When you are triggered, activated, contracted, reckoning with life, feeling pain, or experiencing challenges:

It's not proof that the "work isn't working." It's not proof you're broken. It's not your signal to despair that you are "back there again".

It's proof you're Alive.

It's proof that the creator and the body you were given trusts you enough to show you where love still wants to land.

Every trigger is an invitation. An opening. A portal into deeper safety, deeper self-love, deeper freedom.

You don't need to fix it. You don't need to shame yourself for it. You get to choose to meet it. To breathe with it. To whisper: "I see you." You get another chance to love yourself.

Because that's what healing actually is. Not the absence of reaction - Not "regulation all the time" but the presence of awareness in the middle of it all. And the choice to love, forgive, feel, receive, see God, in all of it.

So when that fire rises inside you, when your chest tightens, When your body contracts or freezes, when you feel that old ache come online again You can choose to celebrate by greeting it.

You're being handed another piece of yourself to hold with love. You're being invited to create a new story in real time. You're being asked to practice love instead of preach it.

That's not failure. That's mastery. That's expansion WITH the discomfort Thats Being With. That's self Love.

This is the work. And it's working.

Because you are choosing to work it... Every single moment of every single day.

You are choosing a life of walking with God of new perspectives Of showing and not telling your body it's safe now... not despite challenges and your own and other's humanity... But in spite of it all.

We are gifted so many chances to rise and meet the infinite well of courage and love and presence and faith inside of ourselves over and over and over again.

It's in the fire of transformation That you find God And the piece of God in you over and over and over again

And for that, and an infinite amount more I have the deepest reverence for your soul

When I was in the second grade I asked my teacher in school,

What is the meaning of life?

(Existential much?) ;)

The teacher told me "the meaning of life is to work hard" (yep!)

Something about that did not land in my body, heart and soul, and I spent the next 10 years searching.

I read every book I can get my hands on, both Jewish, psychological, spiritual. When the children my age took out fantasy books, cool comic books, I learned Torah and psychlogy. I asked questions.

Some adults brushed me off

Some told me

"You will understand when you are older"

I even found myself met with some existential dread from teachers and older people. They didn't express it to me but I saw it in their eyes, in the ways they lived and didn’t live, and in their evasion of my question.

And then one day I found the answer. I was studying and learned this Hebrew Passuk:

אחַת שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת ה' אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ: שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית ה' כָּל יְמֵי חַיַּי לְחזוֹת בְּנֹעַם ה' וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ.

One thing I ask of Hashem (God): That I may dwell in the house of Hashem all the days of my life, to behold the beauty Hashem's light and to bask in the glory of his sanctuary".

It landed deep in my being. To bask in the Glory of God's light. To deeply behold the beauty of the Omnipresent.

And so I've walked with this ever since.

I'm so grateful for my inner little girl.

She's been through it and she also taught me and brought me so much.

This post is about that space. What it means to me to truly walk with Hashem not with the illusion of perfection, but with the human that I am.