"Let us make man in our image" (Genesis 1:26)

Kabbalah is the root of mysticism and the basis of our psychology, our psyche, our soul.
It is the structure of the universe and the configuration of our being.
Kabbalistic principles explain the workings of spirit and the mechanisms of our health and well-being.
Kabbalah is the ancient language that speaks to our modern search for meaning and health.

Imagine your life as a house and disease as something that got put away in a trunk in the basement so that you wouldn’t have to deal with it. This unpleasant something gets a little wet down there in the trunk in the basement and starts to stink. Eventually this stink gets up into the house. It becomes impossible to mask the odor with air fresheners.

You need to take a deep breath and open up the basement windows and let the place air out for a while. Then find out where the smell is coming from, clear off the trunk and open it. Yuck, what a stink! Go get some fresh air. Now go back in, reach into the trunk and drag this foul something out into the back yard. Throw it over the fence. Let the sun get to it. Wash it off. Now be pleasantly surprised that you've recovered and restored a beautiful carpet. And it's just what you needed for that room upstairs.

Disease is a negative experience. It is an unpleasant occurrence. It is an unacceptable part of our personality, which we deny, initially because we are just not able to fully cope with it and later because it seems convenient. Locked away from the light of day the disease worsens. Its influence pollutes other areas of our life, stinking up the whole house. When, by inspiration or desperation, we finally expose the disease to the light of day we find that our life has been enriched by owning the denied; our self is fuller having incorporated this new facet of being.

It is as if you had been shipwrecked, marooned on a tropical island with a child. The island has adequate food and water. Time passes and from a high point of the island you notice over the waves a distant land mass. Building some kind of float you announce to the child that you are going to attempt to swim to the other island in search of help. You explain that you can't make the crossing with him. You assure him that you will be back for him.

The journey is long, difficult and dangerous, through high seas and shark-infested water. Barely, barely you make it, washing up unconscious with fatigue onto the beach. The next thing you know, as if in a dream, there are beautiful natives squeezing mango juice into your mouth under a thatched palm leaf roof. Gradually you come to. Later, regaining your strength, you find yourself in a tropical paradise. However you have forgotten about the boy left behind, still marooned, on the other island.

Life there is full and wonderful. However, there is something off, something you can't put your finger on. In dreams at night and in moods during the day you are bothered, upset. This is the function of disease. It comes to remind us of the feelings denied, left marooned, the boy necessarily left behind on that lonely island.

Now with our adult understanding and set of skills we can go back and reclaim that which before was too much for us. With the help of the tribe and an outrigger canoe make the crossing back and sensitively, creatively, compassionately contact that wild child. Rehabilitate that lost part of your self and let your dominant personality be rehabilitated to it. True the disease must be healed, must change. But so too, the ego must change. Both ego and disease must adapt.

Disease is like a wild man living out in the woods behind our house. He is a part of our self which has been locked out of our psychological house. According to our ego, our dominant self, he doesn't belong. The way we see our self he isn't us.

We come home from work to find that he has broken into the house, messed things up and taken things, mostly food, from the kitchen. Stronger locks and bars on the first floor windows (psychologists, accomplishments, etc.) can't keep him out.

One night when he is howling out in the backyard, stick your head out the window and talk with him. Don't yell! Talk. Tell him that you've left him some blankets under the tarp in the corner of the yard, because you know it's cold out there. Ask him to come back in the daytime, because now you really need to get some sleep. The next day on coming home from work you find a basket of raspberries and a bowl of wild honey waiting for you by the door, gifts of the wild from the wild man.

Gifts and knowledge will be exchanged , as you learn the necessary lessons of the neglected, wild aspects of self. Eventually this wild man will even learn to wipe his feet at the door and replace the drinks he's taken from the fridge with warm ones so that there'll be some frosty ones for you when you come home from work.

Imagine, again, life as a house. Imagine emotions as objects in the house. Some things are out of place: The bed doesn't work well in the kitchen; you can't put dishes on it and it's hard to sleep with everyone coming and going. The frying pan doesn't make sense in the bedroom. That which constitutes a negative experience over here, may be an asset over there. All emotions are valid, they just might be out of place. The denied anger needs a place, instead of inappropriately being blamed on others. Disease needs a home, or at least a room in the house.

