Insights Hurt: Bringing Healing Thoughts to Life

By Daniel H. Shulman

Loss, love, crises of faith and anguish are a part of being human. If lucky, pain brings insight that enables healing. Over the course of several years, I experienced all of the highs and lows of relationships (each more than once). To cope, I wrote. I wrote to myself. I wrote to those I loved. I wrote to those I lost. I wrote to those who I just wanted to see that I was coping. And I wrote to nobody in particular. Through it all, my words brought me comfort. But something surprising happened. I learned that my words brought comfort to others. My struggle was their struggle. I articulated what they were feeling, but could not say. As I counseled myself, I was also counseling them. This book shares those insights. The insights hurt - at least they did at the time. But they also brought healing and a life now filled with happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682223192

Book preview

Poems

PART 1 – Public

Knowing and Unknowables

September 16, 2012

Thinking about what is expected of me. I need to simultaneously use my capacity for reason to know all that is knowable, and remember that faith is the appreciation of the grandeur of the unknowable. The trick is to know when to challenge knowledge or acquiesce in faith. On this Rosh Hashanah, let God guide me in the coming year to judge correctly.

Life

December 9, 2012

Turning points in life are better reached with gratitude than regret.

February 2, 2013

The essence of patience is tolerating the fact that you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes.

February 4, 2013

Contemplating the relationship between Contrition and Repentance. "Contrition begins with a feeling of shame at our being incapable of disentanglement from the self. To be contrite at our faults is holier than to be complacent in our perfection…Repentance is more than contrition and remorse for sins, for harms done. Repentance means a new insight, a new spirit. It also means a course of action. God has a stake in our moral predicament…[T]he power of repentance causes time to be created backward and allows re-creation of the past to take place…Repentance is an absolute, spiritual decision made in truthfulness. Its motivations are remorse for the past and responsibility for the future.

Only in this manner is it possible and valid." ~ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

June 10, 2014

To learn anything, first you must learn to be humble.

December 13, 2014

Shabbat thought: I hate the triteness of Everything happens for a reason. But, if it’s true, there is a corollary I find incredibly powerful: Everything has meaning. I prefer the radical amazement in the active search for meaning in everything over the helpless, passive resignation that I’m merely here while the world unfolds around me.

August 29, 2015

Remember: One of the reasons God put you here is to dream the dreams that only you can dream.

September 11, 2015

Shabbat reflection. One of the authentically Jewish traditions, based on the text of the Torah’s Creation story, is that God created the Universe through spoken Hebrew language. It is a remarkable tradition because there is no sense at all in the story that language needed to be, or was, created before God spoke the words Let there be light. Yet the story tells us also that nothing existed before God created the Universe, except for God, who is before and after all things. If God Himself alone pre-dated all Creation, and language also pre-dated all Creation, then language is divine. The conclusion is at once, obvious. If God is the ultimate Creator, then language is just a little less so. Language creates things that are inexorably human: language creates joy, language creates laughter, language provokes thoughts, language provokes anger, language gives voice to feelings, language gives voice to fears. Every word we write, or speak, is an act of Creation, aided by God who put language in our mouths. When we write or say something that connects with a person, and that person wonders, How do your words express what I never could? the answer is that language has such a purpose. If we have the power to use it, we should use it as messengers of God should…to give voice to the silent and lift the spirits of those in need. A good writer blessed with insight should never forget that he or she is an agent of the Almighty. Shabbat shalom.

Hope

December 10, 2012

Hope without Love is the embarrassment of solipsism. Love without Hope is the agony of loneliness. Having neither Hope nor Love is to defy life. Hope and Love together is a partnership with the Divine.

December 15, 2012

Learned a valuable lesson this week: When God gives you a gift, and then takes it away, hope for its return should not be placed in the gift itself, but in your trust in God.

February 12, 2013

Reminding all the people that have touched my life that the heart is a muscle. If you don’t exercise it, it will harden and atrophy. Broken hearts can be mended with time because they still work. Atrophied hearts need more than time. They need a conscious connection to a persistent and unrelenting love. It’s not hopeless if you reach that point, but it requires a commitment to being in love more than ever.

