All of Me (Malkhut/Shechinah)

Life is a journey to be experienced, not a problem to be solved - Winnie the Pooh

A year ago today I began this exploration of the lower sefirot with the intention of writing each week about an interpretation of one of them. With the exception of a couple of weeks missed due to my travel schedule or writer's block, I have been quite consistent in this practice and find myself sitting down to write my forty-ninth and final entry exactly one year later. 

As has often been the case throughout this journey, upon sitting down to write, I find myself called to explore something other than what I intended. Today, as I sit with the sefira Malkhut/Shechinah, which is often interpreted as sovereignty and transcendent presence, I find myself reflecting on my experience of this writing journey, this deep dive into the divine characteristics that according to Jewish mysticism live in my body. 

This final sefira, sometimes called Malkhut, sometimes called Shechinah, is said to exist in the space between the legs. I always imagine it as a ball of energy, like when you’re exercising and the instructor says imagine a ball between your knees and squeeze your legs together. And like that imaginary ball of energy that, when you squeeze it, activates the muscles in your core, this energy we call Malkhut and Shechinah lives outside the bounds of our physical body and acts as a container for our energy field, also activates the energy at the core of our being - connecting that which lives inside of us to that which exists outside. It is an energy force that lives in the spaces between our body and surrounds our body. It is an energy force that seeps in and out of our pours, connecting what we think of as our bodies to what we think of as not our bodies. It simultaneously holds our individuality by forming the energetic field between what we call ourselves and what we call other, and it breaks the delusion of our separateness - from each other and the world around us. 

The invitation of malkhut/shechinah, the invitation that has arisen from the entirety of this process, is for me to show up to my life with and as all of me. To bring all of myself, to integrate, to break the delusion of separation, to not try to predict, to not try to solve, to not try to know where it is that I am going, but to show up in the fullness of myself to each moment, to carry my stories and memories, my dreams and desires, even my fears and worries - but to carry them lightly, to remember that they are each a part of a greater whole, and that that whole does not need to dwell on any part, does not need to be defined by any part, has the capacity to hold all of the parts - contradictory as they most certainly are, and still have room for more, and still have room for what is not yet, and still have room for what might never be. 

The invitation that comes with holding all of me is to live into that space where I am both a singular being, responsible for the ways that I show up to the world and people around me; and that I am not separate from any of it, from anyone, from anything. 

This is what I have been practicing this year, this is what I hope to carry forward.

Imagination (Yesod)

Abracadabra… I create as I speak

Words create worlds - Abraham Joshua Heschel … 

The foundation of my reality is rooted in the stories that I tell about myself, about my life. But sometimes I can't find the words and then reality sputters… when I don't know what to say, when I don't know what to create, when I am blocked, stuck… what happens to my reality then? How do I know what story to live in? 

Or does it go the other way around, do our worlds create our words? Are the stories we tell forever trying to catch up to the reality that they are describing? Is it that it is only through words that I can understand the reality I am living in, or is it that the reality that I am living in only comes to formation when I put words to it, when I speak it into being? 

Of course it has to be the second one. Things happen whether I am there to talk about them or not, whether I am there to wrap them in a story or not, but do the stories not also shape the things that happen?

I have always understood myself to be a creative person, a person who likes to create. 

I have been spending a lot of time this week with a friend who is in the process of creating something new, of bringing an idea into formed reality, of creating a new world. The process has brought me back to the feelings I had when I was creating worlds, when I took words that I spoke and made them into reality. 

When I first began dreaming about the summer camp I wanted to create, the image that appeared in my head was of me sitting in the driver's seat of a pickup truck while a group of adolescents loaded some lumber into the truck’s bed. 