Build a room in the back of the house for your negative emotion and it won't keep throwing itself through the front window when you're having guests over. Your repressed disease then won't take whatever opportunity is available to be heard. You might even find that after you develop a rapport with your wild man, you can clean it up a bit and invite it up front. It could surprise you and become the life of the party.

Denial is not always a bad strategy. If denial leads to greater functioning, it is good. If it results in a lesser degree of functioning, then it's bad. For example, a child may need to deny "unacceptably" negative emotions, e.g., anger or disappointment, towards a parent or teacher, because that child needs to bond with the caregiver. In the interest of maintaining a relationship with this indispensable, or, at least, powerful, adult, the child renounces, i.e., refuses to admit to herself, her own feelings. This is "good" or necessary denial. It is the best available compromise.

Later, however, when the child grows up, it is just as necessary to reclaim the disowned feelings and experience. It is the refusal to do so that defines the person's negative experience with disease. Childish coping skills learned under duress are not adequate to embrace adult experience. Childish fear ought not prevent us from exploring our repressed negative psychic (psychological) contents. We are older now, with more skills and understanding. The denial is no longer necessary. It is inconvenient, diseased. It is no longer an acceptable compromise.

You can take your negativity, your disease, and keep it in the closet, in a box on the shelf… but the kids will get into it.

For better or worse, consciously or unconsciously, we share our personalities with our loved ones. One person in a relationship may do all the responsibility, leaving the other person to be very irresponsible; she pays the bills and takes care of the home, while he stays out late continuing his adolescence. One person in the relationship might have a monopoly on the anger, leaving the other only the timidity.

One highly organized, driven mother had an intelligent 17 year old daughter, who never the less couldn't focus on her studies. The mother over-managed her daughter's life. The young lady was the "identified patient" in a diseased family dynamic. The daughter's inefficiency was an acting out of feelings of chaos that her mother had denied. The little boy, who exhibits emotional outbursts in a highly controlled family is trying on the suppressed emotions of his parents, emotions they kept in the closet.

This whole process is messy and frustrating. The parents are as ill-equipped to deal with these forbidden feelings as is the child. The feelings themselves are unsophisticated, inarticulate, primitive. As Freud said, "The repressed remains primitive." Unpracticed these denied feelings are slippery, hard to get a handle on. The unpleasantness of our dominant personality's encounter with the repressed emotional contents reinforces the ego's prejudice against them as dangerous or destructive.

Maybe your disease isn't your disease. As in our examples above, the daughter's inefficiency may really originate with the mother, or further up the ancestral lineage. Maybe your anxiety is really your great, great grandfather's. Perhaps there is a whole audience of ancestors looking down to see what you, the cutting edge, are going to do with the disease that they bequeathed. Perhaps they are still responsible, according to the laws of karma, for the harm still resulting from their actions, the disease reverberating down through the generations. Maybe they are all cheering for you to do something creative with the negativity rather than suffer it blindly and pass it on to your loved ones. Maybe these ancestors are hoping you will free their souls from that burden of responsibility.

Our culture overemphasizes the personal. It is usually a mistake to take things personally. (For example, usually the insulting remark never would have been uttered if the insulter recognized your personhood. Or, your achievements may have little to do with your person and most to do with the talents with which you were born; that is, maybe someone else with the same talents would have accomplished more.) Maybe, then, your disease isn't really your disease.

Maybe, at least a part of, disease is a societal phenomenon, a nervousness peculiar to the culture. Maybe your depression and my depression are the same. Maybe it is an existential anxiety. After all, birds are nervous, squirrels are jittery.

Revisioning, re-imagining the negativity is the whole of the cure. Start by considering that the negative feeling isn't ours. The feeling isn't inside of us. We are inside of the feeling.

Zen parables provide excellent illustrations of health and disease. Zen's enlightened mind, what the kabbalists refer to as "expanded awareness/mochin g-dlut," is the healthy state.

Kabbalah and Zen, are healing systems. At the core of their spiritual philosophies and practice is unity. This unity exists beyond the ego's mediation. Behind the apparent diversity of the world, beyond the ego's perception of self and other, transcending duality, all experience is united in a meaningful Oneness. Health is an experience of this wholeness.

