Emuna Therapy

Expect The Best

Research shows that if you expect people to treat you well they are more likely to do so. If people with all their flaws reciprocate your good vibes imagine what Hashem does for people who expect him to be kind, generous, protective etc.! 

Bye the way, if you'd like to be friends on facebook don't be shy. All you've got to do is request it here!

 

No Secrets

Why keep your personal "deficits" a secret -  there's nothing to feel embarrassed about - they are your greatest assets! It's the subject of this week's video lesson and my gift to you!

Wishing you a great week!

Dr. Zev Ballen

 

One Soul

Based on Rabbi Arush's teachings from the Holy Zohar and the writings of the Arizal, Emuna Marital Coaching is getting phenomenally fast results. In this video, you'll hear about the sudden massive growth that's taking place with real couples.  Enjoy!

- Dr. Zev Ballen

  

One Choice

People who are sincerely seeking a real connection with G-d often ask me. "What am I doing wrong? Why am I still so far from living the spiritual life of emuna that I really want to be living? " When I get to know these people, I often discover that they are faithfully practicing daily personal prayer, and seem to be utilizing our books, articles and CD's. So I asked myself: "What's missing here? How is it possible that people whose lives are seemingly immersed in emuna are not feeling fulfilled? Read about it in: One Choice.

Check out more great articles from breslev.co.il:

Forget The Shortcuts - By Rabbi Shalom Arush

Splash In A Bucket - By Rabbi Lazer Brody

A Special Kindness - By Tal Rotem

You Can Do Anything - By David Reckles

The Ten Remembrances - By Rabbi Shalom Arush

Free Milk - By Racheli Reckles

A Warrior Of Transcendence - By Rivka Levy

The Strength Of Chanukah - By Debbie Shapiro

Conquering The Land Of Israel - By DovBer HaLevy

Jacob's Hand On Esau's Heel - By Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook, Z"L

Coaching At It's Best

We shot this gorgeous clip right after our sunrise prayers at the Holy Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. I'm grateful to Hashem and our super crew at Breslev Israel for putting this one together. It's a real beauty, guys!

Please enjoy it and share it with your friends!

With Blessings, Dr. Zev

 

Emuna Therapy

image credit:smiling_da_vinci

Tal Rotem interviewed me and asked some pretty sharp questions. I hope you'll like how I answered him in "Emuna Therapy"...It's right here.

The wife wanted the body cremated; the husband's religious brothers quickly made a proper burial; the wife sued and the case went to a jury trial, but Rebbe Nachman intervened from Above. It's right here!

More new articles from Breslev Israel:

I Don't Envy You - By Rabbi Shalom Arush

Election Fever - By Rabbi Lazer Brody

Loyalty Check - By DovBer HaLevi

Reserved Parking - By Chaya Golda Ovadia

A Child's Eyes - By Racheli Reckles

Veneer - By Rivka Levy

Camouflage - By Rabbi Pinchas Winston

Sound Of The Siren - By Ari Davidson

Mighty Matriarch - By Rabbi Dovid Charlop

With Blessings,

Dr. Zev Ballen

 

 

Live Broadcast - Unlocking Your Power

  

                                       image credit: gadknows

Everyone agrees that our decisions and rituals shape our lives - that persistence in some area of life is essential for a person to achieve mastery and success. What people disagree about is on what rituals will give them the results that they are looking for. What area of your life - if it changed - would lead you to the greatest boost in your personal performance, productivity, health and happiness?

This is the subject of today's broadcast - it is called "Unlocking Your Power."

You can see it today Wednesday at 5:00 PM Israel time at our Chut Shel Chessed Yeshiva, 13 Shmuel Hanavi Street, Jerusalem, in the main sanctuary. Everyone is welcome, both men and women so if you're anywhere near Jerusalem, come on by!

You can see today's lesson here - the broadcast, as well as our lessons posted from now on - are Mac and iPod compatible. If you tune in too early to the live broadcast link, you'll be sent to the main page of the Breslev Israel website, so try to tune in on time as follows (Israel is still on winter time while the USA is still on Daylight Savings time): 

8:00 AM in LA and the West Coast, 9:00 AM Denver, 10:00 AM Mexico and Central Daylight, 11 AM EDT, 4 PM in the UK, 5:00 PM Johannesburg and Capetown, 5:00 PM Israel. As soon as we can, G-d willing, we'll post a link to the lesson for all those who couldn't see it live. If you can't see the broadcast, you might need to download a new version of Flash Media player, which you can do here. We hope you enjoy the broadcast.

I hope you can join me.

With Blessings,

Dr. Zev Ballen

Short On Time?

Four new studies (Mogiler, et. al., 2012) have shown what people with emuna have always known. That, contrary to logic, giving away time that you don't have can make you feel like you have more of it.

What a beautiful observation of the Truth.

Where I have difficulty, as usual, is not in how my colleagues observe reality but in how they interpret it.  Psychologist Jeremy Dean concluded that the people, in these studies, who were generous felt better because of  odd "perceptual" alterations that their brains were subject to. He mentioned "10 ways that the mind warps time."

Aren't you curious to know about the spiritual orientations of the people that were studied?  The researchers might have come up with very different conclusions if they would have asked different questions that assessed the participants level of spirituality and emuna. Then they may have found that the deeper truth is that the people felt better for completely different reasons.

