The 4-Step Process to Heal Emotional Triggers & Find Inner Peace with Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

What we believe in mistakenly is that we are lacking something, that we are not whole. We mistakenly identify ourselves as bodies, personalities, beliefs, nations, worlds, planets. That’s not who we are. And chances are pretty good, 99% that the more comedy I find, more healing I find between the adult and the child within me, the more I will see it outside because I emanated subconsciously, energetically towards the people around me without even meaning to.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical epitherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Today’s guest is Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan. He’s author of the book, Mabat Ahmed, which translates roughly into a true look or honest self-reflection. And his work explores something we often wrestle with, how difficult it is to see ourselves clearly. And he draws from Kabbalisticwisdom. And in his past, he’s also yogi, practice yoga, and he combines the Kabbalisticwisdom with insights that overlap with also modern psychology. Rabbi Elimelech writes about self-awareness, emotional patterns, and the ways our minds can subtly distort reality to try to protect our ego, but that’s where our suffering comes. His work invites readers to step back, look inward with honesty and compassion, and develop the kind of clarity that leads to personal growth. Rabbi Elimelech, welcome to the show.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Lorne Brown 

Now, we had an opportunity to chat, and I want to thank Ellie Reck for introducing us. For those that haven’t heard, Ellie Recht’s done a couple webinars with me. He’s a psychotherapist, self-realized, and he thought me and Elimelech would connect, and would do well. And so you were gracious enough to have a nice, probably a one-hour What’s Up call with me. I got your book, and I was like, “You got a lot to share here. I want to talk to you more about your philosophy and the process work that you share because so many people are struggling and suffering and your process seems similar to some of the things I’ve come across and I wanted to learn more about it. ” First, I want my audience to learn about you. Where did you grow up? How did you grow up to come to where you are today as a rabbi who’s written a book with that Kabalistic wisdom?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Okay. I was born in Israel. My parents both from Germany came before the war, they managed to escape. And my great-grandparents were of course lost in the Holocaust. And I grew up in Israel. At the age of seven, we went to the States to live there for hopefully a short time. And it turned out to be 12 years where I grew up and learned, and I continued all my studies there. The family was religious more or less, but as I grew up and I asked and I looked for truth, I felt that the Jewish religion didn’t give me the depth that I needed to really come to terms with reality. It seemed a bit too superficial. So as I was doing my BA in Yeshiva University, I started looking into the Eastern studies of Zen, Buddhism, yoga, whatever, and it really thrilled me. And I slowly shifted away from the religious part of Judaism.

And when I came back to Israel, I joined the Army and in the Army because of my background and the fact that after a few years, I rediscovered the depth of Judaism, especially through Kabala and Hasidisen. I was also asked to be a rabbi in an Air Force base, not too far from here for a few years. This is after being in computer programming. This is in the ’60s. After having served as a rabbi in that Air Force base, I needed to deepen my studies in Torah, even more so than I got in childhood. So I studied at Cole. Correla is like, well, people learned or that’s their full-time occupation. And we moved to Netivot in the South where we had 10 kids and all of whom are married with kids of their own today, except for one. And as I learned more, I also taught at Torah, and I also taught Hasidut and other subjects in Judaism.

I started helping people. I got a few … I became a psychotherapist in kinesiology and one brain therapy, and that led to this thought and transactional analysis a bit here, a bit there, and several other methods of connecting with people and helping them along. But through the Jewish values that I received, and that became, over the years, my method of helping myself for most and other people as well, to reconnect with the divine essence within. And that reconnection was something that was lacking because in the Eastern studies that I had, there wasn’t a deep understanding of the problems that we face in everyday life. There was beautiful divine connection in the books that I read, but to overcome the everyday problems that we all face as human beings on this earth, in this present inclination, there wasn’t that material that I managed to glean from Tour because Toa was giving to the Jews to be given to the whole world in terms of the light that emanates.

But we have to overcome our ego images, our self images, our egos in order to really be open enough to let the divine light come through to everyone else, to the whole world, which is what everybody’s doing. You’re doing it and Ireti is doing it. Everybody’s doing it. But for me, the moment that I stood and I went to the Cotela Magabi, the Western Wall with my yoga master after having with Steve, the personal mantra, I was a yoga instructor in those days.

Lorne Brown 

That’s when you’re into Eastern philosophy because you had a yoga master.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Yeah. But even later on, when I was already in Israel and in the army without religion, I became a yoga instructor as well. And my instructor came from Canada and gave a seminar in Jerusalem. And we went among other places to meditate near the western wall. And this was Shabbat in the afternoon. And I showed him, and I showed him how to put the kippah, the yamaka on his head, and where to stand or to sit actually in the internal roofed part next to the wall. And as he was sitting down to meditate and I proposed to sit next to him, the congregation began praying the usual Shabbat afternoon prayer, and all of a sudden I joined them out of nowhere. It came from my childhood and my years in high school, et cetera. And I shut my eyes and I said that whole prayer word for word, and I knew where to kneel, where to stand straight.