Kabbalah and Zen each prescribe the experience of unity as an antidote to the fragmentation that characterizes our psychological discomfort and disease. Divine union, enlightenment and healing are all a realization of Oneness.

The truth is as simple as turning one's head. Buddha stated on attaining, "How wonderful, all beings are already enlightened just as they are." All that is required is that we change our attitude, the way we look at things. Your biggest obstacle to realizing G-d is your conception of G-d. Your biggest obstacle to realizing psycho-spiritual health is your conception of psycho-spiritual health.

"The knife does not cut itself, the finger does not touch itself, the mind does not know itself, the eye does not see itself."

Still, we must start where we are, that is, in the ordinary mind. However, let us use the mind to go beyond the mind, into the unknown. Our goal is not new thoughts, but new ways of thinking. Or perhaps they are old ways of thinking, ancient, primordial.

Spiritual concepts are at once lofty and down to earth. They are both transcendental and part of our everyday experience. This connection between, this identity of, the sacred and the mundane is the essence of Kabbalah.

We must rethink our concepts of religion, spirituality and G-d, as well as our beliefs about our worldly experience, in particular health and disease. We must bring heaven down and raise the earth.

Children have an easy time not knowing. They don't know how to do this or that or to get from here to there. They don't know how to ride a bicycle yet or how to drive a car.

Adults are just the opposite. We think we know. We think we know what is best. We think we know what the problem is. We even pretend to know the solution. When we are forced to admit that our assumptions were wrong, we jump immediately to another comforting, if erroneous assumption. We can't admit we don't know. As the joke goes, "Why did the Jews wander in the desert for forty years? Because even back then men had a hard time asking for directions."

It is the small consciousness of the ego that prevents us from realizing the unity of experience. Healing requires us to surrender the narrow perspective of the small self, not to add to it. As the farmer replied when asked for directions, "You can't get there from here." We need to revision "here" before we can get "there." We need to reevaluate where we think we are. Not new thoughts, but new ways of thinking are required.

Enlightenment, union with the Divine, is not an acquisition; it is an emptying. It is not increase, but loss. It is not ability, but humility. It is not a going forward, but a getting out of the way. It is receptive, not active.

Kabbalah, Zen and healing require of us a new way of thinking. They demand a different frame of mind. Conditioned mind, with its prejudices, cannot bring us to the true reality. What is required is a new orientation, new assumptions, a new attitude; not just new thoughts, but a new way of thinking. In the Zen tradition this is called "no-mind." If ordinary consciousness is "mind," then this extraordinary consciousness is "no-mind."

A Zen proverb asserts that, "Enlightenment is like the bright sun in a clear blue sky and yet people ask, 'Where is it?'" Another advises, "As soon as you say this is good, this is bad, you are hopelessly lost." What we take as bad is good. The negativity, which confronts us, is our spiritual path. The problem, shunned by ego-oriented consciousness, is the overlooked "bright sun in a clear blue sky." The problem is the solution. "You find, paradoxically, that what you've been running away from is the source of your authentic being."

That which discomforts our ego-oriented world view, that which upsets our ease, our disease (dis-ease) comes to expand our awareness. The perspective of the conditioned mind is too narrow to accommodate the bigger reality. The disequilibrium caused by disease is for the purpose of a greater, more inclusive equilibrium, yet to dawn on us. We require a less prejudiced point of view. From the point of view of the ego, the disease is a problem. But from the point of view of the disease, the ego is a problem. The paranoid, survival-based instinct of the ego-personality needs to yield to the more holistic vision of a larger, less personal self. This greater Self synthesizes positive and negative aspects of experience into a whole, a Oneness, which is the hallmark of Divinity and enlightenment and health

The best we can do is change our minds, expanding the narrow, personal focus of our consciousness to include an awareness of the greater forces at work in and through our lives. We must behave as if our consciousness, the tip of our soul, were merely a node on a great spiritual internet, linked by the Divine web to all other nodes and to the Master Server, because such is in fact the case.

It is our sense of separation that gets us into trouble, that causes us discomfort and disease. The narrow, personal focus of our consciousness, our ego, overlooks the bigger picture. The ego focuses on self and other, on diversity. It is interested in preserving our separate self, our biological organism. Useful as this is, it is a frame of reference too small to include the rich, soulful inter-relationships, the unity of our larger being.

