119. How to Feel Free in Your Marriage

And we are live Welcome everyone to the connected for real podcast i'm Rebbetzin Bat-Chen grossman and today with me is malka And we're going to talk about freedom and marriage. So let me just introduce the podcast in general in case you don't know This year I am focusing on the four pillars, God, marriage, business, and you.

And specifically every month is a different topic. So this month we're talking about freedom and this specific episode is about freedom and marriage. How do you find freedom within marriage when marriage is so counter freedom thing, you know there's, yeah, she's making her face. So we're going to start by letting Malka introduce herself and then we're going to dive right into the topic.

So Malka, introduce yourself.  Hi, nice to be with you today. Thank you so much for having me. I am a marriage and parenting coach. And I think that my path towards that really started when as a child, my parents did not get along and they did ultimately get divorced. And I think from a very young age, I had this idea that like, I want to grow up and have a nice family.

I want to grow up and have a family, you know, where people  smile at each other all the time and high five and it's like a nice place to be. And when I got married and started having kids, I did kind of catch myself going, Oh, this is not exactly what I had in mind. It's not working out exactly the way I wanted, but I still really want it to work out.

So like, what can I do? And that's when I started studying. In a lot of different places and classes and courses and approaches to say, how do you find happiness, joy, freedom, fulfillment and all those things in marriage, in parenting? Like, how does that work? Is that real? Is that a thing? Can we do that?

Cause if we can, I want to know how. And I've been doing this for depending on how you start my whole life really, but definitely at least 20 years. As a professional and it's been very fulfilling to me personally on my journey. Thank god We're married 28 years. We have six children. One of our children is married and we have a grandchild who's almost a year old and it's so exciting and it's a blessing, you know, to see that like, we're making it, you know, I wouldn't, I can't say we made it because every day is a new challenge and every day we need to recommit ourselves.

But like one day at a time for all these years, we're, we're making it, we're building a life together and a Jewish home together and a Jewish family together. And now one of our children is building their own.  Jewish home together. And that's probably one of the biggest blessings that I could ask for as Jewish women.

So that's who I am. That's what I do. I grew up in New York city. I'm Israeli for 32 years. I love it. Israel too has been a great blessing in my life in many ways, but that's a subject for a different podcast. But I guess it is relevant to freedom because, you know, this is where the Jewish people are the most free to really live.

The complete as possible Jewish life. So I guess it is related after all.  Yes, it is related after all. I love that. Okay. So let's get into freedom.  Let's talk about freedom first and then how it affects marriage, because there's so much to say just about freedom and then bringing it into, you know, a whole container of something that constraining and limiting and sometimes.

It's not so freeing so yeah, let's, let's start there.  Okay. So in any philosophical conversation, you need to start by defining your terms. So freedom doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. There is, for example, freedom from you know, I want to be on vacation when I'm free from having to go to my job. 

I want to, I don't know retire. So I'll be free from having to work at all. There's a lot of things that people want to be free from. Maybe I want to hire a housekeeper, so I'll be free from having to wash my own floors. You know, we're talking  about Nissan and each Hebrew month has a theme and

the theme of the Hebrew month of Nisan is freedom and redemption. They're not exactly the same, but they are very closely related. And then we're talking about the freedom of the Jewish people from the slavery in Egypt, right? God took the Jewish Hebrew people out of Egypt, so they would not be slaves to Pharaoh anymore.

But freedom too is just the beginning. Freedom from is like a little kid who says, I want to do it all myself. You don't get to decide which shoes I'm going to wear today. Or, I want to wear the red dress and not the blue dress. Like, that's An important, but somewhat also childish kind of freedom, thinking that I'm actually a free agent in this world, when actually none of us really are.

Even just because the fact that we share this universe with billions of other people, so how, and we depend on each other, whether you like it or not, right? We'll have to breathe the same air and share water resources and all kinds of things. So we, none of us are really 100 percent free in any way, just as human beings.

And also the point of being from all kinds of oppression or slavery, or even just when a person, God forbid, is sick and they say, God, I can't wait to be better again. You know, please, God, make me healthy, make me free from this disease and everything that it's putting me through that I have to go to the hospital for treatment or that I'm pain, or that the medicines make me sick, or, you know, Well, why do I wanna be free in others?

Why do I wanna be healthy? When I'm healthy? What will I do? If God blesses me with good health? What will I do with it? What will it allow? And that's freedom too.  And that I think is the much more spiritual kind of freedom. That's a much more mature adult kind of freedom. What am I free to do? When I wake up and I say, wow, thank you, God, for another day of life and health and for my partner and for my kids and for our home.

