Tag: self-compassion

Believing in Oneself is a form of Humility

Most of us are familiar with some version of the following story (found here):

So there is a joke you probably know on the topic of humility. The chief rabbi of the synagogue at Yom Kippur is beating his breast and crying, tears running down his cheeks “I’m nothing, Lord! I’m nothing! I’m absolutely nothing!” Next to him the chief donor to the synagogue, a wealthy banker kneels down and hits himself on the chest and yells “I’m nothing! God forgive me for thinking I’m something. I’m not. I’m nothing!” Whereupon Shlomo a poor man who sweeps the synagogue out after services and hauls trash gets down on his knees and yells “I’m nothing! I’m nothing.” The rabbi observes this, elbows the banker and whispers “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

We tend to confuse humility, the idea that we lack pride and the idea of having an attitude that even if we are skilled and knowledgeable, it doesn’t make us inherently better than anyone else, with feelings of low self-worth and self esteem. In most spiritual practices this distinction is crucial because it can help frame a fundamental spiritual practice of self-nullification. Self-nullification is about recognizing that within the greater universe, we are practically nil. In many religions, this is described in relation to the divine, that from a divine perspective, the only real existence is the divine (see here for one example of a Jewish perspective of the definition and purpose of self-nullification).

Yet, in conjunction with this important practice, our spiritual growth can only truly become manifest if we balance this self-nullification with knowing that our lives have purpose and meaning. I have been thinking about this in relation to a piece I read last weekend from R. Elimelech Biderman in Torah Wellsprings (Parashat Beshalach – see the full piece here pgs.4-5).

To quote a few excerpts from the piece:

Reb Tzadok HaKohen (Tzidkas HaTzaddik 154) writes: “Just as one must believe in Hashem (Gd), one must also believe in himself. This means to believe that Hashem is interested in him. He must believe that his soul comes from Above, and Hashem has pleasure from him and has enjoyment when he does Hashem’s will. This is the meaning of the pasuk (verse) (Shmos ויאמינו בה’ ובמשה עבדו (14:31, ‘And they believed in Hashem and in Moshe…’ Moshe represents the six-hundred-thousand Yidden (Jews) of that generation. They believed that Hashem desires them and derives pleasure from them and from the good that’s in them.”

It is hard for people to believe that Hashem wants them because they know their faults. However, faults and errors are part of the creation of the world. This shouldn’t prevent us from believing that Hashem wants us…

From the very essence of creation, a pattern of imperfection emerged.

Yet after all of that, it states (Bereishis 1:31) וירא אלקים את כל אשר עשה והנה טוב מאוד, ”And Hashem saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good.”

This is what Hashem calls good. It is because of imperfections that Hashem created the world. Hashem has pleasure when we overcome the struggles, downfalls, blockades, and hardships and do His will. So, you can believe in yourself, even if you are imperfect. In fact, your imperfections are the purpose of the entire creation. This trait enables you to bring a nachas ruach (inner sense of wellbeing) to Hashem more than all the malachim (angels) in heaven…

Our approach in life is two fold. We must be humble in recognizing our finite nature, our inherent imperfections and our existence in relation to Gd. At the same time, we cannot see ourselves as so low and unworthy that we never strive for anything, we never strive to grow and improve and lessen the imperfections we have in life. When we have a healthy sense of self-compassion and self-worth, we are able to do the things that help us move along our paths to fulfill our goals, our purpose for being.

This is a challenging practice to work on. It can feel extremely difficult to maintain the balance between humility and self-worth. Yet, we must always be working to find the balance, the right mix, so that we are moving forward step by step, moment by moment. We have the opportunity each day to practice through prayer, through our relationships with others and through our work towards attaining our personal goals.

May we each work to foster our own balance between believing in ourselves and the humility to recognize each of us is another part of our interdependent existence.