At first I didn’t understand it. Why was this the image that took root in my mind? Why did my subconscious associate the fulfillment of this dream of opening a summer camp with the image of me and a bunch of teenagers in a pick up truck? After thinking about it I realized that this image, more than an image of kids playing soccer, or sitting in a circle together, or working on an art project, spoke to the specificity of what I wanted in the kind of camp community I was hoping to create. This image showed me that, more than anything else, my vision was of a space where adolescents and young adults had the opportunity to build the world that they wanted to see, and that my role was to support them by creating the conditions for them to do so. Yes, I wanted to lead. But my real vision was to create the canvas on which others could practice creating. The world I wanted to make was a world of creation.  

A couple of years after I first had this vision, we opened a summer camp. It was the beautiful fulfillment of a dream. Over the ten years that I ran this summer camp and outdoor education programs, there were many moments that felt like they encapsulated the feeling, the essence of that original vision that I had. A few even came close to looking just like it. We did have a pick up truck that I drove, and there were many times that I sat in the driver’s seat while my teenage and young adult staff jumped in and out of the truck’s bed as we hauled supplies from one part of the camp to another. 

Eventually, I started teaching some of those young adults on my staff how to drive, and a few of them would become the ones sitting in the driver’s seat while younger staff jumped in and out of the truck’s bed. On the last retreat that our organization ever ran I was walking across the soccer field, reflecting on this incredible journey, when I looked up to see the truck driving across the camp, a couple of counselors riding in the truck’s bed. On closer inspection I noticed that it was one of the younger counselors driving the car. The older staff members had, without my knowing it, taken it upon themselves to start teaching the younger counselors how to drive, and were all taking it in turn to be the ones driving the truck and the ones jumping in and out of the truck’s bed as they went hauling supplies around the camp. 

As they drove past me laughing and enjoying each other’s company in the world they were creating, I stood there awestruck, barely able to contain the emotion I felt at seeing this vision I had come to fruition in a way I could never have imagined.

Possibility (Hod)

In my early twenties, when I was first traveling on my own, there was a thought that crossed my mind each time I would arrive in a new place. As I walked through an unfamiliar city or took a bus through a countryside still unknown to me, I would be astounded by the number of people I was crossing paths with, the number of faces that I never would have encountered, the number of lives there were in the world, the number of stories I would never get to know. It is one thing to know intellectually that I share this planet with some seven or eight billion people, to know that I could never meet all of them or hear all of their stories. It is another thing to walk through a place I have never been and brush shoulders with hundreds, sometimes thousands of people that I otherwise would never encounter. A different set of knowings come with that experience: a felt sense of just how big this world really is, an understanding of how random the circumstances of my life are, and a clarity around how much possibility lives in each moment of life.

This afternoon I walked around a city I’ve never been in and, though now in my mid-forties the same set of knowings arrived in my body. There is a kind of presence that is required when navigating a place I’ve never been, a way that I have to be more attuned to my surroundings, a way that my imagination has to be more open. As I walk past people speaking languages I do not speak, living lives I will never understand, a part of me starts to wonder: what would my life be like if I lived here? What would happen if I just decided to stay, to learn a new language, to adapt to a new culture? Could I do it? Would I want to do it? Does every place feel this vibrant and alive when you don’t know it? Does every culture seem more ideal when you’re just passing though? Do most lives become monotonous in the day to day living of them? Do all places become less bright when they become familiar to the mind? Is it we who dull our own experience of things when we think there is no newness to them? 

For seven or eight years I  spend a few days each summer on an island off the coast of Vancouver. Because of how long it takes to get there by ferry I often take a seaplane. The first time I took the seaplane I was overcome with excitement. I remember the feeling in my body as navigated the Vancouver airport complex in search of the port where the seaplanes took off: the heightening of my senses as I walk through an unknown place; the sweat building up on my body from both the internal anxiety of now knowing where I am and the external effort of walking with a heavy travel pack; the mix of excitement, curiosity, and nervousness that comes with not knowing exactly where I am, not being entirely sure where I’m going, and only vaguely having a notion as to how I might get there. I remember finding the small shack at the edge of the water where I “checked in” for my flight; I remember watching the planes take off and land in the water; I remember walking onto the wooden dock and climbing onto this tiny mix of sea and aircraft; I remember sitting in the co-pilot seat as we picked up speed and lifted up from the water; and most of all I remember looking out the window in complete and utter amazement at the landscape of sea and island mountains unfolding in front of and beneath me. 

