Why use submission separation and sweetening as the frame of reference for teshuva - expanding our vessels through growing in Yiras Shemayim

The frame of reference that the three steps submission separation and sweetening that we are using during our teshuva (www.brachagemach.com - if interested send email to shulikleinman@beyondanydoubts.com) to benefit the teshuva we do is important to understand more deeply.

In order to receive the true happiness and pleasure that Hashem wishes to bestow upon Nishmas Am Yisrael, we have to be a vessel that can contain it, meaning that it will feel like a pleasure to us.

For our mind to expand from the happiness and pleasures we associate with worldly matters, physical and emotional satisfactions, a sense of value based on the appearance of being capable independently existing beings, we need to grow in yiras shemayim.

We have an inner strength to ask Hashem to help us bend our firey responses when experiencing a lack of love and value from other people.  We beseech Hashem to help us release happiness and pleasure from being trapped in the thought that we must "do something" to secure our perceived need for love and value from people or events. The way we beseech Hashem is by effacing with yiras Shemayim anything that blocks us from the reality that He Alone is creating every detail of our circumstance in order to give us the opportunity to realize Hashem is One, to internalize what it means to say Know there is Hashem.  KNOW IT, even in that moment.

Knowing it in that moment effaces the grip that our natural being, our ego-development even when healthy, trusts as the source for happiness and pleasure.  Knowing there is Hashem in that moment, releases the soul's source of happiness and pleasure to its true root, its inseparable connection to Hashem.

Happiness and pleasure come from learning Torah, emulating Hashem (toleratiing insult, overlooking faults, bearing the burden of confusion of mind, forgiving, and casting sins into the sea) and living with emunah, faith that the Source of all Vitality is Hashem and bitachon, trust, that our our firey reactions can burn out lower levels of existence in order to instead flow passion for Torah to create warmth and light.  Our effort to do so is the basis of real esteem and the consequence of doing so is the experience of real pleasure as we build our mind's capacity to receive it and prefer it over the natural we just effaced.

This effacing of worldly matters during the three weeks is a teshuva that comes at a time that has the potential to be a time of holliness but got covered over because of the sin of the Golden Calf.  All progress we make in returning happiness and pleasure to serving Hashem helps us to repair the false belief that there is any glory other than Hashem's Glory.