My short-lived private joint enterprise came to its official end this week. It started ultimately about three years ago and officially about one year and a half. Since it started dying about half a year ago, I had enough time to prepare myself for its ultimate death, at least mentally, physically, and especially spiritually, though it's still quite difficult emotionally to digest it as I'm just starting to fully understand the magnitude of my loss.
But fortunately, my gain far exceeds my loss, mainly because I've worked intensively on myself, partly to try to save this enterprise from its demise and partly to try to accept this death. Through this intensive self-work, which was motivated by a course I took in Jewish life coaching here, I've even experienced (and am still experiencing) a kind of spiritual awakening.
I've decided to settle the account, so to speak, of my life by listing in writing the main things I've learned or attained as part of my new spiritual journey from the seeming failure of this enterprise at random order:
- I've woken up and stopped drinking completely, and I'm continuing to break my personal record of sobriety every day.
- I've intensified my old mental and physical daily workouts and started some new ones. I have the best version of myself spiritually, mentally, and even physically, if not emotionally yet.
- I've finally started listening to my soul and decided to align my life to my true, spiritual, life purpose by getting out of my present comfort zone in one important life domain and making a fundamental transformation there. After this rather fateful decision I even feel serenity, probably for the first time in life.
- I've disconnected myself from those (fortunately few) extremely limiting or disempowering old friends of mine. They belong to the same sociocultural group, which I don't think is a coincidence. I've started to notice some fundamental problems in their dogma and practice and to detox myself from this poisonous dogma I was brainwashed to believe.
- I've made friends with some empowering people, who all happen to be hasidim. This has kindled my interest in Hasidism as the source of their joy of life. I'm starting to study it systematically, even formally.
- I've realized that our essence is our soul and what are considered successes in worldly terms are not necessarily successes for our soul; we only use physical bodies as temporary dwellings to maximize our soul lessons and attain our soul purpose.
All these things have also made me realize the tasks I still have to accomplish:
- Now that I realize that my greatest enemy is my ego, which manifests itself as limiting thoughts, emotions and behaviors, I have and want to tame it and prevent it from continuing to control my life.
- I have and want to finalize the first stage of a fundamental transformation in the above mentioned one life domain in order to start helping others help themselves for their spiritual self-alignment.
- I want to attract to this private joint enterprise of mine a new co-entrepreneur who is committed to it and ready not to abandon it even in its most difficult time.
- Time seems to have come for me to start volunteering to serve the community, for example, by teaching languages I know and joining a support group of those who suffer from alcohol addiction.
Last but not least, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to my (now former) co-entrepreneur for helping me finally wake up and start this spiritual journey. Shkoyekh, E.L.! I also wish you a successful spiritual journey.
PS: I've also benefitted especially from books by the following authors (in alphabetical order) in this new spiritual journey of mine; interestingly, (almost?) all of them are Americans at least by now (and nearly half of them indentify themselves as Jewish in their respective books): Eben Alexander, Martha Beck, Stephan Bodian, Sonia Choquette, Wayne Dyer, Mike Dooley, Arielle Ford, Debbie Ford, Joanna Garzilli, Louise Hay, Shad Helmstetter, Susan Jeffers, Mastin Kipp, Joey Klein, Michael Newton, Tony Robbins, Robert Schwartz, Eckhart Tolle, Brian Weiss, Marianne Williamson, and Anna Yusim.