The inner workings of A Life of Practice
Those of you who have been drawn to this tribe of Good Enough human beings have told me that you appreciate the perspective of A Life of Practice with its focus on becoming not more perfect but more human. Over the past year you have responded especially to posts that offered open-hearted personal stories and models of how to engage with practice in daily moments both challenging and celebratory. I greatly appreciate your traveling with me, and your comments along the way.
What I want to share in a deeper way is the beating heart that fuels me to live A life of practice: Nondual Kabbalistic Healing© (NKH). NKH was developed as a curriculum of healing and awakening by Jinen Jason Shulman. It integrates the wisdom of Buddhism and Advaitic understandings of nonduality with the wisdom of the Kabbalah and the insights of modern psychology. This is a path towards realizing, for each of us, our unique humanity, and living a life of vital and intimate relationships.
I began to receive healings and then study this work over twenty years ago with a “goal” of becoming more human. If you had asked me what that meant, my answer would have been vague.
One! Singular sensation… (from the Broadway musical, Chorus Line)
Nondual Kabbalistic Healing © is rooted in a practice that underpins all of A Life of Practice. One! that helps me to wrestle with the unending dualities of life. One! that keeps me moving with life, whether or how these dualities get “resolved.”
And that One! is: a radical practice of Oneness.
What do I mean by a radical practice of Oneness?
The central prayer of Jewish worship is known as the Shma: Shma Yisroel HaShem Elokeinu Hashem Echad. I learned this prayer as a kid in Sunday school, where it was translated as: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
Another and quite accurate translation is: Listen, you who wrestle with God, Reality is One Thing.
In NKH, we throw everything up against this statement. I mean, everything.
Whatever limitation or wart you want to leave out: include.
Whatever the shadow cast by the brilliant sunbeams of your latest inspiration: include.
Whatever you cannot bear turning away from in disgust: include. Include even your turning-away.
Because all those things we edit out or orphan: they haunt us.
They too want to come in out of the cold.
This is the radical practice of Oneness, the alchemical power of Kabbalistic Healing, and the heart of A Life of Practice.
This Oneness is not prescriptive: how human life should be in some idealized or actualized state, some Golden Age past or future.
This Oneness is descriptive: true to how life actually is, lived on the ground, in the mind and imagination, in the heart, in the soul.
This Indivisible Oneness is a fabric embellished by the moments of our One Life
Some of those moments feel like shining, precious gems, others like bird droppings. Yet all are adornments. One Life. NKH’s radical practice of Oneness invites me to make use of everything I am and experience, a potent compost that nourishes and sustains a life of practice.
Practice is our faithful and trustworthy ally on the journey – because we do still need to journey within the One.
The “journey” is then our gradual, erratic, persistent wandering, awakening to the Presence of God, to Reality, to our own glories and limitations, an integration of our split-off parts, an enlivening of the everything that is right here, right now.
Me and my practice – we keep moving with the movement of life.
And on we dance, awake and awakening, healed and healing.
Reflection:
How are you faring in your “journey”?
What have you accepted? How have you changed?
What have you brought in from the cold? What remains huddling outside?
Let’s talk about your journey. For a free 30-minute consultation with Sara: http://alifeofpractice.com/contact/
One! Sara guides you though a 3-minute video exercise: http://alifeofpractice.com/welcome/
A Society of Souls, Jason Shulman’s School of Nondual Healing and Awakening, offers a four year professional training program: http://www.kabbalah.org