Category Archives: TorahCycles: Midrash for self-exploration and growth

Mercy, Mercy: TorahCycle Ki Tisa

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Vayeira 2013Have you ever done something so bad you thought you’d never be forgiven? Not a small thing, but something you thought, maybe even swore, you’d never do?

That’s what the Israelites do this week, while waiting for Moses to descend Sinai. They get impatient, worry he might not come back. They violate the No other gods commandment, and smelt their gold into a golden calf. It’s not as small as Don’t think about X and then doing so obsessively. But it’s a helluva lot more than We were restless. Hard to stay calm when your mind keeps chewing over  the insufficient calming of Don’t worry. Be patient..

I just finished two books about guilt and shame. About actions taken which dominate the lives of the people who did them. Both Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands are good reads, though it’s tough living inside the heads and hearts of people in chronic emotional pain. Each needs to find a road to redemption. A way to start over is lots harder and more important than dialing up a pizza or a Netflixx movie.

It means finding and accepting forgiveness. In this story it’s gonna take a coupla generations and forty years of schlepping. A road, a long one, to the promised land. Moses, pleading for them, gets HaShem to say yes to coming along as witness, guide, protector.

Interestingly this same reading includes the thirteen attributes of mercy  (rachamim in Hebrew, a lovely sounding word), including compassion, mercy, graciousness, truth, forgiveness, and pardon.

Imagine if those qualities organized your life, your head, and your heart. Imagine a world slow to anger. Imagine yourself slow to anger.

When Moses returns, his face is so touched with holy light that the people, albeit guilty and ashamed, cannot look directly at him. His face also gets red with wrath as he breaks the tablets.

There was a great NPR riff the other day (though it may have been on Bluff the Listener) about an app that lets you see what someone else sees when they’re watching you. How you look when flushed with joy, red with anger, or blushing in shame. A chance to witness yourself as others see you.

My family didn’t do anger with sound. Instead people retreated to their corner with a book. No eye contact. The app would not have shown their inner turmoil, that churning of anxiety, guilt, and fear of future consequences, even if apologies were said and officially accepted.

External forgiveness is great. But it doesn’t really take hold until you forgive yourself. Imagine extending the thirteen qualities of mercy towards yourself. Imagine being able to bathe in them, wash clean your bad choices and your mistakes. Whatever you said or did not undone but cleared of its power to influence your next forty years. Imagine mercy that releases their hold on your heart.

It takes time for a new equilibrium to settle in. We’ve all learned from our personal shlepping that the road is rarely smooth and level. There are always more tests, reality checks large and small, to test our resolve. But if we let mercy in, and our commitment to change is strong, we can move from this now to a better next.

Put On Your Robes: TorahCycle Tetzaveh

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Tetzaveh 2014

This week’s reading has very detailed instructions about priestly vestments. Think special in the way of prom and wedding dresses. Clothes we wear for high occasions, for initiations, and that ready the wearer for ritual. In this case, white linens and a jeweled breastplate, and rituals of atonement and renewal.

Torah names a select few, and one High Priest, as initiated and elevated. In my cosmology, humanity is a nation of priests, each for another.

Some days I can see my robes and on other days yours. When it’s yours, I transcend knowing you don them on one arm at a time, just like I do. Instead I listen up, and can hear deeper truths from you about how I’m off-track and screwing up, or doing well, making good choices. I credit your stories with more authority.

Most problems in life come when my non-robe-wearing self butts into your non-rob-wearing self. If we could remember who we really are, we’d be less easily annoyed and frustrated by what’s said. We’d listen better and argue less. We’d tell stories of friendship, growth, and hope.

There’re days when you feel like a priest and days when you don’t. Days (or at least moments) when you walk around glowing with wow. Others when you’re cranky and nothing helps, no matter what you’re wearing. In those moments what I most need—and can seem furthest away–is to laugh. Or at least a good story.

Neil Gaimon’s sequel to American Gods dramatizes the transition from gods whose stories were tales of carnage, red in tooth and claw, to the rise of trickster gods and clever heroes. Gods who teach by making us think. The God of Torah is yet another evolution: a god whose stories open our consciousness and our hearts. Who helps us out of stuck. Who readies us to elevate both our stories and our souls.