People with emuna feel really good about giving even if they objectively don't have much to give because they believe that G-d who is constantly looking after them will be pleased with their generosity, and in turn, will surely give them back everything that they need and more.  When people have little and give regardless, they are actively demonstrating and strengthening their emuna which is the greatest source of joy.

Blessings for the new month of Chesvan,

Dr. Zev Ballen

Start The Week Right

Here's my gift to you for an inspired week and to get you moving towards an extraordinary year!

Believe me - I value your time and appreciate your visiting here - so you have my promise that what you will see in this video you won't find anywhere else. It can literally change your life!

I'm obviously hoping that you'll decide to sit back and join me. You and your family deserve the very best!

- Dr. Zev

 

Sigh - Cotherapy

By Dr. Zev Ballen

Here's the question that's gnawed at me for most of my life. 
 
What, if anything, would make me happy?
 
I became a psychotherapist in the hope of finding the answer to this question.
 
As part of my training I was required to undergo a full classical Freudian psychoanalysis. I lied on the couch 4 times a week and free associated to an analyst who I never saw. She sat behind me for almost nine years. During that time, if I wanted to make emotional contact with her, I wasn't allowed to turn around.  Through her abstention from being a person, my analyst became a blank screen.  At times, my unconscious fantasies turned my analyst into a withholding childhood mother, a punitive father, or even an omnipotent G-d-like figure. As my childhood conflicts emerged, I gained incredible insights into myself and my dealings with people.  Unfortunately, despite a plethora of insight, after nine years I can't say that I was any happier than when I began.
 
Then I started banging on pillows with baseball bats and tennis rackets in an effort to release my  

pent up aggression and hurt feelings. The primal scream therapist prompted me to scream at the top of my lungs.  This procedure helped me to feel like a new person for about two days.
 
In cognitive behavioral therapy I focused on trying to make all of my thoughts positive. "I'm a happy person..I'm a happy person...I'm a happy person!" The problem with that was that I was forcing myself to be positive but my internal state had not changed. I soon saw that I could not just by-pass my internal mood I needed to deal with it.
 
Next I became fascinated with hypnosis.  I was sure that with the aid of hypnosis I would be able to go deeper into my mind and uproot the mess in my unconscious mind.  The problem with positive thinking had been that it did not deal with the skeletons that were hiding deeper down in my unconscious closet. So I hoped that by re-programming my unconscious mind with positive hypnotic suggestions that this would make me happy.
 
Unfortunately it turned out that even my unconscious mind had a mind of its own. My unconscious mind stubbornly refused to accept even pleasant hypnotic suggestions for more than a few days - after that my body seemed to reject them as if they were foreign bodies.
 
It was around this time that I discovered the fascinating world of Ericksonian hypnosis.  My Ericksonian hypnotherapist said that traditional hypnosis had not helped me because my unconscious was not some passive entity that could be bombarded by ideas however positive - he said that my unconscious demanded more respect than this. I was told  that my unconscious mind had amazing untapped resources that could be used to find creative solutions to my problems. This sounded great. I couldn't wait to start. It was truly empowering to be told that I was smarter and more resourceful than I knew I was in my unconscious mind. This was by far the most compelling psychological theory yet. If I could learn to trust my unconscious then everything would be okay.
 
The problem was that although I could now access more of my unconscious creativity, still my unconscious didn't always know what to do when I was in severe conflict.  Whenever the stress mounted I gravitated back to my core conflicts.
 
So I decided to give psychoanalysis another try but this time the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis. Instead of the emphasis on picking apart the inner workings of my mind I would now hopefully be cured through the corrective emotional experience of a "therapeutic relationship." The idea was that I had never had a healthy relationship before and having one with someone who had earned a degree in psychology would be my ticket to personal growth and salvation. 
 
It wasn't.
 
Determined to cure my neurosis I tried a family therapist. He sat with me on the couch and together we drew my family genogram - a pictorial view of my family tree. He showed me how I am reliving the life of one of my ancestors who lived three generations ago. The theory is that there was some "unfinished business" in that person's life that I am trying to complete in a maladjusted way.  All of these therapies were really interesting intellectually. But no - family therapy didn't do it for me either.
 
Then came gestalt therapy. I was put in a chair and was "helped' to resolve my relationship with mom by speaking to her in empty chair across front of me. 
 
Need I say more?
 
In primal scream therapy I was taken into a sound proof room and told to scream at the top of my lungs. All that I got from this was a sore throat.
 
In paradoxical psychotherapy I was told that all of my worries and concerns about myself were absolutely true (a form of reverse psychology).  I was in fact a depressed narcissist with competitive and emotionally dependant traits. 
 
The theory behind paradoxical therapy was that my problems were rooted in repressed rage. The therapist continued to provoked me in the hope that I would break through my inhibitions and lash out at him. 
 
I couldn't really take the paradoxical approach seriously. It was easy to see through the therapist's ploys - especially since I had read about this technique in graduate school.  
 
After all this, I expressed my misgivings about traditional therapy to a clinical supervisor telling her that I was feeling drawn towards spirituality. My supervisior told me that if I abandoned psychotherapy for spirituality I would be acting out my wish to claim an oedipal victory. I was looking for a vindictive triumph over my mom who was a psychoanalyst.
 
That was the last straw.
 
I am writing this in the hope that I can save you the enormous outlay of time, money and emotional turmoil that almost 40 years of aimless wandering through the wasteland of secular psychotherapies has cost me.
 
Here are 16 reasons not to go to for secular therapy: Continue here...