It’s a really funny time right now, isn’t it?

Not funny haha, funny weird.

I’m seeing that many people, including yours truly, are not really in such a talking mood at the moment.

And I know a lot of people are ‘under the weather’ at the moment (when they aren’t dropping dead of heart-attacks aged 24 because they tackled someone ‘too hard’ in a professional American football game. Yah right… name one other occasion when that ever happened. There has to be at least one other occasion in the history of the AFL where someone got a ‘heart attack’ from tackling too hard. Doesn’t there?)

So much uncertainty, so much doubt, so much to worry about….

(If you  have your eyes open. If you don’t – then so many more anti-depressant pills to buy, and anti-anxiety medication to source, and mental health facilities to check out for when the dam finally bursts and you go totally cuckoo.)

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In the meantime – I am doing my darndest to actually stay upbeat and happy here!

Because life is still so good!

It’s still so good!

I don’t live on the pavement, I can breathe, I can walk around, I have people around me I love and who (hopefully…) love me, I love nearly all the things I spend my time doing.

Whatever circumstance I find myself in, whatever is going on in my life, I can ALWAYS chose to use those circumstances to get closer to God and to make some real teshuva.

Or the opposite, God forbid.

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But you know what?

So much of what takes the ‘blahs’ away, at least for me and my family, revolves around doing things like saying Tikkun HaKlalis, trying to get to the Rav frequently to join in with the prayers and jump up and down and clap for an hour, and doing an hour of hitbodedut and making a HUGE effort to actually follow the practical advice of Rebbe Nachman, and of Rav Eliezer Berland.

If I feel down – I do some hitbodedut to find out what’s troubling me, I dance for half an hour to things like this:

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I try to make some real teshuva, I stop listening to the evil propaganda news, I stop reading the evil propaganda news sites, I look to see how I can improve things in my own dalet amot, instead of hanging on every word and interview from deeply compromised puppet-politicians.

And did I mention, I also read a lot of Tikkun Haklalis and sometimes pay some pidyonot too?

This, very simply, is what I’m doing to get through all this ‘weird’ and ‘heavy’ in relatively happy shape, without driving myself or my family totally nuts with doom-or-gloom scenarios, but also without going so deep in denial I lose all connection with the current reality.

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When things work, I like to share them with you, dear reader, so here’s something else I recently discovered that works really well, to kind of ‘sonic clean’ so much of the stress and depression vibes out of the house:

It’s the Rav, reciting the 10 Psalms of the Tikkun Haklali, or general remedy, as set out by Rebbe Nachman.

You can get the audio HERE, (it’s a Dropbox link).

I have it on CD, and I have literally started playing it for three times a day, to ‘sonic clean’ the house from all the miserable, ‘down’, worry tumah vibes floating around.

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A word of caution: this doesn’t sound ‘melodious’.

The first few times I listened to it, it was actually pretty jarring.

Now I’ve done a lot more work with my tuning forks, I can see that dafka, it’s the tones that sometimes sound a little uncomfortable to us that are actually doing some of the deepest ‘cleaning’ work, so if you can, persevere.

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So many people are feeling like life is totally pointless at the moment.

What’s the point of carrying on, when it’s all just going to hell in a hand basket….

Right?

NOPE!!!!

Totally wrong.

There is still absolutely everything to pray for, and THERE IS NO YEOUSH IN THE WORLD.

Whatever God decides to do, going forward, that’s totally up to Him.

But in the meantime, don’t lose sight of the fact that EVERY LITTLE THING YOU DO IS MEANINGFUL.

Both for the good, and for the bad, God forbid.

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Even the smallest hirhur of teshuva – do you know what a massive difference that is making, not least to your own soul and connection to Hashem?

Even the smallest effort, to stop complaining and to see the good, in the middle of the darkest circumstances – do you know what a huge difference that is really making, at least to your own frame of mind and mood?

Do you understand that Hashem stops everything, just to listen to those two words of heartfelt prayer that you are struggling to get out?