If you or someone you know is looking to forge ahead and set new goals for the journey of life or trying to find a sense of meaning in life, we are here to help foster spiritual and emotional growth and change. Schedule your appointment today here. For more information, please contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

 

True Greatness Is Knowing Where We Are

We all have those days where we feel we will never amount to what we wish we would become. We feel small, distant, lost. We don’t know how to find our way forward along the path to find our “greatness.” Instead, we spend so much energy and time seeing all the ways we haven’t reached our life goals.

One area I want to focus on is spiritual growth. In working on our spiritual goals, our spiritual growth, this inability to focus on where we are versus where we aren’t can make it feel like we aren’t having success. We feel distant from our desires to be more connected to our faith, our religion, our trust in Gd. But are we really so far away? Perhaps we aren’t distant but how we perceive things is what is leading to think we are distant. So much of growing along the path of life comes down to the mindset we bring to the moment. I think this is illustrated in the following teaching:

Someone asked the Rebbe Shlit”a how they should deal with their feelings of lack of success. They hear so much from the Rebbe about the high and lofty spiritual levels one should reach, but they feel so far from reaching any of this! The Rebbe answered that the Zohar HaKadosh says that “he who is small is great,” therefore, by a person simply acknowledging where they are truly holding i.e. that they are “small” and not yet on these high levels they learned about, they are showing that they are truly great.

Sea of Wisdom, Parshas Bo 5784 – R. Yitzchak Meir Morgenstern

When we embrace the notion that we aren’t there yet, not in a negative way, but in a growth mindset way, we change the paradigm. It is no longer that our distance from our desired goals is a sign of what we are lacking. Rather, our place now is our “greatness” and through this current greatness, we are on the path to higher levels of spiritual growth. 

Today, and everyday, when we take stock of where we are, not where we haven’t gotten to, I hope that we can see we are in the place of today’s greatness, knowing full well we want to journey further to tomorrow’s greatness. May we embrace where we are now and find the inspiration from this spot to move along the road of becoming more and more.

Looking for help in recognizing the greatness that is you? If you or someone you know is looking to forge ahead and set new goals or trying to find a sense of meaning in life, we are here to help foster spiritual and emotional growth and change. Schedule your appointment today here. For more information, please contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

2024 – Another New Year, Another Moment of Reflection

Yes, it is January 3. Yes, we are three days into 2024. And yes, writing about goal setting “after the fact” seems out of place. Yet, besides there never being a bad time to reflect on goal setting, I would argue that January 3rd is the best time to have this discussion. 

Think about it like this:

December 31, 2023 – We decide on new goals for the year, one’s that speak to our hopes for the new year. We have lists of things we wish to change and resolve to work on changing them. 

January 1, 2024 – Yes, we should start Day One. And we do. And it seems so easy to get started because for most of us, January 1 is a vacation day. It is easy to work on goals when the work of achieving our goals is our only task.

January 2, 2024 – Back to work. Back to the grind. This is the day of navigating how the goals we have in mind will meld into our busy lives. And I would guess that by last night, many of the goals we had in mind are already shifting around. Many of us are asking not just how to find the time but where do fit in the changes. Some are already feeling like January 2 was not much different than December 29th, meaning a humdrum work day that came and went.

Which brings us back to January 3. Today is the real litmus test. We saw and felt the exhilaration of starting off on the right foot that was January 1 and then the realistic struggle of meshing our hopes with our realities on January 2. The question is, what did we learn from these two experienes.

When we set goals for ourselves, whenever we do this, it is important to remember a couple of key points:

  1. The goal is the end product and our job needs to begin with not just where we wish to go but how we best think we can get there.
  2. It is OK to try an approach and fail at it. Even in the failure there is success. The January 2 people who struggled to maintain the January 1 process can learn and adapt practices to more realistically to achieve the goals they have set for themselves. A failure is not a failure but an opportunity for growth.
  3. Be compassionate about your choices. One of the biggest obstacles to staying the course with our goals is to celebrate the gains and forgive oneself moments of stagnation and falling backwards. 
  4. Today is a New Beginning. And so is tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, etc. Each day brings us a chance to recalibrate, refocus and reconfigure as we need.

