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Counting the Omer: Malkuth

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Malkuth (1)Malkuth (1)Malkuth (1)

Malkuth’s a matrix of the divine, natural, and human worlds, the context for what we experience as life. The word means kingdom. It’s an expressive conduit for all higher energies and the landing zone for your personal form of reality. Malkuth is seen an ongoing expression of creation: How you live your life, interacting with all the energies you’ve been exploring the past six weeks, creates the context for your happiness and evolution, and your progress with your karmic homework.

When your personal kingdom is filled with great gifts or great challenges, it’s partly a message from the universe saying, Wake up and pay good/better attention.

Malkuth is about being present. About living with awareness and intention. Living as though each moment, each choice, each aspect of how you live matters at a soul level as well as at the level of material comfort and aspiration. That’s true whether you’re dealing with yourself or others, if you’re wrestling with your own core issues (especially habituated patterns) or trying to heal the outer world.

Malkuth is about seeing the holy spark in every element of creation. Just as Hindus greet one another with Namaste (I greet the holy within you), we need to live as though we could see that holy spark in ourselves/others in each moment. We need to treat one another, and every aspect of creation, with respect, goodness, and gratitude to make this world a sweeter and more healing place. That will likely mean stretching, especially if your path is filled with bad drivers, big health issues, or relentless temptations.

The other day one of those FaceBook quizzes came around. The kind that tells you your spirit color or totem animal based on what cities, art, or music you prefer. This one offered to identify your top five traits. Words like creative, intuitive, intelligent, spiritual, eccentric, fierce, compassionate, organized, kind, curious, etc. A wealth of desirable ways to be.

My goddaughter Wendy, whom I love from a zillion lifetimes of knowing, wrote: challenging, neurotic, demented-but-in-the-cute-way, insincere, and one short. LOL.

It got me thinking about why our malkuth can feel neurotic/annoying at some times, and all chocolate and kisses at others. We’re pretty much the same us, though clearly stuck in traffic or mud wont bring out the same virtues as a great friend or book.

It’s more than just attitude. If you don’t go slightly ballistic when you’re utterly powerless, even if you can find equanimity or patience a nanosecond later, we’re from a slightly different species.

What I learned these omer weeks, and what I’m hoping to bring back into my daily world: knowing that the more I lighten up, sweeten up, and open up, the more responsive the universe tends to be, and the more great traits I have access to. Sure, some crap is gonna fly, but maybe not as much or often or hard.

Take a moment to think about which parts of your life satisfy you and which do not. Just sit, and let the feelings wash over you as you scan your kingdom. Breathe, sigh, wonder, ponder. Invite all your best traits into this new you that you are continually making, and that will make your kingdom whole.

Counting the Omer: Hod

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Lekh Lekha 2012Lekh Lekha 2012

Hod turns energy – strong, pulsating with chi energy – into form. It gives it not just a direction but momentum. Think of your favorite river, sparking and fast, swollen with snow melt. That’s Hod. It’s associated with splendor and glory.

Hod’s about the way you feel in spring, when everything feels fecund and alive with possibility. When the blooming has taken hold, and the smells energize you. Where every place your eye falls you see and feel vigorous growth reclaiming the land, the victory of life renewing itself.

It makes you feel incredibly joyous, and ripe with the fertile beauty and splendor of the world. That’s Hod running through you. It’s a wonderful time to give gratitude.

If netzach is the flow of the river, then hod is the river banks. The channels that form and direct it towards a goal. All the energy in the world is useless if it doesn’t get focused towards a destination. Hod’s what helps you row your boat downstream instead of just sitting in a puddle.

It’s not magic. You have to show up and row. Hidden in Hod is the idea of perseverance. Of moving, even work, but with a vitality that is confident of its own success.

It’s also associated with the belief that what’s unfolding is part of a larger picture, more than we can control or perceive on our own, even when we ask to be shown. This sense of trust and knowing can be elusive when things are not going our way, when we’re in the tank of unrelenting crap rather than shining with joy.

Hod’s associated with resonance and echoing. There’s a great image of Hod as a pipe organ: like with each pipe, the dimensions of a situation, or person, or problem, determines the specificity of the sound.

Your body immediately response to something off-key. But on the hopefully more frequent flip side: Hod’s how you feel when beauty fills you. Feeling it permeate and open you. When you lose your you-ness and you’re inside it too. Hod is all that magnificence.

Like hod’s pairing with netzach, or the balance between chesed and gevurah, the Tree of Life demonstrates how applied restraint, the melding of opposites, can create something of great and powerful beauty.

Hod’s when you realize some long struggle could really be over. You may, to paraphrase the Stones, not always get what you want, but you will get what you need. If you can see that gift as victory, no matter its shape or name, you’ll have a solid foundation for whatever you aim for next.

Just remember to celebrate your abundance. Hod b’Hod, is the 33rd day of the omer. It’s festive: bonfires and fireworks, a unique day with special celebrations.

Think about when you have felt truly triumphant. When you accomplished a goal, achieved some victory that you honestly weren’t sure you’d ever reach.

Hod’s about that success and the desire to create more of it. When have you had this in your life? What’ve you been willing to sacrifice to achieve it? What would you do next if you thought you just might pull it off?

