PREPENT5771 Day 22 8.31 Lights out

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



On a grumpy low functioning tired day like today, I pause to re-consider my sleeping patterns - how much sleep do I really need in order to function well, and to function best? Am I getting it?

I can blame’s lame energy and getting almost nothing done funk on mercury retrograding as all else around me did today, or on the fact that it’s the last day of August and really end of summer is here, but I think it has to do with how much I sleep. Am I giving myself enough time to sleep? And if not, what can I do about it?

I’m not a nursing mother soldier restless urbanite or 2-jobs migrant worker, so I have, gratefully, no excuses. It’s up to me, up to each one of us under different circumstances, to make sure we each as much sleep as we need and deserve.

And there’s plenty of sleep disorder around to demonstrate just how unsimple and complex this basic act of sleeping has become.

My disorder is of the restless over active kind, the long list of tasks ahead and things to think about and emails to send. I’d say that on average I sleep 5-6 hours a night, and I know that’s 2 hours below average of what a man my age should be getting, according to medical research, etc.

I need to call my own bedtime, lights out, not even reading with a flashlight rule. And abide.

We set off our alarm clocks for waking up. Maybe we need to set some to go to sleep.

Exceptions allowed. But if I want to function well and beyond, mercury and other planets providing, I need to be in bed by 11pm. If I DO get to sleep soon I can get a decent 7 hours.

But going to bed at 11pm is, though responsible, a serious lifestyle change. Maybe not that serious, but still, a change.

What’s your bedtime? I know that for some, and specifically some readers of this blog, sleep is a big issue. For others, It’s no big deal. Either way: take a deep breath, and take a few minutes to think about your state of sleep and what can be improved about it. Just one first step. Even a change of sheets.

Goodnight.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 21 8.30 Re-View

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



How happy are you, on a 1-10 scale?

This question led to this journey, now 21 days in, on the path to focus, clarity, and a higher score on the happiness score. Benchmark data/mid-way: Day by day – but on the whole, this prepent blog is helping me focus, commit to the daily routine of exercise, reflection – making each day count for something of progress. Happier? Yes, perhaps. Def. more fit.

So pause to look back on what so far came up, and what’s left to deal with. Re-view the 3 weeks old map:

Day 1. Take a long look in mirror, full length: who I am now and who I want to become.

2. EAT better: look at my plate: pause to consider my eating habits

3. List #1: 3 things that I regularly or randomly do and regret?

4. Express Gratitude.

5. Make Your Own Sabbath. Slow down.

6. List #2: focus on ONE ITEM from your list of THREE things you want to change in your life. What are three steps you can take to help this ONE change happen?

7. FIX. Fix something today.

8. How can I make a difference in someone’s life today?

9. Fight your inner enemy: what stops you from change?

10. Start a daily 20 minutes physical work out routine. Report to somebody on it. Pass it on.

11. List #3: Blacklist: make a list of 5 people with whom some check in is required.

12. Deal with your blacklist. At least one name on the list – email, phone, resolution if possible.

13. Start going through address books for edits.

14. List #4: who’s spotting my back? Who’s there to help me with my blind spots when I need?

15. List #5: wish list: ten people you love in your life and wish to spend more time with this coming year:

16. Make wish list happen: concrete plans with a few from wish list – actual dates this fall. Carve time for play.

17. List#6: 5 things I am ashamed of in life.

18. Deal with debts

19. Consider your therapy – or any ongoing process of reflection you regularly engage in- what can be improved?

20. Play yard sale: get rid of stuff from closets and shelves. And hard-drive.

21. Review. Pause to look back. And plan ahead. What’s yet to be dealt with?

On this journey to a new page in a new year, feeling better about self, about change for the better – what’s left to examine?

Sex.

Money.

God/faith, spiritual ecstasy, rage.

Fear

Volunteerism

Medical check up

More shofar

New year cards

New anything

Feasting

Breadcrumbs

For those on the journey, what do YOU want to make sure happens on prepent before 5771 begins?

20 minutes update: Back to trainer at the gym. 70 min. weights/cardio.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 20 8.29 YARD SALE

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



On the drive back from the Catskills today – many more signs for yard sales than usual. End of summer rummage through what has to go.

But the urge to stop and rummage was curbed. Got enough stuff already.

In fact – time for a yard sale of my own: what can I get rid of so that I can have more room – or make more room for new?

Thus, today begins the shedding process. Closets, shelves, those under-the-stairs closets.

I give it quotas: 20 items of clothing (esp. those I haven’t worn for at least a year with the hope that ‘one day it will look perfect’: out) 5 books I’ll never really read or read already and can pass on. And so forth. Give gifts to friends, make Goodwill happy, fill up the trash.

