Breath (Malkhut/Shechinah)

There is an idea in sports that a player can “slow the game down”. I don’t remember the first time I came across this idea but I know that it immediately captured my attention: how can a person make the game slow down, and why is that a good thing? Eventually I came to understand that “slowing the game down” meant that a player can experience what is happening on the field or court in a way that gives them more time to process all of the information that is rapidly coming at them. 

This state of “slowing the game down” has also been described as being in a flow state, or a state of hyper-focus. Whatever you call it, what is happening in the body is that the mind is able to filter out all of the unnecessary sensory inputs and put all of its attention only on the inputs that are relevant to the tasks of the game. Without things like noise from the crowd, distracting thoughts, internal expressions of self doubt, the mind is able to, through enhanced concentration, make it seem like things in the game are moving slower, or at least like the player has more time to assess those things. The batter, in a baseball game, can experience a 100 mph fastball as moving slower, the quarterback in a football game can determine where all of the players are on the field, and the basketball player can make split second moves without rushing or losing control of their body.

Though I am not a professional athlete, the world right now is giving all of us the chance to navigate a space where it feels like balls and bodies  are flying around at 100 mph. The world itself seems to be moving extra fast. Days feel very long and weeks rush by barely noticed. It’s easy to get caught up in a sense of overwhelm just trying to keep up. With all of the inputs we have to reckon with, our brains might be doing a week's worth of processing in any given hour. 

One thing about living in such a fast paced world is that our bodies adapt and start moving more quickly. We ask our minds to take in more information and to process it faster. We push ourselves to try to keep up with the fast pace and in doing so we make the pace around us even faster. 

In moments like this I think of the athletes who have mastered the ability of “slowing their game down”. I think about what we could learn from them. I think about what it would take for me to develop that ability, the ability to slow the world down, to quiet some of the noise - be it external or internal. In some ways our instincts and habits in these times are exactly the opposite of what the athletes do. They slow the game down not by matching the speed of their external circumstances, but by creating in themselves the inverse condition. They slow themselves down. They clear out the noise of the crowd, they focus all of their attention on the singular task in front of them. They create calm inside their bodies and stillness in their minds. 

If you watch a baseball player step up to the plate, the first thing they do is survey the field, looking to see where the defenders are positioned; then they assess the conditions, checking how the weather or the wind might impact their approach; finally they take a deep breath and settle themselves into their stance. 

I wonder what would happen if we took this approach to stepping out into the world today. What if, before we acted or reacted to the fast paced chaos that we find ourselves in, we took a moment to survey the field, assess the weather conditions, and then take a breath as we settle into our stance? 

The breath is the key. I have found that by breathing slowly and with intention I can slow the world down; I can experience what is happening around me in a way that gives me more time to process all of the information that is rapidly coming in. I can quiet the external noise, ignore distracting thoughts, and release my internal expressions of self doubt. By taking a breath and settling into my stance, I give myself the time I need to find the next move I have to make.

Rebirth (Yesod)

Arise my darling;
For the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of singing has come,
And the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;
The fig tree puts forth its green figs;
And the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance
Rejoice my darling; 
Arise and come away!
-Song of Songs (excerpted from my family’s haggadah)

Every year, at the onset of fall, as part of Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), Jews all across the world engage in a ritual rehearsal of our own death. We don’t all speak of it in those terms. There are many interpretations of this ritual, many narratives that we assign it, but to me it all clicked into place when I understood the practices of atonement: of taking account of our actions, of asking forgiveness - from each other, from our selves, from our god - as a rehearsal of, if not a preparation for our own death. 

This death rehearsal, as all things Jewish, contains many layers: the interpersonal (and intrapersonal) practice of making reparation for the times we did not live up to the aspirations of our best self; the spiritual reckoning with the inevitability of our own actual death; and, particularly in ancient times, the very practical preparation for the oncoming winter when the land would cease its production and it was not certain that we would make it to the next season of abundance. In each of these ways, this death rehearsal prepares us to enter the uncertainty of the winter season spiritually grounded, all debts accounted for, steady and ready for whatever it is that lies ahead.