This first seaplane flight and everything associated with it lives vividly in my memory. The second seaplane flight I took, the third, and the fourth do not. I remember little things from different times I’ve taken the seaplane: the time we made an extra stop in the middle of the ocean and picked up some passengers from a small motorboat; the time the plane landed in the opposite direction because of the change in wind; the time I saw them towing one of the planes out of the water for maintenance. But for the most part these trips have blended in my memory. The more I take a seaplane the less distinct each experience is, the less attention my mind needs to pay is. For me, a seaplane ride is not longer venturing into the unknown, it no longer feels like an adventure. 

This summer I brought a friend with me on my annual visit to the island. We took the seaplane together and I got to experience it from her eyes. Her excitement, trepidation, and awe at the experience re-awakened my own. I found myself paying more attention as we took off from the harbor, I found myself reveling more in the view of the sea and island mountains we flew past, I found myself once again feeling the sense of possibility that comes with a new adventure. 

The truth is, every day is full of possibility: every day there exists the possibility that my life will change, that something will happen to upend my routine and open me up to a set of previously unfathomable possibilities. But it is also true that most days do not act in this way: most days are full of rhythm and routine, most days blend into each other, most days are filled with the beauty and comfort that comes with predictability and knowing (or at least thinking we know) what will happen next. 

Today, as I sit at a bar in this place I’ve never been, having recently finished a season of work, not knowing what, where, or around whom the next chapter of my life will be oriented, I am once again opening my imagination to the possibilities of where life might take me. Today I am aware that I do not know what will happen next. It is scary to face the unknown in this way and it is exciting to be open to having my life changed by the situations I find myself in. In this moment of possibility the thing I have to remember, the thing I keep reminding myself is that there is beauty in the unknown, that the unknown and the possibility that lives within it is what makes a life a life.

Inheritance (Netzach)

In one of the most common memories of my childhood I am sitting in the back seat of the car while my dad is driving and muttering to himself. Amongst the most common phrases my father would mutter, there was one that came through at a more audible volume, appearing seemingly out of nowhere, and always blurted out with a biting distain: “Canner, you’re a fucking idiot!” 

There were many Canner’s in our family: both my father’s parents, me, my sister, and eventually my brother. But there was only one Canner he would consistently address in this way… himself. 

This phrase could erupt out of his mouth at any moment, certainly not only while he was driving, but the correlation occurred often enough that at first I thought it might have been connected to other cars, other drivers, or the general goings on of the road. My mother cursed at other drivers so I knew that this was a thing that adults did. But over time I realized that there was no discernable pattern that connected the events of the outside world with my father’s self-deprecating utterances. He could just as easily be berating himself for missing his exit as he could be remembering a mistake made decades ago. What was consistent was the intolerance he had towards experiences of not living up to the expectations he had of himself. 

If you were to ask him about this quality, he would have told you that it was one, perhaps the primary quality of his, that he did not want to pass on to his children. In fact, the times that he got the most upset at me throughout my childhood were the moments where he saw a semblance of this pattern of his beginning to show up in the ways I treated myself. Despite his wishes, a rigid intolerance for not living up to my own standards and a habit of self-berating became quite a large portion of my inheritance. 

About fifteen years ago, in my early thirties, I was on a road trip with my then girlfriend and I missed an exit on the highway, a mistake that was going to set us back about thirty minutes. I immediately became livid with myself, blurting out, “Jonah, you’re a fucking idiot”, amongst other unintelligible but equally violent mutterings. This was certainly not the first time I reacted to making a mistake this way, and I likely would not have even registered the incident had it not been for the shock that my self-berating utterances were met with. The presence of a person who cared deeply for me and was unfamiliar with this inherited habit of mine allowed me to see the sharp contrast between this particular response and my general way of being. 

