Sense of Soul - Embodied Kabbalah

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Today on Sense of Soul podcast, Rabbi Matthew Ponak he is a Spiritual Counsellor, Teacher, and Author. He is a Certified Focusing Professional, Focusing is a body-centred introspective method, Masters in Contemplative Religions from Naropa University, a Buddhist-inspired University, teaching meditation and experiential religious studies and is ordained as a Rabbi from Hebrew College his studies are focused on Jewish Mysticism, including Kabbalah. He teaches Jewish mysticism to help people connect with their innate wisdom, calm, and strength. He joined me to talk about his new book, Embodied Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism for All People, where he brings forward essential teachings of Kabbalah and places them side-by-side with profound inspirations from our era and the world’s great wisdom traditions. In an age polarized between materialism and spiritual bypassing, Embodied Kabbalah offers a vision that is balanced, nuanced, and hopeful. Are you feeling called to a journey of embodied transformation? Through one-on-one teaching, guidance and live speaking events, Rabbi Matthew Ponak helps people of any background reconnect with their innate wisdom, in a grounded and emotionally balanced way? Order the book Embodied Kabbalah and learn more : https://matthewponak.com www.embodiedkabbalah.com Visit Sense of Soul at www.mysenseofsoul.com Check out the new Sense of Soul Merch! Do you want Ad Free episodes? Join our Sense of Soul Patreon, our community of seekers and lightworkers. Also recieve 50% off of Shanna’s Soul Immersion experience as a Patreon member, monthly Sacred circles, Shanna mini series, Sense of Soul merch and more. https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul Thank you to our Sponsor KACHAVA, use this link for 10% off! www.kachava.com/senseofsoul  

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thanks so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Did you know that as a member of Sense of Soul Patreon, you get ad-free episodes? You will also be able to join me in our monthly live circles, listen to my mini-series, and much more. And you will also be helping support this podcast so that I can continue to bring you inspiring episodes twice a week with amazing guests from around the world. You can also show me some love and rate, review, and subscribe from wherever you're listening. Now go grab your coffee. Open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken.

Today we have Rabbi Matthew Ponack. He is a spiritual counselor, a teacher, and author. He teaches Jewish mysticism to help people connect with their innate wisdom, calm, and strength. He's joining me today to talk about his new book, Embodied Kabbalah, Jewish Mysticism for All People. Hello. Hi. Hi, how are you? Good, how are you doing? Trying to stay warm. What's it like in Colorado right now?

Well, when I was taking my kid to school, it was negative five. Okay. Where are you in Colorado? I'm in suburbs. I'm in Aurora. Oh, nice. Sure. I lived for I'm in Aurora. Oh, nice. Sure. I lived for five years in Boulder.

Okay, cool. So where do you live? I'm in Victoria, British Columbia. So the very west coast of Canada. So, and it's one of the few places in Canada that's warm. It's surrounded by water. Like the ocean kind of comes in around the island. And then there's mountains on two sides. Even though it's like as warm as Seattle kind of thing or Vancouver, it gets way less rain. Amazing. Well, I'm so excited to talk to you, you know, and I'm always like, is it the

Kabbalah? What do you call it? Or the Kabbalah? I mean, people say different. So there's there's different ways of pronouncing it. But Kabbalah is sort of, I guess, the way that I normally say it. And without a the at the beginning, it would be like Buddhism, right? That we wouldn't say the Buddhism, but for some reason, the Kabbalah, the Kabbalah has sort of been the way that it's said by a lot of people, but it's just Kabbalah. Or you could say Kabbalah. Those are just different pronunciations. Yeah. I have studied it a little bit because of the Gnostic Gospels. And so I have an entire side podcast on the allegorical stories of Sophia. And I'm still kind of working on that. I also discovered that I was 11% Jewish. And my last name is Bavra and seeing a lot of Hebrew words and stuff. I saw that Sophia had Bob in it and Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh, you had Bob in it. And I'm like, what is this Bob? This is my name. This is weird. Yeah. I saw your name initially, you know, in writing. And I said, I wonder if she's Jewish

because Shana, I believe the origin of that's actually Yiddish in the sort of Eastern European Jewish language that developed there over a long time. And Shana means something like beautiful, but it's a very common Jewish name. And also, if it was pronounced Shana, that means year. But it's also associated in one of the early mystical texts with the realm of time, right, As opposed to space, time, and then the individual, the inner world. And Shana is sort of very symbolic. And I saw, I have a friend who she takes your name and she puts it in this thing. And is it called Gematria? Gematria.

Gematria. Yes. Hebrew numerology, essentially. Yes. And I've always been kind of drawn to numbers and stuff like that. Like I always see twos. You know, I have a daughter, 222. I mean, I just twos are like my thing. And so I thought that was really neat.

And then we talked a lot about the energy behind the Hebrew alphabet. Kind of hit my soul. And then when I discovered the Vav in my name. Do you know that long ago it was pronounced differently than Vav? And I think you'll like the way it was pronounced. It wasn't a V sound. It was actually a W. So going back, the letter is wow. Wow. Wow. Yeah. There's a, like a, in the sense of awe. And I don't know how many of the teachings of Vav you've learned. I'm happy to share some if you'd like. Yes. so vav is uh if you've seen ever seen the letter yud it's like a that's the smallest letter and it kind of floats yeah above

the line and if you were to take a yud and draw it down and draw the line down you would get a vav and so one of the meanings of vav it actually has to do with bringing light or bringing sacred energy to a more manifest place. Wow. And it also is, if you just have a Vav and put it in front of a Hebrew word, it means and, but it's a connector. So Vav has to do with connection or unification. And another meaning of it, which actually relates to that word shana to do with time. If you put a vav in front of a verb in the Bible, so normally the verb would be I will go. If you put a vav in front of that, it becomes I went.

It flips it to the past. There's something associated with vav that's beyond time as well. Not bound by the normal constructs of reality. Well, that's very interesting because I just got done writing the prologue of the book that I'm writing on Sophia. And it was happening spiritually. I begin to write not knowing because I hadn't wrote a prologue. Basically, the prologue ended up being about taking a pilgrimage back to Israel and Jerusalem and Ephesus and all these places and me discovering almost like a parallel universe something like the characters were the same yet their roles were different

the place was the same yet everything I thought I knew wasn't and so I felt like I had traveled in time back to a parallel universe and then when I'd come back here I was like I had traveled in time back to a parallel universe. And then when I come back here, I was like, holy shit, nobody knows this stuff. I felt like I was so alone too over the past few years with this. But no, it was okay because I think I needed that space to kind of sort it out. Because, you know, too many people can confuse you, especially when it comes to things that are foreign to people. I think that's a pretty good way of summing up a lot of what's happening in our world right now. Too many people talking to other people and confusing them about things that are foreign to them.

You know what? It's one of the reasons why I was having such a hard time when it came to Kabbalah. Because when you're on this journey, there's so many people's opinions and belief systems that get in the way of the study. Yeah. And it's on some level, there's a lot of wisdom in choosing to be alone, whether it's literally, you know, solitude or, or just finding your own way. And I think it requires taking a step back from what people are saying or people are doing. The most important philosophies that I found in life is balance. So there's a time for aloneness and a time for togetherness. And we have to have both of those to find a good life, essentially. I don't know if you're aware of one of the translations of the word Kabbalah is receiving.

