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The 77% Weekly

The 40/52-weeks-a-year, quick-reading, thought-lingering, spiritual-religious newsletter.

Religion-Outside-The-Box is a donation supported not-for-profit empowering adults to find and be with (the) God (of their understanding).

# 22 / 40


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Be Human.

My dear friend Nancy called me in need of some spiritual-religious help. Her aunt had wronged her.

(In
a nutshell: the aunt sold the family farm to a developer even after
Nancy said she was willing to buy her ancestral land for more money
than the developer was going to pay.)

Nancy told me that she wanted to get over her anger. She knew the anger wasn’t healthy and she didn’t want to be angry anymore.

Moreover, she told me, if she were spiritually enlightened enough, she wouldn’t be so angry.

Nancy’s situation is commonplace.

We don’t like certain emotions and we tend to want to “get out of” them.

I’ve got news for you: You can’t.

You
can self-medicate in one of a hundred different ways so that you can
dampen the emotion you are feeling, but that’s not the same thing.

I told Nancy that she was confusing spiritually enlightened with a statue of Buddha that never reacts. As I understand things, those who are spiritually enlightened are angry when they are angry and sad when they are sad.

(Plus,
she was compounding the problem by kicking her own butt for not being
as spiritually enlightened as she thought she ought to be.)

Folks, we are allowed to be angry and upset.

If you recall, we touched upon this concept when we talked about spiritual-escapism.

Spiritual-religious concept for the week: There is nothing wrong with feeling emotions we don’t like. Except, of course, that we don’t like them.

With love,

Rabbi Brian

The 77% Weekly

The 77% Weekly: The Religion-Outside-The-Box Newsletterhelps people find and be with (the) God (of their understanding) 40 out of 52 weeks a year.

Why 77%?
Two reasons:

1) 40/52 = 0.76923 and it is sent every Monday except the last of each month.
2) In school 77% was a passing grade and ROTB wants to remind you that life isn’t graded, it’s pass/fail.

Religion-Outside-The-Box is a donation-supported,
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