Yes, this is merely a metaphor for the internal shedding, for making room within for the joys to come. But I am tired today, and not in best of spirits and I can do what my mother taught me to do at times like these: tidy the cupboards, slowly and methodically, tiding up inside the mind.

The goal, as E. reminded me today, is to live cleanly, happily, more focused and present and kind. Less clutter can only help.

20 minutes update: Biking to Brooklyn.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 19 8.28 Thinking Therapy

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



Did the young Freud attend High Holiday Services in Vienna? Not that I heard of, but I like to imagine that he went with his grandparents, who were Orthodox Jews, and sat there, observing and perhaps even participating in the ancient Semitic ‘talking cure’ in action, Austro-Hungarian style. There’s a ton of research on the complex relationships between Freud and Judaism and psychoanalysis, once more commonly referred to as ‘the Jewish science. Freud aside, I just find it fascinating that a formalized, ritualized procedure for what we now may call ‘therapy’ has been handed down through generations, reshaped and resized – sometimes repetitious and sometimes full of rapture. Maybe in some weird way these Jewish atonement techniques, 2000 years old, left an impression on young Siegfried (or Shlomo, as he was called by his grandfather Yakob) and thus influenced all of us today, or at least those of us who are, or were, in therapy.

Similar process, similar questions.

The similarities between therapy and teshuva – the Jewish method of self-examination and improvement are vast. Also shared are the big questions – does it work? Is the process of therapy and/or teshuva truly helpful, accessible, effective? And what’s the definition of effective here? What’s success?

Is it worth it?

So I’m thinking about therapy on this quiet Sabbath morning. It’s the 19^th day of a 40 day journey –midway - taking quiet time out for reflection on this journey itself, as a whole – this attempt at ‘therapy’ - a contained process of self reflection and successful improvement of self, time sensitive and with a deadline – the day of judgment.

We’re half way there. Nu? Are we here yet?

What’s ‘here’ here?

These are the kind of questions I remember asking in therapy sometimes, or asking myself on the way home.

And today I’m taking the time to think about therapy in my life – how has it helped, what can it do for me now. Examine this modern method of mental-emotional check-in as it is in my life and evaluate: satisfying, compelling, more, less?

Daphne Merkin, whose grandmother Jenny was sister to my grandmother Celine, just wrote a powerful description of her My Life In Therapy in the NYT magazine a few weeks ago. great read.

She writes about it as the ‘curious and slippery business of self-disclosure.’ After at least a dozen therapists over the years she comes back to reaffirming how is some ways, therapy, in some form, in essential to our wellbeing:

“ I recognized that therapy served me well in some ways, providing me with a habit of mind that enabled me to look at myself with a third eye and take some distance on my own repetitive patterns and compulsions. In the offices of countless therapists — some gifted, some less so — I sharpened my perceptions about myself and came to a deeper understanding of the persistent claim of early, unmet desires in all of us.”

Shabbat shalom.

20 min. Gym.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 18 8.27 THE DEAL WITH DEBT

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



One of the items that came up for me on the shame list was debt. Shame about letting fees pile up for not dealing with annoying debts. Just a stupid waste of money.

Nothing major: Parking tickets, a few bills, that promise to send someone a check for something worthy - different types of debts – unfinished business. I am glad to report that I am not – to the best of my knowledge – indebted to anyone, and as far as I know owe nobody any money. As of this morning.

It took 45 min. I went to the pile of papers in that first drawer of my desk, poured myself a tall glass of milk and went through the ‘to do bills’ pile, item by item: a few phone calls, emails, apologies, payments. Whatever could be handled at this time.

Done.

Pile refiled. Until next time.

Feels lighter.

Though I have to admit that there’s this nagging feeling that I’m forgetting someone, somewhere, something.. So I’m asking - in case you are reading this and are aware of my debt – a payment, a response to a request, an apology. PLEASE TELL ME!

And for those following this closely – this sums up the week of address book lists.

Not that we’re done with the housecleaning. More to come next week is we are getting closer to the Hi Ho’s central.

Emerson, my old friend (I’m reading him daily still and getting to know his irritated, irritable, funny, eye rolling side) has this to say – moving us gently from the address book, to the checkbook, to the book of life and greater kindness:

“Count from yourself in order the persons that have near relation to you up to ten or fifteen, and see if you can consider your whole relation to each without squirming. That will be something. Then, have you paid all your debts? Then, have you paid to the world as much kindness as you received from early benefactors? It were a sort of baseness to die in the world’s debt. Then, can you not, merely, for the very elegancy of the thing, do an unmixed kindness or two?”

Here’s to less squirming!

Shabbat shalom.