Now, what am I going to do with it? How am I going to use the freedom I have? And that's a big thing. So it's true that marriage in many senses. In the freedom from marriage isn't going to get you that marriage makes you less free because you are voluntarily putting yourself in a situation where you're going to share your home and your life and your finances and your body with another person.

So in a lot of ways, you're less free. And there's this other person who's not me, who's wishes and desires and attitudes and ideas. If we're gonna have a good life together, I need to understand them and respect them and learn how to get along with them. So in that sense, I'm less free.  But I think in the spiritual sense, what am I now free to do? 

I believe that marriage is a big spiritual jump. In my freedom to express myself in newer and more complete and truer ways, like the level of intimacy and the way that I know that other person and they can know me is like,  it's a whole nother level than the way I could know a person who I'm not married to.

So in that sense, I believe that there's a tremendous And really powerful kind of freedom that comes with entering the married state that I'm now free to Express myself in new ways. I'm free to build something new with another person the idea of building a jewish home of building a family that's Something that in, at least in Jewish life, as we understand it, you only do together with the person that you're married to.

And so you're, you're, you're free from also having to engage with all those other potential partners out there because you've picked the one, right? And now there's boundaries between me and all those other people, but inside those boundaries, inside the confinements of marriage, me and this person who I've entered into this marriage covenant with.

We are free to do amazing things, but only with each other. 

I love it. I love how you're saying freedom from and freedom too, because it really brings me back to when I ask potential clients, so what do you really want? And the first thing they tell me is what they don't want, right? I just don't want this to happen anymore. I can't stand when he, you know, does this to me.

I just want to know what I and so, There's all the from garbage that comes up and it's totally legit. It's your brain's way of staying where it is. It's, it's exactly what it is. Right. We're not judging it, but then there's the next level. It's like, so what do you really want?  And it pushes you to then say, Oh, I want  to be happy.

I want to know what to do next. I want to be proactive. I want to come alive. Right? So there's always going to be that from and to aspect. Also, when we don't necessarily call it that. Because there is the stuff that keeps you very, very low and in the mud. And then there's the stuff that allows you to sort of rise and start to breathe and start to see and start to think and allows you to expand.

And I love that, you know, like you were saying, we're going into a covenant. Of a container, which really looks like boundaries. It looks like something that is closing you up, but in reality, when you are able to contain something, you can actually use it and you can actually harvest that energy and you can, you know,  use a fuel to propel you towards the things that you want to do and focus that energy.

Like, you know, when we talk about laser focus, imagine,  You didn't have it focused. It's just all over the place. In the natural world, we see this all the time, right? If you want to harness the power of water, you need to confine it. If you want to harness the power of light, you need to confine it.

Otherwise, It's diffuse. It's still water. It's still light. It's just all over the place and it's less powerful But when you confine it to a certain container to a certain direction when you limit it it also becomes more powerful. I don't have the source in front of me, but there's also a beautiful a beautiful sentence that stravinsky wrote in his book on music about how The more constraints he has on him, the more creative he is, and the more beautiful his music is.

So, this is definitely an idea that we didn't invent, that we can see in many other contexts. And I think that reinforces our appreciation of how real it is. And you also said something else. about answering the question, what do I want? Which is one of the most challenging  and difficult and confusing and rewarding questions that any of us can ever ask ourselves at any moment, really.

And one of the big shifts that I'm sure you help your clients to achieve. And it's something I know that I also work with is not, what do I want from somebody else?  But what do I want? That's up to me.  And that's another kind of freedom. Because as long as I think that my happiness, my joy, my fulfillment, my, anything depends on somebody else, my husband, my kids, my boss, my bank account, how much I weigh, how I look, the kind of clothes I have,  anything external,  I am less free. 

I am actually, free.  Imagining I'm giving power over my spiritual, emotional, psychological,  Life and health and fitness to something. That's not me whether it's a person or some imaginary construct like how I look  and  Yeah, a lot of people feel that way a lot of times and like you said, we're not judging it We can we can hear that with a lot of compassion but we eventually want to get to the point where somebody says And I don't have to feel that way anymore. 

