The Truth Hurts Podcast: Page 6
Happiness feels slippery. One minute it's here, the next it's gone, and the whole time you're waiting for something on the outside to bring it to you: the kids, your partner, the house with the pool. The way Gili sees it, you are the only owner of your own happiness, and nobody else can hand it to you. The road there starts with taking responsibility and changing the story you tell yourself, including cutting phrases like "I don't have the strength" and replacing them with something that gives you strength instead. And that takes time. The way she sees it, wisdom is patience, because fruit picked too early tastes bitter.
Read the episode notes: How to Be Happy | The Truth Hurts, Episode 60
You look around you and it isn't always clear what your calling is, and you wait for the moment when it will sort itself out on its own. The way Gili sees it, the answer is much closer than it seems. It starts with whoever needs you most right this minute, and from there it widens out, one circle after another. Giving, she says, is the real secret of life, and even the hardest things ultimately turn out to be for the good. And sometimes the simplest step of all, deciding to be happy no matter what is going on around you, is worth more than anything else.
Read the episode notes: Finding Your Calling | The Truth Hurts, Episode 59
You can eat the cleanest food there is, drink nothing but green juice, do everything exactly right, and still find out that something in your body has broken down. According to Gili, health is not decided only on the plate but in the emotional system behind it: anger, grief or frustration that never get expressed do not disappear. They settle into a specific organ and weaken it. There is even a syndrome in which an emotional crisis produces symptoms in the body that are identical to a heart attack. The question is not only what you eat, but what you do with what you feel.
Read the episode notes: Healthy Soul, Healthy Body | The Truth Hurts, Episode 58
Sometimes you feel loneliest exactly in the moments when you would most want someone to be there. And when you look outward and see a world that always seems to take the wrong side, that paradox does not stay out there. It seeps inward. In Gili's words, that feeling of loneliness is a belief we created ourselves, because Creation only reflects back to us what we believe in. From there she builds five principles that try to explain how this works, and why the only real choice left to us is what to believe.
Read the episode notes: The Paradox of Creation: The Tension Between Consciousness and Physical Reality
There are weeks when it is harder to breathe, and the week between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day is one of them, with the stories that keep surfacing and shaking us all over again. From that painful place Gili turns to a completely different question: what choice is left to us when we have no control over what happens? A secret, sod in Hebrew, is not classified information but an acronym for seder ve'da'at, order and knowledge, a journey of consciousness you enter through a question rather than a ready-made answer. And the Garden of Eden is not a place you travel to but a state you can reach here and now.
Read the episode notes: Secrets: Order and Knowledge | The Truth Hurts, Episode 56
It hurts right now. It really hurts, and sometimes it seems as if the world outside has turned as ugly as whatever is going on inside. It is tempting to want to run away from it, but the way Gili sees it, a time like this is exactly when we have to come back to ourselves again and again. Here she takes apart the saying that there is nothing more whole than a broken heart, and in her words the real break is not in what other people did to us, but in realizing that we created this reality ourselves.
Read the episode notes: Create Your Reality | The Truth Hurts, Episode 55
You follow someone who posts pictures of food every week and you feel like you know him. In fact you know almost nothing about him. Amihai Beer, an attorney and the CEO of Kibbutz Sdot Yam, opened his page not to become famous but on the recommendation of his psychologist, after a health and emotional crisis at 31. In his words, Instagram became a therapeutic tool that lets him express a creative side he did not know he had, especially given his dyslexia and dysgraphia. But he still makes a conscious choice about how much of himself to show. Behind the scenes his wife Sivan is a full partner, even though she stays far away from the camera.
Read the episode notes: Creativity, Authenticity, and Human Connection with Amihai Beer | Episode 54
Somebody says something, and you react instantly, as if you had no choice. According to Gili, that is exactly what real slavery is: not a master holding on to us, but the inner habits we keep giving authority to again and again, with nobody forcing anything on us. She explains why chametz and matzah at Passover stand for pride against truth, and why real satisfaction does not come from what we have but from connecting to the soul. And Nisan is the time when it finally becomes possible to set our fears down and bloom.
Read the episode notes: We Were Slaves. Is It Time to Break Free? | The Truth Hurts, Episode 53
You go into a relationship hoping the other person will change, and that fails almost without exception. Gili argues that first you have to accept the person in front of you as they are, and that whatever bothers you about them is something to repair in yourself. The same principle holds for us as a people: as long as we go on fighting each other, an outside enemy does not have to do a thing. All it has to do is let us kill each other. The solution she offers is forgiving yourself, not as a gift to somebody else, and in her case it even lowered the inflammation in her body.
Read the episode notes: Unity Through Forgiveness | The Truth Hurts, Episode 52
It feels like everything around you is out of control: the news, the arguments, people who are angry at other people just because they think differently. And when something happens that you cannot make sense of, a divorce, a layoff, a stretch that just did not go the way you wanted, it is easy to stay stuck on the question of why me of all people. In Gili's words, faith (emunah) begins exactly where the intellect ends: not the proof you saw, heard or touched, but choosing to trust anyway. And like any muscle, it can be trained, especially now, when everything feels muddled.
Read the episode notes: Faith Beyond Reason: An Exercise in Awakening | The Truth Hurts, Episode 51