It is our attachment to this limited definition of self that makes worse whatever difficulties life sends our way. This attachment makes worse not only life's difficulties, but its goodness as well. To continue with another computer analogy; imagine a word processing program that has a bug in it. Every so often the program freezes and must be rebooted. After much frustration and wishing that the problem would go away, you reinstall the program and find that the problem was really the unexpanded, spell-check, word-count and thesaurus. The difficulty, when given more room, transforms from problem to solution. What from the ego's perspective was regarded as disease, turns out to be, in the bigger, holistic picture, an enhancement of being. Disease turns to cure. As the Zen master asserts, then, "afflictions are enlightenment."

"When you find peace and quiet in the midst of busyness and clamor, then towns and cities become mountain forests; afflictions are enlightenment, sentient beings realize true awakening." Foyan

Negativity happens. Alongside the beauty of nature there is a lot that isn't very pretty. In a natural setting life ends through disease, starvation or being eaten. As anyone who has lived in it can testify, nature isn't a picnic. As the poet attests, "Nature, red in tooth and claw."

We are prejudiced against negativity. Despite our romantic idealizations to the contrary, in good part, life is tragic. Despite the rosy possibilities held out to us by TV preachers and self-help gurus, negativity is an inescapable quality of existence.

Siddhartha before he became Buddha, was a royal prince, heir to a great kingdom. He led a pleasurable, carefree existence cloistered within the walls of his father's sprawling palace compound. Once outside for a religious celebration he saw a sick person and asked his mentor, "What is wrong with that person?" He was told, "Oh, Prince, that is disease, which waits for all." Later he saw an old person and asked again "What is wrong with that person?" His mentor answered, "Oh, Prince, that is old age which comes to all who are lucky enough." Finally, he saw a corpse being carried on a bier and asked yet again, "What is wrong with that person?" His mentor responded, "Prince, that is death, everyone's end." At this Siddhartha renounced life's transitory pleasures, which were his in great abundance, and went off in search of enlightenment, abiding truth.

It is only because we live in a time of unprecedented prosperity, in a culture which consumes the world's resources at a horrible rate, that we can even pretend to maintain our idealized views of privileged existence. But no palace wall is high enough to keep out the negative aspects of life. Because we do not face negativity directly, disease visits us in crippled, confusing ways. Because it is denied, negativity is acted out in our life, manifesting as disease.

Darkness and light define each other. Concealment and revelation are different phases of the same phenomenon. Happiness and sadness are interdependent. The tendency of Western philosophy to see opposites as antagonists must yield to the more Eastern concept of opposites as mutually dependent, two sides of the same coin. Comfort and discomfort are both meaningful. Ease and disease constitute the essential polarity of existence. Ignoring either leads to tragedy.

It is natural to gravitate to the pleasant and to try to avoid the unpleasant. However, there are times when the unpleasant is unavoidable. There are times, and they are often, when it is best to face up to the negativity. This is especially true when an ugly reality keeps presenting itself. Over and again we are bothered by the same feeling, thought, habit, situation. When something keeps getting in your face, it's best to have a look. Follow the signs. Pick up on the cues. Life itself is an oracle.

The world is made broken so that we can make it whole. It is not that brokenness is wrong or bad. It is part of the plan. It is not the disease that is wrong, it is our attitude towards the disease that is wrong.

Our culture over-identifies with the hero. The hero knows what needs to be done and does it. He is the cowboy sheriff having a shootout with the bad guys. He is the first man, bringing fire back for the tribe. He is Hercules completing his twelve labors. The ego is the hero of our psyche, our psychological world. The ego is, by definition, obsessed with the heroic archetype. It thinks it knows what needs to be done and acts. It pretends it knows and counsels action. Often, in fact, usually, it goes off half-cocked, when it would be much more efficient to explore, to have a look around, to reconnoiter. This unenlightened attitude and action just makes things worse. The unchecked, untempered ego degenerates into an arrogant know-it-all. This I'm-the-boss attitude renders it deaf to the smaller, weaker, softer, wounded voices of the psyche (heart, mind, soul.)

There are many other ways to be, many other selves beside the hero. The ego is concerned with threats to survival, protecting the organism: is that a face? is it friendly? can I eat it? the ego is "the janitor of the soul," the "practical" self. This survivalist, can do attitude is not broad enough to encompass the full range of life. If ego is our daylight self then disease is our shadow.

