Tag Archives: awareness

Anybody Home?: TorahCycle Pekudei

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Toldot

When I was in high school, my father, much to my chagrin, began answering the phone saying Nobody home!, mostly in jest but also implying prospective friends or dates too flummoxed or intimidated were people with whom I should not socialize. (This the same guy who, invited to a boring relative’s three months out, intoned gravely I’m sorry, I have a funeral.)

These days when we say Nobody home, we’re usually referring to what we politely call a “senior moment,” a confusion/absence of facts or names, one or many synapses misfiring. We’re so in the moment we can’t add more to it, or so “out to lunch” we can’t cope with what’s already on our plate.

So how do you know if there’s somebody home or not?

In this reading we’re told “HaShem’s glory” descended to fill the mishkan and will hover over it in a cloud as a sign of God’s presence. If the cloud rises in the morning, time to pack up and get shlepping. If the cloud remains low, a day to stay put. HaShem will also keep a fire burning in the mishkan each night.

Hearth fires give security. Very different than being out in the dark wondering what’s too near, eying us with predatory intent. The fire mean’s God’s home and with you. No matter what’s circling, you can feel safe and protected, if you believe HaShem is home.

How can we know as clearly when we’re really present? Having our brains respond accurately is a good start. Other parts showing up help too. If we’re talking I might hear your words. But that doesn’t guarantee I really understand you, or that I’m ready to help. I may hear that you need something, but unless I open my hands, my wallet, or my heart, you might think nobody’s home.

So if we’re not always fully present—for whatever reasons–why would we assume the divine presence is always on tap? Cloud, schmoud! Couldn’t it be smoke and mirrors?

Q: How do you know anyone’s really home in the mishkan?
A: It’s partly a matter of faith. But if you’re not at home in you, it won’t much matter.

More answer: To live with greater awareness and intention, you have to be home in yourself, regardless of what/who is outside you. You need a strong center, though not one that’s housed in too strong an ego. You should be at least as receptive as you are active. Working on your karmic homework while listening for the help that’s offered you regularly.

How? To really connect with HaShem, not just sidle up to the reassuring presence of the fire or the cloud, you have to really be home in your inner mishkan. You need to listen with your heart and soul as well as with your ears. If you’re thinking too much about your t-shirt dyed pink in the wash, you’re unlikely to hear divine insights, even if they’re telling you how to bleach it–or your soul–white again.

Final answer: If you’re at home with you, HaShem is too.

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.

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.

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.

Step By Step: TorahCycle Lekh Lekha

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LekhLekha 2013

Judaism is only part of my spirituality. But I genuinely believe that embedded in Torah is great insight and guidance for self-transformation and development. Most of us have embedded in our brains Bible stories and imagery from childhood. But deeper Torah raises lots of questions and challenges that can help you shape your now, and your becoming.

There’s an arc to the evolution of souls: your getting from creation to whatever’s your version of a promised land. Last week, the first thing Noah did after escaping annihilation was to get drunk and have sex. Ooops. Like eating a brownie an hour after starting a diet.

This week, the first thing we’re told is that Abraham is to leave the house of his parents and the land of his birth. He’s to set out for somewhere new and unknown. It’s a metaphor for walking away from what in your past defines you too closely. Whatever constrains your ability to grow and evolve. An instruction to leave behind your old habits. To prepare for the possibility of the new. To change without knowing what will come. But because you are ready to embrace the possibility and importance of making that shift.

Most of us have screwed up. Usually not just once. For our core issues – – love, food, money, or deeper — screwing up is probably familiar territory. Now’s a great time to begin to make a shift. Maybe not packing and calling u-Haul, but by doing something that feels potentially as important. Deciding to make a fundamental shift in the shape of your reality, your daily life, and your beliefs.

The first big step is self-scrutiny. The next, deciding what to change. Everything after is follow through. Aiming yourself in a different direction. Then continuing, step by step. Making your life about who you want to become, not who you have been.

In the beginning, the changes don’t have to be huge, or even consistent. Even doing one thing differently every other day will begin to increase your awareness. Consider every act a choice.

If you’re like most of us, you won’t walk in a straight line. You might go sideways, in circles, even backwards, for days, weeks, or longer. But each step is a step away from the old, a new step on your journey. Self-reinforcing and invigorating when you succeed.

It’s much easer to see other people’s paths. Your friends’, partner’s, or family’s. You have the perspective and vision to see quicksand two steps or two months ahead of them much sooner than they seem able to. You can see them looping around, not knowing they just veered way off course. (They can do the same for you.) It’s harder to see that clearly for yourself.

Life is such a fascinating and tenuous mix of insight and knowing, intention and awareness. We make greater progress when we add in faith. Believing in yourself is a great starting point.

That’s how change should begin. An energized mix of vision and focus. Sep by step it leads to manifesting. Anticipation and determination. Acknowledging the difficulty of change, but committed to trying. All your doing counterbalanced by the receptivity of an open heart.

Step by step.