That when you make that enormous effort to stop wasting your life watching Netflicks, it starts tipping the whole balance in the world more to the side of ‘good’?

Then when you say a kind word to your spouse you are rectifying all 1o of the sefirot?

That spending half an hour reading a story to your child, or kicking a ball around, or baking some cookies with them, is literally building a whole world?

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I know it’s hard to keep hanging on to God, and to emuna, even though it all seems so crazy and pointless at the moment, but really, what other choice do we have?

If we don’t do that – it’s game over already.

At least for us.

At least, in all the ways that really count.

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Tachlis, the best advice I can give right now for staying upbeat and not getting submerged in all the ‘yeoush’ sloshing around all over the place is this:

• Get off social media as much as possible – it’s totally infested with negative people who just suck you dry, emotionally, and videos and video ‘shorts’ that waste all your time and energy on total narishkeit.
• Stop wasting your time on propaganda news sites – of course that’s the MSM, but also so many of the alternative news sites are also causing a lot of yeoush at the moment, with their doom-and-gloom scenarios that give zero credence to the power of prayer and teshuva to turn everything around. We’re with the true tzaddikim – the Moshe Rabbenu of our generation – we don’t have to worry about the 10 plagues smashing down all over the place, as long as we stick with the True Tzaddikim, and keep following their advice.
• As soon as you start to feel ‘yucky’ or down – take action! Play the Rav’s Tikkun Haklali, dance to some Breslov trance (or anything else that uplifts you), say a Tikkun Haklali, or three, go to a holy site and do some praying there, sit quietly and talk to God….
• Don’t listen to anyone who is telling you the situation is terminal – whatever ‘the situation’ happens to be. King David teaches us that even if there is a sharp sword at our necks, we should still cry out to Hashem to save us.
• Do things that make you happy, calm and ‘filled up’. Have a nice bath. Go for a walk. Find a pencil and sketch something. Make a nice supper…. None of this needs to cost a lot of money – and usually, the stuff you do for free, or the ‘mundane’ stuff is where it’s really at.
• Understand there are no guarantees that we get ‘another day’ after this one. So make the very most of every minute you have, to live the life you want to life, to do the things you want to do, to make the changes, the teshuva, you are yearning to do, to make people with the people you need to.
• Accept we aren’t in control. So, make your best effort – and then leave the rest, happily, to God.
• Be kind to yourself. Yah, we’re all eating ‘franken-chicken’, still addicted to Instagram shorts, worrying way too much about ‘what happens next’, and all the rest of it.

But really?

We just want to serve Hashem.

We are mostly just yearning, with everything we’ve got, to serve Hashem, even though sometimes it’s seems almost impossible to do that.

And God knows that!

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The last thing I wanted to mention, is that while this current situation feels kind of like ‘the worst it’s ever been in the history of mankind’ – it’s really not.

I am coming to the conclusion that the forces of evil go all out trying to ‘reset’ the world every century.

And each time, despite all the havoc and destruction they cause, they never manage to really do what they are planning.

It’s literally the Matrix, where it just keeps getting to this crescendo point again and again and again – but then, the evil is stopped in its tracks.

That is going to happen this time, too.

Sure, a bunch of difficult things may happen along the way, but so much of that really is down to us and our own teshuva process, and efforts to have emuna.

Ultimately, this is God’s world, and He is running it in whichever way He sees fit.

Our job is to do our best to stop complaining, to work on our emuna – and to follow the advice of our True Tzaddikim, so we can actually enjoy ourselves as much as possible, and get to the finishing line hopefully in one piece.

Even if that ‘finishing line’ is just our own, as opposed to ‘global geula’.

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So, courage, dear readers.

Remember that Jews are above nature, and that there is a ‘Moshe Rabbenu’ in every generation, just waiting to take us out of exile while all the evil gets totally smashed to pieces around us.

So, we are not going to let the buggers get us down!

With God’s help.

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