Welcome to my hidden world!

End of 2011!  What a year?!

So much happened, life was boiling and at times I couldn’t catch up and needed a tune up.  There were few weddings and a lot of funerals; financial and relationship ups and downs in my family; wonderful friends;teaching ballet; acting in a play; amazing vacations, with family to CA and Mexico and my amazing trip to Israel; year of learning Torah with Rabbi Goldberger; year of learning Hebrew; year of learning to draw!!! 

Kids are growing and bring so much joy into our lives!  I am so lucky to have such wonderful family!!! 

I am truly blessed, I have everything!!!

I am so thankful to my parents, my husband, his parents for care and support!!!

Let the 2012 be as rich as 2011 but without the funerals and with good health for everyone!

Stop for a moment. 

Put your hand on your heart.  (I am not kidding.  Do it.  Now!)

Feel your heart beating.  Feel it pumping through your chest.  Duh-dum.  Duh-dum. Duh-dum.  About once every second, 60 times every minute, 360 times every hour it beats without your awareness.  Feel it beating right now, pumping away as if you don’t have a care in the world.

Your heart is a muscle, squeezing blood in and out, circulating it throughout your body and brain.  It is also a muscle that is wearing out.  Each of us is allocated only a certain number of heartbeats before the heart just stops beating altogether.

Now think about all the heartbeats that you waste every minute, every hour, every day.  Think about all theheartbeats you give away when you’re bored and wile away time as if you have all the heartbeats in the world.  But you don’t.  Maybe a hundred left.  Or a thousand.  Or even a million.  But the number left is finite.

So the question remains:  What do you intend to do with the precious few heartbeats you have left?

If you actually followed this process, if you really paid attention to its implications, your heart is probably beating a little quicker right now.  Thinking about death and our eventual demise is terrifying.  Yet according to the existentialist, it is actually death that saves us, that motivates us to live life more intensely and passionately.  If every heartbeat is a gift, if at any moment your heart could stop beating or a piano could fall on your head, what choices are you making to become more intensely involved in living and to accept responsibility for your decisions?

If that doesn’t get your attention, you weren’t listening.

From Kottler, J.A. & Brown, R.W. (2000) Introduction to Therapeutic Counseling: Voices from the field.  4^th ed.  Wadsworth. (p.120).

I finished reading When Nietzsche Wept by Yalom in January and had no time to write about this book. 

Finally finished reading Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom.  This book was very similar in format as Love’s Executioner.  It included several stories about psychotherapist ala Irvin Yalom and his experience with his various clients.  I love that stuff!!! 

The stories were fiction with some parts of the truth in them. 

The first story was about relationship between Irving and his mother.  In this story, he is trying to understand what was wrong between them after she was gone.  The point of the story was as I understood that we tend to accuse others and do not take time to understand each other and see OUR role in the broken relationship. 

Throughout Irvin’s life, his relationship with his mother was rocky and they did not communicate a lot.  In fact he tried to avoid her because he felt she was too critical of him when he was younger.  Now, that she was gone, she kept coming in his dreams and he missed her.  He realized that he was taking mom for granted.  She loved him very much and was ready to do anything for her very smart educated son! 

She was afraid to talk to him too, because he was too smart and because he “knew everything” people were afraid of him she thought.

The paradox was that he wrote books about existential issues including meaning of life, freedom, isolation, choices, etc.  His mom could not read the books because she was illiterate, but she carried his books with her and showed it off proudly to people in her community.  Irvin hated that!

Only later he realized that for his mom, He, Irvin, was meaning of her life!  However, he wanted her to have her own personal meaning that would not involve him. 

This point was somewhat controversial when I read this book.  Individualistic vs Collectivistic view.  I understand that in both we are born alone and die alone but throughout our life we are aiming at developing relationships with others.  The more successful relationships we build the more satisfying and meaningful our lives are!

From our Torah study on Monday, the ideal union between people is when they become one whole rather than being separate business partners with individualistic and egoistic interests!  Yes, both are unique pieces that by connecting together become one clear picture.

Irvin’s mother thought that He and His success, his books were meaning of her life because she worked all her life to support her son and other people in the family.  She did not have time to get education and think about her own personal individual meaning that was separate from her relatives.  People she took care of -- were her life!!!

Ok, I will talk about other parts of the book later.  Each part had something that I made a note about.