Second Chances: TorahCycle Noach

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Noach 2013There’s a great health prayer that gives gratitude for body parts appropriately open and flowing or closed and contained. It’s really about sufficiency and balance, the harmony of a smoothly functioning system. Excess or blockage can create chaos, as we’re told happened after creation, with generalized self-serving corruption.

Some excesses, large or small, are a source of joy. Falling in love. A beautiful day. Sublime music. A clean house and a good book. Heading out for an adventure.

But highs are often countered by lows. Being dumped. Traffic jams or flat tires. Leaky roofs. Not enough of whatever you think you need to be happy.

This week’s reading’s about what happens after excess. A total reset. Wiping the creation slate clean and starting over. When it happens to you, it’s easy to feel like the folks in the post-Katrina or –Sandy pictures. The forlorn survivors, standing in matchsticks of rubble, as far as the eye can see. Few volunteers to be that poster child.

Our lives are rarely one smooth arc.  We go through many cycles of joy, excess, loss, hope, and renewal. Over love, jobs, homes, births, deaths. Often much more trivial endeavors. Our lows aren’t as brutal as global devastation, but when you’re hurting and weeping, no matter the cause, it can feel that hard.

When we careen too far in one direction, we tip the balance, inviting in lessons that, if we were paying better attention, we might learn without having loss and pain come as teachers.

Chances are you’ve bumped into those lessons before. That they’re the ones, no matter how well you do with your other karmic homework, that you just can’t quite seem to get out from under.

You might see the storm clouds coming. External circumstances pushing you towards some edge. Or your own emotional patterns steering you onto the rocks. The universe is filled with hints and foreshadowing. But, if you’re not paying attention, you can get pretty wet before you find dry land again.

Most of us have good instincts about what’s important to our happiness, whether that’s body, mind, heart, or spirit. Think about the yin and the yang of what matters to you. What you’d really need to create your next world. Bring that on board. Then release what’s ready to be washed away as you enter the ark of your future.

Most of us won’t see doves bearing divine messages. But hopefully you’ll learn the markers of better decision-making and know what to do next.

At the end of the Noah story, the rainbow symbolizes the divine promise that devastation will never again be so total. Translation: once you’ve tanked, there’s nowhere to go but up. You’ve earned another chance to get it right. Another chance to get clearer about how you want to live.

Take time this week to think about the next cycle of your adventure. What do you want your life to be about? What parts do you need to shed, to say Thanks but good-bye? Which to heal and improve? To invest in, give voice, learn from? If you can contemplate the answers with more curiosity than fear, hooray for the promise of this next round.

In the Beginning (Again): TorahCycle Bereishit

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Bereishit 2013Someone asked me recently what this blog is about.  My answer: to help you answer the question Who are you in the process of becoming?

Torah readings offer a vehicle for self-transformation. They help us to look through the window of the aspirational self. To listen to what the words are saying about how to live. Me. You. Now.

Almost all of us wrestle with something, for that long night we call life, the way we’ll soon remember Jacob wrestling with the angel.

We each have our own issues and process. Some are unhappy in a relationship or a job, while others long for one. There’s body stuff, and money stuff, and friend/family stuff. All the aspects of our daily reality that our minds chatter and fret about so much and often. There’s soul stuff too, whether that translates into becoming a meditator or simply kinder, deepening a spiritual practice or searching for a resonant path.

We’ve cycled back to Genesis. Creation. The edge of another new beginning.

You may believe in the Big Bang, The Voice/Hand of God, or a different creation story. But anyone who’s ever had a brainstorm knows how quickly something can appear out of apparent nothing. An idea bursts through, alive with energy. The synergy and synchronicity of all of you. Your history and your becoming. Your holy spark glittering to show you the next next. Suddenly a vision, where a moment before there was not. A new world of possibilities, multiplying quickly.

That’s the way to start this year.

Shed last year’s battles and disappointments. Bring with you what you’ve learned, what you earned, and what you aspire to. Leave behind the old struggles, fears, and sorrows. Start over cleansed and optimistic.

Poof! What an idea!

Here’s my invitation: To celebrate creation, give yourself time this week to invite new ideas about how you want to feel this time next year. With hopes you’ll feel like you’d just won the lottery of your life and soul. Like you can create the world you want to live in.

It’s another chance to reinvent you. To edit and to refine. To take everything you’ve learned and have it become your ally. A mini-reincarnation without having to start over again with diapers.

A lot of the “in the beginning” story is about separation and discernment between opposites: heaven and earth, day and night, land and sea, and so on. It’s also about free will: following instructions or risking the consequences of your actions. We all face those kinds of choices every day.

As you make them — consistent, impulsive, risky, wise, or not — some of the glittering possibilities of your great new ideas will fade. And some will grow brighter. The array of bright lights will narrow and cluster. As they do, your life options will become clearer. If you’re lucky or blessed, and can hear the hints and instructions coming from your inner voice, they’ll even show you the paths for your evolving journey.

I’m suggesting folks journal this time around. Whatever strikes you as worth remembering along the way.  If you’re so moved, write yourself or the rest of us a note below.

Forgiveness, and then…: Yom Kippur 2013

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Foregiveness-YKThere are so many ways we’ve been hurt and inflicted hurt on others. Numerous categories of harm, from unconscious and unintentional to malicious and planned, even savored.

