Masterclass Series Journey of the Soul Clarity of Mind Part 3 (Video) (Audio)
Join Dr. Gavriela Frye at Machaseh Shel Tikvah (Shelter of Hope) for Counseling for a NEW 4-Part Series on Clarity of Mind: Dealing with Loss and Failure
When: Saturday, June 26 @ 7PM (Rome, Italy)
Part 3: How not to fight ourselves with ourselves
Coming up:
Part 4: How to serve Others in the midst of their own weaknesses
Journey of the Soul Clarity of Mind Part 3
Part 3: How not to fight ourselves with ourselves
Machaseh Shel Tikvah (Shelter of Hope) for Counseling
This article is in honor of the victims and survivors of conflicts, terrorist attack in Israel and the Diaspora.
I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking: “Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. My head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night.” (Song of Solomon 5:2)
How not to fight ourselves with ourselves
Being enemies of oneself means having feelings of rejection towards what we are, think and feel. It means exerting a fierce and exaggerated criticism of everything we do. It means avoiding any opportunity that makes us happy or makes us feel better.
There is no love without hate, just as there is no hate without love. These two feelings are like day and night: two sides of the same coin. Even the most tender and sincere affections have glimmers of hatred, due to the fact that every form of love implies a certain amount of dissatisfaction. There is no perfect love, since there are no perfect human beings.
We love and are loved in a bad way. This concept also applies to the love we feel for ourselves: we are never so complete as to make all flaws or doubts disappear.
The more self-love is consistent, the more love we can feel for others. But what happens when, instead of loving each other, we hate each other? What happens when we act as if we are our own worst enemy?
Enemy of himself, why?
Worst enemy
It would be logical that each of us at least counted on himself to advance in life, but things don't always go this way: often, we are the ones who turn our life into hell.
No one is born hating himself, on the contrary: at the beginning of our life we ask for everything and we give nothing. We have no doubts about the legitimacy of our needs and desires. It is precisely during childhood that those terrible negative fantasies about ourselves begin to boil in the pot, which can mark us for life.
What leads us to this tremendous conviction is the presence of a figure who makes us believe all these things. It can be a loved one and a fundamental person as we grow up, like a dad, a mom or both. Sometimes it is the entire family structure or someone we depend on.
What is certain is that this figure or this structure is incapable of lovingly welcoming a new being. In general, there is a chain of "lack of love": the parents or the family repeat what they themselves experienced during their childhood.
They have almost certainly lived relationships in which indifference prevailed in the face of the needs of others, in the face of sadness, shame and aggression. They have witnessed infinite gestures of abandonment (or the threat of abandonment) and rejection.
Heavy silences, denial of feelings. Refusal and punishment in the face of acts of self-affirmation. Severity in judgments and repression of emotions. In such an environment, it is difficult to have the conditions to build a healthy sense of appreciation for oneself and for others.
The vicious circle
You enemy
Self-contempt develops both consciously and unconsciously. Everyone carries within themselves a component of self-destructive instincts, which grow and strengthen when the surrounding environment feeds them.
What follows is, of course, a difficult story: the child becomes an adolescent and then an adult, and his life is perpetually flooded with feelings of sadness, anger and guilt. The worst thing is that these feelings are highly indefinite: sadness, anger and guilt can arise from any circumstance and can be directed towards everything and nothing.
At this point, in thought, some automatisms are born: “I can't”, “I'm not capable”, “I'm afraid”, “I'm good for nothing”, “nobody really cares about me”. These thoughts also affect the opinion of others: "they cannot", "they are not capable", "they are afraid", "they are good for nothing", "nobody cares about them".
Thus, a vicious circle is created in which the harmful relationship with oneself turns into a destructive relationship with others. This generates experiences that feed the idea of ??being bad or unworthy people.
In this lack of self-love, there is a mechanism called "identification with the aggressor": this means that the individual "victim" ends up resembling the people who have harmed him. Obviously, this is an unconscious mechanism.
As children, you longed for love, appreciation and respect, but perhaps you have received the opposite. However, instead of reflecting and improving, you end up copying the behaviors of those who have rejected, abandoned or attacked you.
You enemy
You end up being trapped in a mirror, to continue reproducing the negative gaze you have received, to internalize the hatred and rejection of which you have been victims, to accept these feelings.
Stories like this are the root of many common problems, such as depression. In it, the absence of objectivity remains during the analysis of what we are told or done.
Do you often feel like you’re going in circles, making it impossible to get off the hamster wheel of gloom, dejection and depression? How does one get out of their own way? Does personal subjectivity hinder the growth and ability to transcend and emerge from the darkest moments?
