Tag Archives: being present

Ticket to Ride: Pre-Passover 2015

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Tree

When I was younger, playing at Disneyland, we went on all the classic rides, and also bought “E-tickets.” They cost triple and guaranteed more screams and thrills. I carry in my pocket more computing power than first took men to the moon, so I’m sure that 1970’s special effects would seem as hokey now as 1950’s effects did then.

But E-rides challenged you. They took away your sense of time and space. Hard to hold onto small-ego You while hurtling though darkness at strange angles, lasers shooting all about, heavy metal blasting. One either retreats into denial or the boundaries between self/other get much thinner very quickly.

We’re at the gate on one of Judaism’s E-rides. In the rhythm of the sacred year we move between slow times and deeper, more intense, periods. We do have the seventh day metronome of Shabbat, tick-tocking like a heartbeat, to keep us grounded. But now we’re entering a bigger set of sevens. Seven weeks of meditations on aspects of the divine as reflected in self. Time to take a hard look, to see where you’re getting things right, and where you’re not.

All your New Year’s vows and promises, sacred and secular, are past. Most of us had just settled in to appreciating nature’s budding and blooming. Daffodils and birdsong. Feeling renewed without much stress or effort. Life was gonna coast happily.

Now comes Passover. The retelling of the exodus from slavery. We’ll land at the foot of Sinai once again. But this time, instead of brisk walk, we get fifty days to walk the path, one step in front of the other, one day at a time.

This process is called The Counting of the Omer. It’s the kind of thing that introspective people long for. A mandated and validated form of navel gazing. We meditate on the lower seven positions (sephirot) on the Tree of Life. Each an attribute of the divine, and an attribute of self as we mirror the divine. We meditate on them in succession:

Week 1   Chesed: unconditional loving-kindness
Week 2   Gevurah: restraint, justice
Week 3   Tipheret: beauty, harmony compassion
Week 4   Netzach: energy, zeal, endurance
Week 5   Hod: glory, splendor, creativity
Week 6   Yesod: foundation, possibility
Week 7   Malkuth: living in the earthly kingdom with our inner spark aglow.

You can do it alone or you can pair up, with someone you know very well, or someone you want to. You can study, share, articulate, open, and generally clean yourself out, one to the other. This kinda study- buddy system is chevruta. It can be two people or more. But think intimacy.

Can you find ten minutes a day for seven weeks starting Saturday evening/Sunday? If yes, I promise you’ll be different on the other side. Can’t say how. Pretty sure for the better. Definitely softer and more peaceful. You don’t have to do anything more than breathe and open your heart, thinking about the attribute. No giving up gluten or sugar or checking your email when you get twitchy. You just have to show up and listen.

Got your E-ticket? Get on board.

Good Morning, Mitzrayim: TorahCycle Shemot

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Shemot 2015jpgIt took forever but we are finally here. After all the festivities, gifting, and celebrating, we woke up the other day to a clean new year. One unsullied by bad decisions or old habits. A blank slate. Tabula rasa. A new chance to get things right. Resolutions made. Vows to keep them. Optimism abounds.

Not so fast. We have just entered the book of Exodus.

I’ll assume you read the book or saw the movie. Baby Moses cast into the bulrushes to escape genocide: raised in the palace; kills an overseer who’s abusing Hebrew slaves; is exiled to the wilderness; sees a burning bush on Mt. Sinai; talks directly to God; returns to free the enslaved.

The big punch line of the next several chapters is that we get out of slavery. But the work in-between now and then, and the even harder work after, when the overseer is inner not outer, fills the next four books.

This process is a metaphor of “the hero’s journey” that Joseph Campbell wrote about so eloquently. You have to go into the darkness and make it through to find and appreciate the light. Baby Moses represents our holy spark: waiting to be rescued and reclaimed. For now we need to engage the parts of us that are willing to look into that dark place and use what we see to transform ourselves.

It’s the journey of a lifetime, with oh so many paths, both twisting and straight, obstructed and clear. It can be hard to find our way, but it happens with small steps, one step at a time.

Making bricks under an overseer’s whip is a vivid image of the darkness. Direct communion with The Source is a worthy goal. But to get there you must choose the light, and reinforce that choice with every small decision that follows. That’s what our resolutions are about. I’ve been stuck doing X, Y, or Z. I want to change. Instead it’s time to do _______. Fill in the blank.

In Torah there is a deus ex machina to help. Literally. The divine hand, expressed through acts of wonder and magic, plagues and punishment. More on that soon. But the core question remains: Do you like things how they are or do you want them to change? Really? What’re you prepared to differently to turn your resolutions into reality? Are you waiting for a miracle or are you ready to step up? Now? When? How often and consistently? What will make the changes sustainable, not failed attempts?

Moses answers at the burning bush with a word we see at important moments in Torah. He is called and he answers hineini, I am here. It is an acknowledgment both that he has heard the call and that he is willing to be to respond. To step up.

This journey is all about showing up. Step by step. It’s not about saying No, thanks. Please don’t ask me to up the ante on myself. It is about listening to the guides around you and the knowing inside you, and then doing your work 24/7. It’s about choosing hineini, to be present in every moment and choice of your life, Every step on your journey.

