Thought for Food

Healing will start with your mind.

The month of Iyyar, which began yesterday, is considered the Jewish year’s headquarters for healing. It is intimately connected to the phrase “I, God, am your healer,” אֲנִ֥י יי רֹפְאֶֽךָ ani YHVH rofecha (Exodus 15:26), which in Hebrew forms the acronym Iyyar.

In fact, according to the Sefer Yetzirah, which is an ancient kabbalistic text about the structure of creation, every month of the year has an area of life ripe for improvement. In one, we focus on food; in others speech, sexuality, dreaming, anger, laughter. The focus for Iyyar is that of hirhur: thought. In her contemporary translation of the Sefer Yetzirah, Return to the Place, Rabbi Jill Hammer notes that:

hirhur can mean thinking, conception, perseveration or meditation. Hirhur refers not to a single thought but to internal monologue. In rabbinic literature, hirhurim or internal thoughts can refer to planning, sexual fantasies, or unresolved anxiety – all are thought-activities that transpire over time. Similarly, hirhur in our text means the sustained process of thinking.

It is interesting that the headquarters of healing coincides with this domain of hirhur. If we are to find balance and liberation (related concepts; consider the word libra), the implication is that we must fix the way we think about things.

A reel I saw recently, perhaps on this very platform, explained that from a neurobiological perspective, in order to instate new neural habits we actually need to give particular attention to hirhur, repeated contemplation. Crucially, we must train our brains to generate dopamine rewards from noticing inner states of satisfaction. It is not enough simply to remark to oneself, “Wow, I’m well fed and warm and in no immediate danger,” or, “Great, I finally did that thing on my list.” Rather, the goal is to actually notice the truth of each statement, and fully enjoy it, for several seconds (or perhaps even longer if you’re lucky enough to be able to).

Apparently, if we do not actively train our brains to notice what is going well and get off on it, it will instead get off on the dopamine rewards offered by familiar stress loops. Although our anxious perseverations are actively generating stress hormones, because they are familiar and thus in a paradoxical sense reassuring, our brains reward them. So in order to remediate our inner emotional state, we are advised to actively practice training the brain using a better form of hirhur, a more beneficial internal monologue. The chap on the reel suggested setting a timer and doing this for three minutes a day, and I must say that I have been doing so, some days anyway, and at the very least enjoying the activity. Once or twice I have been able to drop into really deep states of positive self-reinforcement, actively noticing how pleased I am about being able to be so pleased with myself and my life. Wow - so pleasurable!

And actually, I think this is not only pleasurable, but actually doing my system some lasting good. It’s hard to feel well if we are stressed out and anxious all the time, and it may also make it harder to be well, too. I don’t have handy citations to back this up, but I’m pretty sure that people who are constantly in a state of stress are more apt to develop diseases than those who are generally relaxed and in a cheerful state of mind, curious, aware and appreciative of what is going on around them. Of course there are many other factors that contribute to the likelihood of disease, accident, impairment and so on. I’m not suggesting everyone can meditate their MS into remission, and I’m certainly not for a moment suggesting that anyone be blamed for their physical ailments or told they would not be ill if they had only thought more positively.

However, I think it’s fair to say that chronic mood-state probably does factor as a predictor of long term wellness, on a physical as well as an emotional level — and not only because being stressed drives people to all sorts of unhealthy behaviors and addictions in their attempts to cope. Since we are considering the ways our inner monologues, or hirhurim, impact our wellness, it’s also worth noting that addiction is also directly connected to this faculty. The voice of addiction is a persist hirhur, ardently suggesting that if we just do x or y we will feel better.

Rather than relying on accessing an external substance or activity to provide that dopamine satisfaction, can we instead generate feelings of well-being through using our minds to stimulate its production endogenously?

However we help ourselves to feel a bit better, I anticipate there are those that will now say: “But the world order is clearly imploding and this is very frightening. Is it really helpful to generate feelings of well-being? Shouldn’t we be stressed out?” To those voices I would ask if being freaked out is actually helping you act more effectively. For a start, feeling freaked out and feeling numb can frequently go in tandem. And even if your agitation does lead to activity more than self-sedation, this is acting out of urgency, and acting from urgency is rarely the most beneficial or the most sustainable.

More fundamentally, I would like to suggest that acting to build the world we want to live in is not really at odds with experiencing wellbeing.

Having a positive relationship with oneself and noticing what is good, wholesome and supportive about the world one finds oneself in is, actually, a foundation for being able to show up and show up well.

It is inherently resourcing.

It sustains our investment in what we are working towards: a peaceful, generous, well-stewarded world; this human existence that is so worthy of our care.

It also makes us more fun to be around, and that’s the secret sauce of any revolutionary struggle. It’s much easier to show up in solidarity when we can do so in ways that actively engage, energize and inspire us. (Who wants a revolution with no dancing? Not Emma Goldman and not me). The truth is that we are also far more likely to want to follow the leadership of people who look like they’re enjoying their lives — especially if they can do so in conditions that objectively suck. I’m not talking about pretence or false cheerfulness. I’m talking about the joy that comes from acting in coherence with our deepest values.

Many people who had never been to a demonstration before experienced the No Kings Day protests as surprisingly fun, and that was no accident. Costuming, sign-making, chanting and public art are all effective because they engage people’s minds but also their creative collective spark. In more dire conditions, dopamine-rewarding behaviors become even more important. We have seen extraordinary scenes from Minneapolis (among other places) of volunteerism, communal generosity and powerfully dopamine-building crowd action. I saw one video in which a vigil of hundreds of people stood outside a building in which ICE employees were stationed, singing with great sincerity and solemnity for those inside to consider their conscience, resign and come join the protestors. I do not know if any of those ICE people did indeed cross the picket line. However I am more than certain that that activity, so palpably holy, generated the wherewithal for the community of resistance there to continue their work.

Meditative chant, it must be said, is one terrific way to work on your hirhurim. When a simple phrase becomes lodged in your head it can change everything, and phrases set to music lodge with so much ease. Here’s one that’s been lodged in mine recently.

Besides its many phrases that have been set to music, Judaism provides practices that seed hirhurim of appreciation, gratitude and awe. Notable among these is the practice of making blessings, brachot, with an ideal of making at least 100 every day. (Don’t let the 100 thing put you off. Start with one). Some of these blessings help us notice and appreciate the magnificence of the natural world, with brachot for seeing trees blossoming in spring, or the ocean, or thunder, or a rainbow — or, indeed, a mass protest.

While these might be occasional sites of enjoyment, other blessings specifically entrain our hirhurim, our mental perceptions, by helping us focus on the daily miracles of living in a body. In addition to mandating blessings over food, and blessings for being satisfied by eating, the Talmud advises that upon waking, we bring conscious attention and blessing to being able to see, to stand, to bend, to walk, and so on. Every time we use the toilet, there is a blessing that gives us pause to remember and be grateful that our internal organs are functioning appropriately, noting “that should any start to seep or any become blocked, it would not be possible to exist or to stand, even for a single hour.” So true.

So here we are, beginning a month of healing, and in particular healing the ways we perceive or think about things. “I, God, am your healer,” the Torah reminds us. If we consider God to be the main-frame of awareness itself, this focus on how we condition our consciousness makes a good deal of sense. An even more progressive reading of the text might suggest that is the “I” that is God - that is, our own personal microcosm of awareness - that has the power to heal.

Perhaps you love this idea. Perhaps you think it’s nonsense.

Either way, I encourage you to try cultivating endogenous dopamine release this month, and see what happens. Let me know!