Good priests do that too. Beyond conducting a great ritual, they invite you to see yourself in a clearer light: to witness, accept, and ask for more insight–from yourself and others, from holy messengers in every form. They bring you closer to the holiness inside and around you. They help you make more moments of your life feel sacred, or at least better.

The stories we tell matter. They make us priestly or competitive, feel holy or provoked. Because thought is the greatest trickster god of all. A thought can make you hungry or sad, satisfied or victorious. It’s all in how you tell your stories, and the rituals you conduct to reinforce them. Why choose anger when you could choose love?

Try to be and see the priest in yourself and others, even wearing jeans and an old t-shirt. Even in your nemesis or the guy asking for handouts. It’s harder, and usually we don’t. More often we judge our own or others’ distance from the very holiness we profess to aspire to. Each time we do, we fail an initiation.

Putting on your robes lets you access your wisdom and experience. Lets you leave stories of hurt, cynicism, and doubt in your past. And gives you new stories of love and hope.

Home Base: TorahCycle Terumah

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Terumah 2014A lot of my spirituality comes from the idea of being told. Of instructions about everything from my karmic homework to where I put my glasses. Messages that come with a deep sense of knowing: a synchronous recognition in my head, heart, and gut. Like the puzzle piece that slides perfectly into place, it’s an awareness of direction and action that just feels right, even if sometimes it also seems challenging, or ironically simplistic. Of course I need to be listening to hear it.

Most of us get instructions for from context. From family, teachers, partners, and mentors. Verbal and nonverbal. (Insert the classic image of my mother pulling her shoulders back and square like a drill sergeant, hissing Stand up straight!) Sometimes we listen and sometimes we don’t, to our benefit or peril.

The reading’s about the construction of the miskhkan, the portable ark the Jews will carry through the desert. It acts as home base. A place for people to gather and listen, and for HaShem to communicate with them. Such a fascinating contradiction between the core idea of indwelling spirit (our holy spark) and the need for a special site for God to visit and instruct.

I recognize and respect sacred spaces, from the comforting hush of formal sanctuaries to the hidden magic of ancient painted caves. But I prefer the idea of a portable sanctuary that’s in me. A beacon emitting the Help me, Teach me, Thank you signal the way the SETI Project sends earthly transmissions to whoever’s out there listening.

My word for that inner mishkan is HaMakom, a God-name that means The Place. Completely portable. Where the inner and outer rest within one another. HaMakom can occur anywhere in space-time. In nature or dreamtime, meditation or inspiration. It’s a conversation between worlds seen and unseen that feels just right.

No one yet knows how long they’re gonna be on the road. Making something together is a bonding exercise. Everyone contributes: money, ideas, thread.

The idea that you could make a place to invite the divine to show up is seductive. The instructions, like Noah’s ark, are many and specific. Part of the message: it takes work and time to get where you wanna go. Lots of steps. Collecting. Measuring. Assembling. Blessing. But like the old cartoon about the seeker parked outside a guru’s cave, just because you show up and ask, doesn’t mean you’ll hear anything

Atop the mishkan are two cherubs. They face one another, with a space between them. When I first heard Charlie Hayden/Pat Metheny’s album, Beyond A Missouri Sky, I was fascinated by the openness between the notes. A breath. Like an open heart, that space is our inner mishkan, our receptor site to get spoken to.

There’s lots of instructions coming. For now they’re delivered without recriminations and scolding. We’re encouraged to do good and well. Offered hope in the possibility of progress. Even its inevitability, if we listen well and choose a righteous path with an open heart.

Create HaMakom by honoring your inner mishkan. Stay open and listen well. The more you do, the better you’ll hear the answers you seek.

Day By Day: TorahCycle Mishpatim

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Mishpatim-

This is the Year of the Grand Experiment. Living simply, with more emphasis on what matters to health, heart, and soul than to doing and stuff. Buying less,  and more consciously. Going eyeball-to-eyeball with my values, not just about money but with time, food, relationships, energy. Trying to make conscious choices in every dimension of life. Trying to live by guidelines and “rules,” notes that I wrote down last autumn, when I was contemplating what would make my life better, healthier, more creative, productive, and joyous.