And by the time I finished, my whole face was wet with its tears because something moved me very, very deeply. It was like coming home and everybody had already finished praying and they were all standing, staring at me because I was dressed like a yogi in a sense and it was awkward, but that’s when I finally … Oh, that’s when the revolution or the evolution became more consistent with what I had inside me. And from then on, I could go back to those books that I’ve read, write from the galva detail to autobiography of a yogi and all the great from here to eternity and all these great guys, I could read them with the eyes of the Kabbalah and Hasitu that I’ve learned and all of a sudden became clear to me to such a degree that I could use it in everyday life. And it wasn’t just an academic achievement for me.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for sharing that. And I wanted to have you with that lens of the Kabbalistic lens that you have. But also I remember when we chatted before, but had forgotten and been reminded now that you practice yoga and you were really into the Eastern ways. And it’s interesting how you’ve come back home and now you’re a rabbi and you’ve written a book on this topic. I want to pull out things that I read in the book that I see in other cultures and love to hear your take on it. But one of the things in your book you’re talking about, you can’t change … So our audience who are listening already have a pretty good awareness about having these subconscious programs. We kind of can run on autopilot and run these programs and two things. One is they’re starting to learn that void that’s inside, they can’t fill it outside.

There’s not enough money, there’s no relationship, there’s no amount of power, there’s nothing outside of yourself that can fill that void, maybe temporary, but not permanently. And the other aspect is that you can’t think your way through this. You can’t change your thoughts by sheer willpower. And I’d like you to talk about how you’ve come to this place of its inner work. And when you do the inner work, the external world may or may not change, but it’s all about this inner work and this self-inquiry, this honest self-reflection.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

The section of the Torah that we will be reading this Shabbat talks about the builders of the Mishkan who had to have an attribute, which was translating into wisdom of the heart. That means that whatever wisdom we have in our minds, in our brains actually would not be put into action until we internalize it into our ha, which is where our feelings are. So to be able to internalize our understanding, our thoughts, we have to have that capacity in our hearts to accept them because initially there’s antagonism. We don’t want to learn about the truth. We want to survive within our present ego images. And survival means putting off whatever threatens this self-image that we have. So to become wise, the Torah says, we have to void ourselves to some degree, at least, in our hearts from the beliefs that we’ve had previously about ourselves, about life and everything else.

Now, that is not necessarily Jewish. That is accepted in all the wisdoms that we’re familiar with. What I feel that I received even more through Kabbalah is the fact that to build this tabernacle, the mishkan, we have to maintain the relationships between the different parts of the mishkan. The different parts of the human being are depicted within the model of the Mishkan. And for example, the Menoah, that was in the Mishkan, stands for that light that we want to receive and bring out, and it has seven candles, and each candle stands for one day. Now, one candle does not get extinguished at all, even though all of them are filled only to burn for the night. One of them continues to burn miraculously all the time. This is what is explained in our sage’s explanation of the Mishkan. That seventh candle stands for the Shabbat.

The Shabbat being the greatest present that Jewish people brought to the world, which is one day of rest, which initially was completely foreign to the human daily thought and affair. And that daily rest became known as the Shabbat, not because people stopped working physically, but because in depth, Judaism explains that creating is something that we can do along with God by deceit, but by not creating anything as we would do normally. For example, to put on a light that takes no effort, but that is already a form of human creation, which gives us the feeling that we are someone important. It could be Edison, but it could also be a very simple person. I put on the light,

I did what I wanted. So the Torah explains the idea of being wise enough to internalize what God’s trying to teach the whole world through us is to allow our desires to be his desires. Now, normally, I learned in guru yoga, for example, way back then when I was into yoga, that a person should put his personal desires aside and be subservient to his master in order to realize that his ego was standing in the way of the truth and of the light emanating from God and manifesting in ourselves. I didn’t have a guru of my own. I didn’t have someone to be worshiped, and I felt a bit odd and weird by worshiping someone human. So when the Shabbat comes along and I’m not worshiping anyone human, but I’m worshiping that desire, which is not me, which is expressed within Toa, and I do it sometimes unwillingly.

I don’t necessarily enjoy the observation of all the mitzvah of the commandment, not necessarily. Usually I do. It’s fun, it’s great, but not always. But the fact that it’s not my desire, it’s his desire, means that my heart is now not occupied with my needs and my desires. I’m letting his desire be master guru, let’s call him, and everyone, he’s the same master guru for everyone of all creeds and all nations. I’m letting his desire go through my heart. And then the ideas that I learned way back in Zain and Guddism and especially Natowa are unable to be accepted in my heart and the feelings that I’ve had previously slowly changed to something more positive. And I just want to add one more segue. This sounds very hard, but actually it all comes down to relationships between ourselves and our wives, our siblings, people, because the more love you’ve for yourself, knowing that you are part of God and an intrinsic part of divinity is who we are.

Our egos are just an imagination, our personal imaginations. We should respect them, but they’re not us. And this is what Torah teaches in Kabbalah as well as the other wisdoms, I suppose. And when we realize that more and more, then we become more loving to people around us, more accepting, more open to hear different opinions. And anything that has rife and law and something like that is something that can be tolerated, but it gives us a bad vibe like today’s bombings, for example, but it’s part of life and we accept it because we know in deep, deep down inside, and we all know it inside, whether we are aware of it or not, that there’s only one truth. The Torah says, “And old .” There is nothing else except for him, him being God, and we are the manifestation of God, all of us.

Lorne Brown 

So can I unpack that a little bit? Because from our listeners and the guests we’ve had, it sounds like this is aligned with, you’re using the word God, which can trigger so many people because they’ve had such a bad experience growing up with religion or the wars with religion. So I want to just play with some of the terms here because you said it’s all the same thing, just a different name, consciousness, divine love, universal energy, you’re calling it God. But so many of the physicists and scientists and clinicians that we’ve had here, more and more of the research is going that everything is consciousness and we are a manifestation of consciousness. So it’s actually, there’s no conflict with what you’re saying, just except for there are people that are triggered by God, the word God. So I’ll call it consciousness for a moment so they can breathe and receive.