January 21, 2015

The phrase Today is the first day of the rest of your life falls into the category of trite cliches I try to avoid. Life is too meaningful and layered to be reduced to aphorism. But today…today is a new day, in the cosmic sense. Hitting the reset button, embracing new challenges, enjoying good health, and having hope. A loving family, a relationship filled with promise, and feeling like someone who walks out onto his patio on a clear summer morning, looks over the sunrise, and sees nothing but beauty and God’s creation unveiled before me. For perhaps the first time – ever – I have nothing bad in my life. Just overwhelming love and anticipation.

July 3, 2015

Shabbat Reflection. It is human nature to rue opportunities lost, to ask what if, to lament our lack of second chances in life. But how true is that really? Are there so many things that we do that can’t be fixed? And if we break something beyond repair, aren’t we, as humans, eminently fixable? This is another lesson from the weekly gift of Shabbat. We rest from creation, from breaking, and also from repairing. But once Shabbat is over, we concentrate on creating and fixing what we’ve broken again. God promises second chances, rebirth, renewal, new opportunities, and even do-overs. Regret comes with life. Despair does not have to. Shabbat shalom.

Love

December 10, 2012

Hope without Love is the embarrassment of solipsism. Love without Hope is the agony of loneliness. Having neither Hope nor Love is to defy life. Hope and Love together is a partnership with the Divine.

February 12, 2013

Reminding all the people that have touched my life that the heart is a muscle. If you don’t exercise it, it will harden and atrophy. Broken hearts can be mended with time because they still work. Atrophied hearts need more than time. They need a conscious connection to a persistent and unrelenting love. It’s not hopeless if you reach that point, but it requires a commitment to being in love more than ever.

September 18, 2015

Shabbat reflection. Needs are complicated. It seems that as living things become more complex, their needs increase. A bacteria may need water and the right temperature. A mouse may need warmth, food and water. But what need has a one-celled organism for forgiveness? What need has an ant for adoration, sensitivity and compassion? That we have needs doesn’t make us any different from any living thing. The scope and depth of our needs, however, are uniquely human. We have needs we struggle to articulate, much less have met. We have needs that are seemingly met by the wrong thing, or person, as often as they are by the healthy thing or true soulmate. Yet, we struggle to differentiate. If the indescribability of needs increases as a living being becomes more complex, then how indescribable to us are the needs of God? But, God also has needs. He needs a partner in His creation. He needs our love and praise (perhaps because He knows prayer is more for our sake than for His, because of His infinite love for us). He needs us to return to Him, soul intact, bearing that gift of a soul that He gave to us, only having lived while here in its body a full life of m’assim tovim, good deeds. We have needs, it is true. But we are also needed, and by the One who loves us most. And in the end, this is not so strange. The mutual connection of needs is strongest when paved with love. Shabbat shalom.

People

December 29, 2012

Realizing day by day that people are fascinatingly complex and unique, and that attempts to meet a person’s needs are doomed to fail before you understand what those complex and unique needs are.

Being

January 12, 2013

We all, beginning in the loathsome emptiness of our existence, create our essence – our self, our being – through the choices we freely make. To avoid choosing is to avoid creating the essence of ourselves, in that we cease to be, or rather never become. To confront the choices we face and avoid them is to abandon our desire to be something more than the nothingness that is bare existence.

January 19, 2013

Reflection on Shabbat. Creation is the process of becoming what God intended. That process happens continuously throughout the universe, but particularly inside of us. While the first Shabbat was for God to reflect on the perfection of his creation, because He gave us free will, he ensured that His creation would continually be undone and done again by us. He gave us Shabbat as a weekly frozen moment in time, a holy moment, to consider how our personal creation has unfolded. Each week, God sets aside the whole world for one purpose – so that we can look back at the choices we’ve made and the person we became this week and say, It was very good. Shabbat Shalom.

February 20, 2013

Compartmentalizing on my mind – appropriately. Compartmentalizing affairs of the mind – ideas, thoughts, problems – is not only necessary, but effective. In math we are taught to isolate variables. In physics, we can solve complex gravitational interactions between two bodies; add a third, and the three body problem becomes hopelessly complex. The best we can do when we have too many things going on at once analytically is to approximate based on models and assumptions. And biologically, the brain is wired to compartmentalize. Different lobes have