20 min. update: last night, at 10:30pm I went out running in Tompkins Sq. Park. Running is hard for me. I am out of breath faster than other activities and harsh memories from my days of endless running while serving in the IDF haunt my legs. But I ran a few times around the park and paused to walk a round in between. In all the years I’ve lived down here I’ve never ran in the park. Today’s goal is yet to be determined.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 17 8.26 What a Shame

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus


I walk into an office today and the person sitting there working at the computer hurriedly pulls down shut the laptop screen and turns to me, flushed.

What was he ashamed of? What did he have on his screen?

Shame. Been there, done that, got it now.

What am I ashamed of? What shames do I carry around with me, – body, baggage, questionable behaviors, secret online sites?

Private List: 5 things I am ashamed of in life:

My list grew to 8 easy – current and ongoing patterns, old memories and i-guess-not-forgotten incidents. I’ll spare you the details. It’s private. I am somewhat ashamed of hanging out my dirty laundry – but I do plan to spend some time in the laundry room analyzing my list, learning from shame.

I am making an assumption here: that most of us, in some way, some more often than others, got laundry, deal with our own shame. The question is how do we deal with it?

Because if shame is connected to a feeling of being or doing something that for some reason we perceive as wrong – than you got to own it, feel it, be ashamed with it fully – in order to learn from it, shake it, move on, change.

Daniel Gordis wrote a strong article today about shame in Israel – and how the blame game lacks the dignity of shame even when it is due. “What about learning to live with shame that is almost unbearable? Isn’t it precisely by becoming harrowingly aware of our faults and misdeeds that we become better people?” He takes this process of shame to the collective level of denial – and necessity. http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=186053

Shame list, wish list blacklist – this prepenting stuff is intense. Take a deep breath. It’s almost Sabbath.

20 min. update: it’s 9pm and hasn’t happened yet. Running next, or home aerobics.)


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 16 8.25

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



Make Time For Quality Time

The ‘let’s do lunch’ cliché is well worn and familiar, even when it sometimes does manifest. What would it take to really plan ahead and plan carefully in the year ahead for quality time with the ones we love and don’t get to see as often as we’d like?

We’re 16 days into the 40-day count – and 14 days away from the start of this New Year. Time to plant the seeds.

Yesterday was about the first wish list – 1-10 people

you love in your life and wish to spend more time with this coming year. I got a lot of great feedback from people who loved this task and made the lists.

The next step is to think of what to do with this list, how to prioritize the names on it, and start activating this quality time plan. For me, it means booking a flight to Israel, arranging for a weekly phone call, and carving out time way in advance, away from endless work, for the playground.

To make sure I do it, as part of my self-reflection and perfection of being journey to this new year – I am giving myself the deadline of Rosh Hashanah – reach out to the people on my list, tell them that I love them, and why, and make plans. Period. (Time is such a precious commodity. Using this Jewish time-calendar grid/system in order to make better usage of one’s time is one of the reasons I so love this spiritual technology known as the High Holidays process. It works.)

(20 min. daily bodywork report: rowing machine, sit-ups, weights.)


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771 Day 15 8.24

Love the one you’re with



High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus



Day 15, third week of journey to focus.

Make a wish list: ten people you love in your life and wish to spend more time with this coming year:

1 – 10

Is it just me, or is this list not as simple as it seems?

(if you’ve been following along, or not - this is still the ‘go through your address book’ week, now moving from blacklists to wishlists. A-Z. an exercise in wishful thinking. Part one.)

20 min. report, home excerices,weights. barely.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771: Day 14 8.23 Blind Spots

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus

There’s this ritual I love – at the end of a haircut a hand mirror is held up so I can see the back of my head, my blind spot. This evening, at Raphael’s Barber Shop on First Ave., as he held up the mirror I thought: who holds up a mirror to my inner blind spot, all that stuff I’ve put ‘in the back of my mind’?

Good therapists do that, I guess, really good friends, sometimes maybe even good hairdressers. Random strangers.

Two weeks ago, when this journey began, I wrote about this self-reflection process as a long, close look in the mirror. Preferably full length. Today another perspective is added to the analysis of self – the rear view: ‘Oh, so that’s what I look like from the back? That’s how, how I am right now? Do I like me as is – or do I ask Raphael for adjustment, go for continual perfection of self?

Blind spots – haircut as metaphor for intentional change, and the blind spots are emotions, thought patterns, behaviors that we each have and often overlook, can’t or won’t see. Some of these blind spots been there a long time and some are new, and there something to be learned there about who and who I am. One needs the other to hold up the mirror. What if we can be each other’s back mirror holders, taking turns for each other in full introspection of identity. What if Yom Kippur becomes a human house of mirrors? Intentional human mirrors front and back, all going through the process of perfection.

Who are some of my back mirror holders on my list of friends? And if none, or not who could be? Who can be there to help me with my blind spots when I need to?