And that what so many of them have shared is that consciousness wants to manifest through you. And this is part of your role is to connect to that aspect of yourself, that divinity. And that’s where I want to go into your book is, how do we access that part? Because we have ego. Some people will say, I’ll use the word, God told me I have to kill this person. So in my last guess, we talked about saying that’s not how it works. So how do people know when they’re hearing divinity? How do they access definity? And I’ll add some metaphors here more and more, it’s like we have all this noise. We have thoughts and beliefs, we have anger, frustration, strong desires. All this is noise inside our system. And so there is this signal called like the radio. When the radio has a lot of static, that’s our noise.

There’s somebody talking or there’s a song on, you can tell somebody’s talking and there’s a song, but you cannot make it out because there’s so much noise. We don’t need to tell them to talk louder. We just need to reduce the noise. I call the noise resistance when you have resistance in the system. And my approach and notice acceptions, again, to lower the resistance is to accept, go inside and accept. And you started talking about these feelings, these desires. I’m going in there and I heard you say something about accepting, like accepting these parts. So I want to go from pie in the sky like theory here now, and I want to talk about practical application because at the end of the day, I think most people want peace. I enjoyed your book because I think it gives us some processes to fill that peace and joy.

And my experience is it’s not because you got more money, the relationship or a new job, it’s because you’re tapping into something. It’s hard to explain. You’re tapping into something else. And the way you described the tears you had while you were praying at the Kotel at the wall is you just fully surrendered and tapped into something and you had that experience. Other people talk about Kundalini awakening. Other people on my thing talk about where they pop or all of a sudden they’re experiencing this and it’s bliss and love and peace and light, and then it goes away, but now they’re in search of, how do I get to that again? I think your book gives us a bit of a roadmap to that.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Yes. And I thank you for bringing me down to earth a bit more and trying to be more practical because that’s the essence of the book. It’s the Mabatamed, which translates into truthful self scrutiny is a four-step process. The first of which is to notice the negative feeling that one is having, negative emotion that the one is having at some point, and we all have it every day here and there. It doesn’t matter the intensity, whether it’s high 10 or low one or anything in between. Our sages say that whenever we have something irritating us to any degree, it’s a lesson from consciousness … From the universal consciousness, God, if you will.

It doesn’t matter. It’s from that higher truth. Whenever we are irritated by something, whenever we are afraid, angry, upset, worried, whatever it is at any level, there is some belief inside that is causing us this feeling. So the first step is to notice what we are feeling. And I’m not talking about love and happiness, that’s no problem. May we all be always in a positive form of love or happiness and joy? That’s not where we begin. We begin with whatever makes us irritated. It can be in a quarrel. It can be a red light when you’re pressed for time. And when you notice it, you say, “What am I feeling now?” So for example, as we are speaking together now, I say to them and I ask myself, “Hey, notice what you’re feeling now.” And the answer is I feel a bit of stress.

Okay, what is stress? Another word for stress is some fear. Okay, so I’m talking about some fear. So that’s step one. It’s very simple. Most people don’t, what it’s called today, emotional intelligence. So many people have it, especially.

Lorne Brown 

We’ve talked about this before, Ali Malak, and I want to bring this in because, and for my listeners, as they know, I have my notice of exceptions again because one day was just like a hallelujah in my head. I didn’t know it. And then I knew it became obvious that all these great teachings, I could share that they all have, some have four steps like yours, some have 10 steps, some have two. And I say, I think most people, this process is to accept choose again. So you said, notice your emotions. And so that’s the first step, notice because you’re making the unconscious conscious. The idea is notice everything is neutral, the red light, and then we give it meaning. We’re meaning makers. And the meaning we give it is through the lens of our subconscious program, these beliefs. When you believe in the story, the movie, you’re at the effect of it, you suffer.

So the first thing is to just notice you’re triggered. Don’t judge it, don’t analyze it, notice it. That’s what I think you just said as well.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

To a large degree, yes, but not exactly. The trigger is some belief that we have within us that we haven’t come to it. That’s the second step. The first step is easier to notice because it’s complete, it’s truthful and it’s real for every person, and that is the emotion.

Lorne Brown

Yeah

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Noticeable.You can’t argue with an emotion. It’s either a person says, “I’m afraid, I’m sad.” You can’t say, “No, you’re not sad,” even though you might want to say that. So because that is the easier and more sincere reflection of our daily life, that would be the doorway to that trigger that you mentioned previously, which is the second step. Number two is discovering that trigger, which I call the external axis.

Lorne Brown 

So discover the trigger. And you said you call it the external axis?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Axis, yes. Axis, why it comes from an idea of one of us ages that thoughts roll around in our head in circles and the faster they go, the more immediate and aware they become. But the deeper thoughts, the more subconscious or thoughts barely move and are there inside like a wheel. So the axis of the wheel, that would be where the thoughts are lying dormant, not dormant, they’re active, but they don’t move way back from age zero or perhaps previous incarnation.

