Cross Country #26 Practicing Good Spousekeeping

Goldie:    Current feelings include ecstacy that I have flown east this week to see my sons and parents; excitement to head this week's Board of Admissions meetings which will determine the precious incoming class at The Academy for Jewish Religion. And frankly, I miss the people we've gotten to know along the way.

Barry and I will report to you from our separate locations this week - he's in Seattle with his daughter Juliette and the inevitably gorgeous grandchildren. I'll rejoin him there on the 28th.

Before heading east, I was privileged to give a teaching for a local havurah, Eitz Or of Seattle. Their young rabbi, David Wolfe-Blank, beloved friend, colleague and phenomenal innovator and teacher, died in a tragic car accident almost a year ago. The teaching was dedicated to his memory.

The most important spiritual practices, as my friend and co-worker Rabbi Shohama Wiener says, are gratitude and forgiveness. Barry has taken on saying the "modeh ani l'fanekhah" prayer as his new practice for this trip. This is the practice of waking up with praise for the Creator, in gratitude for a new day of life. Just before I left he said: "Come onto the porch with me, let's do 'modeh" together." Guy sure knows how to get to a rabbi.   

Our little grand daughter Natalia is uncommonly forthcoming with comments of appreciation.....including her sprightly interjections throughout the day of "Know what Mommy? I LOVE You!" Each time she does it she acts as though she is rediscovering that this is indeed the case.

I first learned the value of positive spirituality the hard way. There is a spiritual crisis that attends some of life's traumatic moments for some of us. It is a crisis of meaning and identity, we cease to feel recognizable to ourselves and God may seem eclipsed, inaccessible or in retrospect, to have been a hopeful illusion.

I remember feeling like a cartoon character whose several sheets of transparencies had gotten out of alignment - I didn't fit together inside anymore....after an initial burst of life energy at getting free from a marriage gone toxic, I tailspinned into an acute depression. Couldn't even pick up a cup and move it from one side of my plate to another. Losses upon losses, all unanticipated, were mounting up as the institutions and patterns that had governed my life each let go like ropes breaking off a ship in a dock during a storm.

The Viennese psychotherapist to whom I took myself, wondering if institutionalization was in order, he...well .... he chuckled. "Zo, little rabbi, it is good news. You have not the endogenous depression, you have the reactive depression."
Me: "Doctor, what does that mean!?"
Doctor: "My dear, it means you earned it."

He looked at me over his unlit pipe, goatee twitching and wrote two prescriptions. "In Jewish tradition we are told to keep one piece of paper in one pocket which reads ‘I am nothing but dust and ashes.' In the other one that reads ‘The whole world was created for me.'" (Yeah, I know, I know that bit.) His blue eyes bear down on me, "Here is a prescription for Prozac for one pocket and Zanax for the other. If you fill them, you will come see me weekly, ya? For medical supervision, ya? $125 per session, ya?" (Oooff! Eeek! Auck! Expensive!)

"Or, perhaps you will try a remedy which is also in our tradition, that of finding one hundred blessings in every day. When you torment yourself with certain thoughts, around and around, begin to notice this that you are doing to yourself. Then, interrupt the thoughts by asking, "How can I bless this day? What can I bless about today?" Perhaps even something right in front of you - a flower, a kindness, a discovery on the news, the fact of butterflies.
 
Find a hundred blessings in each day. And, should this work, maybe give a little tzedakah (donation) somewhere in my name in honor of your accomplishment and savings to your pocket book."

His rare wisdom in helping me at the level of soul shaped my days. We never even met again. My friend Shefa Gold taught me how to use meditation to strengthen this approach to blessing. Color began to reenter each moment with each blessing, as though the blessing functioned like a magic wand, restoring my color vision and joie de vivre. Energy began to dawn anew, what some eastern traditions calls the "Kundalini awakening." Thankfully, I had many competent guides to help me integrate the glorious nature of such a time on the sine wave of life.

Barry: (who has read on e-mail some of what Goldie intends to post:)

Goldie's reminder about 100 blessings brings to mind an episode in Cape Town earlier this year.
She and I were sitting in an outdoor restaurant in Camps Bay, South Africa. It was a balmy evening. The sky was a pageant, the ocean calm with the lapping of small waves, and the restaurant filled with beautiful people having fun, many of them tourists from all over the world. We were happy to be there, and I smiled when I thought of the winter weather we had left behind at home.

A bomb had gone off in the Caledon Square police station that day. No doubt folks at home would be reading about it and wondering if we were OK. No one would have reported that it had been a great day for the beach, or that 10,000 tourists had had a great day of sightseeing and shopping.
    They only report the bad news.

Isn't that the way we view life? We think of the one finger that has the splinter in it and take for granted the other nine. This is an issue I struggle with all the time. Perhaps counting blessings will be a reminder of all the positives in my life.

Goldie: If I close my eyes it feels like Cape Town out on our deck tonight, the Cape Doctor is blowing all the way to Reading, PA. (Cape Doctor is not a term for my beloved Barry, it is what S.A. locals call the amazing, shifting wind which purifies the air delightfully.)

Too often this year I've met individuals who have been damaged by irresponsible clergy, shamans, gurus, therapists, shrinks. Increasingly there seem to be some of those who label themselves as "alternative practitioners", "shamans", "spiritual counselors" who have minimal training and receive no supervision. Scary. Takes a lot of supervision and skill to learn how to discriminate, for example, whether someone is having a spiritual breakthrough or a manic-depressive episode, or both. And even if the former, takes a lot of skill to help someone have a positive time of it.

Guess "Practicing Safe Spirituality" is going to be a necessary manuscript to finish. Trying to create principles for noticing if something isn't quite kosher with the person to whom one is entrusting professional contact with one's soul, principles for evaluating the safety of a group. With all the millenial meshuganosis afoot it can be dangerous to be too trusting, or more likely, it's always been a problem.

Meanwhile, guess who spent most of the day in that most sacred of endeavors? Reb Yours Truly at home in Reading, PA washing, ironing, weeding, cleaning the fridge....with three passionately interested-in-getting-all-the-attention-for-themselves pussy cats all over me. Rabbi David Stein wrote to say that there is much holiness in housekeeping - for example changing the dishes for Passover. Ahhh....sweet how a bit of perspective can be of help, at least it's not Pesach yet!

Still, I liked practicing good spousekeeping much, much better.
Barry - I miss you!
Lotsa love and blessings,
Your Goldfish