Episode 2 - I Missed My Exit And Apparently Saved My Soul

Pain without meaning feels heavy; pain with purpose becomes bearable and often transformative. We open with a quick giveaway update and then go straight into the heart of our theme: how spiritual awareness changes the way we experience setbacks, from the massive life shocks to the tiny irritations that clog a day. The lens is practical. If the source behind events is loving and wise, then even a delay or a wrong turn can serve as a gentle correction that spares us something harsher down the road.

We explore why repetition matters—rereading a line or revisiting a practice on a better day can drop the same words deeper, building a reserve for when tests arrive. From there, we unpack the spectrum of tribulations: a missed button, a traffic jam, a frustrating call from school. Instead of dismissing these as nothing or inflating them into everything, we treat them as opportunities to pay a small invoice now rather than a painful one later. That shift nudges us from outrage to humility, from spiralling to steady steps forward.

There’s a hard truth we face with care: sometimes awareness itself is dimmed so we truly feel a test. Even seasoned teachers and lifelong learners meet edges where they react out of character. Rather than condemn those moments, we read them as a map of where to practise next. We keep the tools simple and actionable—pause and name the source as loving, ask what is being cleared, take the next right action, and track the wins you might have missed if you were busy fuming. Over time, the big blows lose some violence, and the small stuff stops stealing your day.

If this conversation gave you a new frame for what you’re carrying, tap follow, share it with someone who needs calm in the chaos, and leave a short review with your biggest takeaway. Your note could be the nudge that helps another listener reframe the next detour with trust.

Chapters

• 0:17 Welcome And Giveaway Winner
• 0:59 Signed Book Giveaway Plans
• 1:24 Why Repetition Deepens Learning
• 2:08 Foreword: Suffering And Spiritual Awareness
• 3:07 Accepting Pain With Trust
• 4:21 What Counts As A Tribulation
• 5:01 Why We Need Life’s Setbacks
• 6:27 Choosing Growth In This World
• 6:43 Big Trials, Small Irritations, New Perspective
• 8:16 When Awareness Is Hidden
• 9:33 Accountability, Mercy, And Moving Through Tests
• 11:10 Closing And Listener Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