The gifts that are coming towards me as I live by these rules are abundant. Some new, others I’ve sought for a long time. Some are delightful. Others challenging. When I do this experiment well, I hear them and if I hear them….That’s the rub, can I keep doing them?

I think the answer is Yes, because somewhere along the way I’ve moved from that old karmic dance routine of “one step forward, two steps back,” to its more evolved sister, two steps forward for every one back, sideways, or standing still staring into space wondering if I really can keep this process going.

This week’s reading has the great line We will do and we will hear (in contrast to a later one, We will hear and we will do). It’s a synergistic form of self-improvement. One that, like a childhood game, doesn’t matter where you jump into the circle. Just that you commit to doing. And keeping doing. Day by day.

This is the first reading in which we get lots of rules. Instructions for daily life: 613 in all coming our way, with 50+ here out of the gate. About everything from cooking to praying. Rules for behavior. But more importantly, an expression of values.

Sinai gave us the biggies, the Ten Commandments. These rules are the how-to manual for daily life.

When I work with people, coaching or problem solving, I’m always trying to get them to understand their values, and how those values influence and relate to their goals. What they’re striving for as well as their ethics and moral elasticity.

How we live daily life should be an extension of our values.

There’s a concept in Jewish mysticism of the big face and the little face: the face of the divine and our own. The little a reflection of the big. In the image, so to speak. There’s also the value of treating others as we wish to be treated.

If you cannot see yourself clearly, it will be harder to see another. Ditto to respecting, accepting, loving, having compassion for, and caring for yourself and others.

Take some time to think about your own values. Relationships, money, time, food, your body, and your spiritual practice. You can call them rules if you need a prod or an organizational tool. But in a more elevated consciousness, it’s about committing to living with ritual and with intention. About making the choice to elevate your actions by consciousness and awareness. Each choice, each moment. You may not see the face of God, but you can very clearly see your own.

Holy Wow: TorahCycle Yitro

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Chukat

We all have forms of practice. Spiritually obvious ones like daily meditation or prayers, and more grounded forms like running or gardening. Leaving Egypt is like getting your K-6 certificate for doing a good job with your practice, so far. It’s a big deal.

So what do our guides do?  Give us a recess or two to figure out the lay of the land and the new us we want to be? Nope. We’ve barely got our feet on the trail and we’re catapulted to the holy of holies. A chance to seriously up our game.

Sinai imagery is of thundering sound from a cloud and lightning shrouded mountaintop. Hearing color. Seeing sound. Every sense askew from both message and delivery.

How about you? Do you want your next batch of lessons to arrive by knocking your doors off? Or do you prefer a process that guides you carefully, even gently, to greater insights and blessings? Do you want those lessons to deepen who you already are, or to challenge you to become different?

Torah talks about our physical senses being shattered open by revelation. The sacred geometry of mind and matter is complex and not under our direct control. But I get regular affirmations that what we think affects what happens in our lives, both for good and ill. We can’t make things happen, but when they come we can decide whether to welcome or run from them.

At its core, the Sinai experience is about deep kavannah, commitment and intention. Intention in a multi-dimensional, seven chakras at a time way: Yes. I’m all here and all in.

To reassure those who aren’t always so ready: in the story, the people close their eyes, cover their ears, and beg Moses to serve as their interlocutor. But for an instant, we each had a chance to say a profound Yes.

Buddhism teaches the importance of preparing for death. For the “go towards the light” moment between nows when you can shape your karma and consciousness. That moment’s also about intentionality and choice.

Mantra: Each choice matters, and impacts what happens next.

The big choice is choosing intention. This reading asks, What’s it gonna take to get your attention? A Holy Wow, a sweet arm around your shoulder, or something else? The universe has many ways, from kind to sly, even scary, of knocking on our doors. Some ways we neither invite nor welcome. But it also responds well to commitments that are deep and true. That align your holiest self with your deepest intention.

Get clear on what you want so you can start asking for it.

I welcome holy moments, but haven’t always accepted the responsibilities that accompany their invitations. As I age, I increasingly value the importance of listening to these messages, whether they come with trumpets or as whispers, as subtle hints or with clear instructions about what to do and how to live.

My advice: The next time you’re scared and want to cover your ears and eyes, instead embrace the idea that what’s happening is for your highest good. That it’s an opportunity to jump tracks, up your game, catapult yourself in the right direction. Then open your hands in gratitude and say Yes.