Six moon cycles later, at the onset of spring, we engage in a ritual of rebirth: the Passover Seder. At the Seder we eat the first foods of the new growing season, we celebrate fertility, and we tell the story of our people’s liberation. In the modern world where most Jews are not farmers orienting our years around the growing seasons, our celebrations tend to highlight the symbols and metaphors of these natural life cycles moments, focusing our rituals on the meaning that can be made in our own lives through our ancient connections with the rhythms of the earth and the heavens. 

Some of the questions we might ask at a rebirth ritual include, what over the course of this past winter has been dying? How does the world I am stepping into look different this year from the world I left this past fall? How have the conditions upon which I am to plant, the conditions in which I am to do my work, changed?

As someone who has always centered myself and my work in the struggle for liberation and justice for all people, I find myself walking out this spring into a landscape that is not hospitable to the crops that I am used to planting. There have been fires, there have been floods, there have been toxic spillages. There are a lot of places in the landscape that are no longer safe for me to walk in, let alone plant. 

Looking around at these conditions I am called to ask, are we in an elongated season of dying? And if we are, what does that mean… for me and the people I love; for communities and institutions that I feel connected to; for ideas that I have held, that have driven me, that have shaped the ways that I see the world? In a time of dying, what are the things that are worth holding onto, that are worth standing up for, that are worth preserving? And what are the things that I can be okay saying goodbye to, that I can thank for that which they gave to me and then let go of, that I can accept the loss of through a process of grieving? In a time of great dying, what does grief ask of me? And if we are in an elongated season of dying, what can rebirth look like in the midst of that?

I do not know the answers to all of these questions, perhaps I will ask them at my Seder tonight. What I do know is that death and rebirth are not always linear and are certainly not binary. All week, as I have been preparing to write on this theme, the image that has most often come to my mind is of a patch of forest on the land upon which my summer camp was held. This particular patch of forest was in a small area of the land on the far side of the pond, a place where most campers never spent much time. The lighting felt different in this part of the forest, the ground was uneven - sometimes solid and other times swampy, and any potential paths were cut off by giant old trees that had fallen. It was these trees that made me fall in love with this part of the forest. 

Some of these trees were clearly dead. Separated from their roots and starting to hollow, their rot became the fertile ground for a new ecosystem of moss, smaller plants, and the beginnings of what might one day become new trees. But of greatest interest to me was a tree where it was not entirely clear which phase of the life cycle it was in. It was lying horizontal on the forest floor, roots mostly upended but had taken an entire tract of soil into the air with it as it fell. 

If the roots were intact and some of them were still entrenched in the soil, could the tree still be alive? And if it was still alive what did that mean about the new life that was already using it as the ground it would emerge from? Was this tree both dead and alive? Was it somewhere in between? Rebirth, it turns out, is not a linear process. New life does not need complete death to occur before it can emerge. 

Thinking about this tree I am reminded that even in this current moment, this elongated season of dying where it seems like there is nothing to do but watch the decay continue eating away at all the things I used to know, there is new life that is dying to be born. And it is each of our work, in this moment, to find those buds of life and do all we can to nurture them, to become them, to grow with them into the beings that we most aspire to be. 

Presence (Hod)

“Clear Eyes, Full Heart… Can’t Lose”
- Coach Taylor, Friday Night Lights

Often when leading a workshop or teaching a class, I will take a moment near the beginning, and several times throughout, to ask everyone to pause and take a breath together. I will then pause and actually take a couple of breaths. Inevitably, I will notice that there are a few people who are not really breathing, which gives me the chance to use one of my favorite lines: “Breathing”, I will say, “is not a metaphor”. 

This usually gets a few chuckles from the group, especially from the people who were not actually breathing. I then take the opportunity that levity provides to talk a little more deeply about what happens when we breathe, when we actually take a moment to be intentional about opening up our lungs to receive a full and deep inhale - the way that the slowness of the breath signals to our bodies that we are safe, the way that feeling of safety unlocks some of our mental capacities that shut down when we are in heighten states of emotional distress. 

I then ask the group to try again: to sit or stand up straight, to drop their shoulders and open their chests, to lift their heads so they are not hunched over, to close their eyes, and take a few breaths this time. I ask them while they are breathing to not focus on anything besides their breath. I ask them to not think about completing the task of breathing, but to just be in the breath. 