So you mentioned receiving a few minutes ago, and that's actually one of the ways of understanding that word, receiving a tradition or a transmission or receiving something from beyond that if we can find a way to clear a space within us or to untangle the knots of our soul that we can receive messages and wisdom and insight as well as experiences and all those kinds of things and though there's different messages in the lineage the most important part in my view which is very much echoed throughout the ages is it's manifest in action that it's, it's wonderful to have a mystical experience. It's wonderful to receive wisdom and guidance and insight, but the, the manifestation and the actualization of the path is in how we live and how we are exemplars of those spiritual attainments in the world. Yeah. How did you get to where you are, Matthew or rabbi? You can call me Matthew. Some people call me rabbi. Some people prefer to call me rabbi and

it would never stop them, but I'm pretty cash when it comes to how I present myself in the world. How I came to where I am. Well, I was raised in the Jewish community in Calgary, Alberta, which is in Canada, another mountain adjacent city like Denver. Calgary and Denver have a fair amount in common, people always say. And I was raised in a very tight knit, loving community. All the people that I grew up with, even if I haven't seen them for years, it feels more like siblings than friends, if you know what I mean. And there's always something to catch up on. And really that was a very strong, I could say transmission I received of just the love of people and having integrity, but my spiritual development, so to speak, or I guess you could

say in the classic sense of spiritual, because I've come to learn since then that everything's spiritual, that having close relationship with friends, playing sports, finding, you know, joy in certain subjects in school or in activities around my neighborhood. That's all part of spiritual development. a spiritual moment per se until I was 16. And I wandered into a class on Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism taught by a woman who was very learned and very steeped in it. And she was teaching to teenagers. I remember sitting in the first class. I don't think I said anything, but I felt a part of myself that I had never known before. It was something in me woke up and it was a very pivotal moment in my life because from that point forward, I've had a consciousness of my spiritual life and everything else was seen in that context that I did have a love of sports and music and math and science up to that point. But spirituality was just, it was beyond all of that. And I incorporate math

and science and love of music and sports into my life and into my teaching on some level. But the call of my soul when it awoke was more powerful than all of those. And so I spent a couple of years exploring the more traditional ends of my religion. I was raised in a more culturally Jewish way, a more secular way. And I discovered Orthodox Judaism and Orthodox Jewish spirituality, which I guess you could say it's more framed in the legal system of Judaism. It's tapping into a lineage that goes farther back. And I spent a few years exploring it until I eventually ended up in a yeshiva seminary in Israel. And I was studying there when I was 18. And it was really a very passionate time. I was learning hours and hours a day. I was praying hours and hours a day. And I

decided based on some of the books that I was reading there, that what I really needed to do was sleep less and eat less and become sort of a, well, I was trying to be a tzaddik, which means something like a mystic or a spiritual leader or righteous person, that a holy individual. And I was reading these books about how the tzaddikim, the tzaddiks, they didn't sleep very much and they were just living on God's light. And though no one had explained this to me at that time in my life, I ought to have taken it a bit more slowly because I was between not caring for my body, being away from my family and my community and also engaging so much with these consciousness expanding practices. Fast tracking. Yeah, exactly. I, I ended

up being overwhelmed and I ended up being shattered. I reached a point where the light overwhelmed me and I had what they would call in transpersonal psychology, a spiritual emergency where it wasn't fun anymore. It was really scary. And I ended up going back to my home in Calgary and taking a good amount of time to figure out what had happened. I maintained some of the ritual life that I had taken on over those few years, but eventually I dropped it because the joy had left and I was really trying to find a way to pick up the pieces. It was like a descension for a moment. Like you had ascended higher than your body really was ready for.

Your brain could actually. My nervous system, yeah. Absolutely. It was one of the common metaphors in experiential Kabbalah is that we have vessels inside of us, meaning you could back in the day, they probably think about clay jars or cups or something like that, that we're filling with divine light. And it's like exercise in a way that if someone goes into the gym and they lift a little bit of weight or they go on the treadmill for a few minutes and it's either pushing themselves, but you know, they take, they stop when it's time, they're going to take a little bit of time to recover. Their muscles are going to ache. And during that time, the muscles

are going to strengthen so that the next time they can lift a bit more weight or they can go on the treadmill for a bit longer. So these vessels are like that too. They can get stretched by the light and take some time to integrate and to heal. But if we fill them with light and we take on too much, they can shatter. That's called the shattering of the vessels. And when that happens, well, light goes everywhere and shards of vessels go everywhere. This is understood in a certain type of Kabbalah as the origins of the universe and why things aren't all whole is the vessels of the universe shattered. In an individual sense that that can happen within us as well. And the job of the Kabbalist in that sense is to heal the world, is to try to find the

light and rectify it and allow it to go back to its proper place. And so too, that was, that was a journey I was on internally for several years and trying to figure out even what had gone on. I didn't know this was possible. You know, this might be the explanation of why so many have physical symptoms of like spiritual awakening. They're awakening to they're more than a body. And then all of a sudden they have all this pain in their body.

That can happen as well. Yeah, there's a teaching from Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava. We lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Ukraine. He says in one of these teachings that, you know, we can make contact with the infinite and have these amazing experiences of becoming nothing, of egolessness. But when we come back to our bodies and we return, we have this process of integration. And he describes what is essentially a spiritual headache. And that in that realm beyond the relative world, in this sort of ultimate nothingness or bliss or everything's good,

there is no pain, there is no suffering. But we come back and he says, our brain actually can't handle that. We can't contain that level of consciousness. And so there's a pain that happens in our head. So they're all related. The soul and the body are intimately connected. So true. And I think that many people can relate to that. Just when you overthink anything, you know, you can experience that. So if you over spiritualize yourself, you may end up with a spiritual headache.

Right. Absolutely. And he says, but the beautiful thing is that when we've had that connection to God or to the divine connection with what's beyond us, and even when we return, there might be that pain of integration, but he or the peace is something that allows us to tap into insight. It can be like a landing pad for new ideas and understanding. That's beautiful. It's like you've been touched by source in some way. Yeah. And sometimes you're touched by source to the degree that it takes a while to do the integration period. And so throughout, I ended up going to university for my undergrad degree and learning a lot of religious history that was very challenging to the Orthodox mythology I had encountered in yeshiva. And so between that, and I was making contact with the world of transpersonal psychology. And that's where I first found these teachings about groundedness and about life balance, which I had been missing. It turns out there's a lot of books in the world about a lot of teachings about going

beyond and attaining bliss and unification. And it turns out that I didn't really need those teachings as much as I needed the teachings of keeping your feet on the ground. But those are harder to find. And so I found them from a teacher in this particular world of transpersonal psychology. And, well, it's a longer story. But in essence, at that point, transpersonal psychology became my religion because it was so compelling and so universal. And it took me a number of years before I found the connection with my own lineage and my own culture. And I realized there were teachings of spiritual groundedness within Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah.