Happy New Year.

Wake Up!!! TorahCycle Korach

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KorachI recently had a brush with death. Sadly I’m not exaggerating. Another 5-10 minutes faster by the fire or slower by the alarm company and poof: gone or burn ward. I’m still processing it. But when I realized the next parshah was Korach, I laughed.

On the surface, it’s about a rebellion to displace Moses as leader. A full bore, get outta here you’re fired attempt to take charge. It’s really about our persistent ability to be unconscious. What looks like a story about rising up and being cast into a fiery pit is really about our unconsciousness’s nasty habit of using complacency, forgetfulness, and mindless acts of stupidity to create confusion and chaos.

Raise your hand if you’ve never blurted the wrong word to exactly the wrong person or missed a critical deadline. Give yourself a gold star if you’ve never sliced your thumb instead of the bagel, hit another car, or tweaked your knee trying to do too much too fast.

When you’re so close to manifestation–making it to your personal promised land–along comes your inner saboteur. Your unconscious. Your stubborn ability to take a good situation and make it bad.

This reading is about screwing up in a serious way. The kind where you really blow it. Get very close to the edge of that deep pit. Maybe even get charred and smokey from the billowing sparks.

Disaster can happen in an instant, even if you build up to it slowly. Unconsciousness can take many creative forms, even seemingly passive ones like laziness, procrastination, and failure to see the big impacts of small choices. Mostly it’s about not being present in the given moment, whether that’s by distraction or entrenched patterns of behavior.

Staying alive means being fully present, not sorta kinda half-assed being here.

Korach has a simple plot. A lot of Torah does. That’s part of why the phrase “Bible stories” conjures simple picture-book imagery. Like us, it’s a collection of stories that describe and define us. Each family has stories that any relative could tell in virtually the same words and with the same timing, pausing for the laugh lines and moans. They’ve become myth, iconic, and archetypal: The time when……

We also carry personal stories. Deeper ones, sometimes never even told, about people and passages long closed or others longed for but never manifested, the places we’re longing to get to. We tell stories of our promised land, even if we haven’t seen it yet.

Torah cycles around every year so we can keep peeling back the layers of its stories. Keep learning from them. Maybe not make the same mistakes over and over.

Unconsciousness keeps us stuck in an old story. It’s a lifestyle that hobbles you, keeps you walking around the same old same old until you either totally check out or something happens so big and dramatic that you have to change. Because being unconscious for too long can propel you into a %^#^&%%#ing mess of a story like a car wreck or a fire that forces you to pay attention. Really pay attention.

Better to wake up now and tell better stories. If you really wanna get to where you’re going, it helps to be alive.

Look What’s Coming: TorahCycle Emor

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Emor 2014We talk about living in the eternal now. But anticipation adds spice to life. It’s exciting having something to look forward to. It’s good to know where you are in the immediate now of space/time. But it’s also useful, fun, and motivating to have nouns and verbs to describe the nows of the future. Their possibilities help keep us open, help us remember that more joy is possible, and help us prepare for the us we’re striving to become.

We tend to measure by what’s already happened, because even for the imaginative it’s harder to count backwards from a future we can’t predict with nuanced detail. But we’re complicated matrices of memories and habits, rituals and desires. We’re hardwired to anticipate events like birthdays and holidays, just like we tend to dig in our heels before work deadlines or dentist appointments. It’s physical as much as mental: If I say “long weekend,” your cells immediately fire up and smile; your pulse shifts up a gear, hoping for fun and relaxation.

This reading details the annual “callings of holiness.” It lays out weekly and annual cycles for being spiritually present. More than 130 days of the 365 are identified as times for various combinations of celebration, prayer, fasting, ritual, contemplation, atonement, study, making love, and giving thanks.

Economists generally use one-third of income as a benchmark for home/utility expenses. Imagine if you actually spent a third of your life in the habits and rituals of holiness. Not in a haphazard, grab-the-moment, isn’t-that-an-insightful/inspirational post or video kind of way. But in the committed, focused, sincere practice of goodness.

Studies repeatedly affirm that people with daily meditation practices are less anxious, more creative, and more compassionate. This reading outlines an annualized calendar for shifting focus from the simple daily palette of breath in and out to more complex patterns of observance.

Holidays and festivals break up the routines of our lives. They offer us chances to say thanks or ask for help in different ways. Prayer and gratitude in their many varietal forms.

I love reading Anne Lamott. She captures the essence of our relationship with the divine simply and honestly. If I could be the karmic love child of Anne and Rumi, I’d have my perfect writer’s pedigree. If you haven’t read Help, Thanks, Wow! and Stitches, buy or borrow them. They nicely summarize the importance of finding mean, hope, and repair, and using various forms of prayer as the punctuation marks of life.

That’s what the big calendar days do for us, whether we celebrate them with fireworks or shofar blasts. They help us affirm that in this now, we are witness to one another’s joy, suffering, striving, and triumphs. They help lift the daily weight off our shoulders, and reaffirm the value of silent prayer and singing songs that get in your head like cosmic earworms, humming your various chakras into time with cosmic rhythms.