When, after a few minutes of deep and focused breathing, I ask them to open their eyes and bring their attention back to the circle, back to their surroundings, it is very clear to me and everyone in the group that something in the energy has shifted. There is more stillness, there is more focus, there is more presence. 

Presence, the ability to be truly in the moment, engaged in the reality that is in front of me, free from the distractions of my mind, outside of the delusions that trap me in habits and patterns that serve a reality that has long past or perhaps never was. 

Presence, a state of being that is always available to me if I can stop my mind from running so quickly, if I can slow down my heart, if I can steady my nervous system, if I can get out of my own way. 

For me, the most reliable way to return to presence is through the wonder of the natural world, specifically the moon. One thing I find so wondrous about the moon is the way that it seems to just show up in the sky, as if out of nowhere. One moment I am walking along, in conversation or lost in thought, the next moment I turn my head slightly and bam! The moon is right there, in full view hanging steady in the sky. Every time this happens I am overcome with amazement, often accompanied by an involuntary yelp. 

About a year ago I was living on a small strip of land that cut out into the ocean in a way that made it possible to see the eastern horizon and the western horizon both meet the water. On the evening of the full moon I decided that I wanted to get myself out of an energetic funk by going to watch the sun set and the moon rise. The sun set happened first. I sat by the water and allowed the sadness that I had been holding to melt out of my body as the sun was dropping into the sea. When all that remained of that great ball of fire were the wisps of pink and orange tinted clouds on the western horizon, I drove across the three mile strip of land to look out at the eastern horizon and wait for the moon to emerge, to rise up from the sea. 

Before the moon even arrived I could feel the energy in my body start to shift. The anticipation brought into me a giddiness that moments before would have felt unattainable. I waited and I watched. There were clouds covering parts of the horizon so I could not be sure exactly where the moon would emerge. Would I get to see it slowly creep out of the water? Would a cloud shift and reveal it already full and whole hanging in the sky? Where along the horizon should I place my focus? 

After about ten minutes of anticipation a cloud began to shift and slowly, the moon began to emerge. I watch in complete wonder and full presence. There was no room for any of the stories my mind had been focused on, no room for the residual sadness that my heart had been clinging to. There was only the reality of my pure delight at the wonder in front of my face. 

As I returned home a friend who I had been wanting to speak to called. I had been planning on sharing with him about my energetic funk. All day my mind had been rehearsing the stories I would tell him. But after watching the sun set and the moon rise, those now old stories were no longer available to me. I was so fully present that I would not have been able to pull them out of my brain even if I wanted to.

As I am not a fully enlightened being, my relationship with presence is often fleeting. I am certainly not beyond being pulled out of presence and into a repetitive, and often unhelpful, thought pattern or emotion spiral. Being pulled into distraction happens just as quickly and far more often. And while the sun does set every day, I don’t always have the opportunity to watch it. What I can do, what I try to remember to do, is find other practices that can lead me to that same presence. The one that is most readily available is the practice of my own breathing. It does not necessarily bring the same sense of wonder that comes with the rising moon, but it does connect me back to the truth within myself, it does fill my heart and clear my eyes.

I don’t always remember it but when I do I can be sure that the presence I seek is just a couple of breaths away.

Essence (Netzach)

It’s funny to think about the things that I get nostalgic for. 

Nostalgia mostly shows up for me in a moment of yearning, a moment in which I am feeling an unsettledness that thinks it can be alleviated by the experience of a particular feeling. The longing for this feeling then sends my mind on a search for memories associated with that feeling, memories that remind me that, yes, that feeling I am longing for did exist at some point in my life, and is still accessible to me. This mechanism of nostalgia can be very useful in helping me move out of an emotionally stuck place. If I give myself the time and space to explore these memories I can access feelings that are currently blocked and find myself having an emotional release that was otherwise inaccessible. The challenge with nostalgia is getting stuck in those memories without having the time and space for an emotional release, because then the old memories can carry with them messages of shame and blame and send me into a deeper spiral of despair. 