But I hadn't found them. And many of them hadn't been translated before. Just very inaccessible. That's kind of been my thing that I found. It's always been here. But yet we were never taught this. And even when I pick up a scripture and I read it for myself, I'm like, God, I'm reading these words, but this is not what I was taught. Just being more present and aware

and trying to keep out those conditioned thoughts and all of the things you've been told is what I, that's why I think I had to be in that solitude because I really wanted to experience the word for myself and what I had come to really was the thought had been removed which Sophia was said to be the first thought and that thought was removed come first few centuries 80 prior to that there was a lot of thought. You know, there's all these allegorical stories, which that's magic in its own. Yeah, there's a lot of universals and archetypal narratives you can find that overlap. Lately, I have an eight-year-old son and we've been reading The Lord of the Rings together.

There's a lot that connects with world wisdom. And I can say specifically in Kabbalah, when Gandalf faces the Balrog and he has to go into the underworld and fight for a long time, he starts off as Gandalf the Grey, but when he overcomes that, he comes back up and now he's Gandalf the White. He leveled up right through descending into a really great peril and that is a concept you will find all over spiritual lineages and in in the Zohar for example the sort of great work of medieval Kabbalah it says that Abraham did that it doesn't say that literally in the Bible but in the interpretation of the Zohar, he goes into Egypt and then he faces something. He has a great trial and he comes back out again. And Egypt in Hebrew want to make that comparison in the biblical world and

the world that the rabbis were inheriting, going into enslavement in Mitzrayim into the constrictions. It was also a psychic. It was also a consciousness. So Abraham is one of the few characters in the Bible that goes to Egypt and comes back out again. And he's considered this bringer of love to the world in the rabbinic interpretive tradition that he was someone who had his tent open on all sides to guests coming through the wilderness. He was someone I've even heard, this is sort of a more of a folk tale, but I really love the teaching that he had a personal stringency, that he wouldn't eat a meal unless he was feeding someone else simultaneously. And like, just what an amazing feat of generosity. So that's essentially how he's understood in the interpretive tradition. And so it says in this passage of the Zohar,

he couldn't have attained his level of being this emissary of loving kindness without having descended into the abyss, into the other side, into the demonic, that that refined him and allowed him to be such a teacher and a healer. Oh, wow. I like that story. This is how we learn. Oh, it's a part of it. Yeah.

And growing up in a tradition, sometimes we're taught the stories and then not the deeper elements. And so Zohar will say as well, these are not just stories. That if you think these are stories, then it's very bold in saying we could write better stories if we wanted to. But there's secrets buried beneath this text. That's what's really going on. Right. Everything is so deep like this. Like the bob, right?

It means number six. It means, you know, unification. It means, you know, the letter. It means and. It means so many things, but like everything is like that. Yeah. There's a great deal of meaning that underlies the surface. Everything. This is the great mystery. So don't, don't get lost in the stories as well. It's that balance. And so they can be all kinds of things, the depth that everything can have, if we can orient to it in that way of learning and

being receptive, right, to a letter of love or to any story, there's a way of understanding reality like that as well, that all, every moment, every tree, every interaction, there's a potential there for that wisdom to come through. There's a very ancient narrative told in a book called Brashid Rabbah. It's a midrash. It's an early teaching of the rabbis, 2000 years ago, give or take. And it says that when God was creating the world, God consulted the Torah, meaning like the metaphysical pre-existing Torah, which actually has similarities with logos. And the Torah helped God create the world like an architect. Or some people say like the light of true reality shone through this primordial wisdom and then animated the world and created the world. in that sense, before the written Torah was given at Mount Sinai in the mythical narrative of how it all came to be, even before that, there were wise people around. There were people even that are

said to have been studying Torah. And what does that mean? Well, one Hasidic teacher named the Meorinayim, who actually lived in Chernobyl of all places in the 1700s. He says, Torah is imbued in the world. It's everywhere in nature. That, yeah, it's in this book, but it's also available to us anywhere that we can interact with it. And so we can imagine taking a story and interpreting it and finding those different levels and layers, but we can do that according to this view with anything we encounter, including our bodies and our own minds. They're all wellsprings that can allow us to tap into that deeper wisdom.

Wow, I agree with you. And I definitely found that. Yeah, there's just meaning in everything if we're able to kind of open our eyes and be present with it. You know, I had on, I don't know if you ever heard of him, Rabbi Harry Rosenberg. I actually listened to that episode. Yeah. I just, I was fascinated

and I was so shocked to learn that what you were just saying, that here we were reading these words and we took them so literally, but then I go back to what I discovered. The thought has been taken out. We were not allowed to think. This is the faith-based. This is what it is. And this is what I'm telling you it means. And then we're to just accept that. Yeah.

I'd like to share another understanding of the word faith. Okay. Pistis means faith. Oh, interesting. In Greek. Huh. Pistis means faith. Oh, interesting. In Greek. Pistis Sophia. Oh, there we go. Thank you for teaching me that. So this is a teaching that's included in my book because it combines both the understanding of faith with embodiment. So embodied Kabbalah is essentially Kabbalistic articulation of grounded spirituality with a few other teachings that I think the world should really know right now that are from the wellsprings of the Torah lineage, but are universal. And the world needs to learn how to find balance.

And this is essentially an articulation from that world as an offering to all humanity. So emunah is a word in Hebrew, which means faith, but it's not faith in the sense of what you were just describing. If I say to an individual, I believe in you. I'm not telling them I believe that they exist. What I'm saying is I trust in them. I believe in your ability, Shanna, to do something. And so emunah is often understood in that way in Judaism, that it's a trust in God. It is not a trust that God exists. And so if we have emunah, it means that we can relate to the world as it's manifesting. And even if things look scary, or even if things are hard, there can be an underlying faith that whatever we're encountering, we have the ability to relate to. It's here for us to contend with on some level. And so

the teaching goes that we can have emunah of the head. And that's this sort of like head centered trust. Of course, I believe that everything's going to work out in the end. Or of course, I believe if things are hard, it's some kind of challenge to me from God. But there's a deeper level, which is the faith of the heart. And that's where we really feel it emotionally. We can tap into it. And really, it's not just a thought anymore. It's a feeling. But the deepest manifestation

of this emunah, according to the Netivo Shalom, who's a more recent mystic who passed away in Jerusalem around the year 2000, he said, it's the faith of the limbs or the faith of the body, the faith of the belly, you could also say that it is how we are in our deepest essence. It's in our bones. And he says, if you were to encounter a wild beast out in the wilderness, someone who just has head centered Emunah might flee or be overwhelmed or something, not be able to handle. But he says, if you have that in your body, you'll know, and you won't be overwhelmed. You can trust in that scenario. And it's a very, very high level, very deep level, but that's, that's what it means to

have that trust manifest. And it's the same word you could translate as faith, faith of existence. It sounds like discernment, trust in your body to lead to, and this inner faith, the self-trust that I have in myself, like rather than believing in everything outside of me. And that's not really something that you're taught in Christian beliefs. You know, it's more outside of me. And that's not really something that you're taught in Christian beliefs. You know, it's more outside of you than inside of you. And Jesus says, kingdom is within you. And I have faith in that. I really like that understanding of faith. It reframes it, that it's not, it doesn't, faith in that sense doesn't remove all the questions. It actually enables you to grapple with them and to confront things.