Hello and welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Yesterday was episode one of season two. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I certainly did. Yesterday I was so excited about it, in fact, that I forgot to name the winner of last week's free book giveaway, The Book Amuna by Rev Dovit Saperman. Last week's winner is user Caddy18, Mike Caddy, a Instagram follower and a friend who supports the podcast quite a bit, and I know he's enjoying it. He's often commenting, sharing, and liking. Thank you, Mike, for your support. I'm going to send out your copy of Amuna. And I want to remind everybody, I've picked up 10 copies of The Garden of Emuna, the book that we're going through right now. And I'm going to endeavor no guarantees, but while I'm here, I'm going to try and get them signed by Ravshalomarush with a little blessing to all of the people who will benefit from winning a free copy of the Garden of Amuna. That will start, that giveaway will start when we're done giving away the books of Amuna by Rav David Saperman. Now, yesterday, just to reiterate, we went through the forward of the book. We talked about why it's important to repeat, because sometimes when we review something or we read something, the words are just that. They're words. We read them by rote. We sometimes go through life by rote. That's natural. Sometimes you're in the zone, and sometimes you aren't. And it's important to pick up the same book or repeat the same motion when you're in a different zone, when you're hyper focused. You're not always hyper focused, and you don't know when that's going to be. So the effort needs to be made multiple times in order to ingrain these ideas and these teachings into your minds. I'm going to continue right now with the book. We're about to get into chapter one, but I'm going to finish off the foreword, and it says, Know that all types of sorrow and tribulations stem from a lack of spiritual awareness. You hear this? All types of sorrow and tribulations, meaning difficulties, challenges that we face on a day-to-day basis, they all come from a lack of spiritual awareness. A person with spiritual awareness knows that everything is the result of divine providence. He therefore has no tribulations and feels no suffering, for Hashem has given and Hashem has taken away. There's different levels here, guys, very, very different levels, okay? He's saying something very powerful. He says somebody who understands and has a serious relationship with the Creator knows that everything is run by the Creator and that He is perfect and divine, that He loves us, and therefore He has no suffering, He has no tribulations. Does that mean He's not impacted? Does that mean He's not afflicted? Does that mean somebody who gets, God forbid, some serious illness or goes bankrupt or has other challenges, does that mean that that's not a tribulation or that it doesn't happen to those people? Of course it happens. It happens to everybody, and of course it's a tribulation. The difference is that this individual understands who's delivering it. He understands the purpose behind it. And because the purpose behind the difficulty is one of pure goodness and love that comes from a loving creator, it's no longer seen or received as a tribulation. It's actually received with love and appreciation, if you can imagine. Even though one must necessarily feel pain, such as the pain of the soul separating from the body, and the pain of sickness, since the soul is strongly connected to the body and separation is painful, even though with spiritual awareness the pain and suffering are lighter. Just like I finished saying, when you know that there is purpose and meaning that is good and beneficial to you, even though there is difficulty in pain and suffering, you accept it with love and understanding. Why do we have to feel the pain? There is no tribulation, my friends, that comes to you in this world, and I mean absolutely none. And a tribulation, we said I think in last season, can be putting your hand in your pocket to pull out a quarter and you pull out a nickel. That can be considered a tribulation because now you got to go back into your pocket to try and get a quarter. Or you're doing up your shirt buttons and a button is missing. That's a tribulation. Now you have to go and change your shirt. Anything big or small that inconveniences you, that makes your life even a little bit more difficult, is considered a tribulation. So why do we need them? Because we've been here before and we're here now, and we are far from perfect. None of us is perfect. And so we're constantly doing the things that we shouldn't be doing, going places we shouldn't be going, eating things we shouldn't be eating, seeing things we shouldn't be seeing. Whether it's intentional or not, we're constantly doing things that we're not supposed to be doing. Now, we're working on ourselves and we're trying to get better and we're trying to improve, but we're human and we're going to fail. We're going to make mistakes. That's natural. And God, in his love for us, doesn't want us to suffer the consequences of our action in the world of eternity, in the world that is unlimited and goes on forever. Because effectively your punishment would go on forever. He doesn't want that. He wants you to pay for it here in this temporary world by putting your hand in your pocket and getting a nickel instead of a quarter. You might laugh at that and think it's not a big deal, but that just saved you from some pretty heavy duty punishment in another world. What an opportunity to clean up shop over here in these short temporary world, 70, 80, 90 years that we have. That's where he allows you to clean up from previous existences also, because you could go to the next world and have to clean up in a way that is very painful and everlasting. And he gives you a choice. Do you want that or do you want to come back down and fix it in this temporary world in a much easier way? And if you're here today and you're listening to this, you've already chosen to come here and repeat and fix your problems in this world because it's so, so much easier, especially when you have the knowledge that God is running the show and it's all out of love. Suffering is easier to cope with when a person is aware that everything is the product of divine providence. If difficult pain and suffering are easy to handle with spiritual awareness, lighter suffering is not felt at all. In other words, if getting some form of serious illness, God forbid, or God forbid going bankrupt, or all the other difficult, really difficult challenges, are made so much easier with a little bit of spiritual awareness, then what happens to all the small things, the minutiae that happens to us on a daily basis. The umpteen things that can happen to a person in a day that's a setback. I just gave you a couple of small examples. Your buttons missing from your shirt, you take a wrong turn and you now have to be rerouted from your GPS, or you hit a little bit of traffic, or you get a phone call from the kids' teachers at school, or a million different things that somebody could lose their mind and focus entirely on that, become hyperfocused on it, and then become upset and depressed. There's a million things like that. They happen to us all the time. If you work on yourself to the point where the big things, the big giant things that we never want to have happen to us in this world happen, and they become less impactful than imagine how the small things that we deal with is like water off of a duck's back. You simply don't feel them. The reason one suffers is that at the time of tribulations, one's spiritual awareness is taken away so that he'll feel the tribulations. Very interesting. What he's saying over here is that God actually takes away some of your spiritual awareness. You know, that's why you see some of these giants. You see people who are rabbis, who have big long beards, who've spent their life studying Torah, and then you see their weaknesses when they're challenged. All of a sudden, you see that they get challenged in a certain department and they lose their minds, and suddenly they act completely out of character, which is rare. It's very rare for these people because they've worked on themselves so much. But suddenly you see that there's one area of their life that they can't manage to control. When it happens to them, they get all excited. They lose a sense of stability and control and understanding. And the reason is, according to Likote Moran, which was written by Rav Nachman of Brezhnev, that we're reading from, he says that God actually takes away your awareness. Because if you're not suffering in this world, you're going to suffer in the next. So that gives you perspective that now I have to suffer a little bit. It can't always be good. It can't always be perfect, it can't always be nice and great and loving and peachy and rosy. I always have to pay the bill for the foolish things that I do. Nothing goes for free, and you don't want it to go for free. Because in this world, if it's if you're not paying back the things that you shouldn't have done, then you will pay for them in another existence that is eternal. You don't want that, my friend. So this way you have a new perspective. You have a new appreciation for the difficulties, for the phone call that you get from your child's teacher at school, for the traffic, for missing the exit on the highway and having to be rerouted. You think it's a punishment, and maybe it is, it's a tribulation, but you know that it's good for you. You know that God is doing it because he's saving you from so much worse. And really that's the way we need to look at it. That God, like a parent, doesn't want to punish a child. Even though the child is very much deserving of that punishment, they've done something foolish and they need to be punished. There needs to, there's everything needs to be held to account in this world. The same way we want people held to account when they wrong us, when we do wrong, we need to be held accountable. It's what keeps us on the up and up. But God doesn't want us to be overly punished. He doesn't want us to suffer. He doesn't want us to deal with these difficulties more than we have to. And so He gives us the opportunity to clean them up in a quick, short way in this world and get through it. Remember, we said last season, once you've gotten through that tribulation, which is really a test also, once you've gotten through it, it goes away. The more you fight it and the more you don't recognize where it's coming from, the harder it's going to be to get through it and recognize that it's coming from a place of love. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts. Drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the trustback. Thanks for listening.