Having an awareness of both the positive and negative impacts that slipping into nostalgia can have on me helps me regulate myself when I notice the sensations associated with nostalgia coming up. And having an understanding that a purpose nostalgia can serve is to help me have an emotional release that I am otherwise blocked from having helps me remember to give myself the time and space I need to let the release happen. 

It usually starts with feeling agitated, and I usually don’t notice it right away. For example, the agitation that came to a head this afternoon started a few days ago, probably earlier than that. At some point today I noticed that I was trying to find ways to release that agitation. I went swimming. I ate a sandwich that I like. I went to my favorite coffee shop. And none of it was working. The agitation was not going away. Nostalgia had already been showing up without me noticing it. Each choice I had made: swimming, the sandwich, the coffee shop, carried an association with a feeling I was longing to experience. I was yearning for a feeling of settledness, of comfort, of home. 

I did not know yet what it was and as I write this am still discovering clues that my unconscious mind had been leaving me throughout the day. I did know that I needed a change of scenery. So I looked at the maps app on my phone, took a deep breath, and tried to feel into the scenery that was calling me. I wanted a little bit of space, I wanted to be somewhere that I could sit in my car, look out upon something beautiful, and just be still in myself. 

I found a place, plugged it into my phone, got in my car and started driving. As I arrived at this parking lot at the base of the the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, with the palisades on my right,  shooting up from the banks of the great waters in constant motion, which were to my left, and the bridge with views of the city skyline in front of me, I was overcome with emotion and a release that came in the form of a deep exhale and profound relaxation of muscles that had been tight for days, muscles that I didn’t even know were holding me in tension. 

For the next four hours I sat in my car, staring out at the great big bridge in front of me, the little red lighthouse across the water at its base, and the massive city beyond it. I have been feeling the energy of these great cliffs behind me and this constantly swirling water at my side. And I have felt a stillness and peace in my body that is often inaccessible. It is the feeling of home that I am often longing for. 

This river, this bridge and the city behind it, these cliffs and the towns that lay on their other side, are for me elements of home, but more than home, they are reminders of the consistency that lives inside of change. They are the geographic features that I was born into and raised by. They have been a steady constant for me to return to throughout the journey that has been my life. They hold me in my essence, they know the parts of me that are core to who I am, to who I continue showing up as. They see what will always be true in me, throughout all of the change that I experience out in the world, and all of the transformation I go through in my person, the features of this place know me, see me, and welcome me as I am. 

When nostalgia is working for me it helps me remember my essence by returning me to moments in my life that speak to an essential part of who I am, who I have been, and who I am continuing to grow towards being. It is a constant in all of the motion. 

It’s funny to think about the things that I get nostalgic for. Today it was a bridge, a lighthouse, and the land and waters that raised me.

Interdependence (Tiferet)

“If we don’t figure out how we’re going to live together, then we’re going to die alone"
- Jack from the television show “Lost”

For far too much of my professional life I operated under the delusion that I work best when I am working alone. I rejected the notion of co-facilitation. I didn’t want to plan with others because, frankly, I thought that they would get in the way of the material that I knew I wanted to teach, and the methods by which I knew I wanted to teach it. Teaching and facilitating by myself meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone keeping up with me. It meant that I didn’t have to take the time to explain all of the intricate details that made up the very well thought out strategy behind my pedagogy. And it meant that I could center my own vision for the kind of experience I wanted my participants to have. 

The funny thing about this delusion is that even when I was completely subsumed by it, I didn’t really believe it. I knew somewhere, not even that far down into the core of my being, that I did not, in fact, want to be working alone. Even inside of this delusion, I knew and could articulate that my greatest professional longing was for people to do the work with. I was living in a bizarre duality where the more competent I became at solo facilitation, the more isolated I felt, and when I did find myself working on teams, I noticed that I was not bringing my whole self to the table. I didn’t like feeling isolated and I didn’t like not bringing my full self. I didn’t want to give up being driven by my vision and I didn’t want to give up my desire to share the responsibility of leading with others. 

Eventually and by accident - or at least by the alignment of forces beyond what my concious mind could intentionally create - I found myself involved in a project that upended the paradigm through which I had been experiencing this tension. I found myself involved in a project that had a vision that did not come from any one person on our team. At first we each thought that the vision came from someone else until we realized that the project did not originate with any of us, it had an origin of its own, a vision of its own. It was a true calling and our orientation to it was that of stewards. 