And that's a faith in the process. And I think it's essential to have that within. Without Emu now, without trusting a process, how would we ever get from one end of an emotion to the other? Because emotions can be really scary. And that's something I had to learn later on after my shattering experience as a teenager. I had to learn what it was to be with emotions. I couldn't believe it. I was, you know, 19 years old or 20 years old or even 22. And I had never known what it was like to really see an emotion through.

I had just naturally learned about distraction and it, what the, the mystical stuff became an even better distraction. Sometimes what we need is distraction and bliss and all that goodness. But there is sometimes where we really need to just feel in. But the capacity to actually go there and allow it to lead you where you cannot know where it's going, that takes trust. That takes faith. And when you mention the faith within or the faith in yourself, that's what comes to my mind in my heart is the trust in the process of the internal world. It's going to be really hard to get these younger generations to have any kind of blind faith

anymore. Rightly so. We should be informed by our experience in the world and by what we know to be true. I really believe that. When I work with teens, I say things like be an inner scientist, ask, what does the evidence of your reality tell you? And if, if you say, I believe in God, like, what does that mean? Like, who's God, who told you what God was? That's the, you believe in it. Right. And I want people to, you know, be well-adjusted, you know what I mean? And have that goodness in their life. But I don't want anyone to feel pressure that they have to adopt someone else's version of what they think is really going on here. Right. How many people feel like reality or God has earned their trust?

Yeah. And how many people don't? There's a lot of people who, whether they've had trauma in their lives or been raised in religious systems that weren't nourishing that are there. They've turned away from that. I think it's all part of the process. You know, when I meet people who tell me that they don't believe in a God who could be that cruel in the world or those kinds of things. I mean, I'm not trying to talk them out of it. Yeah, just let people be and also listen, because if someone has been betrayed, think

about that in a human relationship. If someone's been betrayed. I felt that way. I grieved. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pissed. You know, I went around since 2000 years, you know, and people kept saying that Jesus said, forgive them for, they don't know what they do. And I said, no, I think that some people absolutely knew what they were doing and absolutely have corrupted our system to control people. Yeah. But you know what I love about the, I keep on wanting to say it, the Kabbalah, there's a lot of tools that you can use. So that's what I had discovered even in the story of Sophia. These are stories and tools that not only tell us about a greater universe or cosmology or whatever, but that each individual can relate with and actually use in their life. That was shocking to me, right? It's not just, you know, some 10 commandments or some great ideas of do

good to your neighbor. Like we're talking like the evolution of who you are. Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious if there's a particular teaching from those books that comes to mind. There's the story of Sophia when she is fallen into the chaos, which is like the third dimension. She comes into this earth, right? And she forgets who she is. She's lost all of her wisdom. She has no idea she's connected to a source. She's lost. That to me is like going into the womb, like coming from a spiritual place, forgetting who you are and going into the womb, like coming from a spiritual place, forgetting who you are and going into the womb, into the darkness. And then the story is, is that Jesus comes and he helps her find her divine spark within. And she has to repent and go up the tree to get to, is it the

key term? Keter? Keter. Keter. Yeah. It means crown. Yes, for the crown, right? And so this is the way that I perceived it and received it. So it could be like the story of anybody who falls, like you said, Abraham did, falls in their life, or you're like, you did, or like I have, or who hasn't, this is for everyone, we've all fallen into the dark, and then to find that divine spark within, and then to, you know, evolve and rise, you know, up Jacob's ladders. And then, you know, it's interesting because you could look at that as an individual life, or you could look at your soul's journey or evolution of your soul, you know, that you might have to keep on doing this. So what are you going to leave here? You know, so it just got real deep to me. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's a really wonderful story and a wisdom journey that it's describing. My inner historian feels like I need to say something about the origins of Kabbalah and where it's coming from and how it's being reimagined and re-envisioned. So Kabbalah means two things in common usage in the Jewish world. One, it's used to describe the whole history of Jewish mysticism. I mean, really, in some cases from the biblical

prophets up until today. And the other way that it's used, Kabbalah is a particular mystical movement that first arose in the 12th, 13th century in France and then in Spain. And it may have had earlier versions of it, but the first thing that's ever was written down was in, I think, 1170 thereabout in the book called the Bahir. And it's, I mean, so it's in one sense, it is this very ancient lineage going back to the biblical prophecy, including Jesus and all of that coming forward. I mean, if he was in fact a Jewish spiritual, a mystic, yeah, I mean, well, he was called rabbi, but the rabbis didn't really exist as a movement then. Rabbi meant my teacher. That's what it meant. So he was someone's teacher. In any case, the Kabbalah in the sense of the tree of life that we know of didn't surface until really the 13th century. And in the next couple hundred years, in around the end of the 1400s, Christian Kabbalah developed.

So if you ever see Kabbalah spelled with a C, that was Christian Kabbalah. And then hundreds of years after that, in the late 1800s, theosophic Kabbalah developed, like the Theosophists, the sort of early British New Age. And they used Kabbalah and they spelled it with a Q. And they basically made it a filing system for this world wisdom that they were having access to for the first time from all over back then. And today, if it's spelled with a K, it's usually Jewish Kabbalah. Most often with a C, Christian, with a Q, it's Theosophic or New Age or universally, you could say. But there is really a blend that's around in our days today. So if I hear about Jesus using the tree of life, I see that as a more modern take on an ancient story, which I think is beautiful.

The Zohar itself, which is interesting, right? This was the first major work of Kabbalah in the 13th century in Spain. It claims that it isn't a new teaching. It claims that it's actually the recorded teachings of a rabbi that lived 1100 years earlier and his students. And so there's a long tradition of people writing things in the name of past. And you were even describing having this, I don't know if you called it a channeling experience, writing a prologue of another time in another place. This is an experience a lot of people have. And so wherever it's coming from, whether it was an intentional, I'm going to hide new wisdom in an older garment to have it be more accessible or

alive or have it more validity, or it was someone having, you know, mystical experiences and memories writing it down. The first writings we have are from that time, from the Middle Ages of that tree of life system. Wow. So that's been my problem, Rabbi Matthew, is that I don't know what I'm talking about. All I've received is my own stuff. And I've had to explain this to so many people that, you know, I don't know terminology. I don't know where it came from. I just received it for myself without interpretation. If I may, Shanna, that's, that's a wonderful place to start because if you then encounter the, the written tradition and what's come before,

you can come at it, not just from an intellectual place, but from an experiential place. I think it's a great place to start because it's really hard to access Kabbalah with just terminology. It can be confusing. If you don't have the vessels to receive it and you haven't developed them,

then how are you supposed to understand? You can memorize all the names in the world and it won't mean anything on some level for actually living it or receiving it in that experiential way. So I see what you're saying, not as a bad thing, but as an invitation to when you access it, when you encounter what's written, I think you'll have a real receptivity and openness. I think that that's what I found with lots of things and with other scholars who have studied Gnostic Gospels, Sophia and this and that, you know, they're like, wow, like you understand this, you don't know that you do, but this is exactly what you're saying. And I'm like, oh, that's so

amazing, which helps validate, which helps me have more faith in myself. Right. And so I do always feel like I keep going back to this free of life, the Kabbalah. This is something that I feel resonates with what I've received. Yeah. And I also believe that it is part of human health and wellbeing to have connection to one's own ancestry. And if you've discovered you have Jewish ancestry and you can find a way that that very rich and ancient lineage resonates with you and supports you, I think you're getting more than just validation and trust in self. You're also building bonds with your ancestors. I think so. I must have lit up some DNA in me.