Join Dr. Gavriela Frye as she shares personal stories and experiences to illuminate the true and tried methods on how to escape your limitations, the personal tzimtzum in yourself. Learn how awareness is half the cure, just knowing that you are subjective and acknowledging that you have these blind spots are the first steps to change. Discover how studying your soul and getting objective perspectives from Messianic Jewish literature and from a personal mentor or good friend, will help you see yourself in a different light, a light beyond yourself.
Here is a question: do you have blind spots and if so can you identify them?
because if they're a blind spot that would mean that we can't identify it so how do we ever discover how to get beyond our blind spots we all have prejudices biases self-love denials please join me in this part three of a new course the Messianic Jewish approach to dealing with loss and failure how to not be your own worst enemy.
Shalom to all of you, this is Dr. Gavriela Frye!
I welcome you to part three of our new course the Journey of the Soul: Clarity of Mind to dealing with loss and failure how not to be your own worst enemy here's the paradox all of us have blind spots right if we have a blind spot then it would seem to suggest that we can't identify it that's the very meaning of a blind spot i remember someone coming to see me he was having difficulty finding the proper soulmate and he tells me everything I’ve tried nothing works it must be some type of mysterious super natural force.
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Case of Study
“When I was a teenager, some of the kids in school used to make fun of me. They would tease me about my weight. Looking back, I don’t recall those comments being particularly hurtful; nonetheless, I believed them, and at a deeper level, they affected my self-perception. I began to think of myself as overweight.
Years ago, I heard my children giggling in another part of the house. My wife remarked, “Boaz, you have got to see these photographs!” They had found a snapshot of me from my senior year in high school. I was so skinny that it was scary—and to my children, it was downright funny. How small I looked! Back then, I was already 6’1” but only weighed about 185 pounds. (According to weight charts, that’s just right for a 6’1” male.) I looked like a totally normal human being. I didn’t even look pudgy. I wasn’t at all overweight back then. [1] I was not what the kids in school said I was. Unfortunately, with the help of their rude remarks, I developed a false identity about my weight. Most of us have similar stories. One way or another, our flesh tends to negatively affect our perception of who we really are.
This is true in a psychological sense and even truer in a spiritual sense. As believers, we often suffer from false identities. The reality God has created in us is different from our perception of it. We have new identities in the Messiah, but we often fail to see ourselves rightly.
Let’s take a few minutes to look at our identities from God’s viewpoint. One term the Scriptures use for “those who are in the Messiah” is “slaves to righteousness.” Prior to faith in the Master, we were “slaves to sin”—but not any longer.”
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Free from Egypt
I know the idea of being “a slave to righteousness” is hard to relate to and comprehend. That’s why the Torah gives us the story of Israel’s flight from Egypt to help us understand the transformation we have undergone.
Our salvation is comparable to the exodus. Just like the Israelites in Egypt, we were once slaves. The adversary was our Pharaoh; sin was our brick making; and death was our Egypt. But then God sent His redeemer. Like Moses leading Israel out of Egypt, the Messiah leads us out of bondage to sin. He does it by the blood of the Lamb and great deliverance. He leads us from bondage to freedom. But Israel’s freedom was not a freedom unto anarchy. Had they simply scattered in the wilderness, they would have perished.
Instead, they were set free that they might serve God. He said, “For they are My servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 25:42). In the same way, our freedom in Messiah is not a freedom from God and His righteous laws:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! (Romans 6:1-2)
Continuing in our lives of sin after salvation would be like volunteering to go back to Egypt to make more bricks for Pharaoh.
We Were That Way—But We’ve Been Changed!
The Apostle Paul can help us understand this from a slightly different perspective:
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with hashem (God) through Yeshua the Messiah, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of hashem (God). (Romans 5:1-2)
Just as Israel did not free themselves, we have been changed, and we did not do it ourselves. We now have a relationship with Hashem (God) as a result of His grace and love toward us. Our relationship to Hashem (God) and His Torah has permanently changed . We have been reconciled to Hashem (God). There is no more enmity between us and Hashem (God). The Torah no longer condemns us, rather it instructs us.[2]
However, that doesn’t mean there is nothing left for us to do. In Romans 6, Paul shows his readers that sanctification is not optional. It is the necessary process that follows justification. He teaches that, “the life promised for the man who is righteous by faith is a life characterized by sanctification.” This involves an ongoing process of effort and obedience on our parts, as well as the ongoing work of the Spirit in our hearts.
