Introduction

A world of beauty lives inside us. Its source is in our hearts and minds, rooted in unconditional love and deep truth. Mustering as much wisdom as we can gives us greater access to this beauty.

We can draw on ancient ways of seeing and experiencing the world to help us navigate it with more wisdom. In this book, I share with you keys to living a wiser life based on my own experience of living two of the great, timeless wisdom traditions humanity has produced—Taoist-inspired Tai Chi Chuan and Judaism’s mystical Kabbalah.

I became a student of Tai Chi in the 1980s in Boston. Many people know it as a slow-moving health and relaxation exercise system. Its full name, Tai Chi Chuan, means Supreme Ultimate Fist. At its core, it is a martial art. It is believed the founder of this profound, soft school martial art was Chang San-feng, a fourteenth-century Taoist priest. Inspired by seeing a crane and snake engaged in mortal combat after having a dream about a new fighting system, he understood the practical fighting applications of his Taoist meditation practice.

Taoism recognizes an unnameable source of creation, the Tao, that gives birth to life. Even though we cannot know the Tao by limiting it through names or concepts, we can directly experience it through the interplay of energies that are born from it and make up this world. Tai Chi calls these energies yin and yang, the complementary opposite energies we deal with every day of our lives. They manifest in myriad ways as the pairs male-female, night-day, hot-cold, and on and on. Without the tension between the opposites, life as we know it would cease to exist.

One of the philosophical points of Taoism that became a vivid reality for me through the practice of Tai Chi was to see all energies coming at me, whether I liked them or not, as part of a seamless whole that could be brought into harmony with the right attitude and skill set. Rather than fighting against the parts of life that disturbed me, I began to learn to relax and find ways to redirect their energies in order to flow with them for the good.

My love of Tai Chi as a mind-body-spirit practice continues to this day. In the 1990s, I was drawn to the mystical side of Judaism—Kabbalah and its Tree of Life. Even though I grew up in a home that honored its Jewish roots, it wasn’t until I attended a lecture on Kabbalah in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I understood the potential of the Jewish mystical path becoming part of the spiritual life I was building through Eastern practices. I recognized that each system offered something of tremendous value and I could find a way to have them live harmoniously in me.

Kabbalah means to receive. Traditionally, Kabbalah’s origins date back to the earliest stories of people walking on this earth. After moving to Israel in 1991, I began studying Kabbalah in the fall of 1996 in Jerusalem. My teacher, Hadassah Ben-Yishai, emphasized that it is everyone’s birthright to live an intimate relationship with the Divine, or in other words, the Source of creation. She called this relationship the Divine Romance. It is rooted in the unconditional love the Divine extends to each of us. Under Hadassah’s guidance, I started on the journey to make this relationship the foundation of my life.
Just as the Tao differentiates the ineffable Source into the energies of yin and yang, Kabbalah talks about Ein Sof, Endless Nothing, as the Source of creation and the Source of the Tree of Life, a map of divine energy flowing through everything. The Tree of Life consists of ten energy centers called sefirot (and an additional hidden one), each one an expression of the Divine defined by different names of God, personal qualities, archetypes, and much more. (The Appendix includes a diagram of the Tree.) These energies connect you to the deepest parts of yourself. I came to intimately know them through my own experience.

This book is written in uncomplicated, direct language. There is no jargon to learn or concepts that will leave you scratching your head in bewilderment. This is not a philosophical book or a guide to the intellectual details of Tai Chi and Kabbalah. Each chapter starts with a “wisdom statement.” The rest of the chapter is designed to bring you deeper into the essence of each wisdom statement. Each chapter closes with a question or exercise to deepen your own exploration of each wisdom statement. My hope is for you to have your own experience of the energy and love underlying these chapters, an energy beyond labels that lives in you and is your spiritual inheritance.

The structure of the book is based on the classic pattern of divine energy flowing through the Tree of Life. In a broad sense, the energy flows from the mental, to the emotional, and then to the physical levels; it starts with the topmost energy center, flows down in a specific pattern, and ends with the bottom one. The Tree of Life can be viewed as a template for the creative process, including how you create your own life. Because of this organization, you can read the book from cover to cover to experience this Kabbalistic energetic flow. You can also randomly open to a page; each chapter stands on its own and can be used for inspiration or guidance in and of itself.

Because it can be such a loaded word, let me say a few things regarding my use of the name “God.” Because some terrible things have been done in Its name, for some Its very mention is enough to close their minds and hearts to anything of value that might follow. I associate God with worlds of positive meaning. And, I use other names such as the Creator, the Divine, or the One throughout the book. Feel free to substitute any other name that speaks to you if the ones I have chosen are not satisfying.

The way to live that I learned from my Kabbalah teacher and from Tai Chi was clear: do not run away from what life presents you. In engaging the good and bad with wisdom, you can use everything to look within to discover the depth and beauty that lives inside of you, as well as to bring into harmony and balance what yearns to return to a peaceful place. When you live from a foundation based on what is transcendent, you are living from your essence: a foundation that is rock solid and loving at the same time.

One of the mysteries of life is, even though it is beyond human understanding to comprehend the Source of creation, it is possible to have an intimate relationship with that Source. Rumi called It “the Beloved.” One of my joys has been to take the Beloved to heart and make my relationship with It the focal point of my life. May this book inspire you to embrace your own essence and the timeless love that lives in you.

Kabbalah Taoism Self Help

 

ISBN: 978-1-935604-57-0 . Paper. $16.95. 106 pages 

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