In the moment I defended my inheritance. I made excuses for the tone I took with myself. I downplayed the impact it had on me. But upon later reflection, I began to see it for the inherited pattern that it was, and I began to see that it was something I didn’t want to hold on to. 

Over the last fifteen years I have spent a lot of time parsing apart my inheritance: the beautiful stories and traits that have helped me along my journey towards being the person I aspire to become, as well as the habits and patterns that are not helpful, that do not align with the vision I have for myself. It is one of the great projects of a lifetime: to disentangle oneself from the things we inherit; to cherish and fold into our lives the helpful, wonderful, and meaningful things that were passed down through the generations; and to identify, reckon with, and eventually release the unhelpful habits, patterns, and beliefs that we were never meant to carry onward. 

I am certainly not finished with this project and imagine I never will be, but every once in a while I get an opportunity to notice just how much releasing I have done. The other day I was driving on the highway and the car suddenly lost power. I had enough momentum to pull off the highway and onto an exit ramp. At the bottom of the exit ramp there was a car stopped at the traffic light in front of me and I had to bring the car to a complete stop. When I tried turning the car back on, it would not respond. I had run out of gas and had no way of starting the car again. There was a gas station just across the intersection but I had no way of getting my car there. 

I tried giving the engine a few minutes, thinking that with a little rest it would turn back on just long enough for me to get the car across the intersection. I tried calling the gas station. I thought about trying to push the car. None of these ideas worked. I sat there for about twenty minutes, not wanting to call a tow truck because of how close the gas station was. Eventually a young man driving by made eye contact with me and after parking his own car, came to see if he could help. I gave him some money to buy a gas can and fill it with enough gas to get my car started. Ten minutes later he returned, we got the car started again, I thanked him profusely, and drove right to the gas station to fill the car up the rest of the way. 

Throughout this entire experience, from the moment I realized what was happening, through all of the not knowing how the situation would get resolved, through all of the waiting for this stranger to return, my old self-berating voice, that for so many years was eager for any opportunity to curse me out, was nowhere to be found. The fact that I let the gas level in the car get so low that I got stuck at the bottom of an exit ramp was not met with rage or self-flagulation, but with a mild eye-roll, an amused chuckle, and curiosity as to how I was going to get out of this one. 

And this reaction: amusement at the absurdity of life, curiosity in the face of the unknown, and an openness to the help of a stranger… these too are elements of my inheritance, these too are traits that showed up in the stories I heard and the experiences I had with my father and his parents. 

We do not get to choose what our inheritance is. For most of us it is a mixed bag of things that we want to cherish and things we want to shed, things that align with the values we hold and things that make us uneasy, things that reinforce the ways we want to be in the world, and things that upon further examination to not line up with who we want to be. 

The gift of an inheritance is that it comes with some work for us to do. What we choose to do with it, that becomes the gift we get to give.

Healing (Tiferet)

Healing is sitting in a hot spring by the ocean reading poetry 
Healing is screaming and wailing into a pillow 
Healing is dance
Healing is music
Healing is crying while riding your bicycle to work
Healing is tremors and shivers throughout the body
Healing is peaceful
Healing is violent
Healing is sitting still and feeling the cells in your body ground, settle, come into harmony
Healing is shaking, dancing, flailing, losing control of your body’s movements until tears well up and flow from the eyes, air builds up and pushes blocked energy from your throat that releases in the form of uncontrolled sound
Healing is sitting with pain you didn’t know was there and letting it wash over you

Practice (Gevurah)

Practice… We talkin’ about practice? - Allen Iverson

I have been resisting this practice. I have not been wanting to write about practice. For more than two weeks I have been thinking about practice. I have been writing and not knowing what to write. I tried putting it aside and writing about something else, but that didn’t work either. On continued reflection I began to wonder if my resistance has something to teach me. This is the seventh gevurah entry in this writing practice. Somewhere in the back of my mind, this practice was always going to be seven cycles long, forty-nine weeks of reflection, nearly a year of weekly writing.  