I turned on some epigenetics or something. I wanted to go back because there's something else you mentioned much more, I guess you could say every day, but I don't know if you were talking about forgiveness and just wanting to forgive people because they don't know what they're doing. That's one understanding of forgiveness in our world.

The other understanding, which I grew up with, which is in the Jewish codes and the Jewish texts much more so, is about forgiving people after they repent. That in this communal way of living, someone gets to earn forgiveness by apologizing and paying people back if they've wronged them in some way or doing some kind of penance. And also the last stage of after they've apologized, they've contemplated what they've done, they've tried to change who they are. They're not fully atoned for, if you could say, or they haven't done that full process until they've come across a similar circumstance and chosen the right way. I think there's a time for those two kinds of forgiveness in our lives, but it's

important not to bypass the apology process because relationally, why should we forgive people or institutions who have shown that they're not really sorry, who have shown that they're not changing their actions or they haven't paid back? I, on some level, really appreciated the Pope coming to Canada and apologizing to the indigenous people of different parts of Canada. On another level, I said, well, this is, I think, in the best sense, step one. And there are more steps to be taken. And it's called changing the way that the Catholic Church behaves towards people who are not Catholic and are vulnerable in the world in a major way. And paying things back and

all of those that words help and they're better than nothing, but it's actually a whole process. And so do you forgive people if they haven't earned it? I would say if it's for your own wellbeing, sure. But if, you know, for the world relationally, no, I don't think people really deserve forgiveness. Yeah. So then maybe it's not about just forgiving. It's about actually preferably compassionately, but calling people out. You know what I mean? Or reaching out. No, that's what I feel like has been my journey.

Rabbi is that throughout all of this with my ancestry and then on to the Gnostic Gospels, I found, wow, we have been kept in the dark about so many things. There are so much, there's so much hidden in the world. And I just felt it was like my job to out it all. So, you know, with my ancestry first and then with the Gnostic Gospels, but, you know, you hit something with me. One of the lineages I had went straight to a First Nation shaman. They called him a sorcerer. His name's Etienne Picaroche. And he was known as the Tent Shaker. He was a powerful sorcerer from the 1600s. And the Jesuits wrote volumes on him. And then he went ghost. But he's today known as the apostate. And I don't buy it. The things that I read that they wrote that the

Jesuits wrote was that every time they turned back, he was still practicing and they would say, what are you doing? You're doing all this tent shaking again. You know, we're not going to protect you. We're not going to supply you with weapons. You know, your tribe is at risk. I mean, I found lies, you know, that they had said I ended up finding, you know, otherwise. So I agree with you that there's reparations and just the acknowledgement of stuff has yet to come. But all of those things have affected me so deeply, my ancestors and what they've gone through. And when I was helping someone with their family tree, they were Jewish. And I had to go and search the records of the Holocaust for their names. And I happened to put my name in my last name. And, you know,

I had just discovered I had Jewish. This is not something my dad who passed ever mentioned. And so there was pages of others and I, you could read their stories. Some of them were killed. Some of them weren't some, you know, you could actually read the incident very detailed too. I was so affected and I was more affected that it was hidden from me. You know, why was this hidden from me? Well, because of fear that bothered me. And so it has been my purpose to really discover my roots and to learn about what they went through and give them a voice. Yeah, Shanna, I really appreciate you sharing that story. When I first started putting myself out into the world as a teacher of Jewish mysticism and a spiritual counselor, I said explicitly, I will work with people of any

background. I'm not interested in limiting. This is wisdom. If someone's authentic and they want to learn, they have access. And to my great surprise, in hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised. But at the time, I was shocked that most of the people who were coming to me and were willing not just to comment on Facebook or something, but to really engage into and to book time and to pay for my services, almost across the board, people doing spiritual counseling were people with Jewish ancestry, who have deep spiritual lives, who were never raised with it or felt they had like a break in their own family. So what you're saying, there's a surprisingly high number of people out there with stories like that. And someone I come in contact with, actually more than one person, they can trace their lineage back to mass

conversions in Spain in the 1300s. There's a whole group of conversos, they're called people who were forcibly converted to Catholicism from Judaism and kind of remained in this in between world and remembered it for centuries. And they're spiritually awake and alive people. And they're wanting to find out about this wisdom lineage and really about who they are and where they fit in. So I really resonate with that story. There's a remarkably high number of people who feel alienated from that tradition and are looking for ways back in. Yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah. Because, you know, we've really truly are everything our ancestors went through. Oh yeah. It's in us. And there's also different lineages have different ways of doing things.

So what you're saying is, is there are different traditions within Jewish lineages? Oh, that too. What I meant, I mean, I happen to talk about that as well. Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism and the different many forms of Shamanism, there are different ways of approaching reality and at different end points on the journey or different things that are valued. I think the one thing really that holds it all together is, I hope, a value on kindness and on being good people in the world at the end of the day. But if someone has an ancestry from a certain culture or religious tradition, it's not unlikely that elements of that tradition, even if they were never raised with it, will resonate with them because their ancestors were practicing it and their culture was relating to reality in a certain way that's partly genetic and it's partly passed

on. You can take the religion out of it, but there's still a cultural transmission that's happening. Oh, yeah. Resonating with one's own ancestral religion or tradition, right? Or one of many. Rabbis specifically quote previous rabbis. Oh, yeah. This is something that you do, you guys. I mean, you've already said like, I think three or four, which is amazing. Well, that's rabbis in their most essential form are scholars. We were not priests, if you know what I mean. We weren't, those are the Kohanim in the old temple. They led the rituals. They read, they led the offerings and the rabbis come later and they are the people of the book, really, in that most literal sense that we are scholars. And so a part of what we do is we learn and that we encounter the wisdom of our ancestors.

And I think it's much more powerful, I will say it certainly as a rabbi, to say a teaching in the name of a revered ancestor than to just say it myself. It's an ancestral energy that comes through. And that's a lot of why we learn, in my opinion. It's because I could have written my book Embodied Kabbalah all about the things that I learned. And I have a version of it. In fact, that has no Jewish quotes in it. It's the method, the practice of grounded spirituality of finding balance. But when I learned that there was an immense amount of Jewish wisdom saying this exact same thing, I knew I had to put that into the world. It's got weight to it. It's yeah, I don't know how else to say it. It's powerful.

Yeah, it in a different way i quote i i seriously i use my ancestors probably daily in stories and in lessons and things that i've learned so now i'm really super curious now to go down my my jewish lineage because you're inspiring me big time because i do want to know where this is coming from in me, right? There is something that is rooted in Jewish mysticism with the things that I am learning. Am I right? Oh, yes. Yeah. A lot of what you're describing is absolutely. So Jewish mysticism could be a term that would be used for the whole lineage going back to the biblical era. And Kabbalah is also used in that way, but there's academically, I guess you could say, or it's from the middle ages onward, but what you're saying in general, it's a very massive, rich, wide tradition. It's, I haven't studied the whole thing.

How could anyone study the whole, it's the never ending story, you know? Yeah. There's a story, a medieval interpretation of a biblical story that really, I really, I find very meaningful because it's such a famous story in the Bible I really, I find very meaningful because it's such a famous story in the Bible of Moses encountering the burning bush. And, you know, the literal story is he's walking along with his, with his sheep. He's a shepherd. And there's, by the way, a lot of holy shepherds in the biblical era that was talking about spending time alone, spending time in nature, having time to contemplate there was something a lot of the prophets and the the important characters yeah and so he sees this burning bush and he's sort of wowed by and he thinks it's curious and he turns aside and then you know pretty soon he's talking to god

and he's getting a call now this medieval teacher says that god did not want to overwhelm Moses and wanted to bring him up level by level to have the capacity to be a prophet, because even though he was theoretically ready, he had never done it. And so the first thing God shows Moses is a burning bush that looks like it's a natural phenomenon. And Moses didn't realize it was God. And this teacher says, his name is Rebbeinu Bachia, our teacher Bachia. He says, if Moses had thought that was the divine in that bush, he would have run the other way. It would have been overwhelming for him.

He would have been scared, but it was sort of like God was flirting with him and he didn't want to come on too strong. So first God said this, oh, look at this amazing thing. And so Moses turns aside. And the next thing he encounters in this teaching is the angelic voice and the angelic voice speaks first. And at that point, Moses, it says in this teaching, he, his consciousness was strengthened. Like he levels up, but he's actually forming this more powerful this stronger vessel and a capacity only then after he had formed that stronger vessel was he able to then hear god speak and god speaks and he but it had gone step by step and the the teaching ends with aren't our

physical capacities like our spiritual capacities if someone was living in a cave and they went out to face the light of day all at once they'd'd be blinded. Yeah. If they go step by step, they can exist in that world of light. And that's the way that our soul functions as well. It has these limits, but also this potential for growth and development if we treat it with care and go gradually in an integrated way. So I have found that what you said was spirituality overcame me for many years too. And I was like on vacation and my kids are like, hello, do we have a mother? Yeah. And you know, so I thought grounding myself,

anchoring myself here has been the hardest thing I've ever done. Because I mean, it is a vacation. I could live in meditation. I could live in all of what we're talking about. But, you know, I have a house to claim today. That is such a, I have to say, it's such a Jewish way of understanding the world that I think that's so beautiful what you're saying, Shanna, that it's how could you help the world if you're in another dimension? We have a time for that heaven on earth experience. It's called Shabbat. It's not just a day of rest. It's a day of spiritual delight coupled with physical delight. And it's a time when we can say, okay, everything is as it should be. The world is complete. The world is whole. Everything's beautiful. And I am also complete and I am also whole. There's nothing in me that I need to fix on Shabbat either. And so we can say that to how do we feel that that's

like, eat your best foods and take a nap. And, and for me, it's extremely, and this is certainly in the more traditional world in Judaism today is putting away all devices, no news, no media, getting it out of there. And just one of the ways of doing it is having an organic flow for the day. What am I needing right now? And, you know, if you have kids, you can say, okay, I'm going to schedule some babysitting maybe or get together with friends and sing or meditate. But it's really about celebration and cultivation of delight and joy and all that's right in the world. And we get to do that. Saturday is Shabbat. Yeah. That was the Sabbath. That's what Jesus was doing. Okay. Hold that. Do you know, I was just about ready to ask you,

could it be on a Saturday? Because it's the only day that I don't do anything. I won't schedule anything. But Sunday, I actually go back to work. Yeah. So that I've always felt like I had it wrong. Well, you know, Sunday is a work day in Israel. Sunday is a work day. You get Friday kind of afternoon-ish and Saturday off. And then Sunday is called Yom Rishon, day one.

And it's associated. It's a work day. It's the first day of the one. And it's associated, it's a workday, it's first day of the week. And that's the traditional Jewish calendar, which I'll add one other piece. And this is, for me, I believe that Judaism is a recipe book. You know what I mean?

And you can kind of mix and match, like it's about creating your best life. And so I don't, I'm saying these kinds of things as ideas and suggestions. And some people want to be beholden to the whole thing that it says in the books, but I just want to nuance that with there with a real flexibility there that I see, which is, so the day starts in the evening on the Jewish calendar. So sundown Friday night

is when it begins. And then it ends Saturday night at sundown. So it can be really beautiful. People resonate with it. You can actually start that Shabbat experience in evening time. You're not waking up and preparing anything. You prepare kind of, you know, in advance or whatever. And then, and then you can kind of roll into it and you can wake up and you're still in it. I do that already. But you know, I was just thinking also, can you have that like, like five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day, an hour a day? One of my teachers, may he rest in peace, alaba shalom. He was named Reb Zalman Shakhtar Shalomi. He was an amazing mystical teacher who came really from the old world of Europe, Holocaust

survivor, and was teaching radical things. I mean, he was friends with the Dalai Lama. He was friends with Ram Dass. You look this guy up, Reb Zalman Shakhtar Shalomi. He's got a ton of books, but one of the things he taught, which I loved, he had this blend of the old world and the new world. He could relate to anyone in the most traditional camps and whether they agreed with him or not, but he knew that world deeply, but he was also very much into Gaia consciousness and universal spirituality. So he was teaching that Shabbat could be done, you know, for 10 minutes

on a weekday. And it's just a matter of the method he describes in one of his books called Jewish with feeling is essentially tuning into what we need called Shabbat consciousness, organic time, those two commodity time, right during commodity time, our bodies are commodity, we're tired, more coffee, we're hungry, that's okay. We can wait. Oh, I can't sleep right now. But organic time, it's about feeding, not just the body, but whatever we're needing. And so you can do that, like light a couple candles and take, you know, 10 minutes on a weekday. Find a way to kind of get into the space and just free flow or do something really inherently nourishing and just enjoy it for its own sake. I love singing with friends. And so there's different kind of levels that I'm practicing right now. But one of them is just that kind of organic space, which takes no planning, really. I could do it with my kids at home. We can read books and hang out, put the phone away. I'm hungry. I'm going to eat. I'm tired. I can sleep. But the other way of doing it, which takes more planning and really a community, I'm praying, I'm hoping and praying for a community around this when the time is right. But it's having people over and eating delicious food together. And no one has their phones around. And I actually wrote new songs all about the joy and the bliss of Oasis time. We're calling it right now. It's like being at the Oasis in the middle of the week. And it's, it's just so beautiful. And it's, it's like, it kind of refreshes the whole week and we celebrate what we've done, but we can also take that light and

that the good vibrations and bring it in to what's coming next. What kind of singing do you do? What do you mean? Well, there's two kinds of singing. I would say one of them, which I guess is, well, there's, they're both kind of accessible the way they've written these new songs, but one of them is just wordless melodies. So it's actually chanting syllables. I play guitar. I play banjo. I usually, yeah. And it's these short repeating terms called the nigun. That's N-I-G-U-N. And it means a melody. And they were used in a particular mystical era, starting in Eastern Europe in the 1700s as meditations. But some of them are ecstatically joyful. Some of them are more somber. But you can take a single melody theoretically and sing it forever. There's no limit because they're short and they repeat.

