One of the most important things I've learned by attending and finishing a three-year program in Chabad Chassidus, or to be more precise, pschology based on its teachings, in Jerusalem is the set of faith and confidence - "faith that everything is good" and "confidence that G-d will give me the power to discover that everything is good."
Having understood this teaching in theory, I've moved the stage of internalizing it and implementing it in my daily life. The present life situation somewhere in the Diaspora serves as a perfect testing ground for this experiment precisely because I continue to have the same challenge because of which I had to make a very difficult decision to leave Jerusalem after living there for 24 years.
If this is the first time for you to be exposed to this deceptively simply teaching, you may wonder how everything could be good. The fact is that when the world looks dirty, there are three possibilities: 1) the world is really dirty, 2) your glasses that look at it are dirty, 3) both the world and your glasses are diry. In most (or even all?) cases your glasses are the culprit. "Glasses" are a metaphor for the ego.
As the first step in this experient I've decided to let go of the first major obstacle - resistance. What I've started to try since a few weeks ago is not to resist when I encounter something that seems "dirty". The resistance I'm trying to let go includes that to the very thought that something seems "dirty".
Quite expectedly, I've already encountered two incidents that have been frustrating me, to say the least. In my previous state of consciousness I might have accused the people who are involved in these incidents. I really need a leap of faith to see something positive in these seemingly negative experiences. But I can also ready feel that at least this meta-experience of coping with these experiences, if not these experiences per se, is positive and helps me train my spiritual muscles, so to speak.