Disease comes to correct the dysfunctional world view of the ego. The self which resists the disease is the problem. Personality is the problem.

As a society and as individuals we are over-identified with ego and at war with disease. We feign competency, pretending to know. We fight against that which questions our false or inadequate knowledge. It is important to us that we appear competent; when someone asks how we are, we respond we are "well," no matter how we feel inside. Rather than coming to terms with our disorientation and disease, we persist in behaviors destructive to self, others and the planet.

There are things to do and things to refrain from doing. Typically, in our modern culture, we are biased towards doing. There is too much doing.

Kabbalah regards the passive, receptive state as primary. If you want to do something, get out of the way. Humility counterbalances the ego's arrogance. Giving up preconceptions yields new perspectives. Not knowing has advantages over knowing. The question invites answers. Limitation and constraint are the guiding principles of the natural order. Paradoxically, as we shall see, there is more G-dliness in the Darkness than in the Light.

Imagine, please, being in the deep end of a swimming pool, tumbling underwater until you don't know which way is up. At that point it does no good to start swimming for the surface, because you don't know which way to go. First you must wait for buoyancy to direct you, to show you which way is up. The water will support you and the way will become clear, but first you must be quiet and still. For the moment, doing nothing is the only strategy. Just floating will direct you to your goal.

This watery analogy applies directly to emotional or intellectual disorientation. When we are upset or confused it is best to do nothing, at least for a while. First, we must be passive, float in the experience. Observe what is happening. Be comfortable not knowing. Entertain the question. Rushing to judgment, jumping to conclusions, like swimming towards the bottom of the pool just makes things worse.

Not knowing is (at least) a necessary stage on the path to knowledge.

How, then, do we get this holistic vision, this new way of thinking, this new attitude? How can we get there from here. First things first. The first thing is to know where we are. Be here now. The universe gives us what we need, what we need to experience. It's a beautiful system. The rabbis call this hashkacha pratis,/G-d's oversight of the details.

Kabbalah's main teaching is that the universe is an integrated, holistic system; G-d is One. Everything is meaningfully related to everything else. Life itself is an oracle. Start where you are. What we've got is what we need. What we need is to listen to what the world is telling us. The wise person learns from all.

Everything is meaningful; up and down, happiness and sadness, ease and disease. Nothing is random, purposeless or mistaken. G-d oversees the details. Nothing is wrong, except maybe our attitude. Negativity happens because something needs to be negated. Negativity happens because our attitude needs to change. Our negative attitude, not our negative experience, is the problem. At least it is the part of the problem we can change. Believing in the meaningfulness of negative experience is faith.

The first thing to do in realizing the expanded consciousness necessary for healing is to simply be here now, to get to know, without prejudice, our present experience. This is easy enough when our present experience is pleasant. However, typically when negativity happens we have a hard time being present with it. Then we have difficulty maintaining the unmediated awareness that characterizes the enlightened mind. When disease gets in our face we react. We are upset. The reflective surface of the mind's waters is disturbed by waves of emotion and thought. We judge and evaluate and act. Zen advises us, that when something gets in our face, the best we can do is to have a look, to adopt the attitude of the receptive mind. When something repeatedly comes up and bothers us, when we have "an issue," then we really better listen. The rabbi's said, "If three people tell you you're drunk, then you have to lie down."

"You find, paradoxically, that what you've been running away from is the source of your authentic being," James Hillman.

Stop trying to fix your problems, to heal your disease, to overcome your deficiencies.
Stop fighting with your negativity.
Opposition doesn't work.
You can't win.
Stop acting like you're in control, like you're the boss.
Cooperation, not dominance, is the answer.
Adopt a compassionate, creative attitude to your negative experiences and those experiences turn from stumbling blocks into stepping-stones.
"All you need is love."
The solution to your problem is right in front of you.

"All the world's a stage…"
Life is theater.
We act out our problems in our day-to-day interactions until we find another way, another place, to pay attention to them.
Find a creative discipline to interact with what is bothering you.
Make poems of your negativity instead of acting it out in your personal relationships.
Draw or sketch your problems instead of doing them in your career.
Dance your disease instead of manifesting illness in your body.