Two hours is a marathon, right? They're more commonly five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 if you're really into it. It's powerful though, isn't it? Yes. they're they're beautiful songs so that's one of the songs that we sing and there's hundreds thousands i i have a whole jewish bluegrass album i made of these melodies bridges of song yeah it's on it's spotify etc but it's gonna listen there's so many amazing musicians past and present who have put these melodies together and it could be spelled sometimes with two g's n-i-g-g-u-n if anyone wants to look that up okay so the reason why i asked because one of the things that in my journey i was like well

solomon wrote a lot about wisdom and it called her she which is sophia wisdom and i said so i said i'm gonna find out why so that led me to looking at the story of his father david king david and the liar and oh yeah the liar yes and he would play the liar for king saul and it would be healing so i'm like what is this frequency this these hurts in this there was a secret chord that David played and pleased the Lord. Yes. And today, here we are, you know, healing with frequency and vibration. And there's something there, I promise you. Oh, absolutely.

And there's other parts in the Bible too. There is? The prophet Elisha, a few generations later. Elijah, very famous prophet who was sort of combating, I guess you could say against Jezebel and Ahab. And his student, his disciple was Elisha. And Elisha was straight up energy healing. And he was bringing people who had recently died back from the grave, or they were sort of comatose or something. And he all there's a scene in which there's three kings who approach him i believe and they're looking alicia we'd like to

go to battle like we're trying to figure out if we'll win and he says well i don't really like two of you but i like one of you so sure i'll prophesize for you bring me a musician and they bring the musician and then the hand of god rests upon alicia and he's able to to give a prophecy and the Zohar for example takes that and says the Shekhinah or Malchut the basically the connection with the divine realm that lowest of Sefirot won't rest in a place of sorrow but it will rest in a place of joy or you could even say ecstasy and I actually I think that's a Zohar talking in absolutes. I think that the Shekhinah can rest in places of suffering as well. Okay. And we can connect to it. But what it's saying is he had to bring himself to a certain heightened mood or space so that he could do that channeling.

I absolutely believe this. And I also have just through experience, like I noticed every time I had COVID over the past three years, I'd get on a call with like you and all of a sudden I'm not sick anymore. You know what I mean? So like that vibration as it rises, whether it's through frequency song or even, you know, just our words and our consciousness rising. Absolutely. And those are what we've named without naming them are two approaches or two, I think, symbiotic parts of spirituality that are articulated. You can find it in Christian mysticism as well, I know, but in Jewish mysticism, it's essentially, so what we're talking about in a delight, the positive vibrations, the raising up, that's Shabbat consciousness. That is going towards the light. That is bringing us up.

And the other path you could call work week consciousness, which is virtual work. It is engaging with what is broken. It's going into the darkness or the negativity. And that can happen in big ways and small ways, but I believe we need both. All we're ever doing is hard work of transformation that can be exhausting. It can be great, but it can also be overwhelming or too much. And if all we're doing is cultivating joy and gladness all the time, we're probably leaving a few things that should be fixed, unfixed. Right. And so we're within and without. So those two parts of it. And so singing is very much associated with Shabbat, which is the Sabbath. That's the same word. Yeah. And the other type of song, and these are originals. I really have, since I was very

young, I've enjoyed Weird Al Yankovic. And what I like about what he does is that he takes popular music and he rewrites it. So there is actually turns out there's a whole spiritual tradition of that. For example, Martin Luther, starting the Protestant Reformation, apparently took songs that were like German pub songs.

And he took those melodies and put them to hymns because people already knew the melody. So what I've done is songs like Bohemian Rhapsody. And I have rewritten them with new words, but everyone knows that song. And you can have people who have never sung it before sing this like 12 part, like epic poem in honor of Oasis time. And, and there's, I took a bunch of these classics that a bunch that people know already. And so we're singing with words and it's just, it's silly and it's joyful and it's meaningful, but that's, that's the experience too, is how can we get strangers to sing together? That's a really big challenge in our culture. And it's not about performance. It's about joy and the experience. So I always feel sad about it, but I'm trying to find ways to help people

get into that space because it's auto tune has really hurt us. And so have like the amazing voices that are everywhere. When I've been in other communities and parts of Israel back in the day, people would just belt it out and they didn't care because it was just the joy and the experience of it. And I want more of that to be in our culture. So that's, yeah, it's like elation grounded in delicious food is kind of, for me, what Shabbat's all about. It's that kind of balance between physical and spiritual. It's freedom. Oh yeah. Freedom is definitely associated with Shabbat because there's the traditional blessing

that's said on Friday night recounts the Exodus from Egypt. And it's all about journeying from constriction to freedom. The balance has become the most important thing, right? You can't just ignore that you're having a human experience. And this is, if you're only in a spiritual experience, that's not the purpose of being in a human body. Right. Why else are we here? We're bridges. We're bridges between worlds. We have feet and we have souls you know, souls. We have all of these layers and we are in many ways uniquely to be that bridge as human beings. I don't think we've been owning up to our true responsibilities in a lot of ways, but we have so much potential here. We're not, we're not here to escape. And though you, you can find people who were doing

that kind of escape thing in Jewish mysticism, by and large, they were seen as not really ideal. Yeah, you might be super deep and clearly channeling all this light and energy. But if you're not helping people, and you're stuck up on that mountain, you know, then how can you relate to people if you don't understand that you're even a human being anymore? Judaism hasn't had monks, like ever. Kohanim in the old temple thousands of years ago were, you know, they had families still. Like we've never had this class of segregated people doing that work. And so our mysticism is a householder mysticism. It is primarily channeled or tapped into by, like in the past, by people with families and jobs by and large and it

was it's something that is meant to be integrated into daily life and yeah i agree it should be normal it's not wishy or weird so in that a lot of people are a little afraid of the word mysticism even or esoteric which esoteric literally just means going within and fighting, you know, something deeper, doesn't it? Well, I've heard the definition reserved for a select few. Oh, yes, I've heard that as well. Exoteric is revealed and esoteric is, well, regardless, there's different ways that it's been interpreted. But it's both for, it can be for sort of the spiritual enrichment of society. I mean, I think we're long overdue for a re-enchantment of the West after our disenchantment from the modern era and philosophy. And it was essential to kind of separate us from some abusive power systems, quite frankly, but it's time people can be a part of everyday life, but also householder mysticism is something that will not detract from one's life in the world, ideally. It can be blended in so that people can find that balance in their home life and in their work life.

Can someone be a mystic and show up to work on time and pay their bills? I mean, these are like simple things in some, you know what I mean? But it's actually quite a, that's the balancing act. Can you have that connection to all reality or to, or at least to the unfolding beauty in front of you and also, you know, get a good sleep and kids to school or just, you know, pay your rent, like how that's the, that's the balance. Yeah. And I think that, you know know we're all in this together on some level i don't judaism i don't think judaism has all the answers but i see it as a really fleshed out and contemplated path for all this time that can be translated for the needs of a lot of people today

wow i think about like this is a time where we're all being liberated individually, not just one race or gender or religion. Like there's a liberation that is available for us right now to go within. I think it's really amazing. It's beautiful. There's a lot of potential and I see it as a lot of potential and I have a fear that we won't take advantage of it. There are just even forgetting the spiritual potentials today, which are immense that we've never had access to all of these world traditions before we can actually study them with science and see what's most effective. Wow. Well, like we can, we can harness the power of love

scientifically. That is those kinds of things we're not even dreamed of, but also the kind of access to, you know, not everyone in the world, and I hope it's more and more, but a lot of people in the West aren't worrying day-to-day about basic nourishment. And even though different countries, their people have to pay or not, you know, in taxes or wherever to healthcare,

the kind of healthcare we have available to us is unheard of in our, or from our ancestors. In so many ways, we're living the dreams of our ancestors and we have support. And in other ways, we're not right. There was a certain negativity that can creep up around, you know, cause there are things that are broken, but if we're, if we're spending all our time in that via negativa, which is how Meister Eckhart would have said it in Christian mysticism or the work week consciousness of the brokenness, and we're not appreciating all that we have. That's where I get to worry. If we're not taking time to really just say, wow, and be grateful for all the things we do have, which are if you could transport someone, you know, one of my ancestors from the 1600s or something to today, they would be just in awe for days and months. And there's so much. And so it's important.

What I mean is that squandering it, meaning focusing on what's broken too much work on the stuff that should be worked on in a balance with also doing their best showing up and finding time for gratitude. Because if we're way down in the muck, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to make the most of this really special time that we're in. And I, that's why I'm hoping and praying that for more of that balance, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah. And that choice. I mean, you choose what you, you know, submit to, what you're watching, what you're listening to. And you're doing in the world that not everything is for me to fix, actually. There's some things that I can't fix. And I need to admit that because that's for someone else.

And to quote one of the teachings from Ralph Cook, the 20th century mystic that's in Embodied Kabbalah. He says, there are some things that you can't tie beautifully into the fabric of your life. That's for someone else to do. And if we know who we are, we can align. And that gives us power and confidence and strength and the ability to just follow.

And he says, each of us is like a unique letter in the Torah. And that once we find out who we are that's when we can really know our place in the world I love that especially because my Bob just so many times when I spoke today I connected to that I was like you have to have balance and I think of balance as the Bob like the in between you know the duo like in between the duality or the bridge Bob is associated with the sefirot between Yesod and Chesed, which, and that's all about that balance. Because if all we have is loving kindness and we don't have boundaries, all we have is Chesed and no Gevurah, it's going to be hard for us to exist in this household or world in the

work week, certainly. And if all we have is Gavurah, if all we have are boundaries, what are we, what are we doing? You know, how are we helping anyone? If all we have is no, no, no, you know, so that's the, yes, that's that. And so Vav in that sense takes that light from, you could say Chokmah up near the top of the tree and that's that Yud and it brings it down. And that's where it exists in that central balance and that central axis in the tree of life. So the Shokhmah, that is Sophia. Yeah, well, there are so many ways of understanding these. But Shokhmah, yeah, technically, it means wisdom. But it really has to do with the lineage I'm connected with, primordial wisdom, with a wisdom that precedes reality itself. So, but then it goes to Ainsouf

and of course, you know, the root of Sophia. So it's so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I just find it to be, you know, there's a connection, no matter where you look, there's a connection. The whole time I'm reading the Republic, chapter seven is about Sophia.

I mean, you know, and of course the philosophy is the lover of Sophia and the whole chapter he's calling her she just like Solomon does. And so it's definitely a feminine energy, right? Yeah. It's hard to pinpoint the gender in the Sephirotic realm because it's feminine word and biblically would have accurately described as she holy spirit also was a feminine word i heard in its original text it might be feminine chokhmah in later kabbalah becomes primarily it's the divine father you can have malchut which is shekhinah which is class classically, by and large, feminine, and Bina. Bina is the supernal womb which births the spiritual world, upper mother.

And Malchut or Shekhinah is the lower mother. The lesser. Yes, exactly. And so what you'll find is that sometimes, strangely, Malchut, the lowest sephirah, the lower mother, becomes masculine and becomes King David. And that's just another metaphor. What I'm trying to say is that there's a gender fluidity. The unification. We all should have this within us, right?

A little bit of masculine and feminine. For sure. That balance. That's, I think, a lot of it what it comes down to. I'm going to have to read your book. And from what you're describing about your own experiences and the depths to which you've gone and all you've read, I think you'll really be like sponge-like, you know, accessing what's in there because it is a very experiential approach to Kabbalah. So, you know, where can everybody get your book?

It's on Amazon and it's also Barnes and Noble. I have a PDF version, an ebook that I'm selling off my website. If you go to embodiedkabbalah.com, that's K-A-B-B-A-L-A-H. So embodiedkabbalah.com or just matthewponak.com. They can find it there as well. Okay. Awesome. And now it's time well. Okay, awesome. What's really with me is Shabbat and the great gift that it can be for people, which the essence is when we work, we can really work. We can engage consciously with that. That whole idea of work is something needs to be done, right?

There's something incomplete and not whole, and that's actually okay. It's good to do that work. But when we do Shabbat, it's really embracing all that is whole and trying to bring ourselves as much as we can to really seeing that everything is whole, just as it is right now. And that's including every part of ourself, that there's spiritual work we can do in ourselves and contemplating and look, but there's also spiritual rest and spiritual celebration involves saying, I am, I am good, I am whole, I'm perfect, just as I am. And to, with that mindset and meditations that you wanna do along with it,

also feeding your body with delight. Delight is such an essential part. Take a bath, go in nature, find something beautiful, take a nap, eat good food and all of those things. If we can find a balance between those different parts of ourselves and those energies, I think the world will be a more complete place. So I wish for all the listeners to find their way of practicing

intentional rest and intentional celebration to punctuate their life. Thank you so much for coming on. You've taught me so much. I feel like a student. And thank you for letting me pick your brain. And I kept you way longer than I anticipated. But you've just you've helped me a lot. And I feel like I got to do some work on my lineage. Now I'm excited. Wonderful. It's been a pleasure, Shanna. I really appreciate your questions in your curious mind. Like it was a conversation and you were asking really authentic questions and sharing. So thank you very much. And it's been a real privilege and a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Thanks.

I would like to thank you and our special guests for being with me today. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe and visit my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com. That's mysenseofsoul.com. I hope that you will join me next time. Thanks for listening.