state. In fact, Dr. David Hanscom makes Spirituality Step 4 out of 5 steps to recover from Chronic pain, and he is a top spinal surgeon!

The spiritual journey enables you to experience life from outside of yourself. Gaining (or regaining) a larger perspective that will lead you to lose your sense of self-importance and increase your awareness of other’s needs. Any experience that involves actively broadening you life will work.

But providing the steps and resources to achieve spirituality is just an assembly of examples in his otherwise research-powered book. It’s hard for these doctors, coaches, and therapists to provide advise on this topic.

According to Jewish tradition, you are inscribed into the Book of Life or Book of Death on Yom Kippur. Yet, you can change the decree with penitence, prayer, and righteous acts. There are different interpretations as to whether doing those three will change the decree, or change us. If its the latter according to R Lew:

Spiritual practice wont change what happens. Rather it will help us to experience what happens not as evil, but simply what happens.

This sounds like the Dan Buglio, a chronic pain coach who healed himself of 13 years of back pain. He always talks about building an indifference to pain as key to recovery. By changing one’s perception of it, you change one’s experience of it, and therefore one’s suffering. I found the below written by Brad Gutting in the FB group for Mind Body healing.

Taking a position of total neutrality to the existence of sensations is perhaps the most important step you can take, and it requires unusual patience with yourself. We've spent decades hearing one version of how healing works, and with mind-body issues, it's not so much inverted as much as it's totally obfuscated. It takes awhile for your subconscious mind to catch up, and that's okay.

It takes time, but the time is also ever present.

The gates between heaven and earth is always creaking open. The book of life and the Book of Death are open every day, and our name is written in one or the other of them at every moment, and then erased and written again the moment after that. We are constantly becoming, continuously redefining ourselves.

I’ll finish up with the poem by Amanda Gorman, the famous young poetess, that the Rabbi from Central Synagogue referenced. The poem is called a Hymn for Hurting, and it too becomes woven into the fabric of my healing story.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

To those here with me, if your chips have been down recently, remember, the past is not an indicator of the future, and only when everything hurts, may everything change.

Our souls are making this journey, yours and mine…

Much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca