New commitment

I use to think that I was getting somewhere or more precisely that I was getting there, whatever what that where was. Now I think I'm already there just trying to be better everyday. There's nowhere else to be than now. What matters is how you act, how you talk, how you think today. Conscious of the transcendent presence of the present.

In this period of time, we are counting the Omer during 49th days. we are at 25th day. Each week is a reflection of the 7 sephirot in relation with each other. First weeks was about the 3 primary "internal emotions":  Chesed: love , Gevurah: discipline and their synthesis in the middle, Tiferet or harmony.
The weeks we are in now are in relation to the outer emotions also divided in three: Netzah which is confidence and perseverance, Hod: humility and devotion and the unifying agent: relationship and intimacy. 
Today is day 25 so its Netzah of Netzah: endurance in compassion. Do I have endurance within my commitment? And the proposed exercise for the day by Rabbi Jacobson: Commit yourself in developing a new good habit.

"Learn to speak properly, but also learn to listen, and listen deeply. The greatest gift we can give another is to listen to them and allow them to be".
From the Garden of Paradox, Dovber Pinson.
  
That's my aim to be a good listener, to take out my self and my own ego off the conversation and to be there for the person sharing his/her thoughts with me. Also, I decided to delete all the bad words of my speech. It is like spitting toxic out of my mouth. 
Nowadays, somehow just saying F...in a sentence makes anything automatically cool...for some reason.  
It says a lot of the state of the world we live in today.

That's my new commitment: good listener and good speaker

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Belief

In the beginning of the MBRTRB project, I thought of creating a line of streetwear dedicated to good vibes, dance, djs and house music. I wanted to take the t-shirt as a canvas to send positive messages into this world on walking bilboard sort to speak. Then it moved to a creative outlet on instagram mainly but also Twitter, Facebook and Soundcloud. I had a value dilemna. Why put another t-shirt line on the market, did the world really needed another clothing line when I knew all the waste from fast fashion and fashion itself. The idea now is to take recycled t-shirt or t-shirt coming from a social cause like the ones from Project Pieta, projectpieta.com . The t-shirts have to carry something as well, not just be eco-conscious but also social conscious. The vessel and the source have to be in harmony. One nourishing the other.

In kabbalah, it is understood that everything has a vessel and an essence. The words and their meaning, our body and our soul, our eyes and our view, the sun and the light etc. My t-shirts and the messages. 

Also I want to add new messages. More in tune with where I am now. 

I started to buy almost only vintage clothes. It started as an obligation due to budget restrictions but it moved now to a new habit and challenge. I always loved mixing anyway. I"m a mix myself , part Slovaque, part Palestinian, par French canadian, par Scottish, Jewsih.

I always believed in inclusion and not exclusion.

3 months since my love was deported. Missing him everyday.

The definition of self is fluid

Alcohol was never an issue for me. I never liked to drink. I must have been the only coke head who didn't drink. I had water. Never liked the feeling of being drunk, the losing control part. On coke I was under control apart from being controlled by the coke itself. I loved being stoned. All of it. The buying, the making the lines, the sniffing, the going out. Everything. I wanted to feel like I had been smashed by a train That was the extent of my addiction. Prior to my years on coke I spent 4 years being stoned on LSD. I stopped everything without help cold turkey at 30 years old. So I claimed. One day it was there and the following day it was gone. Or almost gone. Once in a while I would indulge myself again. Until my first daughter was 2 and half years old. Then it was mainly gone for good. But always there still, undercover, in the back. Then when I left my husband it came back. Not as much, not as strong, but coke made its entry again maybe twice a year and weed. I never was a smoker but it replaced the coke. It made its way in my life every day. At one point from morning to night. Someone asked me when I started smoking pot I answered when I stopped taking coke. I was rationalizing my smoking. I don't take anti-

depressant, it is my prozac but natural. It is a plant after all and they're thinking of legalizing it anyway. It was also part of the ritual I had with my love. We use to smoke together. It was something we shared. Smoking. With his departure I stopped. It's been 3 months. And I'm not planning to go back. I don't want to take anything that alters my mind even non addictive. But it's a fight. I have in the back of my head. Only once what could be bad...You can do it this time and then stop for a few months again. I have to tell myself.Whenever I feel tempted what is it gonna bring you, what is it gonna add to your day. You gonna be stoned so what. Breath in breath out. I can't go back if I truly want to move forward it can't be part of my life anymore. It has to be a thing of the past. 
I want to live my life without any artificial substance. I want to face it with a clear head with all my senses intact. 
Today I went to a NA meeting with a friend. I took a 3 month chip. people came to me saying that I was an inspiration and that they saw some good things in the future for me. I was always shy to sharre thinking it was a personal thing. Between me and me. But it made me realize that it is selfish not to share. If I can be an inspiration for someone to help him out of this terrible situation that is addiction. I have to get out of myself and share. I remember going to meetings the first time with my friend. Stoned on weed. Thinking it wasn"t for me. I stopped without meetings. Until I came to the conclusion that I was still an addict to the point now of picking up a chip. 
I've come a long way baby.
The definition of self is fluid

Physical and spiritual cleaning

When I was a child my dad use to call me Miss Contrary and I think that title still suits me. All my life I've been going against the stream. It's in my nature. I've been surfin on my own waves, on my own mind. I remember as a teenager, I wanted to deconstruct myself to reconstruct it the way I wanted to be. It was a conscious will. My mom left the house.  When I was 15 years old. Really left. To live her life. She said it was either that or madness. Without a mom and having no relationship with my dad, apart from our fights and his screams, I had no attachments. I could create a new self. Or begin my way of creating a new self. I use to think that I was raised by 2 mentally unstable and dysfunctional parents. We were neglected privileged kids. My rebellion started at 17 years old, but my true downfall began when I left my boyfriend after 6 years together at 23 years old. I knew if i left him, i would fall down the rabbit hole with no one to catch me. I knew also that the fall was necessary, essential. I had to go to the end of it. And to the end I went. I knew I was speeding toward a brick wall but I didn't care. I was going to crash, eyes wide open. The only thing that was keeping me alive was my desire to have a child, a girl. My dream child like a friend was calling her before she was even conceived. Once I fainted on the dance floor of a club so stoned by all the drugs I had taken. When I woke up the friend with who I was told me that he thought i was dead. I answered how can I be dead I didn't have my child yet. I was going to have a child and it will be a girl. Today I have 2 daughters. To be a mother was the only thing that kept me alive during those years. Everything else was a slow conscious suicide, a conscious self destruction. I felt like a stranger on a strange land. Disconnected. No relation with the humans around me. I was thinking: we're not from the same species, we don't talk the same language. We can't communicate. I liked to be on drugs, accrochée aux étoiles, flying in space, no desire to be on the ground.  I claimed I was a black hole, no limits. Completely stable, no bad trips. Without law, without morality. I was so arrogant. G-d was my only confident. It was him that I was meeting on the dance floor. My sole companion. Detached. You can touch my body but you won't have my soul. 
This year, 25 years later, I learned to be humble. For a while, I felt as though I was doing time. Maybe it's all the documentary I watched on prisoners and prisons. When you do time, you're forced to be patient, you need to work on certain areas in your life in order to move out from the place you're in. Furthermore, there's certain things you can't do because if you do them, you go back in time, moving backward instead of forward. I finished my time and I have changed. Instead of looking for people that holds me back I'm looking for people that will take me higher. I began a conversation with a disciple of one of the rabbi I'm following and we became friend. I'm still watching my favorite rabbis' videos. They helped me go through all the changes I had to deal with last year. Without them I wouldn't have been able to make it. They were and they are my guides. Their teachings are at the core of my evolution. They gave me and they give me comfort and soothing at the times I needed it the most and at all times. Whenever I feel my level of stress is to high I put on a video. I use to listen to deep house almost 7 days a week all day long. I hardly listen to music anymore and If I do I put hebrew music or kabbalistic music. The idea is to lower the level of tension to the maximum. I need peace and quietness. I seek for silence when I couldn't bare silence before. 
Cleaning cleaning cleaning. Physical cleaning and spiritual cleaning. We are right before Pessah. Which is about cleaning our soul and getting rid of the ego. I want to enter Pessah this year, with a clean soul and clean mind and a clean body. 

