The Furnace Within Us

[music] >> In 1961, researchers discovered a mysterious tissue in the human body that they called [music] brown fat. Unlike regular fat, which stores energy, this tissue does the opposite. It burns energy to produce heat. No muscle, no movement, no shivering. How does it work? Inside each brown fat cell, there are thousands of mitochondria, tiny power stations. When the body senses cold, it activates them and they burn fat directly into heat. That's why a newborn baby, who doesn't yet know how to shiver, doesn't freeze. He has a reserve of brown fat that lights up an internal heater the moment he enters the cold world. But here comes the startling revelation. What activates this internal heater? The answer is [music] the cold itself. The colder the environment, the more the sensors in the skin send a signal and the brown fat burns more intensely. The cold doesn't turn off the internal heat. The cold is what ignites it. Listen closely. The source of the heat doesn't come from the outside. It's rooted within, dormant, waiting, [music] and it's actually the coldest environment that awakens it. Without the cold, the inner furnace would remain off. How many of us seek warmth from the [music] outside? Encouragement, recognition, a kind word, love to warm us up. We look at a cold [music] world, indifferent people, disappointments, loneliness, and we freeze, waiting for someone else to warm us. >> [music] >> In the meantime, we shiver, completely dependent on external warmth, and when it doesn't come, we feel frozen, empty, extinguished, convinced that we have no source of warmth of our own. Thousands of years before science, the author of the Tanya discovered the law of the soul's brown [music] fat and interpreted the verse in Song of Songs, chapter 8. Many waters cannot extinguish love. [music] Listen to this revolutionary interpretation. The many waters are all the troubles of this world, the cold, the hardships, the disappointments, [music] and all of these, says the Tanya, cannot extinguish the love, the divine spark whose nature [music] is always to rise and be absorbed above like a flame that rises on its own. Within every Jew there is an inner fire that does not depend on anything [music] external, and it is precisely the coldness of life that does not extinguish it, but ignites it. We don't need to wait for warmth from the outside. Just like brown fat, we have an internal furnace that the creator planted within us, and it is precisely the greatest cold, the [music] hardest, loneliest moments that can ignite it. Don't extinguish, ignite. So, the next time we feel cold and burnt out, waiting for someone to warm us up, let's pause, turn off the brown fat, and remember the flame that rises above it. We will no longer wait for warmth from the outside. It is precisely in the greatest cold that we will ignite the furnace within.