We each arrived to the project clear that we were there to bring whichever parts of us the project needed, that we could each show up in our fullness, in the fullness of our sovereign selves, and that we were there to hold the project together. 

It was a wonderfully powerful experience that broke the delusion that I wanted to do any facilitation on my own ever again. It also broke the delusion that told me that to be in community I would have to give up  my own agency, my own autonomy. It opened up an entirely new paradigm for me that saw the ideas of autonomy and belonging not as oppositional but as mutually essential to each other's fulfillment.

The drive to assert one's autonomy and the desire for community are presented to us in the mainstream education system and through popular media as a binary set of human motivators. You can have “Communism” or you can have “Capitalism”. You can obtain value and worth through moral deeds and personal sacrifice for others, or you can have your value and worth be tied to your individual achievements. You can care about the wellbeing of others or you can care only about yourself. You can be a team player or you can be a leader. 

In the hyper-individualistic society of the United States, this constructed binary shows up in the way that we valorize notions of independence and put down notions of dependence. Independence is the declaration upon which the entire story of this country is told. A dependent, in our tax code, refers to someone who is yet unable to support themselves financially. Independence is coded with notions of strength and dependence with notions of weakness. 

But any of us who have taken the time to look at the world as it actually is know that this is a false binary, know that it is a constructed binary. We can see that our need for autonomy and our need for belonging cannot be  fulfilled when pitted against each other, and cannot be reduced to an independence / dependence binary. The idea of interdependence reminds us that we are individuals with unique gifts and talents who are also social beings that require collective action to reach our fullest potential.

So, what does interdependence look like? It looks like sovereign beings moving in coordinated action. It looks like choosing to rely on each other, not because we have to but because we want to. It looks like asking for help even when I don’t need it. It looks like knowing I can do something by myself but choosing not to because I remember that doing it together will be more fulfilling and will make it better. Interdependence looks like making sure that I am centered in myself so that I can show up to my community without having to center myself. 

Courage (Gevurah)

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”
― Mark Twain

I was fifteen years old the first time I jumped off of a cliff. I was on a hiking trip in the desert and as we came upon the base of a cliff our tour guide pointed to the top and said, “we’re going up there, and then we’re going to jump!” It wasn’t exactly jumping, it was rappelling. We would be lowering ourselves down the cliff while attached to a rope. I watched people in the group in front of us gracefully glide down, bouncing themselves off the side of the cliff, lowering themselves with apparent ease. In my mind I knew it was safe. But my body was not as ready to trust what my eyes saw. 

As we climbed my body began, ever so slightly, to tense up, to contract. At the top, I walked right up to the edge and looked over. Immediately the guttural sensation of fear kicked in. My stomach lurched, turned over, and revealed a blackhole-like space that my insides seemed to be swirling around; my heart skipped a beat and then started beating faster, generating a burning heat in my chest; my breath lost the easeful rhythm that I hadn’t even been aware it was keeping; and my field of awareness constricted - my vision narrowed, I could no longer make out the words that those around me were speaking, and all of the meandering thoughts that had kept me company on the hike disappeared so fully that I didn’t even know to miss them. 

I took a step back from the cliff’s edge, reestablished my breath, and found inside myself a clarity of focus and determination. There was a decision in front of me and it quite quickly became clear what I was going to do. My choice was to take the leap, to trust that I would be okay. I was deciding to acknowledge the fear and move through it, move towards the edge of the cliff, towards the experience that I wanted to have. I didn’t suppress the fear, but I didn’t give into it either. When it was my turn, I put on the harness, walked up to the cliff’s edge, strapped myself in, and began lowering myself down. 

