A New Name, A New Relationship

Origami; Making Hope Come Alive, Peace Park, Hiroshima, Japan
Blessings of Being Awake: In this most holy month of Elul, when we blow the Shofar everyday to remind us to wake up and come back to our true self, I am choosing to focus on something to prepare my soul and being-ness for the new year 5771. I have chosen to change my relationship with the three letter word for the Mystery of All Life, Blessing Bestower. These three letters, g-o-d, have lost their luster with me and have become more problematic than supportive and loving. There is an emptiness when I say this word. And now that my parents are dead and I am an orphan who must truly take care of me as there is no one else to do this, I am sensing a becoming of a more aliveness and as Rabbi Dovid Zeller, of blessed memory sings, believing in this aliveness as me. I have choosen a name for this Divine Ayn Sof, The One Without End that is Unending Love that empowers me and speaks to my wholeness. And for now it is HaRachamana, the Compassionate One. And I am smiling.
Spiritual Challenge: To remember that I am holy and I am HaRachamana, without judging the forgetting of falling back into the old familiar patterns of doubt. And to remember that I can hold Me as HaRachamana holds me and I can empty my body of anything that is not needed to be held any longer. Letting me back into my heart and my womb, and as Mystical Hebrew teaches, I am being the androgynous giver and receiver that I am.
Spiritual Practice:Breathing in the name, noticing my visceral reaction; breathing out the name and noticing the body's response. HaRachamana lives within for those moments I am awake and even when I am asleep walking through my life.
Blessings of the Vav: There is no end to what the mind can imagine and if i connect the dots, all the dots, i can begin to feel included in the the ten thousand things, no longer an outsider. When I listen to me, the HaRachamana, there is only possibilities.

'Love is All You Need' Is Not Enough for Me Today

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole Coming Out Alive
Blessings of Being Awake: I noticed the passion in my voice and the excitement in my body as I was talking to Cheryl yesterday about how I was interpreting the concepts of power and love that Adam Kahane wrote about in his book Power and Love. He expanded on Martin Luther King's and Paul Tillich's writing on love and power while telling his story with great vulnerability and inquiry of his work on social change. I told her that a book had not excited that much interest in me in a long time; I had written and drawn all over the margins, the notes invoking thoughts and emotions and a lot of Vavs and ands. And as I ranted on, I got clearer about how important these two energies were for me. Love is all you need has been my mantra; loving myself as if I were my own lover has been my intention. And in trying to figure out what that exactly meant has been my practice! And in this moment, what I am aware of is the missing element to loving me is power, the generative energy to grow my soul.

Spiritual Challenge: And in living as an only child, introvert, solo-no partner, I have ignored the love, the generative energy of connectedness and unity. My challenge is to learn how to live the paradox of I and We simultaneously. Oy vay, just writing those words makes me nauseous! This must be a large threshold to cross and I am on it making the transition to the other side, feeling the power and the love.
And I read the words of the poem that Nelson Mandela used during his imprisonment that are stuck on my computer and they inspire me forward, 'I am the master of my soul and I am the captain of my fate'. And I link them together with the words Hillel wrote, ' If I am not for myself who will be? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?'

Spiritual Practice: In my workshops on visioning and storytelling and strategic planning I use the phrase, ' together we can make anything happen' and often remember my father's famous line, 'we need each other.' So I need the mind, even when it separates me from others, I must value my body that holds all the emotions and sometimes cannot do every yoga move, and i must remember my Spirit that even when not physically seen I can feel. And I need you as you need me to be complete, individual and unique and connected. My practice is to live as if I am one, interdependent, intra-dependent, fulfilling my soul's mission to grow and heal the world for us together.

Blessings of the Vav: Is that this Otiot, letter Vav, exists with it's own intelligence and has the holiness of the mystical energy of connectedness, as she stands between heaven and earth, within the emotional torso of me, the third letter of the One Without End. And I am circumcising my heart, loosening the thickness of my neck and coming home.