 

 

The Other Side: TorahCycle Beshellach

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Beshellach

Sometimes you feel like you’re leaping towards liberation and other times the pace is glacial. But all roads lead to the sea, a metaphor of the last barrier which must be crossed, though the path ahead has vanished.

The story goes that everyone was standing on the edge, unsure and afraid, an angry army getting closer, until one guy jumps in. Only when the water hit his nostrils did the sea part.

That’s how ready and committed you need to be.

They emerge into a place called the Sea of Reeds. Still a sea, but with some purchase underfoot. Things returning to scale instead of a colossal tsunami on either side. And the reality of entering a new world. A new land, where everything’s unknown, both the gifts and the challenges. How nicely prophetic for the turn of the year.

Perhaps you too have made a shift in your life. Maybe not as big as getting out of slavery, but in your world just as important. Hooray if it was conscious. Even if not, think about where you were last year this time. And when you’d like to be next January. Find the vision you’ll need.

Mystical Judaism has the image/idea of klipot. Layers with which our holy spark gets covered and obscured. Think coats of pain that accrue from all your actions of denial and confusion, hesitancy or mistakes. They keep you just disconnected enough from your holiness that it can feel a little out of reach.

Now’s different. The turn of the year seems to peel away a few layers. Like you just had a loofa scrub. A little red and tender. But definitely refreshed and invigorated.

On the other side we’re like newborns. Full of potential, with our freedom, our spark, and our hope.

Take a minute to let the idea of “the other side” sink in. Big or small, you’ve made changes and committed to more. Your holy spark’s a bright ember. How’re you going to keep it glowing brightly?

What do the Israelites do on the other side? They dance and sing.

I’ve been listening to playlists put together by wise and knowing friends. One spins a beautiful refrain: What shall we do, what shall we do, with all this fragile beauty?

That’s the song of now. To decide what to do with your hard-won and fragile beauty. You can sign songs of triumph or songs of new desire. But also sing songs of hope and of commitment. Blow on your holy spark with a sure and encouraging breath. A breath of appreciation for past courage and of trust in your future.

There are moments in life when time slows. When we can get the perspective we need to move forward. That this reading comes at the time of light’s return is no accident. It encourages continuing work on our process. Asks us to look into the eye of God and then back at ourselves. To see and use our inner spark to light the way.

Whether you got here fast or slow, take a good look around. Remember this place of joy and possibility. Carry it with you as you embrace your next challenges.

Time’s Up: TorahCycle Bo

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MiketzWay down deep in most of us is a hurting, a wounding to heart or soul, self-esteem or sense of self, that has brought us to this moment. It’s caused damage along the way, but also brought us to the knowing, both painful and liberating that we’ve reached the point of no return. It’s time to make a decision that will turn that painful it around, whatever your own special it is.

Remember the owwies of childhood, and your ambivalence about both wishing them gone and wanting to touch them? Change comes if you’re willing to dig deep enough to find and touch your inner sore place. You’ll know it by the way it feels: unresolved and always asking for something, perhaps attention, food, or love.

The source isn’t necessarily something that was done to you. It could have started when you failed to step up and take action or responsibility. It’s almost certainly something for which you have not yet forgiven yourself or another. Omission or commission makes no difference. What you most need to let go of  is its hold on you, on how it defines and organizes your story of life.

Confession. During a recent snow-enforced confinement I played Angry Birds (an addictive game of digital slingshot). There’s one bird on reserve (that acts like a neutron bomb) to use when you’ve failed once too many frustrating times at knocking down the targets.

It would be great to have such a ready tool for ourselves, when we’ve gotten stuck doing our emotional homework. Launch the mighty eagle; blow away all your failures and equivocation.

Our inner pharaoh has said Yes/No, Yes/No, Yes/No once too often. Time’s up. It’s time to fling that mighty eagle at yourself.

As silly as it sounds, some of my biblical imagery goes back to the classic 50’s movie, The Ten Commandments. After the last plague, the killing of the firstborn, the pharaoh who’s said Yes/No nine times prior stands holding his beloved son, his face a portrait of anguish, remorse, and regret. Nothing will make that boy alive again.

