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?

This week’s reading is about reconciliation and enmity. About brothers reunited in one story and tribes launched into perpetual warfare in another: the seemingly endless cycle of killing in Israel/Palestine that we’ve lived with so long. It’s difficult to understand, but also important to hope for what seems most needed, fragile, and painfully elusive: shalom, peace.

For a fictionalized version of the Biblical story, read Anita Diamant’s excellent novel The Red Tent. Even knowing the outcome I found myself screaming at the pages, No don’t send them to negotiate! Send folks who understand love as well as war. For a more modern, non-fictionalized version of contemporary Middle East history, try The Lemon Tree. It’s by no means a perfect picture, but does try to show the tangled roots of the conflict.

We, in our smaller mirror, are also often locked in conflict, inside our psyches. You and you, wrestling with your core issues. But embracing the belief that if you could just do that one thing right, or at least better, your life would move forward much more as you want.

I believe in change. That we humans can improve, make progress: both for ourselves and in the outer world. Even if that’s just at the margins of a problem, or intermittently, change is possible. It takes the right mix of kavannah (deep intention), right action, and faith. We’ve certainly seen huge makeover successes. The no-longer smokers or alcoholics, or someone who’s challenged another addiction, whether it’s chocolate or heroin.

What does it take to put your inner enemy to rest? To both say and do This new me is how I will be, now and forward. To release all your muttering and preoccupation with what’s gone wrong, and refocus your energy on how things should be.

We’re too often afraid of change. We try to bribe the future, or whatever powers we pray to: Make it easy. Make it fast. Make it not hurt. Make me successful. Am I done yet? I call it the “wake up thin” fantasy.

Sadly it’s never that easy.

The twelve brothers in this story each represent aspects of self. Allies and mischief makers. The strong, sure, and committed. The stubborn, restless, and impulsive. The angry and entrenched. Some willing to come to the table, communicate, and accept the blessings and burdens of what must follow. Others experts at perpetual self-sabotage.

To really create change, you’ll need to harness this messy and complicated collection of voices.

Exercise for the week: Think about an issue in your life that feels intractable. Something you’ve been griping about for a long time. Shine the light of your knowing into the darkest corners of this problem. Name all your internal brothers, especially the ones you’re least happy about or proud of. Figure out which voices need to be better heard and understood and which are just old noise that’re preventing you from making progress.

Get that far, and listen for the good insights that will follow.

Where do you find complete peace? Emotional and spiritual sanctuary?  Feel fully open and receptive, without the distractions of fears, fretting, or lists of the mundane. A sense of expansive graciousness and serenity. A place of creative vitality. Experiencing wholeness at a visceral level. This is a great week to remember when you’ve had that feeling, to invite it into your life more often, and to use that energy to recharge your soul.

This week’s reading’s one of my favorites. Jacob, traveling, lays his head on a rock to sleep, and dreams of a ladder to the heavens, with angels ascending and descending. Upon awakening, he exclaims, HaShem was in this place and I did not know!

The Hebrew word hamakom literally means “the place.” It connotes the physical place where events occur. But in a deeper sense, hamakom means exactly that place of stillness when you’re completely connected with the universe: no ego/I running the show. No busy-ness, no questions, and no need to be anywhere but present. A holy silence you’d happily visit, and are nourished simply by knowing it exists. The real insight: hamakom is available any time you can open to it.

In her wonderful book My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the first few weeks of a stroke that oriented her into her right brain as floating in a place of divine calm. Peaceful euphoria. Surrendering. No longer needing to be in charge. Focused, but content just being.

This feeling is very similar to what athletes describe when they are in the zone, time and opponents standing still. Or what the mother of an infant feels when her child is asleep and she has three minutes of uninterrupted bliss in a hot shower. Traditional methods of access include meditation, chant, and prayer. They all lead to a similar hamakom: a place where the self, the I/ego/me that we spend lots of time feeding and providing for, that tends to run our lives into complex urgency, takes backseat to a greater sense of universal meaning and calm. Instead of frenzy we feel peace.

You can get to hamakom simply, by offering yourself more chances to go there. Whether you have more formal practice or access hamakom through a walk in the woods, music, or some other gate, I hope you allow yourself that beautiful sense of complete beingness. Honoring you need for hamakom more regularly will make you happier.

Try a simple experiment to open the doors of your heart and psyche. A couple times a day this week, just close your eyes for twenty seconds. Focus on your breathing. In, out. In, out. Nothing more complicated or even longer. No mantras or prayers. Just breath. Slowing down. Being present. Being in hamakom.

Try it. See if it changes anything.