On Sunday evening, April 30, Let’s Get Real With Coach Menachem featured a virtual shiur with Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld, LCSW, who has a private practice and sees patients with anxiety and addiction.
Coach Menachem Bernfeld, Life Coach and Founder of Let’s Get Real With Coach Menachem, introduced the program by speaking about the importance of being aware of your feelings. Some people try to escape their feelings, he noted.
Rabbi Rosenfeld taught that “the experience of being in Gan Eden and out of Gan Eden is the ultimate story of our lives.” Both are perspectives. If a person lives in Gan Eden, there is calmness and menuchah. Outside of Gan Eden there is anxiety, worry, chaos, difficulty, and struggle.
The story of our Torah is the distance between Gan Eden and outside of Gan Eden and between menuchah and chaos. “Menuchah is not a destination that a person arrives at. Menuchah is a process – a way of becoming calmer in this world.”
He pointed out that tzadikim are calm, but for everyone else it requires a process to try to become calmer. It is a process to find the light of Hashem. If we are aware of the struggle, we can learn to be calm. Calmness is available in each moment.
The human being is born into a state of chaos. We encounter a world with so much motion. A cohesive sense that I am okay is so distant. Hashem created a world of chaos. In the beginning, it was described as tohu va’vohu.
He taught that the only way for a person to find Hashem is if he makes a decision to enter into a state of menuchah. We were kicked out of Gan Eden. We then entered a place of being chased. There is always something to do. Wherever I am, I am not supposed to be there; I’m supposed to be somewhere else. It is the curse of the human being to always be wandering. We become stuck when we think of menuchah as a destination. We’re chased by thoughts. Being kicked out of Gan Eden means to be chased.
He taught that the secret of menuchah is realizing that I am not running from anything and I am not running anywhere. In this moment, there is menuchah to be found.
We have to realize that nothing is chasing us except our own minds. “The secret of menuchah is to realize there is nothing to run to and that where I am now in this moment there is menuchah.”
Gan Eden is everywhere. It exists in the mind. We never actually left it. He suggests repeating to yourself, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” When you do this, you begin to forget the outside and you enter the place of calmness.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that “Menuchah is emunah in Hashem. It’s to be connected.” Menuchah is not the absence of work or engagement. That is Shabbos. Menuchah exists in every moment. Rabbi Rosenfeld taught that “‘more chaos’ means more incredible, powerful, and miraculous is the power of menuchah.”
If I carry emunah, it brings the most powerful element of menuchah. There is never a moment devoid of the possibility of finding menuchah. He taught that “Hashem wants menuchah. Menuchah is the purpose of all things.”
One should work on finding menuchah morning and night. Ask Hashem to help you find it.
By Susie Garber