Lorne Brown 

You subscribe to the intergenerational, because there’s research on this that some of the people use the term traumas inside your tissues. I love Buddhism. Your issues are stuck in your tissues, Chinese medicine, emotion, energy, emotion, stuck energy. But you’re accepting of the idea that you can come into the world with this already inside of you, these programs because of other generations.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Yes. And not just generations, your own previous incarnations as

Lorne Brown 

Well.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

I will. And that’s part of the whole plan to work through your karma, which in Hebrew would be called meaning … Well, it doesn’t matter. I can’t translate change for now. And by going through that karma, understanding it and letting it dissipate through understanding and acceptance, you reach who you are. Once again, common to all wise paths. Now, to discover this trigger is not simple because the first thoughts that come up are usually the ones that are foremost, but not necessarily the true reasons, the triggers that make us feel sad, angry, ate for whatever it is. So the method that I propose in my book and what I do every day is to accept every thought that comes up and ask, so why does it make you stressed? For example, I gave myself as an example of being stressed a bit at this moment, and the question for discovering my external access, it’s called external because it has to do with the world around me.

What makes me stressed? So the answer would normally be, you can guess what it is. What’s the answer?

Lorne Brown 

Well, I would say for you, bombs in the sky. Yeah. Really?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Come in my moment, and we’d get the alert and that, and we’d have to snap this conversation. So that would be the obvious answer, but that’s not the trigger for my stress. Why? Because it’s a thought, as you mentioned before, and as a thought, it doesn’t necessarily cause a threat. There’s some underlying thought or belief that must cause the threat, which brings up the feeling of stress, whether it’s high stress or loss, it doesn’t matter. So I asked myself, so if the alert goes on, what’s stressful about it? Why are you stressed? And I’m not arguing with myself. I’m trying to discover the underlying belief. So the underlying belief is we would have to stop this interview. And then the question is, if we stop this interview, why are they stressed? Okay, so we start, what’s the problem? Well, if we stop the interview, then the things that I want to say would not be said.

And the audience, the people out there or listening might become dissatisfied. And that’s not the answer either because each time I ask, “Okay, so why does that stress me? ” I always go back to the initial emotion, which was the most obvious. And the final answer, I’ll make a long story short, is that if people are dissatisfied with what we are discussing or what we are putting forward, that means, this is where the interpretation, the personal interpretation comes into play. That means that they don’t like me, they don’t want me, they don’t want to listen anymore. And that’s not the answer either. So if that’s the case, why does it stress me out? And the answer is because that means that there’s something wrong with me because people think badly of me. Okay? So the internal axis always comes out to some self-deprecation, self-devaluation.

Lorne Brown

So that’s why I love your work because I was like, yes, I just see this pattern. It’s just a pattern. It’s not like it’s fixed that it has to be this way. It’s just a pattern I like watching. What I wanted to highlight here though is in my practice, we’re never upset for the reason we think this idea. And so when we distill it down, people come in, it’s a relationship issue, it’s a job issue, it’s a money issue, it’s a financial issue. If I didn’t say that already, not having a baby issue. When we do the work, and this is training as clinical hypnosis and we regress, you just did it because of this, be this. And then at the very end where everybody has something in common, it’s that shame. It’s that guilt. Shame. There’s something inherently wrong with me. Guilt. I did something wrong.

I’m unlovable. I’m not enough. So I have people that can hardly pay their bills that I see. And I have people that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars that I see. It all comes back down to, I’m not enough. So where does that come from? From your cabalistic study, why is it that it seems like collectively there’s this inherent shame and guilt and not belonging, not enough? What’s the spiritual understanding of this? I understand it exists, so I just work on it. I don’t have that kind of pay grade where I know why this is the case. I just know it’s something I notice and we use the tools to bring the noise down to clean it up, transform it. But I’m curious, is there a purpose behind this? Because it seems to be there.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Of course. We are all, in essence, one. We’re part of divinity, part of reality, part of universal consciousness. We are all good and we all know deep inside. The problem is that we believe our self-image to be something separate, something that needs to be attended to from day one. And therefore there is a constant contradiction between what we all truly know deep deep in our subconscious or superconscious and what we believe in in our thoughts from day one or previous generations or reincarnations. That friction between the deep down truth that we all know and the manifested self-image that we think mistakenly is us, that friction causes pain. That pain, it’s an existential pain. Therefore, in my book, I call there are three intelligences. One is the IQ, intelligence quotients. The second is emotional quotient. That was the first step in Mabatamed. And now we are talking about what I call the belief quotient.

How do I discover what I believe in? And the answer is to have negative feelings. So what we believe in mistakenly is that we are lacking something, that we’re not whole because we don’t identify ourselves with who we really are. We’re part of the wholeness of God, of the unconsciousness, of awareness. We mistakenly identify ourselves as bodies, personalities, thoughts, beliefs, nations, worlds, planets. That’s not who we are. So because of this disparity between the true knowledge we all have inside superconsciously and the manifested knowledge that we have, we all come down to the name to the same position that we mentioned before that you-

Lorne Brown

Not enough. Shame. Something is wrong with me.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Yeah. Something is wrong with me. And it has many versions like I’m zero or I’m fragmented, but it all comes down to a negative self-awareness or self-evaluation. And negative self, negative meaning I’m not part of the whole. Obviously, healing would be just the opposite to internalize that we are in essence whole. Whether or not we make mistakes outwardly, okay, that’s something we have to deal with that has to do with changing the modes of life and repenting, whatever it is. But it’s on the outward shell of our existence. The inner shell is what really heals us, which is re-identifying ourselves with who we really are. And I haven’t come to it yet, but that’s the fourth stage.

