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.

Magic (Malkhut/Shechinah)

But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
- Iris DeMent, Let the Mystery Be

It was dusk or maybe a little earlier. It was hard to tell if the sun had already gone down because the cloud cover was thick and dark. And then the sky opened and the rain came pouring down. One hundred campers were sitting on the deck of the dinning hall and my best friend and I were standing in front of them under the overhang. After about ten minutes we turned to the campers and told them that if we could all be absolutely silent for three minutes, we could stop the rain. They looked at us with the perfect mixture of skepticism and curiosity. Across each of their faces we could see variations of the thought, “we can’t stop the rain… wait, can we?” They wanted to believe but they also didn’t want to believe. Eventually they were willing to try. The first few attempts were disrupted by nervous giggles that turned into huge outbursts of laughter and chatter. Then on the fourth or fifth attempt we made it past the halfway point, the rain started letting up, past the two minute point, it was just a drizzle. Just before the three minute mark, one of the counselors stepped out from under the overhang and the rain stopped.

There was a counselor who worked at the summer camp I ran who was impossible to get in touch with. He often didn’t have a phone and was quite unresponsive to emails or other messages. During camp this wasn’t a problem because we were all at camp, but during the off-season, when we were all spread out across the entirety of New York City and only had an activity once every couple of months, connecting with him was a near impossibility. Eventually we discovered that the most consistently reliable way of getting in touch with him was conjuring. If we needed to get in touch with him, one of us in the office would speak his name and he would show up. Sometimes it took a day or two, but most of the time it happened within a couple of hours.

I have a deck of Jewish Values Cards. Each card has a value written on it. A few years ago I started having people pick a card at random to see which value the deck wanted them to contemplate. Over the years, this deck developed a reputation for having powerful magic. Invariably the deck would show people exactly the card they needed to see. One time someone picked patience, immediately got annoyed and asked if they could pick a different card. I usually don’t let people do that but I made an exception. I reshuffled the deck, and this time when the patience card showed up again, she had no choice but to accept the lesson.

Magic is an orientation, a way of experiencing the world that embraces connection, that invites the unexplainable, that sees interconnectivity that the logical mind cannot find reason for. Magic accepts the notion that we are more than our physical form, that we are more than our minds can understand, that there is something going on that is beyond our capacity to make sense of. I choose to embrace this phenomenon. I choose to find joy in the unexplainable. I choose to accept that there is something more that I do not understand, that I will not understand, that will remain a mystery. And I choose to like it that way.

Anchor (Yesod)

One of my favorite things to do while staring out the window of the back seat of my family’s station wagon while on long road trips was to imagine that I, or a version of me, was swinging alongside the car, from electric pole to electric pole, as though I was spiderman. I could spend hours staring out that window watching, in my mind’s eye, this semi-embodied version of me, imagining myself out there, in the open air, swinging from pole to pole, actively propelling myself forward, through the air. There was a mesmerizing quality to it. The stability of those poles gave this imagined version of myself something to grasp onto, something to play off of, something outside of myself to keep me connected to the ground while simultaneously flying free.

Occasionally, we would find ourselves on a stretch of highway that didn’t have these poles. Sometimes in those moments, my swinging self would just disappear, but other times I would watch him land on the top of a Semi-truck, where he would rest until it was time to start swinging again. 

One such drive that my family took during the summers was from New York to Cape Cod. There we would spend a week biking, eating seafood and ice cream, and playing in the bay. The Cape Cod Bay was an incredible body of water. Because of its particular geographic features it has one of the most dramatic water level differentials in the world. At low tide the bay consists of miles of sandbars with nothing but ankle deep streams of water separating them. At high tide the bay fills in completely and the water comes over your head just feet from the shore. 

One of my favorite things about being at the bay was watching the boats rise as the tide came in. These boats that just hours before were sitting flat on the ground would get lifted up and be floating, rocked gently back and forth by the evershifting water, held almost in place by their anchors. Anchors that once sat right next to them in the sand and were now digging into that sand keeping their boats from drifting away.