The creation of the new or how to let go of the old

that is his tshirt ≤3

A lot have happened lately. Yet again, not only another beginning but a true new beginning
My love have been deported to his country. It was a shock. Although I've been praying for him to go back. His situation was in a dead end. There is no future for an illegal immigrant. Lots of worries. I was praying for him to leave because that was the only way to end this relationship that didn't make sense for any of us. Even if we loved or love each other. I have a tendency to live in the absolute. It is not always good. Life is here on earth and the earth has material demands that the absolute only can"t fulfill. So now that he is gone, I sleep early, wake up early, go to work, take care of my children. I never thought teenagers needed their mom so much. How did I do it without a mom by my side. (I didn't do very well...It was total chaos.)
I stopped everything cigarettes, weed. I don't drink, i eat healthy, I have a small routine exercise that I do every morning. I live a good and simple life. I look rested. For some people it is easy to walk the line, for me, it is always a fight. I have to force myself to be disciplined, to stay on the right track. Every day it takes discipline and effort. But one day It will become second nature. First we have to refrain, second engage into new positive habits. I apply for volunteering. Set up a charity box in my house. 
For once in my life, I live according to my means. Which is enormous. Funny how I make a third of what I use to make and I don't borrow money anymore. I cut everywhere the unnecessary. I buy my clothes in thrift store which is the future. I'm thinking of a way to do the same with MBRTRB. 
The members are going up on instagram and I haven't given up on it just yet. Eventually the way will appear to me.

The idea is to see ourselves as a perfect human being. Which we are. Our soul is. Perfect. Better to aim at a perfect self than at an imperfect being. Better aim high than low. Instead of thinking I'm not good or I cant do this or be that etc., repeating and conveying what we heard people say about us, parents, teachers, family, peers, whoever, we have to think outside of that exterior knowledge of who we are. We have to get rid of the image of how we view ourselves and begin to construct a new self free of those external judgments. Why not change angle? Get out of our comfort zone and redefine ourselves.
Instead of saying I'm a disaster when it comes to finance, think I always manage my budget. Dare to think outside of our own definition of who we are. That is, if you want to move forward. It is strange how we become attached to the way we are, stuck in the status quo. Often we have to be forced to change. Because change doesn't come easy. It is a painful and scary state. There is this unsettling moment where we find ourselves in a no man's land, leaving the shore but not yet at our destination, facing the unknown, leaving the security of what we knew until then. Reassessing our needs and our wants and readjusting our trajectory to something different from what we were accustomed until then. Not denying the past but creating a new definition of who we are. 

 "Following the light of the sun, we left the old world". Christopher Columbus. 

The term G-d is not used in Kabbalah, but Eternal Light. So that's what I did, forced out of my old world: my job, my apartment and lastly with the departure of my love, I followed the Light and asked for His guidance on this new journey. And Blessed be he, I made it thanks to Him. 

That's all I can say: B'H' I made it, I made it. I made it through the other side and the transformation is almost complete. I can clearly claim I'm not the same. I have changed for the better. I am a new woman. 

Breaks and Pause and Balance and Reaassement

Life is made of pause and movement. Of shadow and light. I've been in the shadow for a while. Had to pause myself. Reassessment. I was also stuck. Voluntarily stuck. I guess I didn't want to rush anything. I wanted to take it slowly. I thought it will unfold by itself. I guess putting my faith in the hands of God. Asking him for an answer. Waiting patiently. I will see it when times comes. I always thought from a very long time, always, that things happens this way because that's how they were meant to happen because exactly they happened that way. Each moment has a lesson. Each person we meet whoever they are, taxi driver, cashier, coworkers, people on the street, has something to teach us. Life is a learning journey. From this moment to this moment, from now to now, one step at the time. I use to be in rush. Explosive, wild, without laws but my own. I'm different now. Last year taught me modesty and discretion and humility. I stopped biting my nails which is a never seen before. And I'm thinking why not me? Why do I think it can't be for me...why not? What stopping me, the risk of failure, so what. We create our own limitations. We are so much in it that we don't see it anymore. It becomes part of our personality and ultimately our life. So all that to say going back to MBRTRB with a new collaborator, a young woman who studied in communication in France. She will help me with marketing. 
Before I use to think if I stop believing in it who will...and I think I stopped for a while believing in the infinite possibility of life
Be my own sunshine
Until next time, keep it real
Peace and love always