Lorne Brown 

Wait, but I want to see if I missed a third. The first was notice, the negative emotion. Two is to discover the trigger.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

External. I call it external access. What the-

Lorne Brown :

External access. Okay. Yeah.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

If people thought badly of me, that means that there’s something wrong with

Lorne Brown 

Me. But is that part three then or what’s part three?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

We haven’t come to it yet.

Lorne Brown

Oh, okay. I haven’t missed it.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

I just want to say one more thing in part two. As children, we accepted very innocently, without thinking twice that when our parents said something negative or our teachers or siblings or whatever, then it must be true because they are the grownup.

Lorne Brown

And also I’ve been told that because of how our brain develops, we’re more in a theta brain wave, so we don’t have our prefrontal cortex. So we’re sponges and we just take it as facts. So sarcasm’s not very good for young children under 12 because they take it as truth. You’re not pretty, you’re not very good at this, you’re not smart enough. They believe that. It becomes their program.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Kamala says that until the age of 13, a child is not grown up enough to really understand that he has a choice between good and bad. Everything hearings is growth is something that he automatically internalizes believing that it’s true. This is Kabulah. Yeah.

Lorne Brown

And we see this in, they call it ACE, adverse child events, how this affects their health growing up. And children of divorce, young children, just the way they are, they take it personally. Somehow it’s my fault. I need to make my parents whole. I need to make them whole. I got it. So we see all this stuff. So between that young age to 13 from Kabbalah, there’s that. And then in neuroscience, they say zero to somewhere around 12, so they’re close to what Kola said about the brain and how it’s developing. So continue, please. This is really interesting. Step two and three.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

That reinforces our understanding of the external axis as the trigger for our negative emotions. When we understand what we just said now about the way we grew up, all of us, so it doesn’t matter whether we are millionaires or poppers, we all come down to the same trigger, which is something is wrong with me or I’m missing in my … Okay. The third phase. So the second phase is pretty unique. The third one is no less unique and perhaps even more difficult to many people because it takes the external axis and worms it around like a mirror. And I’ll give you an example from our discussion. Our external axis was if the bombs come down and I have to leave and our interview is cut off and people will feel dissatisfied and think badly of me, that means that I’m lacking. Something is wrong with me.

Turning that around, turning that as a mirror, that means that what I’m seeing outside of me is actually to be found in my inner dialogue between myself, between me and myself. Because all of us, this Kabbalah, have two conscious parts, which are very similar to some others … One is negative when one … One is a female, one is a male.

Yingyong. Right, exactly. Which sounds very familiar, right? Of course, everybody knows. And these two parts talk to each other. They’re the dialogues. In psychology, like in tears, we call it the adult and the child. And the adult could be very positive, but more often than not, he’s also very negative. The adult, the thinking part of our ego can be very-

Lorne Brown 

Judgmental.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Judgmental, critical, disregarding, not accepting. And the part of us that feels the pain that we mentioned at the beginning, in my case, the stress is the child because children are open in their hearts to feel pain. You recall I talked about being wise, to have that ability within one’s heart to accept the wisdom of building the tabernacle. Children have that. Their hearts are open and they’re also open to pain. And the external axis mirrored inside would sound like this. I feel stressed when I look at myself and I’m critical of myself. And I say, “You didn’t come out good to myself.” I’m talking about, not in terms of our present conversation. In other circumstances, when I look at myself, between myself, in those moments when I’m listening to that inner dialogue and I can hear myself sometimes being self-critical, not because of things that are happening outside, simply in terms of who I am, who do I think I am?

How do I evaluate myself between myself disregarding external circumstances?

Lorne Brown

This is this inner dialogue, this inner chatter that is going on all the time. And when you pay attention to it, you start to realize some of the things you’re saying to yourself. Yes.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

The unique thing here is that you realize that what’s set up the trigger in the external axis is actually an inner dialogue between your adult and your child that has been going on from day one, if not from previous generations and incarnations. This internal dialogue has had to remain subconscious because it threatens that ego, as I explained at the beginning of our conversation. It’s accepting responsibility for ourselves rather than blaming it on others. I can blame the enemy for the bomb. I can blame my neighbors for the noise, but that’s an external expression of self-blame between myself and myself on different occasions over the many years that I’ve been alive. So that means that before I go, that rather than deal with my wife, my kids, my neighbors, the actual beginning of my healing should be to myself between those two parts of me, the negative and the positive side, the ying and the yang, and realizing that I accept the situation without changing it in terms of this is where healing begins in that third step.

I mean, just without doing anything, just understanding it.

Lorne Brown

So here’s my metaphor for you that I heard that I love. So the idea is that what’s in your coffee cup is kind of how this poem goes. And if somebody bumps your arm, what you spill out is not because of what somebody bumped, but it’s what you put in your coffee cup. For example, if you have coffee, what do you spill? Coffee. If you have tea, what do you spill? Tea. If you have water, what do you spill? What you spill out is not from the person bumping your elbow. It’s what you put in your cup. If you spill out shame and hate, it’s because you have shame and hate in your cup, not because it bumps your elbow. If you put out compassion and love when you spill out, it’s because you have compassion and love inside you. So yes, the external event is what caused you to spill, but what you spilled is your accountability responsibility.