May each of us find the goals we wish to have, the ability to accomplish them step by step and the flexibility to integrate our new hopes into the lives we find ourselves living each and every day.

It’s a New Year and a new opportunity to start fresh. If you or someone you know is looking to forge ahead and set new goals or trying to find a sense of meaning in life, we are here to help foster a spiritual and emotional growth and change. Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Who isn’t an imposter? The struggle of confidence

Let’s be real today. Who among us isn’t struggling to a certain extent with feeling like an imposter? According to this overview of imposter syndrome from Psychology Today, 70% of adults will have the feelings related to imposter syndrome at least once in life. In other words, most of us will have experienced this sense at some point in life.

I find myself reflecting on confidence and feeling like an imposter often. I find that part of the struggle is because we are inundated with the pristine images presented on social media. And just to be clear, we all do this. We get headshots to show our ideal selves, our smiling faces, our confidence. Most of us weed out the awkward picture for the perfect shot. We try not to post our foibles, only our successes.

Today, I want to say, I get the imposter feeling because many times I myself struggle with confidence. Recently I had an experience which reminded me of this struggle. The other day I was working along with a colleague and when he started speaking about me to a third person while I was present, sharing some of my “resume,” I found myself feeling both a sense of embarrassment to hear praise about myself (not in a humble sense, so don’t presume this comes from a sense of humility) and a sense of confidence being reminded that, yes, I am those things. For those who know me, that response is not surprising. Yes, I am aware of my resume and I do know what I have accomplished or attempted to accomplish. Yet, I struggle to believe it to be true. I struggle like we all struggle wondering whether we really have made an impact.

Why am I sharing this, being vulnerable with my readers?

I have a philosophy I bring to my work as a spiritual coach and I always tried to bring to my chaplaincy. It was something I learned early on in hospice work. Inevitably, during the course of a visit with the hospice patient and/or family, people would start asking me basic questions about my life, such as, was I married, did I have children, where do I live. At first, though I would respond, I was hesitant to answer, boundaries and all. Eventually, I realized that this was their way of testing the waters to see the humanness of the professional across the room. Sure, we could argue it is a form of avoidance in the midst of seriousness, but I truly believe it was a method for building trust. As such, I came to see this part of the conversation as a value unto itself. Sure, there are limits and professional boundaries and we aren’t there to unburden ourselves. Yet, if we don’t relate and connect on the basic human level, we will never fully engage the depth and sacredness of the space. In my coaching work, I have found the importance of bringing myself into the space, drawing from our common humanity to help further explore and build trust and relationship, which inevitably goes a long way to helping someone grow and discover.

Back to the imposter syndrome. We are all struggling in one way or another with who we really are and with how we perceive how others perceive us. It is part of being human. My hope is that each of has ways to remind ourselves that while it is a struggle, if we really think through all the naysaying, we might find how much we really are the person we claim to be, not an imposter pretending to be what we aren’t. May each of you find the confidence to overcome feeling like an imposter.

Are you struggling with your sense of self-confidence? Wondering if you really are the person people see you as? Are you working on your spiritual growth? Faith? Feeling lost in the midst of the journey of life? Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Audio – Lessons in Tanya 26

Chapter 15 – This chapter describes the difference between the beinoni who is considered as not serving Gd vs. the one who is serving Gd as the distinction between the person who does just enough vs. the person who goes above and beyond to do a little extra. The Alter Rebbe derives this from a talmudic discussion about learning something 100 vs. 101 times, for the extra one time shows a revealed sense of love for the subject as opposed to just learning to fulfill an obligation. This concept is one which has powerful spiritual growth implications as I refer to during this podcast. I also discuss how this argument opens the door to a discussion of accepting those times when you aren’t able to go above and beyond (which we will return to again in subsequent discussions).

