Click here to view other books by Miriam Millhauser Castle

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Book Excerpt from Practical Inner Torah

Practical Inner Torah: A Guide to Going Within By Miriam Millhauser Castle Search deep inside your Jewish soul & unlock your potential with the dynamic, effective program presented in this 2nd volume of the popular "Inner Torah" series. Buy Practical Inner Torah at a special online price at www.targum.com

Step 1: Claim Your Inner Torah

By the time one reaches adulthood, he or she has lived through a wide range of experiences. Throughout adulthood, one continues to have experiences until the moment of death. These experiences are the medium through which Hashem communicates with us as individuals. They are the text of our inner Torah.

We need to constantly remind ourselves that everything that happens in our lives is from Hashem and is tailored to the needs of our souls. Our souls are eternal. They are on journeys of rectification that both pre- and postdate this lifetime. The bodies and personalities in which they are clothed are simply vehicles that allow them to “act” in this world in service of fulfilling the purpose for which they are here.

It is up to us to decipher the messages that Hashem sends us as individuals via the experiences of our lives, just as it is up to us to decipher the messages Hashem sends us as a nation via the written and oral Torah. Before we can begin to interpret, however, we have to be willing to see the text of our lives as text. This means that we have to recognize that everything we have lived through and continue to live through is significant from the vantage point of our souls. And that doesn’t mean only things that are traumatic or dramatic. Everything, no matter how seemingly trivial or insignificant, has an impact and, in time, may come to influence who we are and how we function in the world.

For one woman, switching schools in the fourth grade turned out to be an experience that had profound consequences. It affected her sense of herself in ways that she didn’t understand until she encountered that fourth grader during the course of inner Torah work and understood for the first time just how significant that move had been.

At the other end of the spectrum, I meet women who report a litany of tragic life events without even blinking, so taking for granted that these are the circumstances of their lives that they don’t even begin to appreciate the enormity of the impact of any one of those events, let alone so many. They’ll speak of parents who fought all the time, divorce, a mentally ill parent, an abusive sibling, poverty, being shuttled between families, learning disabilities that went unattended, and more. Or women will relate the events of their adult lives with the same sort of detachment, describing traumatic births, serious illnesses, special needs children, emotionally abusive husbands, deaths of loved ones, and other circumstances that require enormous faith and herculean strength to endure.

These people are not only numb to their experiences on a feeling level, but they don’t appreciate that it is through these experiences that they are being asked to come to know themselves and to take their rightful places in the world. So many people want to just forget or cut themselves off from anything difficult or painful that has happened in their lives. But just as history influences and shapes the present on the national level and we are literally commanded to remember all that we went through and saw as a nation, so too history influences and shapes the present on the personal level, and we must be equally vigilant in our remembrance of all that we went through and saw individually. From this comes a sense of continuity, of wholeness, that we need to constantly cultivate in order to move in the direction of emulating Hashem, who is One.

I often hear people say, “I don’t remember much of anything from my past.” It is not that the memories aren’t there. The body/mind stores everything that happens to us. What’s missing is access to those memories; they can’t be retrieved. Once there is an understanding that the past is affecting the present and can be reached through the gate of present experience (see step 3 for further discussion), this concern usually fades away. Just entering into this work extends an invitation to the unconscious, and before they know it, these same people often remember all sorts of events and scenes that previously were inaccessible.

It’s also possible to begin this work with events of the recent past that are easily retrievable and to move in further from there if necessary when the nervous system is ready. Something that happened six months or a year ago could be a trigger for an extreme reaction today just as readily as something that happened ten or twenty years ago. It makes no difference how long ago an event happened. If it had an impact that has not yet been attended to on a visceral level, it needs to be addressed. It is all inner Torah, whether it happened yesterday or forty years ago.

The attitude that one’s life is one’s text to be studied and understood on increasingly deeper levels is the first step in the inner Torah process. Embedded in this attitude is the understanding that nothing that happens in our lives is devoid of meaning.

Each of us is responsible for deciphering that meaning, for being with the events of our lives in a way that recognizes that Hashem is communicating with us through them and trying, in the kindest way possible, to help us realize our full potential that only He knows. Hashem is asking us to take ourselves and our lives seriously. He gave them to us for a purpose and He is directing their unfolding in concert with us, to whom He has given the power of free choice. We owe it to Him and to ourselves to claim our inner Torah and to be attentive to it.

Buy Practical Inner Torah at an online discount at www.targum.com

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