No blame again. It either came karmically, like you said, past lives intergenerationally or got imprinted on you. There’s no blame. It’s what got imprinted on you. But the accountability and responsibility, what I’m hearing is, is the fact that you are feeling the shame is all you need to know that it’s your job now, you’re responsible to heal it because you’re experiencing it. If you didn’t experience it, you would have nothing to heal. You can thank the person who bumped your arm because they brought to your awareness that you have this old program running inside you. And if you didn’t have the old program, it wouldn’t have spilled out.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Which is why when the person wanted to convert and came to Hillel, one of the great sages back 2,500 years ago, he said, “I want to convert to Judaism. Could you teach it to me on one leg?” And he says, “Yeah, love your neighbor as yourself.” And the rest is, you have to study.

Lorne Brown

I know this.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

To love others as yourself, Rabbi Ativa says, “That is a great principle. It’s not just a great commandment. It’s a principle. What’s the principle, what you just said and what I just said?” As much as you love yourself or the opposite, so can you love your neighbor, your friend, and other people because what’s happening inside us is reflected by people around us for good or for bad. It depends on what we have inside us. And what I added after your words is the fact that if I have shame or fear, why do I have it? I mean, who’s giving it to me? In the everyday normal way of life, the answer is I myself am giving it to myself. The adult in me that has grown up innocently, but mistakenly, criticizing myself and others, that adult keeps hurting me inside because I haven’t been aware that I have two sides to me.

I always start out with one personality. I’m not.

We’re a dual personality in essence. So that’s Kabbalah right from the highest top, all the way down to the bottom. Each one of us is actually in yang. What am I giving myself as I wake up in the morning? How do I accept it? Do I have what’s cultural by it, peaceful and harmony at home inside me? If outside me, if there’s no harmony, then there are a million reasons, but there’s only one thing that I can do. Find that place within me that is full of strife and disharmony and try to find that harmony within. And chances are pretty good, 99% that the more harmony I find, more healing I find between the adult and the child within me, the more I will see it outside because I emanated subconsciously, energetically towards the people around me without even meaning to, for good and forbear.

So these three steps are no more than diagnostic. They themselves have been giving us the understanding that’s already a large part of healing and only through understanding, but it’s the fourth step that takes it proactively to the healing time.

Lorne Brown 

Just before you go to the fourth step. So in that third step, as you said, when you do your inner work, when you heal, you said then the external world, you’ll have a different perception. And I said at the beginning with notice, we experience the world. Everything’s neutral and we experience it through the lens of our subconscious. So we perceive reality. And when we do this inner work, step one, two, three for you, the lens shifts. So now the external world is perceived differently because you are different. And I say sometimes then the external world changes too, but you don’t need it to because your perceptions change, meaning you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. Intellectually, you may not like something, but viscerally, somatically, it’s not causing a trigger anymore. So that’s when you’ve healed it and now your perception of the situation’s change.

Put into the real life scenario of some of your step three is that child part. And one of my favorite modalities is inner child work. If you don’t have compassion for yourself, then you can’t have compassion for the person outside of you. And when you find that compassion for yourself, it just happens automatically. Like you said in the external, now you’ll have compassion for the other person. I just heard it from a different level now when you talked about Hillel saying this, commandment, say it on one foot, but when we no longer are in the illusion that we’re separate and we’re all one, how could you not but love thy neighbor as thyself because you are thyself, thy neighbor, you are all in. So of course, I just saw that meaning for the first time that we’re all from source, we’re all one. So that’s step three, thank you for that.

Does that check with you? And then we’ll go on to step four.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Checks very well. And as I mentioned, and I think you mentioned it as well, for many people, that’s already enough to start that healing process. They don’t need more, but we’ve been accustomed and pre-programmed to run away from negative feelings, pain.

We do everything we can to get away from pain, which is why to accept these negative emotions and let them reside for a while. Temporarily is not an easy thing for most people to do, for all people, I suppose. And that’s the barrier that we have to go through in order to reach face four. The barrier, meaning that resistance to allow that pain to reside there and just breathing it in and understanding that it’s not from the outside, it’s from who I mistakenly think I am and I have been for the past, I don’t know how long. Having reached that point, I want to be more proactive if I can and realize that even though I was innocently mistaken in my self-identity until today, from now on, I can hopefully with God’s health, realize that I’m whole within, even as I do make mistakes on the outside and I correct them as needed.

So that step can be first, this is where faith comes to faith. I don’t want to say the word faith, but where a deeper understanding of our inner divinity comes into play. I ask myself a simple question. Is it my fault that I believe that I’m less worthy than others, that I’m somehow marred, somehow something is wrong with me? Is it my fault that I believe in it? And the natural answer is no, it’s not my fault. It’s something that I was pre-programmed to believe. So if it’s not my fault, can I ask someone who put it into me, whoever it is, to help me get rid of it? I mean, it’s not who I am. I understand mentally or intellectually that I’m whole, but I don’t believe it,

But I’d like to be there. So for whoever put inside me, can I ask him to help me get rid of it and realize who I am? Can at least think in terms of those? The answer is not automatically yes. Most people don’t believe that they can be someone whole. Most people think that they have to remain partial, marred. Something’s wrong with me. So to allow oneself to simply dream up that hypothetical situation that maybe I am whole and I just don’t realize it, just that thought is the process that allows us to go to self-healing in a deeper, truthful way. I want to get the truth. I want to be truthful with myself. I don’t want to lie to myself. So I’d like to … So there are three things that I suggest doing in stage four. One, give a mantra. I want to give myself a mantra that I don’t believe in, but I’d like to believe in it.

