jeff.halevy

It's been a while Instagram. Hope your holiday season is a hole-in-one! (PS - Best gift ever.) - In all seriousness, this year has been an interesting and challenging ride. - I closed businesses and started others. - I ended relationships and started new ones. (Including most recently getting married.) - I willingly killed a part of myself and gave birth to a new one. - Part of that process -- becoming and embracing the real me -- attracted new people into my life: friends, customers, clients, a spouse, and business partners. People who realize the value of doing nothing more than making me laugh with putting and pooing... #puttingandpooing. (Shout-out to you MC!) ⛳️ - ...the journey continues. - Existence is not suffering; resistance is. - Wishing you a meaningful holiday full of many more laughs -- Jeff 🤗

jeff.halevy

Confession: I've been doing drugs, like Schedule 1 totally illegal drugs. Yes, really. (And that's why I've barely been posting to IG.) - While Nancy Regan decided back in the 80's that this particular drug I have been using -- MDMA (also "Molly" or "Ecstasy") -- needs to be classed in a category that means it has no therapeutic value -- I will need to disagree. - Not only based on my recent experience with this drug -- or as I prefer to call it, medicine (administered by a trained professional) -- but the experience of many who also have suffered from #PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), which is a condition affecting #mentalhealth caused by experiencing a terrifying event. - (And let's face it, for most of us have encountered at least one of these events, whether it was on a battlefield or not -- serious illness, family trauma, and emotional or physical abuse are just some examples.) - For years I barricaded myself in a fortress of machismo and numbness, which was originally fortified through the use of unequivocally non-therapeutic drugs. And later, post-rehab, through sheer denial and displacement: "success," "strength," "willpower"...the list does on...and each item deserves quotes for good reason -- none of it was real. (Uh-oh, if we "succeed" for reasons other than those generated by the true self, is it a recipe for disaster? I will bite my tongue, but just take a look at the headlines.) - Now I find myself focusing on what is real. And while I am still in a blissfully scary place figuring it all out, it has made it incredibly challenging to find the "right" content to post to Instagram, land of the happy, strong and successful. Right? 🙂 - But that's just it -- and I do not want to pile on with social media's detractors (there certainly is some good) -- the landscape of social media is inherently illusory, if not deceptive. Deceptive not only to others, but more importantly, to ourselves. And what's worse, is that it conditions us to further bury ourselves in trenches of superficiality and denial. Maybe more so graves than trenches, as this outward display of a false self only kills the true, authentic self -- and if we are breathing, [cont.]