Tag Archives: goal

Counting the Omer: Netzach

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Vetchanan 2014Vetchanan 2014

Netzach, like each of the sephirot, takes all the energy of what has preceded it and channels it. One way to think of the Tree of Life is as a funnel, where energies are concentrated as they flow into our realm of reality.

Netzach is about energy. Words to describe it include triumph, victory, and power. Think of being victorious in a way that has a chicken and egg relationship with confidence and personal energy. The one begets the other. Its negative counterpart might be self-centeredness or narcissism, or laziness and passivity.

Netzach is about focused will. It’s the chi that energizes you when you apply yourself to a goal. It can come through as a determination to overcome obstacles, to triumph in adversity. It manifests as a creative force, inspiring you to make and do. Netzach has been likened to the current of a river, the vital force that moves it rushing downstream.

Netzach is a very personal energy. It’s where the sephirot are becoming more specifically human. About you and how you live more than a theoretical expression of divinity or godliness. It informs your choices and actions.

There’s a lot of emotional charge to netzach. Charisma in the highest sense, the way a person can inspire people, themselves and others, to reach higher and beyond. To exert their best selves to achieve what might have felt out of reach.

Netzach gathers more power in context. The sephirah is like a placeholder, ready for you to fill and energize it. There’re also aspects of endurance and fortitude, of having the patience and the strategic will to follow through on the vision of knowing where you want to go.

Netzach is correlates to the kabbalistic world of emotions. People and situations take on greater meaning, the more we are involved with them. So the greater your emotional engagement, the more likely your efforts and intentions will succeed.

Netzach is what makes manifestation possible. If you don’t show up, the energy for a given situation won’t either. If you sit on the sidelines only to think and watch and worry about failure, you’re unlikely to be victorious.

One of the deep words in kabbalah is kavannah. It means intention or commitment, not just in the I wanna sense but in the I vow, I commit, I will sense. Netzach is when you make kavannah. When you put some oomph behind your words. Instead of just saying you’re going to clean out the garage, you grab the bucket/gloves, clear the drive, and start picking up and moving things. If you want a promotion, or a new job, or a new partner, what will you do to earn it?

Think about what motivates and energizes you. What makes you willing to get out of your routine, to reach higher, further, and with more effort for a goal? Try to remember times when you have been inspired and those when you have been a slacker. What gets you engaged vs. what makes you sit things out? What motivates you vs. what makes you feel/act like a shopping cart with a bad wheel? What would it take to change that?

Are you ready to feel energized again? Remember how much fun it can be.

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.

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.