Self-Awareness | Healing through Jewish Wisdom

The conversation

You talk to yourself far more harshly than you'd ever talk to your closest friend, and then you wonder why nothing changes. The way Gili sees it, there's an earlier stage before self-love that most of us skip right over: self-acceptance, accepting yourself for what you are and for what you're not. She suggests starting to notice the thoughts that keep coming back, writing them down, and recognizing the pattern before it decides once again how your day is going to look.

The truth

Jewish identity, in her view, is traditional, not religious and not secular. Religion is the means, not the goal. It serves our role in the world: bringing unity into it.

Before self-love there's an earlier and more essential stage: self-acceptance, recognizing what you are and what you're not, and speaking to yourself the way you speak to someone you love.

Real self-awareness means understanding yourself on your own, so that even when someone says something about you, it no longer decides anything for you.

Writing your thoughts down exposes patterns you would normally miss, like discovering that the same thought has been going around in your head for two years without you ever doing anything with it.

Self-awareness has a right dose too. Too much of it turns into social anxiety, when all your attention flows inward instead of outward.

Someone who is genuinely self-aware examines which thoughts and beliefs created the situation and takes responsibility for what's happening to them, instead of asking "why did this happen to me."

Questions and answers

What is consciousness?

The way she sees it, consciousness is self-awareness, the understanding that the reality you see is a reflection of you. That doesn't mean that everything you see is you, but it's precisely the contrast between you and other people that teaches you who you are.

What's the difference between accepting myself and loving myself?

Self-acceptance comes before self-love. It means accepting yourself for what you are and for what you're not, and speaking to yourself kindly, exactly the way you speak to someone you love. Constantly beating yourself up is not self-acceptance, even when it seems like it's helping.

What actually helps with social anxiety?

One way that can help is to get busy doing something good for someone else. When the focus moves from you to them, the pressure in your head goes down, the chances of a positive response go up, and as it's described in the episode, that lowers the level of anxiety.

What does a person with high self-awareness look like?

They recognize their own feelings, they have clear values, and they at least try to act on them. Mistakes turn into lessons they're grateful for, and instead of asking "why did this happen to me," they look at which thoughts and beliefs created the situation and take responsibility for it.

Gili's original episode description

I'm not someone who's given much thought to my Israeli identity. Even my Jewish identity is something I've only been working on these last few years, and never from the angle that came out of October 7.

On October 7 our lives turned upside down. On October 7 we found out that we really are in existential danger. You could say that we lost our innocence. We were exposed, and we're still being exposed, to horrors and injustices that happen because of our Jewish identity. Because you're a Jew! Literally Europe of the last century, and it's confusing, because a second ago we were living a completely different reality, and this whole preoccupation with Jewish identity is the least Tel Aviv thing you can do in the twenty-first century. But my brothers and sisters, if that's the reason they want to kill us, then let's at least know what it is we're talking about.

In my humble opinion, Jewish identity isn't religious, and it isn't secular either. It's traditional! Because even the most secular Tel Avivian is connected to tradition, and I don't think there was ever a period when the entire Jewish people was religious. The Creator chose us as a people, not because of religion. Religion isn't the goal, it's the means to our role in the world: to guide the world in the knowledge of God, which is unity.

This isn't an episode about brotherhood and loving your fellow Jew, and it isn't about self-love either. What we're really talking about is consciousness.

So what is consciousness? Consciousness is self-awareness. It's the understanding that reality is a reflection of yourself. Everything here is a reflection of you. That doesn't mean that it is you, but how would you know who you are if there weren't someone who isn't you, so that you could understand that you are you? It's thanks to the contrast between us that each of us learns who we are, compared with the others who aren't us. And that's the whole beauty of it! We came here to embody all the faces and expressions of the Creator, and that is infinite. Self-acceptance means accepting yourself for what you are and for what you're not. That's it.