$100 Students Are Easier To Work With Than $25 Students

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Luke Ford

About six months ago, I was giving a friend $25 Alexander Technique lessons. He bargained me down to giving him half lessons for $12.50. And this guy was my most difficult student. He didn’t want to do many of the things I suggested. He argued with me through much of the lesson. He took phone calls. He didn’t do the homework assignments.

By contrast, those students who’ve paid my full rate of $100 a lesson were easy to work with. They listened to everything I said. They did everything I asked. They got the most out of the lessons while many of my cheaper students didn’t get much out of their lessons because they didn’t respect the work as I was giving it away to them at such bargain rates.

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Supplements

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Luke Ford

A doctor tells me what he takes: “Stuff I take that is of proven efficacy: 1. resveratrol. I work on it in the lab, it may reverse changes of aging.
2. CoQ, I take it. 3. magnesium, good for nerves and all sorts of things 4. B-100, again, good for nerves brain and blood 5. chia seed 6. black sesame seeds.”

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Jews In Downtown Los Angeles

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Luke Ford

From KPCC: Someone who does classify himself is Luke Ford, 46, who converted to Orthodox Judaism in 1993 after being raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist in Australia. The infamous blogger lives in the Pico-Robertson district that’s home to a myriad of Orthodox synagogues and kosher restaurants and markets.

While Ford acknowledged that Greenwald is right to open his doors to every Jew, he said it would be very difficult to live a strict, Orthodox lifestyle Downtown.

“There really isn’t an observant community in Downtown Los Angeles,” Ford said. “Jews who want to take Judaism seriously are not going to be able to live in Downtown Los Angeles.”

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Emek Hebrew Academy In The San Fernando Valley

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Luke Ford

A source says: Last year at this time, Emek fired its principals for secular studies and for Torah studies. This year, the secular studies principal did not last a year. He has resigned. Rabbi Eidlitz, who helped engineer the ouster of the two principals last year, was himself booted a few months ago. But he landed on his feet. His lawyer out-maneuvered the Emek lawyer on a non-competition clause so Rabbi Eidlitz was able to land a good job at Ohr Eliyahu, which he can now use a base to poach rabbis from Emek.

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The Therapist Who Loved Me

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Luke Ford

In early 1994, my psychiatrist suggested I would make more progress if I got a psycho-therapist. I agreed.

One afternoon, my girlfriend, nine years older and not Jewish, drove me to the office. I had all sorts of fantasies that my therapist would be hot and when she came out to get me, I was disappointed that she was fat.

“I guess you won’t be fantasizing about f***ing her,” my girlfriend said later.

Many years later, I had a hot therapist. I was thrilled when she came out to the waiting room and introduced herself. She was young and hot and just my type.

I won’t give any description of her to protect her privacy.

For most of our work, I had a girlfriend I loved in my sex-and-love addicted way and I spent most of our therapy sessions talking about the trials and tribulations of my tortured relationship.

I felt quite capable of loving several women at once. It would protect me from being overly vulnerable to any one woman. Sometimes when I was with my girlfriend, I thought about my therapist, and sometimes when I was with my therapist, I thought about my girlfriend.

I loved to make my therapist laugh. Once I regaled her with a story about a past girlfriend who would implore, “**** me like a whore.” My therapist couldn’t stop giggling. Later, she apologized for her loss of control.

There was no need to say sorry. I adored her innocence.

The next session, she said that I could not talk explicitly about sex. She was young and it just didn’t feel right. If I was talking to a male therapist or to an older woman, or to a different type of woman, that would be fine to be as explicit as I wanted.

I told her that I would comply with her wishes but I thought that such restrictions made her less of a therapist.

She said she respected my opinion and that I was welcome to talk about what sex meant to me emotionally.

For the rest of our time together, I kept pushing limits in this area but did not go much beyond them.

A few months in, I asked her what type of therapy we were doing and she said it was psycho-dynamic (the type of therapy most like analysis aka re-parenting).

I don’t think that my being in love with her interfered with our work. I don’t think it interfered with my relationship either as my love for my therapist was on the one hand pure and sweet and childish, and on the other hand, it existed only in fantasy, never in reality.