Look at it this way. I often say that the Messiah “transformed” me, and He did, dramatically. He regenerated the very core of who I am. He transformed my DNA, so to speak. But the Torah “changed” me. There were many years when I had the Messiah living in me but continued to live life in the flesh. It wasn’t until I began to submit myself to the Torah that I really began to change in more visible ways. My character changed. The ideas I thought and the way I spoke began to change. As a result, Yeshua has transformed me both internally and externally as I have submitted to Him, the Living Torah, and as I have submitted to His Word, the written Torah.
In Romans 6, Shaul (Paul) says, “that we should no longer be slaves to sin” and that we should not let sin reign in our mortal bodies. He then challenges us by saying that we should not offer the parts of our bodies to sin. Finally, he concludes by reminding us all that we “have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”
We Are No Longer Sinners
This powerful passage contrasts our old man to our new nature. Too often, we continue to allow ourselves to remain slaves to sin. We do this, in part, because of a faulty sense of our true identity. We believe that the pull of sin is natural and that it’s virtually unavoidable.
This concept goes against biblical teachings. Our new reality is that we have been set free from the law of sin and death (not the law of Torah, as some wrongly suppose). Romans 8:1-2 states it clearly:
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Yeshua, because through the Messiah Yeshua the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.
It is the law of sin and death, the law of the flesh, that has separated us from God. Through the Messiah, that separation is eliminated and we are reconciled to God. The law of sin and death, which once bound us and forced us to sin, has been eliminated from our lives. Sin is now optional for us; it is not part of our new nature or our new identity.
Paul states in Romans 6:20 that we were (past tense) slaves to sin, and at that time, we were free from the control of righteousness. Before our life in the Messiah, before being set free from the law of sin and death, righteousness (the call to holiness) had no influence over us. It had no appeal to us. However, the text indicates that now the opposite is true; now we are righteous and we are free from the control of sin.
He Makes Us Righteous
Admittedly, it is hard to consider ourselves as “slaves to righteousness.” Most of us struggle day after day to submit to our new nature. Paul offers us a word of comfort regarding this struggle:
Thanks be to Hashem (God) —through Yeshua our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. (Romans 7:25)
Paul has full assurance in the work of the Messiah. Not only is he growing in righteousness, but he has complete confidence that he will fully put off the flesh with all of its inherent shortcomings.
Scripture says that as believers, we are slaves to righteousness. This is both a spiritual and a physical reality. Our newly created selves (with the Messiah’s life in us) must bear forth the fruit of the Spirit. We must demonstrate genuine biblical righteousness. We must submit our lives to the will and wisdom of God, found in His just commands.
As slaves to righteousness, we realize that our lives are no longer our own. Rather, we are vessels and instruments through which God’s love, mercy, and grace are displayed. Through the Messiah we have become the servants of a new Master. Unlike Pharaoh, His yoke is easy and His burden is light. To labor for Him in the fields of righteousness is pure joy. We are bound to Him with fetters of love.
Our Master calls us to holiness, and He has fully equipped us to accomplish His purpose. We struggle for our true identity to shine forth. We must let God’s mercy and love be displayed in and through our lives. May we all be faithful servants of our King!
Traps and Tips:
Living well is often difficult due to mental traps that subtly hinder our serenity. Falling into these traps is extremely easy and, often, the cunning mind that unwittingly contrives them is ours. Here are 5 of the most common mind traps.
5 TRAPS THAT PREVENT US FROM LIVING WELL
1) BE CONDITIONED BY THE JUDGMENT OF OTHERS. Passively accepting criticism from strangers as if we truly deserve it (and perhaps downplaying the positive judgments of those who know us well) is a serious risk to our self-esteem.
2) JUDGE OTHERS AND HAVE AS A GOAL EXCEEDING THEM (INSTEAD OF YOUR GROWTH). This destructive attitude opens the door to one of the most harmful feelings for life: spite. A life lived in spite is a life that is not, nor will it ever be, serene.
3) FEEL CONSTANTLY UNDER EXAMINATION. Living with the feeling that someone is ready to judge us 24 hours a day and to measure our success is a great burden as well as a track with only one stop: frustration.
4) DON'T GIVE YOURSELF THE FREEDOM TO FAIL. Always demand perfection from yourself and not give yourself the opportunity to make mistakes means to prevent yourself from growing. To be able to use the experiences deriving from that mistake (and from others to come) to achieve something more and more similar to one's dreams. This mental fence, which applies to both work and private life, seriously risks inhibiting action and blocking any momentum.