(For those of you who asked for direct and simple daily exercises, how about: spend 3 minutes in front of a mirror, holding hand held mirror, by your self, looking at the back of your head. While looking, think of at least 3 different people who you would like to do this for you on a regular basis – who will hold up a mirror to your blind spots?)

I feel the need, I guess, to move from focus on the blacklist – to more on the wish list. FYI, Israeli style, my address book is skimmed and 3 emails sent to 3 on my list, 3 long silences of various friendships gone sour. Check. We may go back to the blacklist later on the journey but for now I’m switching gears to focus on the wish list of people I love in my life, and want to spend more time with. Starting tomorrow. 20 min. report. Sunday was lame with 10 min. of biking when pouring rain interrupted. Today 20 min. bike and 20 min. weights to even up. E. is running daily, even in the rain. C. in Israel is working on it.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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PREPENT5771: Day 13 8.22 Swiss or Israeli? (Blacklist con'd)

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus

“But the work of self-improvement, - always under our nose, nearer than the nearest, is seldom engaged in…a few, few hours in the longest life.” (Emerson)

I started going through my address book today. Books really –outlook, facebook, skype, company directory, family tree, googlegroups. Some are personal and some professional and many overlap. It’s a lot of people. And it’s a bit much. Perhaps when our ancestors came up with the suggested methods for preparing for the new year and included ‘make peace with your neighbors’ they didn’t think that one could have so many people in multiple networks. I gave it 60 minutes today and got through B. This is a time consuming and emotional activity, no doubt. But I liked it – flagged some, wrote quick notes to others, deleted some, added some, remembered who’s in my life and why. It’s a counting of blessings. But it is super time consuming.

So: Option 1: I COULD commit to doing this thoroughly, the comprehensive method, Swiss style, walk the talk, and take a diligent hour a day for this clean up work - making my way through the alphabet of my people by Yom Kippur.

Or, Option 2: I can take the more intuitive and easy route and take some time today and tomorrow to let my memory retrieve the few most urgent, important names of people I need to reach out to make amends, and settle for that. Israeli style.

Either way, this is, I think, the task of these days, to do the work of self-improvement. Start right under our nose. And tomorrow I’ll decide what to do.

Suggestions, dear reader? Swiss or Israeli? Other options??

Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.

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PREPENT5771 Day 12 8.21 BLACK LIST AND LOTUS RISING

High Holy Days Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie: 40 ways in 40 days to find your focus

BLACK LIST + LOTUS

O. led a yoga class this morning and talked about the lotus, rising serene out of the mud of the swamp. It's the same with this process of self awareness, perfection, change - we got to go through the dirty laundry, our black lists, our shame - to clean up.

I spent shabbat upstate, off the grid, unplugged, doing yoga, resting - and thinking about my black list of people with whom I have unfinished business - and talking about it with my friends. O., when asked to make her list of 3-5 people on her list right away listed a woman who wronged her in 1976 - pretty detailed and bad blood. C. listed, without blinking 3 business relationships gone sour. My own list provided people who in one way or another promised me things and than vanished away.
Well, we made the list (big step!) - now what???

The lists, we agreed, are not even. Need to sort em out. In some cases there are amends to be made, apologies requested or offered. In some cases the deed was done, a truce of sorts was made, and still a nagging tension lingers. What IS unfinished business? what if they are dead?
Case by case. And we all agreed that this is a slow process - that it takes time to dare delve into the deep recess of what we prefer not to think about.
The goal is to be lighter, focused, less weighted down with grudges and angers. Like a lotus - this takes time and effort.
So how do we address our black listed?
with intention and patience: One at at time.
I am going to send an email that has indeed been in my draft folder for over two years to # 1 on my list. I dont' expect great friendship to re-emerge. But I want to let him know exactly how and why he hurt me, and that I don't want to be in the position again of bumping into him at some social event and smile fake and awkward. Just clear the waters, empty my draft inbox.
Number two on the list is, the more I think about, not that important. Yes, she ought to apologize, but time makes it all look silly.
and actually, that's sort of the same with the rest of my list. so far.
Tomorrow, back home, I will start with the A-Z address book search. Who gets deleted? who gets a note? where is there a tinge of 'ouch - we gotta talk?'
I'll give it a full week.
And there is of course, another big question as we go through the books of life our lives - who's BLACK LIST AM IN ON?? do i even know? suspect? guess but not dare admit it? As I go through my list - and you through yours - that's the harder one to ask - and the one where real work may be also pending.
On the 20 min. daily workout news - YES! swimming yesterday Yoga today. E. emailed to report that, despite how much she hates it, she went running both days!

Lotus flowers, emerging upwards. 28 days to go.


Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as we move forward and, as always, you may find more information about our High Holy Day services by visiting,www.higholidays.com.
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