Memorialize with creative expression what makes you uncomfortable, your dis-ease, and practically your life improves; you become smarter, more effective at dealing with the problematic people and situations in your life.
If you do your negativity in a journal or sketchbook, then you don't have to do it elsewhere in your life.
You can do it here or you can do it there, but it's not going away.
What you have is what you need.
What you need is a better attitude to life's difficulties, to the disease.
Everything is an oracle, including the negativity, especially the negativity.

"Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding." Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

What we take to be a problem is really the solution to another problem, a bigger problem of which we are not yet aware.
The problem is the solution.
Everything depends on how you frame it: the context for your disease.
Questioning invites knowledge.
Darkness enlightens.

Buddha exclaimed on achieving enlightenment, "How wonderful! All beings are already enlightened, just as they are."
Everything is already perfect; everything except our attitude
The way you look at it is the problem.
The difficulty is integral to the system.
Something is calling for attention.
We are prejudiced against the experience.
What you do with the problem is the problem.
Sit attentively; interact creatively with what is "wrong."

Write a "Dear Disease" letter.
Learn its language.
Do something "for" not "about" your experience of disease.
What you don't look at comes around to haunt you.
Write it out instead of acting it out.
Write as if your life depended on it. It does!

"When you find peace and quiet in the midst of busyness and clamor, then towns and cities become mountain forests; afflictions are enlightenment, sentient beings realize true awakening." Foyan

The problem is the way you look at it.
Change the way you look at the problem and the problem becomes less problematic.
Find a different way of interacting.
Behave differently towards the problem and it behaves differently towards you.

When you go to the market with a lot to buy, you make a list.
When you have a lot to remember to pack for a trip, you make a list.
When there's a lot going on in your heart and mind, write it down. Write even if you have to write about not being able to write.

The journey is the goal.
The end is present in the beginning.
Each step of the journey is its own destination.
Each moment is complete unto itself.
Seek the wisdom of now.
Learn the lesson of the present circumstance before you move on, before you try to change it.
All healing and growth depends on being fully present now.
Be here now.
Take the disease as your primary coordinate.
Find ways of being here now without fixing or figuring.

"You find, paradoxically, that what you've been running away from is the source of your authentic being." James Hillman.

It is precisely the desire to change, to grow and heal that prevents healing, growth and change.
Our strategies make things worse, compound the problem
Experience the fullness of the truth from which you flee and you will change.
Stop running away.

Words are magical.
The name contains the magical potency of the named.
Adam name the animals and had dominion over them.
Labels, diagnostic jargon and the pronoun "it" inhibit understanding the disease.
Avoid the inadequacies of pronoun. If I say, "You made me angry," I am sure of neither the "you" or the "I," only of the anger.
Perhaps you acted only as a trigger and my anger had nothing to do with you. Perhaps my anger is not even mine, but my mother's or father's or grandparent's.
Call disease by its name.
Avoid inarticulate self-destruction and suffering in silence.

If you want to change the world, start with yourself.
You are part of the equation.
Change the way you behave and the world becomes a different place.
Develop a practice of creatively considering your difficulties.
Change in a relationship does not fundamentally depend on the other.
Move from childlike dependence to self-empowerment
You have the power.
Be willing to let go, to lose your attachment and things take their natural course.

"Everyone wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die"

The number ten signifies completeness; the numerals one through ten being the basis of all other numbers. It may be immediately noted, however, that our list of sefirot contains not ten but eleven stations. This is again one of those contradictions or paradoxes or different ways of looking at things that are so frequent in Kabbalah and life, such as disease becoming cure. That said, Daas is a mysterious sefira which is sometimes not counted. Alternately and more elegantly, this discrepancy is resolved by realizing that Keser and Malchus are closely identified and even identical, but on different octaves, so to speak. (More about that later.) This is mutual identity is another example of the kabbalistic principle, "The end is wedged in the beginning." Previously in our discussion of humility we identified Chochma as the first sefira, while in our list above Keser/Crown occupies that position. Keser, as we shall see, is not part of creation proper, just as the crown is not really part of the person. Keser/Crown sits "on top" of creation, transmitting G-dliness from the Emanator to the emanated. Keser is G-d getting ready to create, the Infinite, Unqualified Light/Ein Sof already approaching creation, quality.