I often talked to my girlfriend about my hot therapist and on occasion I’d have her pretend to be my therapist so that we could play. After the relationship, I had therapist friends pretend to give me therapy so that I could mind-f*** them.

During the sessions with my hot live therapist, I held nothing back. I made up nothing. I wasted no time trying to impress her. I don’t my lust interfered. It was good for me to relate intimately to a woman I’d never ****.

Near the end of our time together, she said she had seen me walking on the street and wanted to stop and to say hi but didn’t in case it would freak me out. I said it would never freak me out to talk to her publicly.

At the end of our therapy, I asked her if we could have coffee. She said no. That would be inappropriate.

We were both close to tears during that final session. When we said goodbye, I shook her hand, the first and only time I touched her.

We’ve had no communication since.

A few months ago, I Googled her. She appears to be happily married and to be moving ahead in her career. She’s a good good girl and I hope she never reads this.

A friend of mine plooked his therapist. Well, he showed up for one session. At the end of it, she said she couldn’t be his therapist because she found herself attracted to him. So they went out and had drinks and a fling that lasted a few weeks, perhaps months. She was crazy in bed. In the end, he dumped her because she was too psycho.

I suggested that what they had enjoyed did him more good than any talk therapy they could’ve done. He did not agree. He regretted not having what I had had with my lovely chaste therp. He said he could sleep with women any time, but that had been a rare time he’d sought therapeutic help.

Chaim Amalek says to me: “What you need is a motorcycle. Why? Transportation, and to pick up chicks. Also to get you out of your head and away from psychiatry/analysis and other wasters of time and money.”

“Why not try your hand at a horror movie? You meet a nice Jewish Girl, fall in love with her, marry (“Honestly Levi, I am wayyy into older guys”), and then…..she converts to Seventh Day Adventism. After telling you she is pregnant. She begins eating pork in front of you. She decides to raise the kid as a Christian. She starts blogging about your Jewish eccentricities. But you cannot leave her because she makes big bucks and besides, AT has merged with Scientology, and the rabbis forbid it to you.

“Writing for the umpteenth time about an old gf is not a stretch.”

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Floating On Balloons

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Luke Ford

My favorite dreams are about floating on balloons (always balloons that I make and attach to a chair, not commercial hot-air balloons).

I think it was in 1992 — I was about 26 — that I had the best dream ever. At this time, I was reduced to living at home with my parents. I was four years into my bedridden journey of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In June of 1989, I had dropped out of UCLA and accomplished nothing since.

Mom and dad lived on seven acres in rural Newcastle, about 45 minutes drive north of Sacramento. The home was 2471 square feet and was valued at $393,000 in June 2012.

I was lonely and hopeless. I feared I would never get well and that I would be destined to pass my life as I had it now — a couple of good hours a day, a mile of walking, the occasional telephone conversation and the rest of my time spent in bed listening to my own tortured thoughts.

The main thing that inspired me was Dennis Prager and his presentation of Judaism. I had dozens of his lectures on cassette tape and my parents read to me the Jewish books he recommended. On occasion, Rabbi Yitzhok Adlerstein would call me in answer to one of my fevered letters. It was a great kindness when I was feeling most desperate.

One night I dreamed I attached numerous balloons to my chair until –without planning it — I floated high into the sky and caught a gulf stream and floated south over the Pacific. I rushed through the night and the clouds were variously dark and grey and purple. Jet airliners flew past me and I felt deliriously free and happy. Eventually the clouds parted and I landed in New Zealand.

That’s when I woke up. The dream was so vivid that I still remember it decades later. It left me feeling happy for days.

I knew that as things stood, I would never get well. I knew that I lacked common sense and would be unable to figure out things on my own. I knew, however, that I was good at connecting with certain people and that if I could just put myself in front of enough of them, one of them would find a way for me to get on in life.

I started placing singles ads in Jewish and secular publications, seeking salvation from single females, and a tiny trickle of women made their way to my home, some to stay for a weekend or a week. Each ad was like a little balloon pulling me up to a better life. Eventually, I attached myself to enough balloons that I floated away from home, converted to Judaism in 1993, moved to Orlando and lived with a woman who took me — willingly and gratefully — to her psychiatrist, Daniel Golwyn, who prescribed Nardil and placed a great deal of reality and normality within my grasp never to be relinquished.