And that mantra or declaration, I call it in my book, there would be something like this. I’m happy and whole when I know, and when I say when I know, I mean not just intellectually, but in my heart as well, this is the wisdom of the heart. When I know that even when thoughts come up that I’m no good or that I’m blemished, that something is wrong with me, these are just thoughts. I’m always whole because I’m part, intrinsic part of wholeness, of the infinite light, of universal consciousness. You call it whatever you will. It doesn’t matter. Okay. So that sounded a bit long, but in essence, it’s very simple. It starts with, I’m happy and whole, which is not the truth. I’m not. I’m stressed, but I’m saying it as a mantra, which is okay. That’s the idea of saying something artificially at the beginning, hoping to internalize it after repetition again and again, like all mantras.

The Jewish mantra, the great Jewish mantra is God. That’s the greatest mantra there is because many gurus back in the East when they found people who came where I come from said, “Hey, you’ve got a good mantra. Stick to it. ” The mantra is, “I am happy and all when I know. ” That’s an important word. When I know, I mean, like Grok in 1984, when I know in my heart, which is not the situation that even as I believe as the thoughts come up, they’re thoughts. Okay, but they’re not me. I say it aloud 10 times, twice a day. After each time I add one small prayer to-

Lorne Brown :

Consciousness, God, universe.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Universe, please help me internalize this phrase, this belief because … Okay, why? Because I don’t believe it. It’s artificial. It sounds, to some people, it’s stressful to say these words. To some people, it’s always absurd, which is why we do need to somehow connect with our inner beliefs in that supernatural old being, whatever you want to call it. Please help me believe what I’ve just said because I don’t really believe it. But that’s being truthful with yourself, which is the motto of the whole. Mabatama is truthful, self-scrutiny. I’m scrutinizing myself and I know that I believe that I’m not worthy, and I know that I don’t believe that he can help me, whatever it is, but I’m saying it nevertheless because I do believe that there is … The words have power and energy, and they can slowly, slowly change those waves, those energy waves that include me.

Lorne Brown 

And when we say these things, we’re not saying we like it. We’re not saying we’re resigned to it. We’re just being authentic. Because at this moment, I don’t love myself. I don’t think I’m enough. So that takes a charge out. And so I do a whole brain posture, so I kind of intertwine the hands and the feet, and I would do something like, “I accept myself for the person who thinks I’m inherently wrong and not lovable.” And I say that over and over again until the charge comes down because I’m not fighting with it anymore because it’s the truth. I do feel that way. Again, not saying I like it, not saying I want it, not saying I’m resigned. I’m just being authentic. I’m accepting and acceptance is a form of love. I’m accepting this is how I think and feel right now. And then the choose again is the second part.

And I choose to be whole and complete. I connect to consciousness. And this is where the subconscious can’t tell the difference from imagination and reality. So if you believe in God or consciousness, you can ask it to come in and bring in the love and help you heal. People bring in ancestors that are only alive. It doesn’t matter to the subconscious … And again, because everything is consciousness, that ancestor or that crystal or God, it’s all one, but so it doesn’t matter. So you just choose what you resonate with. So that’d be my process with the choose again, which is what I see you doing, accepting and choose again in this process. So in step four, you said you had a few things. There was a mantra. What other tools do you have in step four?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

The three tools, the mantra, the prayer, please help me internalize this mantra, believe what I said just now because I don’t really believe it yet. And this is something that should be done at least 10 times out loud, at least twice a day. And the third thing is imagining what my life would be like when my prayer is answered, when I actually did it.

Lorne Brown 

There’s the choose again. That’s the choose again. Practice gratitude or imagine as if you have it now.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Yeah, right. And from there, Gratitude overflows. Because

Lorne Brown 

The subconscious cannot tell the difference from imagination reality. That’s why you can laugh and cry at a movie even though you know they’re actors. So when you can imagine your life as if you already have it now, we know through research that when you start to think that certain chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, get released when you’re having this awesome life. I call this setting your GPS. This is my terminology. So when you do what you just said, imagine what it’d be like if you had the life that you want now, you’re setting the GPS. You’re not trying to figure out how. It’s not your job to figure out how I’m going to get there. Just like when you set your GPS, you don’t sit there and go, take a left, take a right. You just set your destination. And if you choose to do something different than what the GPS is telling you, it will start recalculating, meaning it will keep trying to take you to your destination.

And when you do what you just said, imagine what you’ll like. You’re setting the GPS as subconscious. Now it wants congruency and it’ll start to look for opportunities. The keyword is it wants congruency. If your subconscious says, “I’m not enough, I’m not worthy, I’m not lovable,” it will keep bringing you opportunities to feel I’m not worthy, I’m not lovable. When you change the program inside, you change the GPS, it wants congruency, “I’m enough, I’m whole and complete, I have abundance,” then it’ll start to bring those opportunities to your life. That’s been my experience.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Very well written and summarized. I just want to make it a bit more practical.