I can love myself just the way I am. And that doesn't mean I'm not going to keep trying to grow or improve or achieve the goals I want to achieve. But it means I start with saying,  I am, first of all, worthy as a human being, or if we want to put it in Jewish terms, Hashem, God, loves me just the way I am. I mean, He gave me life this day, so I guess He wants me to be here.

He, she, whatever, God, right. I guess God wants me to be here.  And that level of acceptance actually gives me motivation and it gives me energy and it gives me, like you said, fuel to want to make the best of everything I have because I'm starting to saying, Oh, I have, I have a life, I have a soul, I have a partner, I have a home.

I want to do good things with all those gifts today. And so that's another kind of freedom, freedom from all kinds of conditioning or conditions or all kinds of like transactional thinking that I made up. Okay. I'll do this for him. If he does this for me which again, it's not wrong, but that isn't what's going to get us to the best kind of relationship to the healthiest, most robust.

most intimately close, most loving. That's not the way, right? It's kind of childish, right? And we want to be adults  who are really living an adult fulfilled life together. And for that it requires me to let go of all the conditions and go I wanna love you because you're mine. 'cause I chose you because we're in this together forever.

It doesn't mean I like everything you do, it means I'm paying a lot less attention to it  because like, I'm not perfect either.  Oh, we are not perfect. Let me tell you. We're not perfect and we don't wanna be scorecarded. So I mean,  in Hebrew we say, right v'ahavta l'reicha kamocha , do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

And that.  If I had to sum up, marriage, and I don't like to sum up complicated things in cute little verses, but if I had to pick one, that would be it,  right? you want love? Show love. You want respect? Be respectful. You want to see your husband smile at you? Smile at them. You know, put out the energy that is the energy you want to experience in your married life. 

But what about,  that's not up to you, right? What's up to me is how I show up. I have a hundred percent authority and power and  responsibility. For me and how I'm showing up. So the better I become at being me, the more I turn myself into the person, the Jew, the wife, the mother that I want to be, the more that invites the people around me to do the same, but again, it's, that's a hundred percent up to them. 

I want to double tap on what you said because a lot of times I want him to smile at me or I want him to walk in and be happy. I want him to, to, to, to, to, right? And we say, okay, so you do it. And it's like, no, it's too hard. Why would I do it? He's not, right? And so it's like, oh, you're expecting someone to do something you're not even willing to do.

Right? You're expecting someone to take a step and courage and put all of their energy into something that you yourself can't even fathom doing. That's not fair, right? And if you want it, then you do it. Maybe he doesn't want it. Like, maybe to him, it doesn't matter that there isn't  You know a smile because that's not his love language.

His love language is something else like you have to be ready to lean into your own needs and wants without needing someone else to You know do all the work and that takes a lot of energy and a lot of courage because really We don't want to work hard. We're nice and lazy.  Our brain is wired to just To be if I can do less, I'll do less.

Cause why, why work hard? Right. So it's always this  juggle between, I just want everyone else to do it for me. You know, it would just be so much easier if my husband was perfect.  And if he was just  loving and caring and like gushed all over me and was able to speak my love language and everything just worked out so perfectly and it's like, yeah, but.

Yeah, he's human,  but think back to when you were dating or when you were a newly married couple, right? You probably didn't go. Oh, it would just be so nice if he or I'll just you were probably thinking a lot like oh I think I'll do this for him. Oh, his birthday is coming or anniversary is coming. It wasn't just like oh I wonder what he's gonna do right?

There was a lot more initiative on our part  How can I surprise him? Or how can I make it? Or like, what will I wear? Or what will I make? Or there was, there was a lot more initiative. There was a lot more of me thinking like, what can I do to make him happy? What can I do that he would like? What can I, I wasn't just thinking about what can he do for me, right?

That's something that that tends to get derailed later. But  When you're still in like the very romantic stage, there's very naturally a lot of that and we can recapture it later. And I want to bring it back to freedom because  There's also the freedom to ask.  In addition to saying, well, if you want something, you be that energy, you put that out there.

We can also ask for things, except that we often don't want to ask.  Okay. And why? Like, what's the big deal? What's so hard about asking you for something? So first of all, because asking acknowledges the other person's otherness.  It means that they haven't already thought of it or they haven't already done it for me And I'm already in a business position where  I'm asking him to do something for me Which I probably wish he would have read my mind and done it before I asked in the first place Right.

So first of all it acknowledges the fact that we are different separate people and we don't always think the same things all the time And that can feel a kind of uncomfortable. It acknowledges the other person's autonomy, right? I might ask for something and he might say, Oh, I'm sorry, I'm busy. Or that doesn't really work for me.

