Author: DrRachel

In this profound season of introspection we are called to see through the eyes of G-d. In preparation, we hear “Judges and officers you shall appoint for yourselves in all your gates.” (Parshat Shoftim). This may be taken to mean to be ever mindful at the seven gates of the soul – the eyes, the ears, the nostrils. May we be mindful, absorbing whatever enters in long contemplative silence and stillness, both watching the reactive impulses of the small self and abandoning our subservience to these habit patterns only to embrace whatever pain and sorrow that arrives with mercy, treating each direct experience as our most honored guest, breaking in new light out of the darkness.

Rabbi Yael offers the following reflection, compassionately inviting us to step out of our small way of seeing ourselves and others, into the unbearable compassion of G-d that ushers in the dawn of our becoming.

“We humans are so quick to judge

Ourselves and each other.

There are, of course,

Times when our judgments are sound,

Clear,
Helpful.

And, as we know,

Our judgments can be harsh,

Demeaning,

Shaming and cruel.

We so often berate ourselves for our perceived shortcomings.

We belittle our efforts.

We criticize our questions, vulnerabilities and fears.

And we do this to those we love as well,

Allowing harsh judgments to invade

The spaces between us.

And our harsh judgments run wild

As we look

Toward people with whom we deeply disagree.

All these harsh critical, berating judgments

Add to the pain within and around us

And yet, they persist.

As Elul shines its light

It calls us to notice judgments as they arise.

The small and the massive,

And each time we do,

To take three deep breaths around the judgments.

Rather than attacking the judgments head on

Or trying to figure out what to do with them,

Three deep breaths into the expanse of Elul

Creating some softness and space around the judgments.

Three deep breaths

To make way for discernment and compassion

To find and lift us.

A mighty task,

A deep practice we engage in

For the sake of each other and all life.

Three deep breaths.

May Elul turn us with care

To paths of love, connection and peace.”

Shalom,

Rabbi Yael

Ten thousand flowers in spring

A cool breeze in summer

A moon in autumn

Snow in winter

If your mind is not clouded

By unnecessary things

This is the best season of your life.

                                                        – Wre Men Kuan

“Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.”
~ from “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern

“Inner healing requires self-acceptance. Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav offered the following strategy: When all we see and feel is negativity, we must search within ourselves for an aspect of goodness, what he called a white dot within the black, and then find another and another until these dots form musical notes. Our task, he said, is to find enough white notes to form a melody—a melody that will define our core and affirm our fundamental goodness.”

Lew, Alan. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared (p. 128). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

“It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth.”

Georgia O’Keefe

Beauvoir arrived at a notion of a fundamental conflict between self and other….partly through her own struggle, an explicit and implicit subtext of a second sex with an imperious need for love that she experienced as a temptation to self-abnegation.

Introduction by Judith Thurman of The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir describes the fall into knowledge…the beginning of conscious femininity…and the necessary step to becoming a woman, realizing the curse or responsibility woman bares which includes necessarily resisting the temptations of self-abnegation and power itself. She brazenly writes:

The conflict will last as long as men and women do not recognize each other as peers, that is, as long as femininity is perpetuated as such; which of them is the most determined to maintain it? The woman who frees herself from it nevertheless wants to conserve its prerogatives; and the man then demands that she assume its limitations. “It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other,” says Montaigne. Meting out blame and approbation is useless. In fact, the vicious circle is so difficult to break here because each sex is victim both of the other and of itself; between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure freedom, an agreement could easily be found, especially as this war does not benefit anyone; but the complexity of this whole business comes from the fact that each camp is its enemy’s accomplice; the woman pursues a dream of resignation, the man a dream of alienation; inauthenticity does not pay: each one blames the other for the unhappiness brought on himself by taking the easy way out; what the man and the woman hate in each other is the striking failure of their own bad faith or their own cowardice.

We have seen why men originally enslaved women; the devaluation of femininity was a necessary step in human development; but this step could have brought about a collaboration between the two sexes; oppression is explained by the tendency of the existent to flee from himself by alienating himself in the other that he oppresses for that purpose; this tendency can be found in each individual man today: and the vast majority give in to it; a husband looks for himself in his wife, a lover in his mistress, in the guise of a stone statue; he seeks in her the myth of his virility, his sovereignty, his unmediated reality. “My husband never goes to the movies,” says the woman, and the dubious masculine pronouncement is engraved in the marble of eternity. But he himself is a slave to his double: what effort to build up an image in which he is always in danger! After all, it is founded on the capricious freedom of women: it must constantly be made favorable; man is consumed by the concern to appear male, important, superior; he playacts so that others will playact with him; he is also aggressive and nervous; he feels hostility for women because he is afraid of them, and he is afraid of them because he is afraid of the character with whom he is assimilated.

What time and energy he wastes in getting rid of, idealizing, and transposing complexes, in speaking about women, seducing, and fearing them! He would be liberated with their liberation. But that is exactly what he fears. And he persists in the mystifications meant to maintain woman in her chains.

That she is mystified is something of which many men are conscious. “What a curse to be a woman! And yet the very worst curse when one is a woman is, in fact, not to understand that it is one,” says Kierkegaard. Attempts have been made to disguise this misfortune for a long time.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (p. 752). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

A reading of an excerpt from Anne & Barry Ulanov’s book Primary Speech

“Prayer entered into seriously marks an unmistakable break with the way we have been living. It is never simply another happy little part of our lives, an attractive addition to the day or the night like a new car or a dress or a fetching new way to prepare a souffle. Prayer is struggle. But prayer, following the dictates of an imperious desire, can become a voracious appetite and in its own time, at least, become all-consuming. Deal with it frivolously and all desire for it will disappear, or it will be converted into such a mere decoration in our lives that it might be better to give those middling energies over to a more easily satisfied appetite….The desire for prayer is the desire for a meeting with truth. It is the thirst for understanding which will give purpose tot he boredom in which so many of us pass our working lives….In the desire for prayer, a wrenching need for wholeness expresses itself. we want to live our metaphysics and to experience our beliefs.”

June 10-12, July 17-19, August 15-17

“What is the priority of this moment?” Do you hear the call to go on a retreat seeking solitude as well as directed communal contemplative practice for all levels.  Dream work, creative self-expression, meditation, and movement are practiced with sister silence and mother nature, invoking restoration and vitality.

Do you feel a call to leave the city, pack up your tent and travel to the Healing Springs of Saratoga? Upon registration, more details will be provided.

Retreat Cost includes Meals, Camping, Spiritual Direction, and Art Materials: $500

A love song to God is, in Truth, a love song from God.

The next book in the Mystic Heart Series is the Bhagavad Gita translated by Stephen Mitchell, scheduled for July 9th at 11 am.

“Souls who love God, a Sufi sheikh said a thousand years ago, ‘know one another by smell, like horses. Though one be in the East and the other in the West, they still feel joy and comfort in each other’s talk, and one who lives in a later generation than the other is instructed and consoled by the words of his friend.’”