Lorne Brown 

Please.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

I suggest in my book that the first idea that comes to mind when you ask that question, how will my life look is when you go back to the initial problem that you started with at the beginning of Mabanteme, in my case, being stressed a bit from the intervention of Bob’s, whatever it is, and go back to that and imagine that initial scene where you are in my case stressed out or whatever under the new you who has been going through this self-healing process, how would you react then to the same situation? So that brings it down to earth. It’s not just the general idea very well expressed by you, Lorne. It’s also that very practical application of what you’ve gone through in terms of where you started. So you go back to the beginning and finish off the job in a very personal, intimate and honest way.

Lorne Brown 

It reminds me of Byron Katie. She has your inquiry process. And question three, I think is, or four is, how would I act or B if I didn’t have the thought? I often use, again, thinking of hypnosis, and I can’t remember where I heard this from, but I use it in practice. And it’s a nice way to open up this opportunity by pretending it’s five years or imagine it’s five years from now. So for us, it’s 2031 and you’re happy professionally, personally, what has happened. And if you give that question to the unconscious, you’ll just start to dream up and then you try it on. What do you see, hear, smell, all the senses, and you just keep trying things on and then all of a sudden you’re having this dream, whatever that world is. So you just ask the question and it’s amazing to see what people start to dream up and it’s just the feelings that come up.

And why five years? Because you have to give the ego, the ability to let go. If I said in three months, your mind will just say, “That can’t happen. That’s impossible. It can’t happen.” But almost anything can happen within five years. So if you give it permission to dream, it will let you dream. So you can’t say next month. It’s got to be five years.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

I’m very happy you said what you said now, Lorne, because one of the great problems that I had personally, and I think others have as well, is when we read books by great people, masters who’ve already reached a great enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. For example, Byron Katie, from one day to the next and that she got the light and understood. It was a process, but we don’t get the day-by-day work that is involved sometimes in slow evolution of one’s personal self-evaluation. For most people like myself, it’s not a sudden explosion.

It’s a bit not drudgery in it, but it doesn’t come in one day, which is why five years is a wonderful time to think rather than three months. I agree with you completely. So for people who think, “Well, if he can do it, so can I? ” Let’s be truthful. We can all do it. In principle, we can do it in a second, all of us, which is a wonderful way of thinking of the Messiah or the common messiah. But practically speaking, it’s one day after the other where we self-evaluate in terms of our relationship with wives, children, neighbors, colleagues, and working it through again and again, feeling that happiness that flows in over time and changing slowly but surely. And especially if we have a five-year planned dream like you talked about, wow, that’s being realistic.

Lorne Brown 

And again, the key for everybody, thank you. The key is it’s five years from now. Now you have to imagine it’s happening now. The subconscious doesn’t end your future. You can’t say, “I will, or I have, ” you got to say, “I am, I have. ” You have to imagine it’s happening now. The reason we say five years is to turn off that part of your brain that says that can’t happen, just so you can dream. So very, very important for that part. And I want to add, when you talk about the process, be grateful. It’s a slow process the way you’re describing it. I describe it that way because I’ve interviewed people where it was instant pop and it wasn’t so good for nine months. They popped and they’re good now. I’ve interviewed them, but they will tell you that those nine months to a year were not a good experience when they popped up and tried to live in this world.

It just happened. They didn’t choose it that way. It happened. But I would say that the slow and steady wins the race, probably the turtle versus the hair you want in this in most cases.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

I like that. I’m a turtle.

Lorne Brown

So many of the people I talk to talk about duality and non-duality. Does this show up in Mahbat Ament or does this show up in your Kabbalistic training? How does your lens see duality versus non-duality?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Non-duality is the innocent mistaken viewpoint that we all assume since childhood, because that was meant to be the screen through which we gradually rediscover our ability. So actually non-duality is the truth. Duality is non-truth. Evil resides in duality and good within non-duality. It’s very simple philosophically, I think. And Kabulah is, even though it seems like duality, but it all goes to the same point of non-duality, which is foremost the first and major topic of all of Judaism, especially. When you go into Hasidism, which is the interweaving of the mind with the person, which is what we are talking about. So the word for that is that the sages used to have God reside within the lower realms of existence. For him to reside, it’s not two things. It’s one thing. And we know what I’m talking about. To realize that whatever you see, whatever you experience yourself and others is actually a manifestation of that oneness, that is the ultimate ecstasy.

And from the non-dual standpoint, it’s not even a goal because we’re there all the time. But that’s from the non-dual standpoint. From the dualistic view, which is most common to us, it’s a goal. It’s something that we strive for and we use Torah and its commandments to help us get there.

Lorne Brown 

Rabbi Elimelech, I want to thank you for your time and thank you for writing the book. So the book is called Mabbat Amet, everybody. And again, it’s by Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

So you can find that online.

Lorne Brown

And are there any other ways where people can find you?

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan

Well, I have a landing page.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes. Do you know what it is? If not, it’ll just be put in the show notes regardless so people can look for it.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

It’s called Mabbatemet.com. 

Lorne Brown 

That’s easy. Mabat. M-A-B-A-T-E-M-E-T.com. And we’ll put that in the show notes as well.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan :

And on Amazon, I’ve got both books, the first one which you didn’t mention. It’s called Torah Therapy, A Guide to Therapy with Torah Values, something like that. Okay.

Lorne Brown 

All right. So you can check out the website, Mabbatamet.com, and we’ll put in the show notes the other book as well. Elimelech Lamdan, thank you very much. I appreciate your time today.

Rabbi Elimelech Lamdan 

Thank you, Dr. Lorne. It’s been a pleasure to be with you and with all your listeners and have a very, very good life.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Co-Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.