Overcome Elul Anxiety: The Path to Complete Teshuvah and Freedom from Addiction | Mordechai Weiss (Rebroadcast)

Elul is my favorite time of the year because I love that it's a short month in the Elul's month and yeshiva ain't six months.

It ain't like the winter's month or the summer's month.

Elul's intense.

And definitely in the confines of the walls of Yeshiva, Elul is famous along with the impending judgment and notwithstanding.

Right.

definitely included in all this is also a fair amount of anxiety and perhaps even a bit of some unhealthy anxiety, which I like to pose the question to you directly.

Is there a way that we can

keep Elul a strong, I don't want to say intense month, but a different than all the other months type of idea that there is the high holidays and judgment coming up? But is there a way to go about it? And how would you advise somebody that wants to go about it in a really, really productive way, but a non-anxious and completely healthy

way? That's a really excellent question.

And it's something, McCall, that very much is relevant to so many people.

And while the discussion that we're going to talk about is that it pertains to Elul, but of course, it also can come up in all areas of Avodah Hashem.

So Elul, as you mentioned, is a time of generally where people are feeling more intense because of the seriousness of the days.

But at the same time, Avodah Hashem in general is serious and often anxiety can be mixed in there in an unhealthy way.

And those people as well, even, you know, who are not specifically wondering about Elul, but even people who might be wondering about in general, how do I approach the seriousness of Levitas Hashem without creating some form of unhealthy anxiety? I think that would be relevant to think about it in that broader way as well.

You have my attention, and I'm sure you have the rest of the world's attention.

So what's the secret sauce? How do I know? How about let's go like this and get very, very, very direct.

How do I know that something is a step too far and maybe closer into the pool of anxiety and not healthy Yiras Shamayim? Yes.

So...

I want to reflect a little bit on what I was saying before and what was brought up in terms of my background.

And that is also why I feel that in some way, I hope that I would consider myself qualified to respond to this is because I've also not only is my response going to be, you know, based off what psychology thinks about anxiety and what's healthy and what's unhealthy.

Definitely a lot of my thinking on this topic is influenced by Torah perspective, by the Rebbeim that I learned by as well.

in terms of how to approach it.

It's a sham in a healthy way.

So definitely it's something that I've learned about.

And I also sit with clients.