Or can we do something else instead? I might not get the answer that I want. Right. And in addition to acknowledging the separateness, And the autonomy of the other person,  or maybe a direct result of acknowledging the separateness and the autonomy of the other person. It feels very vulnerable,  right? The idea that, Oh, I don't just demand, I ask, I don't just snap my fingers and get what I want, or I don't just automatically get what I want just by virtue of being his wife.

Like it doesn't just rain down on me endlessly all the time. Exactly the way I want.

This, That's like, I don't like that,  like, I think it doesn't go my way all the time. Like the act of asking, the function of asking, the mindset of truly asking means acknowledging the separateness and the autonomy of the other person and the inherent vulnerability in asking for something, which means maybe he'll want to give it to me and maybe not, because  We're not the same and we don't want the same things.

But the more I practice doing that, the more I acknowledge the freedom that's in all of those aspects, right? Not just my freedom, but his freedom, the freedom of each of us to be ourselves and separate people and still choose each other over and over and over again. If you're not choosing it freely, then what kind of relationship do you really have?

Right.  Yeah. The freedom to be able to say,  I trust you enough. I trust you enough that I'm going to ask for this. And if I don't get it, we're still going to be okay. That's big. That's really big.  Let's talk about people who feel like they're trapped, feel like they're controlled, feel like they're not choosing, feel like they're not in freedom.

Because this is a great tool of the evil inclination is like, as it sits on your shoulder and says, Notice that you don't have that. You don't have freedom. You don't have the time. I just have a story I have to say before we address this. We were in the pool doing water exercise and a lady came in like five minutes late and she took off her clothes and like looked really good in her bathing suit.

And my mother hasn't seen her for, you know, a long time. So she says, Oh, you look so good. You lost so much weight. You know, like I see you've been really trying. And she says, yeah, it's because I got divorced. I finally had time and freedom to take care of myself. And I just, you know, my mother looks at me, I look at her.

I'm like, wait, what? Right. Because there is something that really, really deep down, you believe that you don't have the freedom to take care of yourself or to exercise or to care enough because you're just. Held in prison and in reality she could have lost all that weight even in in a marriage, right?

She could have completely changed her marriage if she wanted to But she decided to be proactive only after she was finally quote unquote, you know Not in that anymore.  So that's something that really woke me up to Wow, look how much freedom we have and how much freedom we give up Just with the way that we limit ourselves  basically.

Oh yeah.  So my model for this is actually not a marriage coach. My model for this is Anatoly Natanshiransky who has been a hero of mine since I can't remember when. And he has spoken and written many, many times for that, that even when he was in jail, even when he was in solitary confinement,  his body was in prison, but his spirit was free.

And I have told myself countless times in my life, if Sharansky could be free in jail, then I can be free in a spiritual sense. I can find my freedom in whatever other situation that I'm in. And that has been my message to myself. Those other things that you described at how she felt, we call them limiting beliefs.

And as long as we believe them, they are true for us and they are real, which is why it can be helpful to write them out in a journal or to speak about them with a third party, with a coach and say, well, I believe, right? It usually doesn't start with, I believe it says, well, I can't because he is usually the framework.

I can't lose weight because my husband, I can't buy the dress that I want to for Shabbos because whatever, I can't, I can't because he or I can't because they and it's important first of all, to even become aware that we have these beliefs  and then once we can put them out there, spread them out there and shine a light on them.

Then we can question them and say, well, is that true?  , how does that work? Explain to me how he controls what you eat or when you exercise or how you spend your time. Like if we would discover that there's actually some kind of really horrible control and behavior going on here, we might want to talk about not living with this person anymore.

In many cases that's not actually what's going on. In at least some of those cases it is in fact the woman controlling herself and her thoughts. And it's not actually external control. And then we can help her to figure out how to rewrite the story. She's telling herself about herself and about the marriage that she's in and about her body and her weight and her time and, and all those things and help her write a new story.

You know, that says I can be the woman who I want to be. I can lose weight. I can earn money. I can, Serve God, I can do whatever it is that's most important to me to do. I can be that person. And this is what it's going to take for me to do it.  I love that. I love that. So let's get really practical. A woman's listening right now to this podcast and she's thinking,  I can't whatever, because he. And it's painful because the belief is so real and it feels so, so true.