It can also be noted from our list that each sefira is associated with a particular quality. These distinctions in G-dliness are the source of differentiation, so apparent in our world, which before tzimtzum were not possible in the all-inclusive light of the Ein Sof. It should be noted that these distinctions in G-dliness are only apparent to us, creation, i.e., looking from below up. G-d for Himself, even as He manifests for our benefit in the different sefirot, mystically remains simple, uncompounded, undifferentiated; "I, the L-rd have not changed@@"

Each sefira includes all other sefirot; Chochma is compounded of: Chochma of Chochma, Binah of Chochma, Daas of Chochma, Chesed of Chochma, Gevurah of Chochma, Tiferet of Chochma, Netzach of Chochma, Hod of Chochma, Yesod of Chochma and Malchus of Chochma; Gevurah is compounded of Chochma of Binah, Binah of Binah, Daas of Binah, etc.

Referring back to examples of the beneficial associations between Chesed/Kindness and Gevurah/Discipline, we can now observe that refusing a child a third ice cream cone because it might cause a stomach ache would be an example of Gevurah of Chesed, the Discipline of Kindness. Here discipline is actually kindness. A study break which sharpens concentration would be an example of Chesed of Gevurah, the Kindness of Discipline.

The sefirotic system provides us with a method of organizing our experience. the qualities associated with each sefira demonstrate links, relationships between the things of this world. The sweetness of an apple, for example, is associated with the sefira Chesed/Kindness. The sefirot, like Kabbalah as a whole provides us with a vocabulary and grammar to describe our experience. Describing our experience, our positive and negative experiences, is a creative process. Familiar with the intricacies of our problems we can better handle them. When we see the topography of our disease, the bumps and cracks, we know how to approach it; we can get a handle on it.

Sometimes old concepts need to be broken to allow for new realizations.
Falling apart precedes reintegration, allowing for radical realignment.
Disequilibrium precedes new equilibrium.
Destruction and construction are two parts of the same process, two sides of the same coin, mutually dependent.

Disease as failure, constraint and frustration is the destruction which is as integral to creativity as construction.
Do the failure, constraint and frustration creatively on a page instead of acting them out.
Disease is the necessary counterpoint to health and growth.
Decay feeds growth which feeds decay.

Disease removes us from a state of ease, from our familiar accustomed state.
Disease disrupts our usual way of being, challenging our attitudes.
Disease demands that we integrate new contents, forcing us into new relationships with experience.
Find a new relationship to your problems.
Art has always been a way of addressing life's irreconcilable circumstances.
Poetry can be a non-invasive interaction with the unaccustomed.

If a culture doesn't have a word for the experience, then the experience doesn't exist.
Linguistics equal reality.
Choose rich phraseology over the poverty of unarticulated experience.

Balance is not steady.
It is a fluid state, not a static one.
Balance is flow; getting stuck is the problem.
Balance dynamically responds to the dynamics of disequilibrium.
Balance rests on disequilibrium.
Tension allows for new equilibrium.
We must become better at responding to disequilibrium, flow through the darkness, find new ways of experiencing, heap images on it.
Synthesis requires conflict.
Ignorance, confusion and darkness open the way for new insight.
Challenge refines us.

Getting stuck in ignorance, confusion and darkness is the problem.
Find something to do in these problematic states.
It pays to have something to do with, not about the disease.
Art saves lives.
The difference between genius and madness is that genius has an art.
It's okay to breakdown as long as you keep doing your art.
When you're in an emotional crisis it helps to have something to do.
Artists have rejected analysis of their psyche for fear of inhibiting their muse.

Disease is not damnation.
It is not a hell state where souls are punished without purpose.
Rather, through its suffering disease provides a corrective influence on the world view which the ego has fashioned.
Disease is necessary, meaningful and complete unto itself and does not need to be healed.
It is we who need to be healed, not the disease.
Our attitude towards the disease, our hostility, our stubborn refusal needs healing.
Art allows for an openness to revisioning the disease.

