Welcome to a SIMHA Emotional Wellness moment.
Rav Wolbe continues talking about the trait of Hitboninut, of contemplating and observing what's around us, using our five senses to appreciate creation.
After looking into flowers and the heavens and animals, the next thing to contemplate is oneself.
David Hamelech said, “Kol HaNeshama Tehallel Ya,and the Gemara says Al Kol Neshima/ Every smell that we make, we should thank Hashem.
Do we ever pay attention to our breathing? Breathe in, breathe out. Air comes in, oxygenating our blood, and then it goes out and we breathe in once again. Do we ever listen to our heartbeat, or someone else's heartbeat?
Put your ear to your child’s chest and listen to how the beat keeps going. Do we ever pay attention to that? That needs contemplation. Where does the heartbeat come from? How did it start? Who keeps it beating? We make Berachot on our food and drink, but what about the berachot we make on our bodily functions? We're able to see, we're able to fall asleep. Wonder of wonders! Doctors don't understand exactly how sleep works. You close your eyes and suddenly fall into a subconscious state, and the body rests! Wonder of wonders. It's something to start contemplating, he says. How much fear of God is hidden in such contemplation? Did you ever think about the ability to eat and swallow? What about peristalsis? You can stand on your head and swallow something and it's going to go upwards against gravity. And what about your kidneys, your intestines- small and large, sifting through the food. Rav Wolbe says each one of these thoughts should take time, as we contemplate an experience, and all our bodily functions. How the body is able to take the food and send it to where it's supposed to go? The dairy products that we eat and drink have calcium and the calcium goes to our bones. But there are conditions where people don't have a healthy distribution and calcification occurs, and the calcium goes to the wrong places, which is very unhealthy. But how does the calcium know to go to your bones? Did you ever think about that?
Why is it that when you have a headache, you take Tylenol or aspirin, and it goes into your stomach, but somehow your headache goes away? How does it know where to go? How does anything know where to go? How does the same same system (your blood) not only cause the food, but also the waste, to travel at the same time?
Imagine a system where Uber Eats and a cesspool work in the same pipes, and yet everything stays clean.
There are endless things in our bodies to think about and contemplate. Rav Wolbe says that by thinking about and paying attention to these things, you'll become a born again person-literally, a born again person! There's so much wealth we have inside of us, that not we're not aware of.
It says that someone that has something but is not aware of it doesn't have it.
Many years ago there was a television show called The $6 Million Man,. The title referred to the different body parts that the man had replaced in his body, valued at $6 million. We are all multi-billion dollar men and women.
You can't replace everything in man. Eyes, ears, nose, throat, pancreas, liver, kidneys, heart, brain, colon. The list goes on and on. And we possess them all. It's like we have diamonds and jewels and Ferraris and yet we don't even think about them. They're just sitting around in the parking lot. We don't even pay attention to them. That's what Hitboninut does. It makes us wealthy and enriches us.
It makes us feel happy and content, and that's our job. Have a wonderful day.