BS’D
Hashem communicates to us through the circumstances of our lives. Our individual life circumstances reveal our tikkun – those difficult and repetitive challenges which we must embrace and then learn to complete. Through our daily challenges, Hashem instructs us as to how to grow wiser, stronger and assume responsibility for our choices.
We can choose to view our repeated and disproportionate emotional responses as indicators of the precise areas in our lives that we need to improve.
Our emotional buttons being pressed are really our souls calling out for us to work on this area of our lives. Hashem is presenting us with unique opportunities that enable us to reach parts of our nefesh that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
In order to complete our tikkun and undertake the mitzvot properly, we require self-awareness. For instance, we must learn what annoys us and why, what triggers our defenses, and what are our true motives.
The following five practical ways may help us increase self-awareness and shed any pretense:
- Get to know yourself by zooming into your true life’s purpose, strengths and weaknesses. Our weaknesses need to be identified and embraced before they can be worked on.
- Make a commitment to face the truth despite discomfort and avoid the temptation of excuses (used in order to avoid short-term pain)
- Contemplate and reflect on behavioral patterns and emotional responses
- Be patient with yourself and the process
- Be open and willing to accept your weaknesses, to be understanding of yourself and therefore of others
Difficult and painful events offer the chance for us to grow emotionally into new people. We each have the potential to have an ‘old’ me and a ‘new’ me – that is, to create a new person by growing through an experience. Each experience provides us with the opportunity to create new thoughts, speech and actions (and/or reactions), and consequently to reveal another aspect of our soul.
Though this process is not easy, we must have emuna to know that eventually we will be successful at growing to the point where we feel at peace with ourselves on the inside. This internal shift will B”H enable us to also live a genuine Torah life on the outside.
