Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of Simcha, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health awareness.
Our theme of the week, is how practice makes perfect. In our first class on this topic, we discussed how practice makes perfect in jump rope or tennis or golf, and we based it on the concept of myelination, which is a type of insulation of sorts, of the wiring in our brain. Insulation causes the electrical impulses to move that much faster, and turns our actions into automatic reactions.
The next day, we said that this also works on our reactions in situations, not just our physical actions, but the way we view things, such as our generosity and the like. We went on to the Ramban who tells his son to reread his letter once a week.
The father of the Mussar Movement was Rav Yisrael Salanter, who was a giant in Torah and a giant in human psyche. Rav Wolbe writes that he predated Freud's understanding of the subconscious by 60 years. He speaks about the concept of subconscious and how to impact your subconscious. His hiddush, his novel approach in mussar, was this very point of repetition: To take one line that speaks to you, it can be something like, “Man was created for his life in the next world,”and repeat it again and again and again and again with emotion.
That's going to make an imprint. Taking the obvious and repeating it again and again with feeling and heart will make an imprint on your heart and on your emotions. That was his hiddush- that through emotion and feeling, you will arouse and make breakthroughs in your character traits.
This idea that our job in changing is not about getting new information, is really the introduction of the famous sefer Mesilat Yesharim, written by Rav Moshe Chaim Luzatto, a great Torah scholar, a great Kabbalist. In the introduction to Mesilat Yesharim (Path of the Just or Upright), he tells us an important rule.
He says, I'm not here to teach you anything that you don't know. It's not my job. I'm here to tell you things that you do know, but because they're so well-known and they're so advertised, so too, the level of forgetting sets in. That means the more well known something is, the less of an impact it makes. For example, did anybody think about their heart today?
Your heart is probably the most important thing in the world right now, or your brain, or your kidneys, or any of your vital organs. But we don't think about them because they're just there and they're obvious. We don't think about the sun. We don't think about gravity. We don't think about any of these things because they're just there. They're not something that is extraordinary.
They're ordinary, and that's called hergel. We just get used to things. And when you get used to something, it doesn't make an imprint on you. And, therefore, these well-known ideas are not going to become part of us, because they're not something exciting or new. They're not something that makes an impression on you.
In order for something to stay with you, it has to make an impression. How does something make an impression? When you repeat it again and again with feeling, that will make an impression.
Sometimes you'll hear an idea in a speech. A speaker will give us an idea and he'll give it over in such a passionate, beautiful way that it'll make an impression on you. He'll speak about kindness.
He'll speak about not speaking Lashon Hara or the importance of learning Torah, or whatever it may be. But you know it all. He gave a whole speech on not insulting people, and you know you're not supposed to insult people. But he gave it over with stories and jokes and with some new ideas that added a little excitement to it, and it made an impression on you.
He took the ordinary and it made it extraordinary. That's the point here. If we want to change and create those new neuropaths in our brain, it doesn't happen with just knowing it in your brain. You have to repeat it and experience it. I've used the mashal in the past, that if you want to learn how to play basketball and you go to Basketball College, and you learn all the the science behind dribbling and the physics and everything else, you're not going to be a good ball player. You have to get on the court and play ball.
It's the same thing with how to react, how to be an empathetic listener, how to validate, how to do active listening, or all those techniques. Learning about it is not enough. You have to do it again and again and again and act on it, and then it'll become part of you. That's why in order to become a social worker, you need thousands of hours.
The same is true with smiling and with reacting calmly. All these things need thousands of hours. The same is true with putting ideas into your head. We need thousands of hours. We need a repeat and repeat and repeat.
Why do we repeat Shema Yisrael every single day, twice a day? Because without repetition, things don't go in.
Have a wonderful day.