And your body is in this darkness and you are just, you know, really stuck. That's how it feels. It feels like it's really real, right? When we talk about, Oh, it's just in your head, it's a limiting belief. Don't worry about it. It's like, you know, it's nice to talk about it that way. But in reality when we're talking about how it feels in our body, It feels heavy.

It feels draining. It feels exhausting and, and we obsess over it because we feel it so much, right? We're, it takes over everything. It, and it also almost like spreads into everything. So, if we're talking about money, let's say he controls the money I'm allowed to spend. Spend on myself on the kids on different programs.

I want to take on what I do with the money on the food on whatever. So suddenly it's like I'm suffocating under this control. And in reality, you know,  I had one, one client is like, you work you want to have a full income. Why do you think that you have no control over money? It's like, because I bring it to him and it goes into the joint account and he's the only one who has the power to, or, you know, to, to do what, whatever it is, because he knows better because he has the training, he has whatever, and it's like, yeah, but do you see  Where this is not really as true as you make it sound.

And so it's, it's very hard for a person who's in it to see past it. And I think that's really step one is how do we allow ourselves to just open up the tiny little crack to be able to let the light in.  We all need to start with compassion for ourselves. The bad feelings are not going to disappear in a second.

We're not going to change all of our thoughts right away. We're not going to change all of our relationships right away. There's a lot of work we all need to do to help ourselves.  One small step at a time for some women that's going to go through mindfulness meditation practice or a yoga practice or something that helps you to slow down, which is like the opposite of everything we're trained to do to actually slow down and go in this moment.

I am alive. I am sitting on a blue couch. I am breathing by the grace of God.  I can see, I can hear, you know, to start finding what it is that I have and what it is that's good in me right now in this moment before I fix any of the things.  Now there may be a lot of really, really  hard feelings. I may be feeling angry, I may be feeling sad, I may be feeling grief.

I may be feeling a lot of those things together and a whole lot more. One of the things that we know through a lot of current research from all kinds of directions, is that avoiding feelings is the worst way to try and make them better. That unfortunately,  and ironically, none of us really wanna do this.

Actually acknowledging how I feel and allowing myself to feel it like literally sitting on the couch and going I Malka I'm gonna sit here on this blue couch and cry or feel angry or Feel however it is. I feel I'm even gonna set a timer for three minutes  And I'm not going to do anything to get rid of it,  to fix it, to treat it, to make it go away.

I'm just going to let it  flow over me.  I'm going to feel it in my body. I'm going to feel the knots on my stomach or the pounding in my temples or whatever it is. And if  I actually allow myself to do that. When I allow myself to do that, I will discover that like a wave in the ocean that rises and crests and then falls and goes away, feelings behave the exact same way.

And if I am being angry at myself or anybody else over and over and over again, you know why? It's because I'm feeding that anger. I'm not letting it go. And the only way to let it go is first of all, to feel it. So I would say whatever it is you want to fix, whatever it is that's bothering you, you first need to learn to sit with it, to acknowledge it, not to judge it, not to say, Oh, I shouldn't feel that way.

Oh, I'm not a good wife. Oh, I'm not a good mother. Oh, he's not a good husband. He's not good. Whatever. Just  at the level of the, this is how I feel now.  This is how I feel now and allow myself to feel it for a minute, two minutes, three minutes. Not the rest of my life, 10 minutes, maybe a few days, but let it be.

Just show it some respect. That is not actually what's going to get you. Okay. That's not what's going to kill you. That's not what's going to destroy your marriage. If you can let it be, you also will find a way to freedom. But the only way out is through. 

The only way out is the only way to being freer from hard feelings is actually first to feel them. If I had a better way, I would sell it. There is no better way. That is the way.  Yeah. So that's the first and very, very important step. Yeah.  You know, it's painful.

And so we'll do whatever we can to bypass whatever we can to go over or under or around. And it's counterintuitive really to sit through it, but  it cuts so many corners and it's the best shortcut that I know also, right? It's the healthiest way also to acknowledge the fact that I'm not perfect.

My life is not perfect. I'm not going to feel happy all the time. Nobody normal does, right?  And to make a little bit of room for that humanity in my life. We have ridiculous, unreasonable, unrealistic ideas about what a happy life looks like. It's if a happy life is a life where everybody is always healthy, always rich, always beautiful.

Your kids always do exactly what they're supposed to do. Your husband is always romantic. Like,  that's maybe a Disney movie. That's not anybody's real life.  And then

oh, I love it. I just said to someone this morning, I was walking to my You know, to my spot where I talk to God and, oh, my favorite spot in the world. And in the park on the way, I saw a woman, you know, we were talking whatever, and it just came out of me. And I think it's perfect timing to say it here.