According to Wikipedia, Nardil aka “Phenelzine is used primarily in the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). Patients with depressive symptomology characterized as “atypical”, “nonendogenous”, and/or “neurotic”, have been reported to respond particularly well to phenelzine. The medication has also been found to be useful in patients who do not respond favorably to first and second-line treatments for depression, or are said to be “treatment-resistant”. In addition to being a recognized treatment for major depressive disorder, phenelzine has been found in studies to be effective in treating dysthymia, bipolar depression (BD), panic disorder (PD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), bulimia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

Around 2004, an attractive young woman would blog that I was very Danny Deckchair. According to the movie description on IMDB.com: “An Aussie becomes a national sensation when he lifts off in his deck chair tied to balloons.”

I have never have taken a hot-air balloon ride in real life, though I loved to watch them float by when I lived in the Napa Valley, but for that money I could buy many Dennis Prager lectures. For $80, for instance, I could buy four of his talks on men’s sexual nature.

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Dennis Prager’s Contempt For Bankers

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Luke Ford

On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “You know how much fear I have for big government. My contempt for most banks in the world is deep as it is for big government.”

“The profession of banking has soiled itself so often. You don’t have to be on the left to acknowledge how incompetent or corrupt so many in banking have been.”

Dennis Prager talks like this is a moral problem among bankers. I suspect the problem is one of incentives and that most people in that position would act similarly. Bankers get to keep the massive gains they can make from gambling with their money while banks get bailed out if they lose. So losses are shared with the public while huge gains are in private hands. The incentives that bankers face are to gamble rashly. If they win, they win big and get to keep a good chunk of change. If they lose, they get bailed out.

Dennis: “The [real estate] bubble burst and now there’s a run on the banks in Spain. The biggest bank in Spain has a garbage rating from the agencies. Junk. There’s no liquidity. No money in Spain. So they want the Euro to bail them out. I think the Euro could collapse, at least in certain countries, in the course of the next year. The breakdown of nationalism was a bad idea but Europeans don’t trust nationalism. Why? Because the Germans used nationalism as a racist tool to exterminate people, therefore nationalism is bad?”

“What are you then? People aren’t European. You might as well say we’re North American. How many people listening feel North American? Zero. You feel American or Canadian or Mexican. Do you think Mexicans feel bonded to Salvadorans because they’re both latino?”

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What Do I Want From My New Therapist?

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Luke Ford

Last week, I started with a new psycho-therapist. I’ve had six years of therapy, and four main therapists. All have been Jewesses (except for one shaygetz). I only fell in love with one of them.

I enjoyed that ride. Impossible relationships are the most appealing to me because they are the least threatening. I can date shiksas and secular Jews all day long and nothing permanent can happen unless they embrace Orthodox Judaism and so far only one has been tempted and that relationship quickly started to feel like a millstone around my neck. I would be tethered to her all of my life? No, thank you. Pathetic can be cute at first but it wears out its welcome fast.

Every new therapist asks me how they can help. What do I want?

The past few years, I’ve answered with a story I heard in a marketing seminar. The speaker had previously owned a string of hypnosis centers. He said that he taught his staff that when somebody comes in and says, “I need help with X”, X is never the real problem, because if it was the real problem, the person would’ve solved it already.

So what I primarily seek from my therapist is help in areas where I’m not seeking help. If I knew what I needed, I wouldn’t need it.

I don’t want a therapist who automatically buys my stories. I know that I’m fooling myself much of the time. I tend to see my choices in much grander terms than reality would permit.

I’m a romantic. I see more to life than is there.

I want accountability from my therapist. When I report to somebody regularly about what I’ve been doing, that has a salutary effect on my behavior. I’m not tightly bonded to anyone right now. I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t have a close friend I tell everything to. So right now I particularly need a psycho-therapist to report to once a week.

I’m susceptible to either-or thinking. For example, I might believe that that either I cut this person out of my life or I let him know that I find some of his behavior unacceptable. When I can’t figure out how to react to somebody, my therapist might suggest I consider making no reaction or my therapist might suggest a whole slew of reactions I never considered.