The first step was the hardest. I could feel the dissonance in my body as my brain worked to convince my stomach that it was safe to lean back over the cliff, that it was safe for my legs to release the weight of my body, to give up the control they were so used to possessing. Letting go was exhilarating and terrifying. My heartbeat and my breath were all over the place. My brain was processing so quickly I could barely notice the experience. About halfway down I paused, held myself in place, suspended in the air, and took a moment to look around. Taking in the beauty that surrounded me, my breath came back, and for a moment I could feel everything I was experiencing: the peace and the terror. The fear then kicked back in and I started shaking, I started worrying, I started doubting my ability to go on, noticing all of the ways I wasn’t doing it right. Another breath and I got myself moving again. Before I knew it I was back on the ground. My landing was not graceful. My legs, shaking so vigorously, could not hold my body as it re-established contact with the earth. Flat on my back and still shaking, I got unclipped by one of the guides and made my way out of the landing zone. 

I sat quietly with my group integrating the experience I just went through. I could feel the fear in my body begin to subside. I could feel the air on my skin. My breath returned, my heartbeat slowed down, my vision became crisper and more clear. The space in my body and my mind that had been so consumed by fear became open and I could feel a new emotion take its place. I was proud of myself.

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
― Maya Angelou

In the years since that moment in the desert, I have taken many a leap into something unknown. Some of these leaps include small moments of being present in my physical body: crossing the street during aggressive rush hour traffic, stepping onto an airplane, standing at the edge of a cold body of water readying myself to jump in. Some of these leaps come in the form of larger life moments: leaving a steady job without a full plan as to how I would sustain myself, opening myself to a new relationship after a deep heartbreak; getting myself to try again after a perceived professional failure. And some of these leaps come in small moments of putting myself out there in the world: knocking on the door of an unfamiliar apartment even though I triple checked that I had the correct address, walking into a room of people I do not know, sharing an unpopular opinion in a conversation, or speaking an uncomfortable truth to a beloved friend. 

In each of these moments a version of that guttural fear shows up in my body. And in each of those moments, I remember that I have a choice as to what I am going to do with that fear, as to how I am going to respond to it. This choice, this moment, is where courage lives. Courage becomes a possibility only in a moment of experiencing fear. Courage is remembering in a moment where I am overcome with fear that I have a choice as to how I am going to respond, that I have agency over how I am going to act. Courage is choosing to act in accordance with my values in the face of my fears. Courage is what allows me to do hard things. Courage is an attribute that can be cultivated, a skill that can be practiced. Courage is what allows me to live out in the world as the person who I think I am, the person I see myself as, the person who I aspire to be.

Tenderness (Chesed)

Tender: soft, open, vulnerable
Tender: one who cares for and maintains 

I have a tender heart and the heart of a tender. 

My tender heart is soft and open, whole and full of holes, scarred from the wounds it has accumulated but not scared to face what those wounds reveal. My tender heart wants to be seen, wants the truth of my pain to be welcomed, to be held with grace and care, by others and by myself. My tender heart seeks out quiet and slowness, calm and warmth. My tender heart houses my vulnerability and heightens my sensitivity. It is the garden of my healing and the birthplace of my strength.

My tender’s heart is fierce and warm, attentive to whomever it holds, focused on the space it can offer and the care it can give. My tender’s heart wants to see people as they truly are, wants to know their struggles and honor their strengths. My tender’s heart wants to hold people in their wholeness. My tender’s heart houses my patience, my empathy, and my compassion. It is through my tender’s heart that I practice humility and forgiveness, that I get to live out my value of love and my belief in people.

Tenderness is an orientation towards the world. It carries a softness that allows for opening, for vulnerability. It requires patience and spaciousness. It has no room for urgency or harshness or the very notion of domination. A tenderness paradigm invites the wholeness of the self to show up with empathy, with care, with a desire to hold and a willingness to be held. Tenderness asks us to gaze upon each other with soft eyes, with a smile, with open arms. Tenderness asks us to be present with ourselves, often with our pain, our hurts, the places inside of us that are in need, that want to be tended to. 

To be tender is an invitation to reveal the most delicate, gentle, embarrassing, and vulnerable parts of myself to the world with the understanding that it will sometimes be met with harshness or disinterest, but it will other times be met with care and love.

To be a tender is an invitation to dedicate the entirety of my focus, of my attention and care, to the wellbeing of something outside of myself, be that a fire, a garden, a friend, or community. 

I aspire towards tenderness, towards my soft openings, and towards my kind holding.