You know it's much easier to keep your balance when the ground is really nice and secure, right? It's, there is no point if you're not using any core muscles to stay balanced and  keep your, your structure.  As soon as things start to shift, as soon as things start to  wobble, and you start having to use your core muscles, and you start having to use all of your inner strengths in order to stay balanced, that's when you're really working, and that's when you're becoming, and that's when all the goodness can really come out, right?

It's when When you're being shaken up, and so we're not praying to be shaken up. Thank God. You're like, you don't need to ask for it. Just gonna come, right? Because God, exactly,  exactly. We actually, and we actually ask God to bless us every day with health and happiness and joy and You know and all the good things.

Then we asked that he shouldn't give us crises or illness, or  we're not saying that the bad things are good and we're not saying that we want them. All we're saying is that they are a fact of life. Everybody is going to encounter many different kinds of difficulty throughout life and throughout marriage.

And when those things come, I want you to know that you can do it. You can meet those challenges. You can grow through them. You can overcome them, hopefully, please God. And the more you believe in your freedom  to engage in whatever it is life gives you in the best possible way, And it's not always going to make things necessarily work out the way you want. 

Right. But  if you believe in your strength and you believe in your ability and you do the best you can, that's better than the alternative.  I think that there's something really important we have to talk about and that's the difference between freedom and control, right? Because we want We want to control the outcome.

We want to control where we're going. We fight reality when things are not the way we want them to be. And then we feel like we don't have the freedom because we can't control the reality. We don't have the freedom because there's something that I cannot change, right? And  they're not. Actually bound together.

There's freedom in every situation, even when you can't control it. And I think that's the beauty of what you were saying before. You could be in jail. You can be in in the worst places possible and still have your freedom. Your freedom to believe, your freedom to be connected to God, your freedom to receive, your freedom to think and imagine.

And say whatever you want to say, right? You have freedom to a lot and it doesn't mean that you have the freedom to change anything or the control to address everything. But this is a really important thing because a lot of us are fighting reality, you know, or like something very, something very new agey, right.

Which which is not Jewish about the idea that if I just think the right way, if I have a certain mindset. You know, that I'm gonna control the weather, or the results of an election, or the outcome of an illness, or the course of a war, like, no. That's not what mindset work is about. And that's not what meditation is about.

And that's not what you're, that's not what freedom is for. And that's not what the free will and the free choice that God gave us as human beings. That's not what it's for. It's about making sure that I.  the best that I can do, even in a very difficult situation, right? It's freedom to, to express myself in the best possible way.

Even when I'm facing a challenge, it's when somebody shoved me in line for the bus and I used my freedom to not curse at her, even though I think she deserves it. Right. Because is that really going to be the best possible use of The freedom of speech that God gave me, right? Or if I push her back, right?

 Is that freedom? The freedom to push her back, right? If somebody cuts me off on the road, right? Right? It's what we're talking about from and to, right? If you're using your freedom in a way that just, you know, very low level, then you're really just thinking freedom is from. Freedom from being pushed around freedom, from being controlled freedom from, you know, whatever, someone else deciding for me.

And whenever that is your motivator, usually it's exhausting, first of all, and also You're not really going anywhere. You're just constantly attached to reactive mode. And then when you're freeing too, it's really, I'm free to say whatever I want to say, regardless of what they say. Right.

So somebody's screaming at me. I wish they weren't screaming. So I'm going to take that and be like, I'm not going to scream. And you know, why are you not screaming back? Why are you not, why are you so calm? Right. Even more importantly, the freedom to not let their behavior. impact my integrity, right? What they say about me is not who I am.

What they say about me doesn't change who I am. It's not unless I let it, right? Unless I  inhale it and let it all become part of me, but I don't have to, right? So it's also the freedom to protect myself from real threats.  Right to say no, no, no, I don't I'm not letting that in I decide  what I'm gonna listen to what messages I'm gonna let in how I'm gonna choose to feel about it, right?

If somebody says something nasty about me, do I have well, of course, I'm insulted. You know what he said about me Well, I'm sorry for what he said, but  I don't have to be hurt Insulted depressed whatever  I don't  That's a a big aspect of freedom, right? Is freedom to be aware of how I respond to other people and to make the choices that are best for me and not just work on automatic all the time.

