The Spring/Summer Semester was a challenging period in my (Sam's) life with the death of my Father at the end of February and the huge impact his loss had on my family and especially my Mother, his companion and soul mate for over 50 years. For the first time since I came into the Work thirty years ago, I had no choice but to miss meetings... even ones I was supposed to be tutoring! So my sincere apologies for the lack of journal notes during this period. Looking back, I think the best I can do now is to offer sometime of an overview for the four Spring and eight Summer sessions and convey my grateful thanks to all the Kabbalistic companions who worked hard and contributed so much to our shared learning during this time.
We started our Spring Term in the Tree of Life School, on Valentine's Day, with a session on Holy Creatures, which remained our key theme until our closing Spring Session on March 27th 2012. This followed on from last term's exploration of Sacred Ground as we began to shift our focus further into the Tree of the Psyche, though still very much in integration with the body.
Several spiritual traditions have an idea of an evolution of consciousness throughout lifetimes and sometimes this is linked with a kind of hierarchy of consciousness from that of the earthly or mineral level, through that of the plants and on into the animal and human level. Although I can see a symbolic sense to this, I personally have no feeling for such human centric models... I've met as many spiritually alive trees and animals as people! So it was a pleasure for me to focus the Spring sessions around celebrating our animal souls and getting to know them a bit better.
When Joyce and I visited the British Museum in December, we especially enjoyed gazing at the Assyrian stone carvings, including the protective figures that would have stood at the gates to ancient cities and temples. We saw huge carvings of Holy Creatures with the bodies of lions, the hooves of oxen, the wings of eagles and human faces... they reminded us of the creatures described in Ezekiel's vision and revisited in Revelation and perhaps were an inspiration also for the Seraphim that gazed upon the Presence of God in the Most Holy Place of Solomon's Temple.
There's something rather wonderful about this visual reminder that perhaps it is sometimes the most instinctive and natural parts of our being that are most open to the Holy Spirit. In Jewish Mysticism the first aspect of the soul or psyche is called the Nefesh, the vital or animal soul. The Zohar says "Nefesh is the lowest stirring to which the body cleaves, like the dark light at the bottom of the candle flame which clings to the wick (body) and exists only through it. When the candle is fully kindled, this dark light becomes a throne for the white light above..."
In the Christian Tradition there has been for centuries a tendency for judgement and suspicion of the body and the physical 'passions', which has led to an unhealthy split between the body and soul and a disrespect for the earth and our fellow creatures, which perhaps underlies our current environmental crises. How much more wholesome and holy to see the outer world as a throne for the inner light.
So for these Spring sessions, as the sap was rising, in our little Kabbalah Group, we too were connecting with the beauty and power of the vital soul. In our sessions, we took walking meditations in the Vicarage garden and in sitting meditation we made inner journeys, of an almost shamanic nature, involving meetings with wild and beautiful landscapes and creatures within us. For each of us in our own ways, this was a healing process. One that gave us a renewed sense of the sacred being of nature and our place within it. In meditation we also came close to the natural rhythm of the breath and the sensations of the body, giving them the interest and attention we would give to any other beautiful, wild creature.
What a blessing it is to realise we don't have to be other than ourselves to be whole and holy, to be free. As the poet Mary Oliver says "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves". It's such a relief when we realise again and again that we don't have to go somewhere else to be spiritual but simply arrive with more awareness and love for where we already are..
"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
