Question: What should I do if during the lesson I am bombarded by extraneous thoughts and feelings that distract me from the lesson?

Answer: A person goes through many different states. Sometimes he sits in the lesson totally detached and sometimes he is even asleep. It happened to me very rarely, but if I suddenly fell asleep Rabash used to hit my leg gently under the table or to pull me by the sleeve without anyone noticing, although I wasn’t actually tired but in a special state of mind. Sometimes you can sleep two hours a night and feel that you are fully awake and sometimes after sleeping seven to eight hours,  you feel that you are craving sleep; it has nothing to do with your physical state.

What should you do when you fall asleep? You should make efforts to fight it as much as you can, as much as possible, but at the same time to agree that there are states that are arranged for us from above in which there is nothing we can do. So I come to the lesson and fall asleep. I have never mock or shout at someone who sleeps during the lesson. It means that this time he cannot do anything about it but he is still here.

If extraneous thoughts go through my mind during the lesson, it is due to my preparation. It is very important to understand on which foot you got out of bed: whether on the “right foot” or on the “left foot” or even “on all fours,” which refers to the first thought you had. It depends on what thought you went to sleep with, on what you read before you went to sleep. You can watch a football game, but you must read something during the last five minutes before you go to sleep. That will shake you a little from within and push you in the right direction. And with this thought you should fall asleep, as if in prayer.

Then you will wake up and get up with positive thoughts with which you will come to the lesson. Even if later you fall asleep during the lesson, you will have a good preparation. If you listen to the lesson, then even better thoughts and intentions will come to you. Even if you have other thoughts and intentions, they will come for only a moment and you will be able to immediately recognize them and drive them away.

This is our work. But the main thing is still the action: to come, sit, and get ready for the lesson, to draw the drawings and to write down everything, which means to perform mechanical actions that help me connect to the lesson. Besides, you have to draw a circle, which means to imagine that you are in the group. You can even draw a circle on a sheet of paper, so that it will be in front of you and remind you that you are in a circle with all the others.

This form of a circle should be carved in your brain so that you will want to see the world only through it. It is as if you have special glasses in your mind and now you see that the world is round. It is because this is actually its true form and you want to see everything through the center of the group.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/07/13, The Zohar

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