Just before a body-soul seminar, a person approached me and commented, “Hey, you don’t look like a fitness trainer! Why don’t you stick to being a rabbi?”

Physical Well-being and Spiritual Leadership

Two answers to the person’s comment: First, I’m not a YouTube trainer who wants to show his six-pack abs and flaunt what he can do but what you can’t. Second, our revered sage Maimonides (aka the Rambam) teaches and what much of the rabbinical world either ignores, forgot, or never learned. The Rambam’s writings coach people in physical well-being is an integral part of spiritual leadership.

The Fitness of our Forefathers

Look at these prime examples from our sages:

1. Our forefather Jacob out-wrestled an angel. He lifted boulders that ten shepherds together barely lifted.
2. Each of Jacob’s 12 sons was an expert in martial arts (see Malbim of Parshat Vayichi).
3. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, who was both a juggler and a gymnast, could do pushups on his thumbs alone (see tractate Succa 53a)
4. Rebbe Shimon ben Lakish (Reish Lakish) could broad jump the Jordan River. In addition, he was a former gladiator who was deadly in hand-to-hand combat.
5. Maimonides was an expert in physical fitness who even codified the principles of health, nutrition and fitness within religious law.

Body-Soul Harmony

Our health and wellness approach is rooted in the timeless health advice of the Rambam. It stresses harmony of body and soul, the truest form of holistic health. What good is a perfect figure or 21″ biceps if you suffer from anxiety and depression?

My years of athletic experience, both as an athlete and a coach, include training in all different types of sports. I’ve seen the same pattern in running and weight training to wrestling and combat arts. I would go through a vicious cycle of approaching peak fitness, then suffering a big setback of an injury or flu. My nature to strive for the max pushed me to repeatedly burn myself out rather than build myself up. Even while learning to become a fitness trainer and health coach, my instructors were teaching me the same methods that didn’t lead to the results I was looking for.

The Optimum State of Well-being

With Hashem’s help, I came to the conclusion that true fitness is the optimum state of body-soul well-being. This occurs when one’s physical and emotional energies function harmoniously. This is opposed to the person who wins the marathon, then spends the next two weeks recuperating in the hospital. With body-soul fitness, your goal is not to run the 42 kilometers or to build the massive triceps. And, it certainly is not the aerobic-dance queen who is so carbo-starved after her workout that she eats twice the carbs that she burned. Your goal is to feel good so that you can serve the Almighty more efficiently and happily.

No, we’re not talking at all about religion; we’re referring to Emuna, literally “faith”, but much deeper: emuna is the Divine light that your personal relationship with G-d invokes, shining on body and soul to harmonize between the two and bring you to your optimum state of well-being. This is the genuine holistic health that is impossible to attain elsewhere.

Holistic Fitness is Functional Fitness

Genuine holistic fitness is functional fitness. Functional fitness means that you function effectively. Despite your age, you can run, walk, climb and lift as you need to. It also means that your body is free of disease and your soul and emotions are free of their ailments – worry, anger, anxiety, worry, depression, jealousy and other negative emotions.

My holistic approach, which I share with our community of subscribers and readers free of charge, addresses diet, disease prevention, exercise and lifestyle, and above all emuna, the pure and simple faith in the Creator that nourishes the soul and results in the epitome of fitness, the true balance of a healthy body in perfect harmony with a healthy soul.

The Lazer Beams Approach

In a nutshell, here is the Lazer Beams approach:

The Talmud teaches that each human being is an entire world. Indeed, we regard each of our clients as if they were the only person in the world. Your unique fingerprints attest to your unique soul and your genetic individuality. A healer must therefore guide you, treat you and respect you as an individual.

No two people have the identical chromosome map. If each snowflake and sand crystal is unique, then all the more so each human being. We therefore adhere strongly to the principles of biochemical individuality. What does this mean on a practical level? One type of diet or exercise might be effective with one person but detrimental, even damaging, to someone else. We therefore tailor our health-coaching programs for each individual. You’ll find articles here that include nutritional guidance, family guidance, custom fitness programs and diffusion of stress, modern society’s public enemy #1. Our health-coaching programs are the paragon of preventative medicine, aimed at preventing sickness and maintaining health and wellness.

Our comprehensive holistic approach is especially effective with children and adolescents as well as adults. Also, seniors should not feel hopeless about what they think is a chronic health issue. A change in lifestyle can often accomplish what no medicine can. Furthermore, it can even relieve a person from the need to take medicine. That’s what preventative medicine is all about – helping you and your family to be happier and healthier so that your visits to doctors’ office will be far less frequent, 

We go beyond preventative medicine for the body alone and include the necessary spiritual nutrient of emuna in building a pure and strong soul while helping people connect to the Almighty, the best guarantee in the world for health and happiness.

Emuna and Spirit

Emotions come from the soul and the soul is a tiny spark of its Creator’s Divine emanation. Therefore, acquired emotional problems (as opposed to mental birth impairments and mental illness, which only a qualified medical professional can treat) originate from the a “spiritual-nutritive” deficiency in the soul. This occurs when there is a blockage of the soul’s vitality, namely, the Divine emanation that is its very essence and vitality, resulting in the “darkness” of negative emotions. As such, we treat the human spirit with a boost of emuna. This unclogs the blockage, enables the flow of Divine emanation and returns the soul to its vitality. That is where it gets enhanced proximity to its source, the Creator.

From here, feel free to glance at our Testimonials page.

Welcome!

Welcome to the new Lazer Beams website, where you’ll get tons of free information and coaching for body and soul. If you’d like some more individually tailored, feel free to contact us. Use the form at the bottom of this site. Meanwhile, blessings for your health and happiness!