With luck you won’t need to go through such deep loss to make progress. But the stark and simple clarity that it’s time now to make changes is an important and compelling insight.

You cannot change the past. You can wish it undone, or pretend it was not so. You can’t erase the hurting. But you can transcend it. Can make your future different than your past. Use the energy you spent being angry, or fearing pain will happen again, to make changes, getting out of the narrow places that have confined and identified you for far too long.

The Jews are chased out of Egypt. You have the luxury of choice. To saying Yes to you and to joy.

We’re blessed this year to have this reading come at the transition between old year and new. A time when many of us make pledges about how we want to behave differently. If you make only one resolution, make it to live free of the pain of the past, and to live with greater awareness about what really matters to you in the year to come.

What’s It Gonna Take? : TorahCycle Va’eira

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Va'eirah-2013After fruitcake and holiday sales is the New Year and everything that beginning represents. We start new cycles at other times, but the annual ritual of making resolutions is hard to ignore. Planning to get kinder, lighter, more focused or frugal…. Fill in the blanks with your own special challenges of this incarnation.

This week’s reading is about seven of the ten plagues. Various forms of discomfort and warning to deliver one message: Time and past time for change. P.S. The more you resist, the crappier it’s gonna get.

Moses and Pharaoh duking it out. Let my people go! Yes…No! Our own inner pharaoh knows this dance. We specialize in resistance, and are creative self-saboteurs, committed to keeping things as they are (no matter what or how much we say we want them to be different). We’re complicit with our oppression; with all the unhappiness that insight packs with it.

Why the push-pull? The list is tediously familiar: resistance from fear, guilt, laziness, shame, inertia. Stubbornness in every shape and style.

We each carry our own karma. Health challenges in one person manifest as emotional trauma in someone else. Family dysfunction, relationship problems, body shape and image, self-esteem. Pick a card, any card. All yours to wrestle with.

You know what works and what doesn’t. Know when you’re stuck, aimed in the wrong direction, faking it without real commitment, or otherwise avoiding what you say you want to do more or less of. Many of us spend huge amounts of time, effort, money, and enthusiasm making things worse instead of better.

A favorite line from the internet: I wish I weighed what I weighed when I decided I needed to lose weight. That kind of non-progress. Because knowing alone isn’t enough to make change happen.

This story, leaving slavery, is a very big deal. The first and biggest step towards freedom is overcoming resistance. Real change. Yikes!

So what’s it gonna take?

If we need to terrify ourselves with literal or metaphorical blood, darkness, frogs, or boils, then so be it. Hopefully you won’t do too much damage along the way. But it will likely be as annoying and persistent as buzzing flies.

Wouldn’t it be grand if we could don a biohazard suit for the duration, to prevent our emotional toxicity from leaking out? Maybe we’d change faster if we didn’t have others on whom to project our crap.

There’s a great John Gorka refrain: We’re all flashes in a great big pan and they’re turning up the heat. Our holy spark cooking in the heat of our collective, flawed humanity.

But throughout these goings on, this testing, we are slowly waking up. We’re learning something strong and powerful about who we are, what we require, and what we’re willing to sacrifice for what we most truly need.

So take some time during this year-end for reflection. Between the festivities and toasting, find a little quiet time to look at your thrashing, at all the ways you make life harder and more anxious for yourselves and those you love. Think about how to ease the process, and how to prepare for the changes that are coming. Keep that resolution and good will follow.

Wake Up!! TorahCycle Shemot

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shemot 2013

We’re at the beginning of the next beginning. Actually 400 or so years into it. It’s like waking into a bad dream: We’re overworked chattel. The sun’s hot. Threats abound. Blessings, poof! We’ll need everything we worked so hard to learn, if only we can remember what that is.

We get used to our realities. We don’t live under overseers’ whips, though our lives are filled with requirements and expectations, to ourselves and others. We go through our days, find comfort where we can, and are happy to collapse in front of dinner and our screens.

We stay in jobs, relationships, and other situations that don’t nourish us. It’s not that we don’t know we’re dissatisfied. Certainly our kvetching and the sadness around our eyes are big giveaways. But we feel like we made a commitment, aren’t sure if just one more try might make the difference, or even what we would do differently, because we’re not sure we’d be able to pull it off.