Yom Kippur, aka The Day of Atonement, is the most sacred of holy days. A time when we, as individuals and a community, ask for forgiveness. A time we atone for our own bad actions committed, contemplated, and witnessed, and good ones not chosen, and forgive others the same. It begins the year with as clear a conscience and heart as we will grant ourselves and those around us.

It’s a fasting day. A time to go inward. A day spent looking into the mirror of our inadequacies, with the hope that we will come away cleansed and renewed. Not a bad bargain for a little hunger.

There’s also literal chest pounding to accompany our moral inventory. The guilty and the rest of us, reciting the oh-so-many ways to short-change goodness. We witness, anonymously, the failings of others as we acknowledge our own.

Sometime this week (Saturday the 14th if you wanna be in the synchronistic groove) reflect on the list below. Look deeply into your memory and your heart. What if you actually honored this set of behaviors as a template for daily life?

An illustrative excerpt (imagine the syncopated thumping and chanting, and each action starting with “We have…”): We have acted wrongly; been untrue; gained unlawfully; defamed; harmed others; been unjust; hurt; told lies; given bad advice; neglected others; laughed in scorn; stirred enmity; treated others with disdain; thrown ourselves off course; and, my personal favorite, we have kept ourselves from change.

Yikes! for most of us. But what if you felt forgiven for your past. And if you set an intention to be more conscious? Start with a clean slate, and promise (perhaps not for the first time) to do better?

You can up the ante with face-to-face or written apologies. But start by looking yourself in the mirror and seeing where you’ve blown it. Pay attention to how you feel as you consider the how’s and why’s of your misdeeds, your persistent shortcomings, even your moments of casual indifference.

Most of us don’t really want to cause harm. We act too quickly, from self-interest, even by trying too hard to help. We think about our own feelings more than others’. Around our core issues we lapse into bad behavior out of unconsciousness, habit, resistance, and fear.

The atonement process helps get your attention. Helps you think about becoming a better person. About paying closer attention to how you act towards others and yourself. About trying to live with more goodness..

It sounds so simple. But we all backslide. Even if your most sincere “I’ll try harder this time” turns out to be a colossal failure, the saying and the trying both matter. Self-forgiveness is the beginning of greater awareness.

Perhaps journal when you go through the list. (Feel free to add your own sore spots.) Try to identify an intervention. Some consciousness-sparking cue that might trigger better attention the next time something snags you. Anything that’ll cue an interrupt and a moment of heightened consciousness. You don’t have to keep score of hits and misses, just remember to remember, and see what that changes in you.

The Vow: TorahCycle Mattot

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MattotThis week’s reading is officially called Tribes. Lots of warring and strife, and the slaughter of both enemies and innocents. It starts out saying: A vow’s a vow. If you said you were going to do (or not do) a certain thing, if you swore an oath, then (ahem) you’re actually supposed to follow through. As in, not break your vow.

There’s a caveat about vow annulment. Not surprisingly, just abandoning or ignoring vows isn’t kosher (excuse Jewish pun). In specific circumstances certain people can be released. But before you spring for the crack of light in the doorframe, remember that vows honored are generally successful, and those abandoned are usually not.

Are you ready to demonstrate obedience and discipline to something you think still matters, something that might change your life?

Vows are made in times of crisis (no atheists in foxholes, they say). Also in deep moments when we hope to motivate ourselves for betterment.

We make lots of promises along the way, to self and to others. Some are absolute, but many take that “if, then” form of “after X, I’ll be good about Y-ing.” A carrot on the end of life’s stick; a reward to aim for.

We often make things complicated with conditions and rules, when the secret is much simpler, hidden in clear sight like Poe’s purloined letter: Live exactly the life and healing you want to achieve. Wanna be less angry, then stop shouting. Thinner, eat less. Kinder, do more for others.

There’s a famous illustrated Zen story about finding the bull. (Google for the pictures.) It’s a metaphor about the steps on the path to enlightenment. Which boil down to vowing only one vow, and then keeping it: I will keep my vows.

What if consciousness were that simple, if everything followed from that one act?

Not complicated. Not lots of rules and measuring, trying to remember when, what, or how X and Y were. What if you simply lived the way you say you want to live? In your open heart, with clarity and consciousness, as though you were already at goal. Being both receptive and active in equal measure, at the right times and places. Worrying less about your house, your car, or your job. Not fretting about what your partner said, why you don’t have one, or what would make things better in your relationships.

What if you lived in goodness and joy and gratitude? With greater awareness and intention?

What if there was only one vow: to let go of all the old stories and live the you that you’ve hoped to become, the one you wish you already were and secretly bemoan you might never meet. What if you embraced that you, the one who keeps your vows? What if all your inner tribes stopped fighting one another? No more arguments, failure, or recriminations. No  more waiting to find enlightenment. Instead, a successful you. Innocence regained, with the fresh wisdom and insights that come with it.

Sit with this one. Take a few minutes every day to let it roll around you and breathe you in and out. What if you vowed your deepest wish? And kept your vow.