Take a moment to mark your calendar with the big days coming up, from the personal to the societal, the spiritual to the familial. Mark them out the way you might an upcoming vacation. See how much depth, joy, and insight awaits you. I hope it makes you smile in anticipation.

Brick By Brick: TorahCycle Metzora

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SheminiThe protagonist of Stephen King’s novel Dr. Sleep has a deep, guilty, secret. He builds his life around it, hiding it in the foundation of his identity, always believing that no matter how much good he does, he’s still the guy who did That! When he finally spills in an AA meeting, something miraculous happens. He realizes everyone around him has heard and possibly done worse.

We don’t need to build our lives on a dark foundation. Better to build them with our best actions, and clean out old dry rot as we grow.

This week’s reading’s about ritual purification of a house with patches of red and green on its walls. The high priest assesses if it’s possible to cleanse or if it should be demolished. A house can mean a dwelling but it’s also a symbol for self.

For decades I thought in eastern metaphors. I would have said I was a Buddhist or Bu-Jew. A fundamental goal of many eastern religions is transcendence of the self. Goodbye to the idea of I/me. I’ve come to believe that there’s great benefit in elevation through self. Not in a chest-thumping ego way, but in a we’re-here-to-do-good way. So when I hear house, I think of self as our home base in each incarnation.

We’re here wearing earthly clothes exactly because we’re supposed to be working on earthly things. Cleaning up the place, energetically as well as ecologically, while we move our personal karma along. Helping out day by day, in both random and conscious acts of goodness.

You don’t need a scorecard to measure the good you do. It shouldn’t matter if you’re an activist or just in the right place and time to help. Whether you do a big deed or are a willing ear or shoulder to cry on, or a pair of helping hands for someone in need. However you make our collective self happier, sweeter, and more harmonious elevates your self and the rest of us. Your actions reflect the higher and better good, and raise the bar for all of us.

You and I and everyone we know have a unique and necessary constellation of talents and skills. Yes, plus all our foibles and habits and annoyances. But in the toolkit of us, we’ve got everything we need to cleanse this house of ours.

When you arc too far into greed, gluttony, or any form of darkness or sin, your ego attracts mold and dry rot. It doesn’t take a priest to see the changes in your personality, vocabulary, and day-to-day choices. The rest of us observe and feel it all too easily.

We build the houses of our lives brick by brick. By acts of kindness or acts of selfishness. By our caring or our indifference. Now’s a great time, right before Passover, to clean out the dirt before it does damage. Spring cleaning your character as well as your cupboards.

Start by looking for your old splotches. Then get out the bleach and begin paying better attention in each moment. If we can stay more conscious, live with greater awareness and intention, we might be able to prevent what we’d otherwise hide and then need to heal.

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.

Here and Now: TorahCycle Vayetze

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vayetze 2013

We all have sacred places. Places that make us feel completely safe, held. Places that expand our consciousness. That connect us with the world of the unseen, either by their majestic grandeur or their simple peace. As we go through life, those places and their talismans shift. Your crib and blanket give way to a special park or beach, or a magnificent vista. Any places that come with a special knowing and a healing resonance we respond to as sacred, and accord them reverence and appreciation.

This week’s reading finds Jacob on the road. He’s left his father’s house and his brother’s anger; he’s off to find a wife. The image of a stone shows up several times, early as a pillow and later as the memorial of a peace treaty. Both times, the sites are declared holy places.

Stones sometimes say Notice me! when I’m out walking. I especially like it when they appear as I’m wrestling with a problem, trying to gain insight and clarity. They come home to sit with others that said hello in the past.

Altars everywhere. That’s a lot of what Torah is about. Journeying from sacred place to sacred place. Finding them, recognizing them, naming them. Acknowledging both the divine presence and the reciprocity of that relationship.

This reading brings us the phrase Jacob’s Ladder, a stairway he dreams of, angels coming down and angels going up. Last week for Halloween folks had faux cobwebs everywhere, obscuring things. This is the opposite, a route of direct transmission. He calls it HaMakom, literally “the place,” as in God was in this place and I did not know.

HaMakom is a place to ask questions as much as to hear answers. There’s a quality about the asking, getting to the bedrock of your sincerity, that clears away all the extras.

The Hebrew word for angel is generally translated as messenger. And that’s ultimately what angels are. Bringing you what you need when you need to hear, see, or receive it. These messengers can be the person who stops to help you with your flat tire or the stone on your path.

We are those messengers too. Appearing in hamakom for one another as and when we are meant to be. Angels in our human skins.

In Nicole Krauss’s History of Love she says: Angels sleep unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude. Because being human is more complicated, more raucous, and more painful. But the more we engage with what we’re here to do, the more vital it feels to do it well and right. The more clearly we see.

Hamakom is not just your own little bubble. It’s all of our bubbles interacting at the same time. So it’s important to be here now. In hamakom. For you and for the rest of us.

Whenever stones or angels talk to you, listen up. Hamakom is wherever you go, wherever you are invited. It’s where you are right now. We’re always in hamakom.