Stop That Worrying!

Thoughts become things. What you resist persists. We are what we think.

We have all heard these sayings, and we’ve all experienced those so-called self-fulfilling prophecies when the worst thing we think could possibly happen does… why? Because somehow we created it ourselves! But, how?! Kabbalah tells us.

Kabbalah teaches that when you worry about something, you are opening up the door for the Negative Side to come in. Just like when we have certainty we are able to draw down the Light of the Creator and manifest, when we have worry we open the gate for the Negative Side and draw in what it is we are worrying about.

In the Torah, it says that before soldiers go out to battle there’s an announcement made: if you have completed the construction of a new house and haven’t gotten to live in it yet, if you’ve planted a vineyard and haven’t harvested it yet, or if you are engaged but not married yet, then go home. This announcement tells those people who have things that they’ve started and not yet completed – a new house, a new marriage, a new vineyard – to not go to battle.

The reason why, kabbalists say, is because these people are going to be worried that if they die in battle they are going to miss out on all those new things in their lives they haven’t gotten to experience yet. And because of that worry, they shouldn’t go to battle.

This doesn’t appear to necessarily make sense right away, because whether a person has a new house or an old house, a new spouse or an old spouse, a new vineyard or an old one, dying is dying. People who already have houses, spouses, or vineyards also don’t want to die. One would think that if a person is going to die, the fact that he actually also has a house he hasn’t moved into is very low in his scale of worries. Death is the big deal; everything else is secondary to that.

However, what the kabbalists teach is that the soldiers who haven’t yet lived in the house or married the spouse or harvested their crop have extra worries. They are not just thinking about death; they are worrying that they will die without experiencing any of those new things. They are thinking - I hope I get to live in that house… I hope I get to marry the person I love. That worry, that specific new worry that nobody else has except them, is the opening that the Negative Side needs to come in and cause their death. Their deaths would not be caused because of the battle, but because they have opened themselves up with this additional worry. And with that we can understand why that announcement made.

This is a very extreme example, of course, but explains the process of worrying – whether it’s worrying that you’re going to be late for work, get dumped, fail at something, and so forth - the spiritual process of worrying is the same. You are opening those specific doors for the Negative Side to come in.

Hopefully this understanding encourages us to catch ourselves when we find that we are beginning to worry. Because if we even start the process, we are beginning to open those doors. In fact, Kabbalah teaches that if something amazing is meant to happen to us, and we engage in the process of worrying, we are actually making it so that that thing cannot happen for us anymore.

Worries become reality not because of what someone else, or life, did to us. It is the worry of the soldier with the new house, the person with the new job, the woman with the new love, which opens to door for the Negative Side to enter. If, instead of worry we have certainty, then blessings that are meant to come to us will come. We manifest whatever we put our attention on; we can choose certainty or worry. Whatever we choose is what door is opened.