Is this struggle I’m finding myself in some kind of resistance to an ending that I have been anticipating in my subconscious, perhaps semi-conscious, mind? Is it akin to putting down a book with twenty pages left because I don’t want it to end? Is it a version of the “out of character” behaviors that young people display at the onset of an ending they are nervous about? Am I experiencing separation anxiety manifesting as severe writer's block? 

Or is it simply a manifestation of my life long paradoxical relationship with the idea of practice itself? 

As a child I could sit for hours with my legos building worlds, creating stories with characters I had imagined. It was a kind of practice - playing out stories that reflected the world I was learning to live in. It was a practice I was committed to, a practice I looked forward to, a practice I put many hours into on a consistent and regular basis. At the same time, this consistency, this commitment to practices was completely absent in my life at school. Throughout my childhood, from elementary through highschool, the most consistent comment I would receive on my report cards was: Jonah’s quality of work is erratic. My teachers were uniformly aghast at my simultaneous ability to produce quality work and inability to do it consistently. 

This continued into my college years. I very rarely did my homework and when my friends tried to get me to join a study group my response was to claim that studying was cheating. I had a roommate who could not understand my work habits. He would often come home to find me reading on the couch but it would almost never be a book that had been assigned by one of my classes. He would rebuke me for having no discipline. I countered by saying that I had a lot of discipline, but only when it came to things I cared about. This, he claimed, was not discipline. 

A few years later when I started working as a teacher I relied heavily on my improvisation skills, my ability to adapt to the situation in front of me, my penchant for meeting the moment, for being responsive to the emergent needs of my students. I took pride in the fact that I never taught the same curriculum twice. In this way I was devaluing the notion of practice. 

But simultaneously my late adolescence and early adulthood, the years that I was in college and teaching high school, was the time that I was building practices that would stay with me, that would ground and center me throughout my life. In college, while I was scoffing at study groups I was also building an annual Yom Kippur journaling practice that continues more than twenty-five years later. While rejecting the value of consistency and repetition in my teaching career, I was also building a practice of making challah and hosting shabbat dinners. This practice of bread making which requires consistency and repetition has become a staple of my life. 

And then there is this practice itself. Nine years ago I was invited into a practice of writing about the sefirot as a method of counting the Omer. For eight years, when the Omer came around I would join several friends in a shared google doc and write each day, for seven straight weeks - 49 days of writing. 

Up until that moment I don’t think there had been a time in my life in which I did anything for 49 days in a row. It was the most consistent I had ever been about anything. And through that practices I learned a few things about myself, I recognized a few patterns about the kinds of practices that work for me. For the most part what has worked for me is to build my practices in the container of the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur Journaling, Challah making on Shabbat, writing (or this year leading a guided meditation) during the Omer, this writing practice itself which was tied to shabbat and the weeks in a year. It seems that I enjoy practices that are time bound, that either have an end in sight or have something outside of myself to create a temporal container around them.

There are other practices I have developed, but more than any specific practices, what I have learned over the years is the practice of practice. I have come to see the ways that having practices gives me structures that allow me to return to myself. I have come to see the ways that embodying the notion of practice, slowing down to bring intention and choice into each moment, helps me ground, helps me be present, allows me to show up stronger and in line with how I want to be in the world on a more consistent basis.

Compassion (Chesed)

Twice this week I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of compassion: what it is, why it is so important, and what it requires of us.

While leading a group coaching conversation, there was someone in the group that I was having a hard time finding compassion for. The person was saying things that I fundamentally disagree with, that I experience as hurtful, and that I think are patently untrue. As the group leader my job was to support this person, to be present for them. And, my job was to model for this person and the entire group how to support and make space for a person I disagree with while also not allowing their untrue and hurtful comments to be accepted as gospel. As I sat there, listening to this person passionately claim things from a perspective that was entirely foreign to the way I see and understand the world, wondering how I was going to respond, how I was going to engage in this conversation without turning it into a fruitless debate about facts, I started to think about what compassion would ask of me in this moment. 

