Everyone can fall in love, but not everyone can stay in love. Falling in love is easy. It does not require emotional strength. Falling in love is getting high on someone else. It’s like popping a pill. Falling in love is selfish because I am using you to make me …
How Strong is Your Core Self?
Just as achieving peak physical health requires working on one’s core strength, so too achieving peak emotional and spiritual health requires working on one’s emotional core strength. A person who has a strong core self will be able to take on most anything life throws at him. He will experience …
Finding Your Unique Purpose
Each of us is here to make a unique contribution to better the world based on our unique abilities; to know what one’s unique contribution is, is to know one’s purpose. Besides having a unique personal mission, Jews also have a universal mission which is to be “a light unto …
What is Happiness?
From a Jewish perspective, happiness refers to a very specific emotional state. What many people fail to understand is that happiness is only one of many pleasures that one can experience, such as joy, growth, power, creativity, doing the right thing, perseverance, discipline, change, learning, giving, love, and closeness to …
Are you living your life or someone else’s?
Do you have ownership of your life? Having ownership of your life means your decisions, actions, values, beliefs, and commitments belong to you because you have consciously chosen them. Ownership means you do what you do or believe what you believe because you want to, not because you feel coerced …
Ten Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged
When you start thinking that he/she may be the one, make sure you ask these ten questions before you tie the knot. #1: Do We Care about Each Other as Good Friends Do? When you’re getting serious about someone, don’t ask: “Are we in love?” The question to first ask …
Human Being or Human Robot?
What is a human being? Depending on your philosophic lenses, there may be several answers. Judaism defines a human being as a being created in the image of G-d—a physical body with an eternal, non-physical soul. The medieval commentator, Rashi explains that “created in G-d’s image” means that the human …
Greatness or Grandiosity?
Judaism encourages us to strive for greatness. What’s more, one of the greatest needs of a human being is to be great. This is because we are created in the image of G-d and every human being is instilled with a thirst to be G-d-like. We see this everywhere we …
Life Pain or Traumatic Pain?
Previously, I discussed the importance of listening to ones feelings. Feelings educate us.They are information that we must access and process if we want to maximize ourself-development. They are the pathways to self-discovery. I also pointed out that troubling feelings such as sadness, loneliness, shame, anger, etc, contain the greatest …
Disney’s Inside/Out: Emotional Attunement
In the movie, Inside/Out, Riley’s parents demonstrate the damaging impact of being emotionally unattuned when they fail to listen to their daughter’s anger and sadness. While at the end of the movie, they model the healing impact of being emotionally attuned when they embrace Riley’s sadness upon her return home …