In some way these anchors are to their boats what those poles alongside the highway were to my imagined self. They offer, at the same time, grounding and space to float. They offer the chance to fly, to move freely, without concern that you will be left adrift. 

As a person who moves around a lot, it has been important for me to set anchors for myself, to give myself some grounding so that I do not find myself adrift. These anchors take the form of places that I know and return to, people that I love and can hold me, and rituals that bring me back to myself, that I can come back to, that I can call upon if ever I start drifting a little too far. The security of these anchors gives me the courage to follow my curiosity, to disrupt the scripts that I might get stuck in, to drift enough away from what is known that I might experience and learn something new. 

Sometimes the tides I find myself caught in are quite strong. In these moments my anchors might give a little more than I’m comfortable with, but if I’ve built them well, they will hold me just enough to weather the storms, and can be reset when the waters are once again calm. 

I have been sick for the last three days and I was not able to write and post this piece according to the timeframe that I have been abiding by during the last twenty-six weeks of this ritual. But I was able to gather enough energy and brain power to write and post this today. The anchor that is this ritual got dragged a little bit, but in the end, it weathered this storm and kept me close enough to where I want to be.

Discomfort (Hod)

The only way out is through
- Robert Frost

For a long time I would use as my personal motto the phrase: I don’t do easy. It was a crude and not quite accurate wording of a concept that I knew I was committed to but didn’t quite have the language to name clearly. A couple of years ago I heard a phrase from Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams that perfectly encapsulated this commitment I had been living: building my tolerance for discomfort. 

It was never that I wanted things to be hard, rather it was that I understood that the only path to the kind of growth I was looking for, to being on the road towards the person I wanted to continue becoming, was to continue making choices that pushed me out of my place of comfort, that asked me to challenge the assumptions and habit patterns that I had been conditioned in, and to - in making those choices - widen the space inside myself that I could occupy. 

One of the things that I carry, a habit pattern that I developed very early on, is a tremendous amount of shyness. People who know me or have seen me in one of my communities have trouble believing this because when I am comfortable in a space or with people this shyness disappears completely. But when I am in a new situation, when I am around people I do not know, my shyness can send me straight into a freeze response. It is a shyness that is rooted in a fear of judgement and manifests in a feeling, an assumption really, that I will not be accepted, that I will be ridiculed. 

What is most frustrating about this shyness is that the person I know myself to be, the version of myself that I understand as true and core, actually loves meeting new people. I love making new connections, I love hearing another person’s story, I love learning the ways we are each different, and seeing the ways we are all the same. So this shyness that I carry shows up as a real challenge for me. It is a built in obstacle towards getting to experience the thing that I am most drawn towards. 

I have, throughout the course of my life, discovered that there are three strategies I employ to move through this shyness. The first is avoidance: to not go to new places, to only meet people in situations where people I already know are making an introduction. This strategy, while keeping me in comfort, is completely unsatisfying to the part of me that actually enjoys new connections. 

My second strategy is finding work-arounds: this mostly looks like putting myself in situations where I have a specific role to play, a script to go by, an external reason or structure that gives me permission to engage with people without confronting my shyness. The problem with this strategy is that it locks me into a role, it doesn’t make space for me to show up with all of myself, and doesn't allow me to see what version of myself wants to emerge in a given situation. 

The third strategy is the only one that ends up being satisfying: sitting with the discomfort, sitting with all of the feelings and doing the hard thing anyway, staying in the messy space of holding at the same time the truth that meeting new people absolutely terrifies me, and the truth that I love meeting new people. It is a practice of holding both, of giving myself space to feel all of the discomfort, while also pushing myself to do the hard thing. 

To me this is what building my tolerance for discomfort means: that I face the hard things, that I sit with the uncomfortable feelings that arise in my body, and that I breathe into those sensations to remind myself that - though the discomfort in my body is real, I can handle it, and by handling it, by sitting with it, by breathing through it, by facing the hard thing, I am doing the work of living out my values, I am doing the work of becoming the person I know at my core I want to be.