Episode 26

Do you want to work on taking the actions of your life and find meaning in all you do and who you are? Are you struggling with your spiritual growth. Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Self-Compassion, not Self-Loathing

As is apparent by now, I am a big fan of Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, o.b.m. I have been reading his works since I was a bar mitzvah, having gotten as a Bar Mitzvah gift his daily reader, Growing Each Day. I often quote snippets from this and a couple of his other daily readers whenever a message speaks to me. Yesterday, I came across this one line which is a good reminder of the dangers of self-loathing and the importance of self-compassion:

“We may not truly realize that our own unbridled anger may be even more destructive to us than hostility to others.”

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, Living Each Day, p. 72

Anger at oneself can be even more harmful than the anger we express towards other people. This is the anger of frustration regarding not being the best or ideal person we wish to be. This is the anger that comes from a place of shame. And this anger can lead us down a dark path. Anger towards someone else, even if expressed, can be less severe because its destructive nature will depend on how the person we are angry with reacts.

To respond to this, we would do best to work on self-compassion. For me, self-compassion begins with a constant work of recognizing and being accepting of the mistakes, the times I fall short. This is an active process of recognizing the emotions that arise in those moments when the self-loathing begins. Self-compassion is not an excuse to not work to improve. Self-compassion is the tool that helps us find the avenues to be comfortable with change and improvement as we open ourselves to learn from our mistakes and to remember we can try again.

My prayer for today is we find the tools to help quell the self-anger that often arises as a means of being open to the new journeys and opportunities always unfolding in front of us.

Looking to invest time and focus on the tools we have to help cultivate self-compassion and combat self-loathing. Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Self compassion as a door to compassion for others

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is a meaningful holiday for me. It is one of a series of opportunities in the year to take stock and to start anew. Unlike other times, such as my birthday and my wedding anniversary, part of the power of Rosh Hashanah is how together, communally, we are all together in this process of establishing a New Beginning, a new hope for the upcoming year. Through the sound of the Shofar, we are called to wake up and listen to the sounds and to the silences around us so as to better figure out what it is we hope for in the coming year.

I had the fortune to do a lot of reading and reflecting on the past two days (the beauty of being shut off from the constant barrage that comes from our connected world). And yes, while Shabbat and the holidays are about so much more than unplugging, the unplugging is a powerful byproduct.

In my reading over the holiday, I came across a piece that relates back to a book I read through this summer, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, by Dr. Kristin Neff. In a piece from Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski’s Growing Each Day, he suggests the following spiritual approach to understanding judgment during this period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which I would extend to how we should see self-reflection in our daily lives:

God knows that personal interest makes us oblivious to the significance of our own misdeeds, so He contrives to make us observes in others actions and behavior similar to our own. How we react to our own acts as we see them in others determines how God will judge us. If we are considerate and lenient in our judgment, and give others the benefit of the doubt, allowing them the broadest latitude of circumstances that might have caused them to behave improperly, then God will judge us with equal leniency. But if we are self-righteous and quick to condemn others, we will be judged with equal severity.

p. 3

When we consider the work of self-compassion, one of the premises is that we tend to be quicker to forgive others mistakes than our own when the same mistake is made. We tend to be our own harshest critic. And lest you think that our self-criticism doesn’t ultimately harm our compassion for others, the more we lack in self-compassion, the harder it will be to continue to be compassionate and forgiving of others for their foibles. If we consider the above quote, we can see how our sense of personal, self-acceptance and compassion for our imperfections will open us up to increase our ability to be compassionate to others. If we are reacting to what we are witnessing, we would do well to spend a moment or two reflecting on what we see and what is being mirrored to us so we can react better to them and to ourselves.

As we continue on this journey together exploring how to foster new beginnings for ourselves, may we find ways to bring more compassion into the world for ourselves and for all those around us.

If you are looking to deepen your ability to recognize within yourself areas of desired spiritual growth: Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com.