I find that therapy opens up my choices. I realize I have many more than the instinctual ones that come readily to mind.

I also find out in therapy how my read on reality is frequently distorted. I see things through the lens of distorted experiences. Therapy helps me to better understand my past. It gives me alternate explanations for what happened, and it helps me to realize that I do not have react habitually. I can make new choices. My instinctual responses to stimuli do not always serve me.

I tend to isolate when things aren’t going well. I find negotiating relationships distasteful (not just romantic ones but prosaic ones with blokes). I essentially grew up as an only child (my older brother and sister left the house early). I’m used to getting what I want and when I’m confronted with the need to compromise with others, I frequently choose to just go my own way, forfeiting those relationships.

Shul is often a crowded place and my tendency is to bolt as soon as possible, but if my friends talk me down from my anxiety, I can hang around longer and enjoy myself, even in a crowd. I find many social gatherings in Orthodox Judaism hard because everyone my age is married with kids. I feel like a loser because I’m not and so I want to leave as quickly as I can.

Relating to those outside of Orthodox Judaism brings many challenges because Jewish law restricts what I can eat and where I can go and what I can do and those outside the fold either don’t know or don’t care about the rules, so it is easy for me to say to myself, it’s not worth trying to be social with them.

I want to have sex with every attractive woman I meet so it is challenging to relate to them as human beings when they show no desire to go to bed with me. They might talk to me about some lofty idea and I’m just wondering about how their speech would change if I placed them in extremis. I’m not really hearing them in a deep way. They’re not fully real to me. They’re just potential fixes for my addiction.

My mind naturally focuses on what’s wrong with my relationships. I easily think of countless reasons to dismiss people from my life. I will see one side of somebody, an unattractive side, and I will discount them without considering all the facets of their humanity and how much they have to offer.

I constantly feel this thirst for attention and when I take the easy ways out for achieving it, the degrading ways, it’s like drinking saltwater. It only makes me thirstier.

I don’t tend to have good boundaries. I’ll start the day with the best of intentions, but by the time I’m at work, I’m cracking dirty jokes. My brain allows me to justify almost any behavior. When I have to report back to an objective party about my choices, their frequent wrongness becomes obvious to me.

I find that in therapy, I have to keep restating my goals, such as more human connection, and my therapist constantly asks me if the things I am doing will help me to achieve my goals. So therapy helps to keep me on track. It forces me to articulate what I want and to judge the means by which I seek to achieve my goals.

It’s not easy for me to realize what I’m feeling. Therapists are about the only persons in my life who ask, “How do you feel about that?” Therapy forces me to figure out what I’m feeling, even if it is awkward or pathetic, and when I see my emotions more clearly, I tend to make better choices.

I find that regular psycho-therapy is like getting a tune-up and I just run better and make fewer destructive choices.

I have no more concerns about getting hooked on therapy than I have about getting hooked on God. I have no plans ever to do without either.

GREG LEAKE EMAILS: Hi Chaim Amalek,

My hypothesis is that Luke is trying to promote a sympathy lay. It seems like he wishes to convey the idea that he has so many contradictory difficulties that some beautiful, ravishing woman with her beautiful hair spilling over her shoulders and her cleavage clearly visible in her power suit would see him as someone who requires redemptive sex.

Naturally, he has already stated that he could not possibly marry a woman unless she is Orthodox, and it is hard to see the power suit and the black stockings and the tailored fit and the beautiful hair all suddenly being concealed in a frum outfit holding his interest.

Frankly, I have been reading your comments for a long time, and if Luke had just followed your advice, he would be 100% better off.

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The Profundity Of 12-Step Programs

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Luke Ford

I’m reading about the sixth step — “We’re entirely ready for God remove all these defects of character.”

I am particularly struck by these sentences and how they applied to my own life:

Many of us, ourselves victims of emotional deprivation in our early years, had learned to survive by cultivating hatred, anger, and resentment as motivating forces, seeking to insulate ourselves from hurt and fear. Now we discovered that we had crippled ourselves by using this monotonous strategy of distrust and isolation in all relationships, whether they were inherently hostile or not.

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The Female Reporter Who Cross-Dressed To Get Into the Internet Asifa

Posted on May 25, 2012 by TheJewishChannel

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