Read also: Part 1 and 2 of this Course here
5) CONSIDER LEISURE TIME A EGOISTIC WHIM. Never unplugging from everyday problems and not taking care of your playful side (which is still alive in each of us) prevents our mind from resting. In doing so, the risk of falling victim to anxiety and stress increases.
To learn more, read: The 3 biggest excuses not to start a hobby broken down piece by piece
HOW TO DEFEAT THE 5 TRAPS AND LIVE WELL
If you see yourself in at least one of these behaviors, don't despair because you are on the right track: the first step is recognition!
You can work on it by trying to rebuild the last time you were a victim.
The next step will be to recognize the dysfunctional behavior while you are about to perform it: rejecting it in a fully conscious way will favor the acquisition of a positive automatism.
To help you in this task, you can ask for the help of a good counselor who, with a careful and impartial look, will help you analyze the situation, measure your progress and find YOUR way to emancipate yourself from this type of dysfunctional behavior.
To learn more about the role of the counselor read: The counseling
YES: WITHOUT THESE TRAPS YOU CAN LIVE WELL
Without these traps, the quality of life improves because it is possible to enjoy full serenity that allows you to be freer and to act according to your desires.
It is therefore worth fighting for and it is a challenge that can be won if fought with commitment and will.
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I know myself as an advisor to many and Counselor not it's important to measure engage because you don't want to assault anyone's psyche and you want to make sure that people are able to absorb and assimilate the ideas so that's on the other end of how to advise which we'll talk about in part four how to help others deal with loss and failure so with that we conclude part three of this course i thank you for your feedback it's been Dr. Gavriela Frye at Machaseh Shel Tikvah (Shelter of Hope) for Counseling.
You can listen to the first two parts at https://machasehsheltikvah.org/news.php the Messianic Jewish approach to dealing with loss and failure and we've just addressed part three which is how not to be your own worst enemy be blessed god bless you to find the clarity even of knowing that you may not have clarity that's also clarity and to get beyond it and learn to grow in the greatest possible way through any challenge to any setback to any difficulty thank you very much.
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Verses from the BIBLE on LOVE OTHERS AS YOURSELF
James 1:22-25;
"Love your neighbor as yourself" is a favorite biblical verse on love. These exact words are found in several places in Scripture. Examine the many different instances of this key biblical passage.
Second only to loving Hashem (God), loving your neighbor as yourself is the focus of all biblical laws and personal holiness. This is the anecdote to correct all negative behaviors towards others:
Leviticus 19:18
You will not take revenge and you will not have a grudge against the children of your people, but you will love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (NKJV)
When the rich young man asked Yeshua (Jesus Christ) what good deed he had to do to have eternal life, Yeshua (Jesus Christ) concluded his summary of all commandments with "love your neighbor as yourself:"
Matthew 19:19
"'Honor your father and your mother' and 'You will love your neighbor as yourself.'" (NKJV)
In the next two verses, Yeshua (Jesus Christ) called "love your neighbor as yourself" as the second greatest commandment after loving Hashem (God):
Matthew 22: 37–39
Yeshua (Jesus) said to him: "You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind". This is the first and great commandment. And the second is similar: "You will love your neighbor as yourself". (NKJV)
Mark 12: 30–31
"'And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.' This is the first commandment and the second, like that, is this:" You will love your neighbor as yourself ". There is no other commandment greater than these ". (NKJV)
In the following passage in the Gospel of Luke, a lawyer asked Yeshua (Jesus Christ): "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answered with a question all of him: "What is written in the law?" The lawyer answered correctly:
Luke 10:27
Then he answered and said, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind' 'and' your neighbor as yourself. '"(NKJV)
Here the apostle Paul explained that the Christian's obligation to love is limitless. Believers must love not only the other members of Hashem's (God) family, but also their fellowmen:
Romans 13: 9
For the commandments, "Thou shalt not commit adultery", "Thou shalt not kill", "Thou shalt not steal", "Thou shalt not bear false witness", "Desire not", and if there are other commandments, they are summed up in this saying, namely: " You will love your neighbor as yourself ”. (NKJV)
Paul summarized the law, reminding the Galatians that Christians are commissioned by God to love each other deeply and totally:
Galatians 5:14
Because the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: "You will love your neighbor as yourself". (NKJV)
Here James is dealing with the problem of showing favoritism. According to God's law, there should be no acts of favoritism. All people, including non-believers, deserve to be loved equally, without distinction. Giacomo explained the way to avoid favoritism:
James 2: 8
If you truly realize the real law according to Scripture, "You will love your neighbor as yourself", you do well ... (NKJV)