Compassion asks me to hear what this person is saying from their point of view, from their experience, from their pain, from their fear. Compassion tells me that I cannot judge someone from a place of my experience, of my sensibilities, my orientation, my social and emotional maturity. Compassion reminds me that I cannot dismiss someone just because I think they are wrong, just because I cannot understand how it is that they have come to think and believe what they have come to think and believe. Compassion calls upon me to offer grace even to a person who is not offering it back. Compassion is not a transactional quality, it is not something to withhold simply because it cannot be returned. It may in fact be the case that the moments when compassion cannot be returned are the most important moments to offer it. 

So I listened, I heard their pain, I felt their fear, I understood what they were and were not going to be able to hear from me, and I responded in a way that honored their humanity without agreeing with their statements, without accepting their assumptions. I found a parcel of a truth that I could agree with, acknowledged that truth, and I offered a gentle challenge and a broader perspective. I certainly did not change this person’s mind but I did give them space to feel heard, I did offer them a window into a different way of thinking, and I have to hope that in doing so I could help loosen the grip that their fear held them so tightly inside of.

Perhaps I was so easily able to call on my compassion in this moment because I had been practicing it all week, because I had already confronted those parts of myself that are most resistant to offering compassion, because I had already been in conversation with the things that make compassion so difficult for me. 

Earlier this week I spent time reconnecting with a past partner. It had been several years since our separation and the time that had passed, as well as the healing work that we each had done, allowed us to enter into conversations that were not available to us during our time together. One of the things we talked about was the way that each of us carried heartbreak in the aftermath of our relationship. 

This conversation challenged a set of assumptions that I carried for most of the time since our separation. How could she be heartbroken about us not being together when I had wanted us to be together and she was not choosing it? For most of the intervening years I did not have space to acknowledge her heartbreak because I was so consumed with my own. In my mind there was a simple truth: if she was feeling heartbroken about us not being together then she could just choose for us to be together, and if she wasn’t choosing that, then she didn’t get to be heartbroken about us not being together. 

But compassion demands that I step out of my own experience and see the experience of the other person. Compassion demands that I understand that even if something feels very simple to me, that doesn’t mean that it is simple to someone else. Compassion demands that I release my story, my version of reality, and accept that someone else might be experiencing our shared reality differently, might even be experiencing our shared reality from inside of a different paradigm than my own. 

I truly did not understand how she could feel rejected by me because, in my reality, I was clearly stating that what I wanted was for us to be together. In the reality I was operating from, being together was the pinnacle of connection, so to me when I would say, “I want to be with you but if you don’t want to be with me then I can’t have you in my life because it would be too painful for me”, there was no rejection in that statement. It was I who was being rejected because in the paradigm I was inside of there was choosing to be together or there was rejection. In her paradigm, knowing that she was loved and would be loved no matter what was the pinnacle of connection, so if being loved felt at stake, then rejection was also at stake. To her when I said, “I want to be with you but if you don’t want to be with me then I can’t have you in my life because it would be too painful for me”, it felt like an ultimatum, it felt like rejection.

In realizing this, in seeing that we were operating from different paradigms of love and relationship, paradigms that understand connection and rejection differently, I was able to loosen the grip I had been holding on my own pain, on my version of the story, on my need to be right and righteous. Or perhaps it was the loosening of my grip on those things that allowed me to have the space for this realization, that allowed me to have the space to see the difference in the paradigms that we were operating in, that allowed me the space to have compassion. 

If I am to have compassion then I have to let go of my pain, I have to let go of the preciousness of my story, of my own victimhood. Compassion demands that I put my own experience aside so that I might see, feel, and understand what another person might be experiencing. And even if I cannot see, feel, or understand, compassion demands that I imagine, that I try. Compassion demands that I believe that there is truth in what another person says even if, and especially when, it is a truth that I do not see or cannot understand.