We'll say, well, of course, this is how I feel. Look at how they treated me, It doesn't go by that kind of math.  Yeah. And you know what? I love, I love talking about the from and to, because there's so much gold in there.  When we think, you know, like a scientist, what was the reason for this?

Right. It's like looking back to finding what are you a result of? And that works when you're in a lab and it works when you're trying to do a science experiment. But in reality, humans are actually programmed to go somewhere, right? You need a goal. You need something that is going to motivate you. And that's really the only way to get anywhere.

So when we fall into the belief of the science world and just like, Oh, it must be that you were hit. That's why you're hitting and you were screamed at. So that's why you're screaming and you were abused. So that's why whatever, right? And you came from a broken home and you so must be that you're going to have your issues.

Hello. No, the, the freedom to choose. I am actually motivated by something completely different. Therefore I'm going to end up somewhere completely different. And it has nothing to do with where I came from, which is a big, huge aspect of freedom because it actually allowed you to choose anything, any path, all the paths are open for you, every single path.

And if somebody will say, Oh, but it's so much harder for, I'll say, you know, it could be. I'm not sure, but even if it is. Who promised us it was going to be easy, right? It could be that it's harder for someone from from home style A to build home style R. I don't know. But so what? We don't only do the things that are easy.

And the fact that we can look at other areas of our life, right? We see that lots of us choose to do many difficult things all the time. Some people run marathons, some people earn PhDs, some people climb mountains some people become social activists, right? Which can be very, very difficult in the hospital world.

People do choose to do difficult things all the time. And so the difficult thing that you want to do is to be a certain kind of parent or a certain kind of partner, then do it  right. There isn't anything in your past that can, that can prevent you from being the kind of person you want to be unless you've let it.

And I'm not saying that it doesn't have a strong hold on us. Some of the time, but that is the beauty of being a human being is that we can learn to be like you said, to set a goal and say, that's the kind of person I want to be. And then to build a plan one step after another step after another step to figure out how to actually get there.

And there are many different spiritual programs, certainly in the Torah and maybe also out of the Torah that help people to become the kind of people that they want to be and that they believe that they should be. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the biggest things was that I was once in a class. And he said God is the ultimate coach Right. He gives you the things you need right now in this exact stage so that you can get to the next level And and I love that you're saying baby step after baby step after baby step perfectionists Especially if you're extraordinary, you like things to be done, right.

And a lot of my listeners are extraordinary people. And we know that about ourselves. We're not okay, with just being, we need to actually, you know, become and create and live and be open and expand and all this great stuff. And with that comes this pressure to be, you know, there already, you know, it's like, are we there yet?

And there's a lot of pressure. To get there as quickly as possible, or fix it, or heal it, or whatever it is, right? And the awareness that we can just sort of slow it down and say, Listen people, one step at a time, I'm not going to become whatever overnight.  But if I start taking whatever baby steps, I will eventually get there because I know where I'm going.

And my coach Steph Crowder in her podcast, she once said, and I love this. It goes with me everywhere. It's like all you need when you're going out on a hike is a compass and a flashlight, right? The compass to know. Where you're going, like the, you know, direction, the, the, almost like, you know, plugging in your ways and the flashlight to see  the first step, like what's, what's right here in front of you, there's a rock.

Okay. I need to step over the rock. There is a tree. I need to go around the tree. If you have those two things, you're set. You don't need the whole map. You don't need the whole plan. You, you, you could think you have the whole plan, but let me tell you, God is way bigger than that.  The best response, the best response I've ever heard to are we there yet is from Rabbi Zelig Plissken who says well We're here now,  right and whatever the thing that you're supposed to be doing is the thing that you're supposed to do right now Which isn't the thing you were supposed to do five minutes ago, and it isn't thing you're supposed to do  It's a thing you're supposed to do right now.

Where you are now is where your work is. Well, but also in a week I want to be That's good to know. That's really good to know because we're going to make a plan that gets me to there. But that plan is going to have to go through many, many, many steps. You don't get to skip and, you know, jump ahead. It doesn't work like that.

Not just you. Nobody does. Right? And certainly Jewish sources are full of examples, right? Rabbi Akiva, who only started studying when he was 40 years old, and how long it took him, and yet how far he got, and, and how high he went, and many, many, many other examples of people who, they were not born Jewish.