"If what is fundamental exists within you, how can you say that you have not obtained it?" Wen-i

Disease is fundamental.
It is the philosophers' stone which changes lead into gold.
Disease is part of the stuff of life.
It is not a mistake.
For all your romantic fantasies you cannot keep away.
It is our bad attitude, our resistance to the importance of disequilibrium that gets us
further into trouble, that makes things worse.
Disease is integral to life.
Stop resisting.
Deliberately interact with the problematic emotion in a non-directed way.
You are not the director.

"The ancients said that when you want to keep away from what you are hearing and seeing, you attach yourself to what you are hearing and seeing..." Wen-i

Wanting to avoid, you attach.
Ignoring the problem makes it worse.
Denial and premature attempts at healing compound the disease, deepening our inelegant involvement with disequilibrium.
Recognize your attachment to disease.
Creatively embrace the problem.
Find new ways of expressing the disease.

Carl Jung said that we ought to personify our disease, that we ought to treat our anger, depression, anxiety, confusion, etc. as though they were people.
Treat your disease like a person; it is at least a sub-personality.
Personal relationships require respect.
Presume intelligence and meaning.
What is the disease's point of view?
Find the images that speak to your disease.
Learn its language, its terminology.

Be deliberate about your relationship with disease.
Establish a relationship.
Talk to it.
Write to it.
Listen to it.
Try to get along.
Believe that it has value.
Respect its point of view.
Imagine its point of view.
Imagine that it wants to enlighten and enrich.
We have to admit our relationship before that relationship can be improved.
Begin a dialogue.
Address the hellishness on its terms.

Respect yourself, including the part of you that has no self respect.
Indulge the negative perspective on the page.

Disease is a wild-man breaking into our house, disturbing our daily activities, disrupting our tame, predictable worldview.
Disease as wild-man breaks doors and windows, soils carpets and furniture and leaves the refrigerator door open.
Bars and locks, psychologists, accomplishments and positive affirmations cannot keep the wild-man out.

Disease as wild-man often comes at the worst possible moment, throwing himself through the picture window when we are having a party, or blocking our vision when we most need creative insight.
Primitive, stereotyped perspectives, our unfinished business, interfere with both our ability to enjoy life and our ability to practically address life's difficulties.

"You shouldn't strain to seek the path; if you seek it, you will lose the path. You need not strain to make things fluid; if you try to make them fluid, thing remain as they are. If you neither seek nor try to produce fluidity, the path will merge with things; then what thing is not the path?" Foyan

Sometimes disease as wild-man arrives in the middle of the night and starts yelling in the backyard, disrupting our sleep.
Then stick your head out the window and talk to it.
Don't yell or threaten, talk; ("You need not strain to make things fluid.")
Tell it, "Look, it must get chilly out there. I've left you some blankets underneath that blue tarp. Take them as a present. I'm trying to sleep right now, could you come back in the morning? I'll make you some breakfast."

Befriend the disease as wild-man.
Do something for it.
Do something before the crisis.
Leave out some food and the door unlocked when you go to work.
The wild-man will reciprocate, bringing you treasures from his world, sweetness and healing, honeycomb and herbs.
Learn to communicate.
Teach it to close the refrigerator door and how to wipe its feet.
Build a room for disease in your psychological house.
Follow it out into the jungle to taste the bounty of the wild.

I am able to say to my sense of abandonment, one of my wild-men,
"Not now. I'll talk to you later. I'm involved in a difficult negotiation with my ex-wife and I don't need to feel like a four-year-old trying to get mommy's approval."
And because I have already established a relationship with the disease, already paid it respect, it takes a back seat saying, "All right, but why don't you tell her x, y, and z?"
And I tell her x, y, and z and it helps and I thank my sense of abandonment for the good advice.

Disease comes to inform us.

"In my school there are only two kinds of sickness. One is to go looking for the donkey while riding on the donkey. The other is to be unwilling to dismount once having mounted the donkey." Foyan

We look for the answer even while it carries us along.
People fear that if they look at the face of their disease, they will perish
We fear that if we entertain it, we will be overwhelmed.
But we are already riding on the donkey.
When disease wants to overwhelm us, it does not need our permission.
It does not need our complicity.
If disease wants to push us over the edge, it can.

The attitude of avoidance, hiding from disease is like the magical thinking of a child who hides from the bogeyman under the bed covers.
Such an position in fact makes it easier for the bogeyman to wrap you up and carry you off.
We are under the covers being beaten up by disease, stubbornly refusing