Counting the Omer: Chesed

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ChesedUnconditional love is something we all long for but rarely experience. From our pets perhaps, or young children. As adults we get momentary rushes, but they tend to be a little more specialized: gratitude, appreciation, joy, relief, new love. But in our 24/7/365 worlds too often we equivocate, hold back, or keep a quid-pro-quo relationship with our heart via-a-vis the hearts of others, even those we hold close and dear. Best to keep a little something in reserve in case the world surprises you and you need it later. Like carrying around a psychic water bottle.

It’s not for want of caring. But too many of us have been bruised and wounded in ways that leave us cautious about being too (let alone totally) vulnerable. But as we go through the world with veils of emotional protection, we’ve also limited our heart’s ability to feel. Unintended consequence or not, it happens.

We don’t advertise these shortcomings and barriers. In fact we’re pretty creative about our disguises, volunteering, putting on band-aids, and helping out, embracing altruism and compassion in our rhetoric and actions. To other we may seem completely loving and caring. But how close to the core do we let them get?

Chesed is about love with a capital L. Divine love. Unconditional love. Love that comes from the heart not from head or need or expected or hoped-for reciprocity. Love without questions asked or answered. Deep and abiding and open. Love eternal. Loving-kindness and grace. Unlimited benevolence. It’s about generosity, about reaching past the boundaries of ego and self.

Chesed is associated with the principle of expansion. About things growing. Not that unlimited growth is always for their best or highest benefit. That’s why its counterpart is Gevurah, the principle of restraint and boundaries. (Next week, stay tuned).

Chesed is the first of the seven lower sephirot on the Tree of Life. Sephirot represent the qualities that organize how we live as incarnated souls. Higher soul levels breathe through chesed. You can feel them in very special times, birthings and dyings and fallings in love.

Chesed’s about being open, kind, full of goodness and grace. It ties to tzeddakah, generosity–a right action in Judaism–sharing that benefits both receiver and giver.

Chesed’s about saying Yes. It is about optimism, willingness, receptivity, even curiosity. It’s about the absence of limits.

What prompts this in you and what makes you run from the idea? (Ask sincerely, and don’t grip your pen too tightly.)

It’s hard to imagine being heavy and dark when you’re filled with chesed. But pay good attention if anywhere in you feels looser or tighter when you think about people/situations in your life where your chesed feels either extra strong, strained, or out of balance, past or current. Are there patterns and similarities? What brings out the best in you? And what tips it past the balance where the giving remains good for both you and others.

As much as you can this week, meditate on that kind of openness and caring. It’s the beginning of this process, and the more open you can become, the more you will receive.

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.

Day By Day: Counting the Omer

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TOLEvery year in spring mystical Jews do a seven-week daily meditation. It’s multi-dimensional tour of aspects of divinity and self called The Counting of the Omer.

The practice stretches between two major sacred festivals. First, Passover, commemorating the exodus from Egypt (“the narrow place”), but more symbolically about leaving places of constraint. Think about a momentous life shift, like divorce, or a healing crisis. It’s about moving into a new and better you. Forty-nine days later comes Shavuous,  Sinai, being in the divine presence and taking it in through every pore of every incarnation.

They’re the book ends. Here’s how the middle works:

Tree of Life in Judaism refers to the symbolic tree of creation and to a paradigm of how to look at the world. The Tree is a set of stacked triangles that operate in triads: a characteristic, its opposite, and a balance point. They’re traditionally represented as spheres, called sephirot. The bottom seven are a strong and useful paradigm to use for solving any personal issue you’re wrestling with, aka getting out of a narrow place.

The first triangle is about unconditional love, discernment, and compassion. For an example, in relationship terms, think about: I love you madly forever; I need more boundaries, space, and time; Let’s work out something that’s good for us both. The  names of these spheres are chesed, gevurah, and tipheret.

The second triangle is about your life force: What energizes you? How and where do you aim it? What’s possible? In creative terms, it’s your Eureka! moment; your final draft/exam/signature/etc; and the possibilities that open up come from becoming an author/doctor/homeowner/whatever you’ve been striving to manifest. The spheres are netzach, hod, and yesod.

The seventh sphere is malkuth, the kingdom of here and now. This reality. How you pull all that powerful everything into the day-to-day of this life you’re living.

Week 1, which starts Tuesday April 15 at sundown, is a week of meditating on chesed. How you are open, generous, expansive, giving, and filled with love. Every Tuesday at sundown for the next six weeks is committed to each successive trait.

The holographic path has circuits of each sphere within the primary trait of the week (7×7=49 days). Omer-holoFirst you think about how loving you are, then why it’s good to have some boundaries, how to set them with grace,….and so on daily, through each trait. You can Google for daily meditation prompts from various perspectives, or ask and listen to your heart for questions as well as answers.

I recommend naming/numbering journal pages with the traits before you start, because it’s easy to slip behind and harder to get back in queue. This is a practice very worth doing, especially if you can identify one issue that you’ve been grappling with and feel like you’re stuck in a repetitive cycle that’s not leading you forward. You may not get to goal, but you will almost certainly get new insights and ideas about how to change your perspective and behavior.

So just for fun, starting bedtime Tuesday, think about how you are giving, loving, open, generous, and kind, in all the aspects of the Tree of Life, and see how it changes your now. Then work your way through each trait.