Economists have a theory called sunk cost. It’s the idea of Don’t throw good money after bad. (And implicitly, stop whining about what you can’t get back and do something different.) Even understanding it intellectually, I’ve always found it hard to embrace. It goes against every fiber of heart. Nooooo! I want this to work out. To be okay. Not to disappoint, or hurt. Not to cause or feel pain. Just hang in. Things’ll get better.

In our attempt to accept the status quo, we keep lowering the bar of what’s good enough to put up with. To our own detriment. As Kenny Rodgers sang: Know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.

Shemot arives to say Hey! Wake up!!

It’s a shofar blast, jolting us out of our discomfort zone. Time to get going. To acknowledge this now is bad for you and to do something about it. Time to face whatever’s next. Even if the birthing process is unknown, risky, or scary. Because doing nothing is worse.

Eastern religions are full of great enlightenment stories. There’s meditative sitting. Focusing on breath. Solving intractable riddles. And immediate experience, like the woman who groks the wholeness of creation as her chapatti dough drops into hot oil. Snap, crackle, pop and suddenly it all makes sense.

This story will take longer. Lots of hubbub and equivocation before the race for the gates. But it signals the most important message: we will change.

Have you ever woken one morning realizing it’s time to end a job, relationship, or addiction. How could I have stumbled so long in the dark?, you ask. What I need to do is so clear. Duuuuhhhh!!

Each life has good times and hard ones, growth and stasis, joy and sorrow. (For everything there is a season.) But like seasons, lives should transform.

A handful of years ago the book Not Quite What I Was Planning started the idea of a six-word memoir. Try writing one for your life. And for right now. Are they the same or different? What pushes and pulls you, inner and outer? What are they telling you to do next? What six words would you want to write next year?

All Those Gifts!! : TorahCycle Vayechi

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Her Twelve TribesOur inner selves reflect different aspects of who we are, or like to think we are. Our lover. Our banker. Our artist. Our bargainer. Our internalized parent. The proverbial inner child. The manifestor and the needy one.

This week Jacob blesses his sons with what range from character assessments to hopes for their future. Individually the blessings are interesting; as a group they encompass a useful and hopeful set to build a future upon.

What’s the point of blessings? It’s great to be smart, attractive, or athletic. But beyond making life easier or happier, what good do blessings do?

Blessings are somewhere between the best hits of elementary school (understanding things like how weather works), and the best of adulthood (falling in love, appreciating music, poetry, or wine). The discerning and savoring selves: your brain and sense of wonder dancing happily together. They’re also teachers and guides.

Blessings help you become clearer about who you are and what you’re here to do. Blessings help you get on with life with less fuss and grumbling.

Note: Blessings aren’t like shopping. You can get better or worse about using and appreciating your blessings. But you can’t trade them in for new or different ones, like you might a car. They’re gifts, not assets. They should inform your ability to do your karmic homework.

What you need to do more/less of, and when to start or stop doing so, isn’t a secret. Probably not to you. Certainly not to your guides, or even your friends and family (many of whom would be happy to tell you). Instead of waiting for an instruction manual, say Thanks and use your gifts. You’ll figure it out.

We don’t always use our blessings wisely. We get too ambitious, overshoot the mark. Or are too cautious, don’t try as hard as we should.

We have small triumphs, like mastering a new techno toy. And larger ones, like a better job or happier relationship. And we screw up. We learn from our failures, and sometimes get luckier than we ever though we could or even deserve. Favorite lines from Joan Baez, Life’s a thump ripe melon. So sweet and such a mess.

Blessings are what get us from one melon to the next. They’re somewhere between home base and everywhere you’ve always wanted to go.

I’m calling 2014 The Year of the Grand Experiment. Manifesting my lists of how I’d want to live if all my blessings were happily working synergistically, and I were truly honoring what I tell myself is important. Baseline reality: choices around time, money, food, and stuff. Deeper: spiritual practice, creativity, and emotional growth. Winnowing the cupboards and expanding the soul.

What a great week to meditate on your blessings. Don’t focus on things that come with worldly acclaim. Think about aspects of self that make you happiest to be you, and that offer clues and challenges about how to live your evolving life.

The next parts of Torah are about how to free yourself from what constrains you. Take some time now to think about how your blessings can illuminate the journey to your personal promised land.