Brilliant or or knowledgeable or at the spiritual levels that they attained. They had to work really hard to get there because that is actually the only way to get anywhere.  Yeah. Yeah, and I love that you say I don't know if we're there yet, but we're here now Is exactly what I used this morning with my daughter.

She was crying the whole way. I don't want to go I don't want to go and i'm like dragging my feet trying to get the two kids out of the house trying to get them out Now there's a second day already that they're doing this to me. I don't know what's going on It must be the baby energy or something because my kids are just totally acting out And yesterday I had a really hard day because I was just like get there already, you know, like let's just move right?

We're like two blocks away. Can we just get there? And I had a terrible day yesterday, but today this morning I put on music for myself like a guitar background type thing And i'm walking around the street with guitar music in the background my two kids like Really dragging their feet doesn't want to wear her shoes So i'm holding her shoes and there's a coat in my hand because the other one doesn't wear his coat And all these things and i'm just like so chill Like this is exactly where I need to be right now And we're gonna get there when we get there and it's gonna be okay and my attitude completely changed Let me tell you it was really hard yesterday Was such a hard day that I just did not have the energy to go through that again.

So I had to shift. Right. Not all the days are going to look the way we want. We aren't always going to have the attitude that we know we could or that we want to have. That's okay too. And learning to have compassion for ourselves and say, you know what? Myself and my bad mood or on my bad day, that's not all of who I am.

It's just a day.  Right. And when I'm ready, I'll change it. And it might be in a few minutes and it might only be tomorrow. And it might take me until next week, but I'm going to get there. For me, it sometimes helps if I'm trying to learn something new and it's taking me time and it's not going the way I want.

And I feel really frustrated. I think of something that I'm really, really good at.  And then I say, how long did it take me? To be really good at that. How many times did I make that cake or how many times, right? Did I do that thing that now I can just do it like that and pretty much expect excellent results.

It took a long time.  There's well, but I don't want to have to wait a long time. And then I realized that, you know, that's my inner child speaking who thinks that you have to have everything good. And right now, And, you know, and I, and I've learned to not be afraid of her when she like gets all tantrum y and to be patient with her and that I have a relationship with her.

She's not going anywhere, my inner child, right? She's going to live with me as long as I live.  And I have learned to have much better communication with her,  you know, and to learn how to soothe her and how to get her to settle back down until she goes to have a nap and leaves me alone. But yeah, the long way is the only way to get anywhere.

We rarely have really effective shortcuts  and looking for them  just be really frustrating. Yes. Yes. Oh, this has been such a fascinating and exciting conversation. I'm sure everybody has a ton of questions, so feel free to,  email us both or text us or get in touch because we have a lot more to say about this, but our time is up.

Malka, tell everybody where they can find you and how they can be in touch with you. They can find me on LinkedIn using my name, MAlka Neustadter on Instagram at Coach Malka on Facebook. I'm everywhere.  That's great. I love it.  I love it so much. And thank you all for listening and for  having me. This has really been a delightful conversation.

Thanks very much. And thanks to everyone who listened.  Thank you. And by the way, you know, on the, on the whole,  topic of freedom, you were saying, how long did it take me to get here people? I was afraid of speaking in public. Okay. I just want you to realize how far a person can get just with taking little tiny steps.

The first step God forced me into was just saying yes. And then I didn't end up speaking at the end. Right. You could listen to that in my episode. I think it's episode a hundred. How long my process took and now I'm recording podcasts. I'm super confident. I don't even think twice about what I'm doing.

Right. And I love that you say that find something that you're really good at now that took you a while to grow into because it really is phenomenal to just watch from the outside. Like if I, look, look at myself now, I'm like, who is she? How did we get here? The fact that I have a morning routine and I actually pray every day and things that I thought I would never get done.

Just not that person. I can't, and I'm too this and too that and whatever. There is so much freedom in letting go of all the limitations about yourself and just believing that God is more more capable than you. He can guide you there. So thank you. And you don't need to let go, and you don't need to let go of them all at once either.

You can do that one at a time too. Oh, for sure. Listen, I am the queen of that. If you guys are actually interested in finding that one thing that's going to move the needle, I have a great freebie called the guide to unravel overwhelm, and it could be found at connected for real. com slash guide. We're going to make sure to link that below as well with all of Malka's information.

And you can go download that for free and start to do it right away. It is the thing that changed my life. It is why I gift it to everyone because it's so, so powerful. So, thank you so much for listening. Make sure you come back next week. And thank you to Malka for being here. And don't forget to be connected for real.