This is the last reading in Genesis. We’re at the edge of a transformation. It’s a time to think about integration, about creating oneness out of many diverse parts.

The blessings Jacob offers his sons give us much to hope for and much to aspire to. We carry the seeds of leaders and kings. Of priests and scholars. Seafarers, schoolteachers, soldiers, and olive growers. We’ve been given the swiftness of a deer and the ferociousness of a wolf. We’ve been blessed with fertility and beauty.

With all these gifts you’d think we’d move swiftly into integration. Instead, we tend to stumble and fumble, break bones or hearts, and after some famine of love or nerve, end up in this very human land of living, feeling, and doing, where we’re asked to do our work: To labor. To make bricks. To learn our lessons. And to keep learning and re-learning them. Until the pain of slavery becomes so great that we’re finally ready to break free. The next book: Exodus.

Do you more often think of yourself as a deer or a coach potato? Do you live a holy life of goodness and service? Or do you bumble along like the rest of us, causing messes it takes time, effort, and the occasional apology to clean up? The truth is you’re not whole until you’ve claimed each blessing’s attribute, and also integrated its shadow part.

And it’s exactly the shadows around which you have the most resistance that are the ones you need to be willing to claim. To say Oh yeah that’s me. Not necessarily the me I’m proudest of, or love the best. But a me I know well, a me I wrestle with. And out of that wrestling – be it with angel, self, God, or laziness and recidivism — emerges the seeds of wholeness.

Exercise: Identify your best qualities: Honesty, kindness, courage, equanimity…. Everyone will have their own list. Some night, when you’re neither joyous nor melancholy, stand in front of a mirror and light some candles. Close your eyes. Take a few breaths. Think about one of those traits. Then open your eyes and really look deeply at the person looking back at you.

Can you feel those qualities and blessings in yourself? Are you more willing to acknowledge your good parts? Do you shy away from the harder places? Or do you scold yourself for where you feel stuck, and forget about your strengths and the progress you’ve made?

As you do the mirror exercise, ask how each aspect, both blessing and its shadow, serve you. Not only in their highest idealized sense, but in your current you. The you who’s evolved from your personal history. Look at the aspects of self you’re often too afraid to embrace, and the ones that you cling to, that make you feel safe, even if they keep you a slave. Keep remembering that wholeness is possible if you’re willing to risk profound and honest dialogue with yourself.

We’ve all had chapters in our life that started out crappy. Not necessarily as badly as being sold into slavery, but bad choices of partner or job, health diagnoses we could not dodge, empty bank accounts with too many bills in the queue. These are contemporary problems and the Torah is an old manuscript. But the principles hold true: no matter how badly something begins, there’s a reason for it that, in the immediacy of our response, we don’t always discern, and possible good to follow. The proverbial lemonade from lemons.

The trick, as life has likely taught you, is not getting stuck in whining and self-blame. As a friend recently blogged, the best path to healing is genuine vulnerability and a good-sized helping of self-compassion.

This week’s reading includes reconciliation between Joseph and the brothers who sold him into slavery; then the migration of the whole clan to Egypt. In the short run, things look rosy. Everyone enjoys harmony as their fortunes shift. Joseph’s father Jacob is told HaShem will go down into Egypt with them, and will take them out again. Good now but lots and long bad to come before things will get good again: everyone will become enslaved.

The story of both slavery and leaving Egypt is among the most powerful organizing stories of Judaism. In Torah, the phrase I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt is more than so you owe me. It’s a reminder that any difficult situation is a cauldron, and that we’ll be changed in and by it, however bad things seem in the moment.

As good as something may look in the beginning, we’re incarnated to do our holy work: the work of soul growth. That means owning up to our past actions and choices, including some suffering (or at least discomfort) to harvest lessons from them, before we get liberated into the next phase of our beingness. It’s the darkness before the return of the light. No surprise these readings happen now.

The word in Hebrew for Egypt is mitzrayim. It means the narrow place. The place of constriction. The place we each find ourselves, and generally stay in far too long, before we’re ready for change. Most of us repeat the cycle over and over: the flush of joy and excitement when good happens; gradual disillusionment; growing awareness of the need for release; struggles for freedom; starting over.

You can count those cycles as lifetimes, or as multiple phases within this lifetime. But if you’re not learning by tromping over and over some of the same ground in your personal mitzrayim, you’re pretty unusual.

Exercise for the week: Think about what in your life has most excited you and then most disappointed you. It may be people, situations, ideas; the list is long and unique to you. Remember what your hopes were in the beginning, and what most frustrated, angered, or saddened you at the end. Hang onto the list. This story’s gonna get deeper.

Dreams of prophecy can portend great positives or seem ominous. There’s a theory that every one or thing in a dream is an aspect of self. That we’re playing out a tableau with the parts of our selves that don’t use linear logic or simple subject-verb-object sentences. Dreams are run by our higher selves, our guides, and also by trickster energies. Their styles vary but their goals are similar: get us out of our comfort zones and our habituated ways of perceiving. It’s the ambiguous, silly, or scary stuff that’s especially designed to get our attention.

There’s certainly times you’ll wake and wonder, where did that or who come from? Others when a dream’s meaning seems like a neon arrow in a dark sky. A favorite movie image comes from a Steve Martin film. He’s in a ruined old castle on a dark and stormy night. Lightning’s flashing, thunder pounding. The pictures and the fireplace are spinning, and he’s standing there shaking his fist at the sky, saying over and over, Give me a sign! Give me a sign!

Would that dreams were so clear.

This week Joseph is rescued from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows swallowed by seven lean ones. He predicts seven years of famine after seven years of plenty, and is then put in charge of resource planning. As famine spreads, the brothers who sold him into slavery come looking for food; he has to deal with his feelings about them and what they’ve done to him. Topics for another day.

Themes of food security run through the Bible. People move often because of famine. When the Jews wander in the desert they’re told to gather only the manna they need for the day, or it’ll rot, and that more will be provided. Later instructions about leaving fields fallow for a year also require planning and eeek, trust. One name for HaShem is El Shaddai, the Source of Sufficiency.

In personal growth and development it’s hard to tackle deep tough core material without a nurturing, strong, and loving sense of self-esteem as a base. If you spent seven years really making yourself happy, self-aware, and able to cope with surface stresses, you’d be much readier to wrestle with deep and intractable issues. When your crap comes to the surface, as it will, in dreams and/or reality, you’ll need storehouses of inner good-will to cope well, and to decipher the healing messages you’re being offered.

But that means doing your emotional and spiritual homework all along. Saving some of your seed corn and not devouring it as popcorn in front of a DVD, munching away blindly ignorant of your future. If you want to make it through the hard times, you’ll need the insights and foresight that dreaming can point you towards.

Exercise: If your now self could tell your younger self something that might’ve seemed like prophecy if it were fulfilled, what would it be? Can you put that same process in motion now, moving forward?