Ana Becho'ach Part II

So this morning my daily walk on the beach had an inner, different, more chaotic, jumbled energy.  Each moment here in Israel I am letting go and healing, so I've felt more emotionally raw and there is nothing that scares me more than my own vulnerability. At last, though, here, I am fully, completely safe to actually risk being in this space and let this experience be all it needs to be to fully transform - thanks Illana.

I've been here just a week, and cannot handle the fact that I physically live in Los Angeles, where the connection to your soul is sold as a souvenir trinket. I should know, I've bought a lot of them, over the years, from a lapis and turquoise Yin Yang to somehow grant me Zen inner peace, to a Goddess figure to remind me that I am the embodiment of the divine feminine.

But this morning, with a spontaneous pause to sit and meditate and be gently helped in reciting the Ana Becho'ach prayer, and the healing of my soul that began when the plane landed at Ben Gurion Airport finally kicked off the spiritual meltdown I knew would come.

It's painful but incredibly liberating to admit to myself how spiritually damaged I am from chaotically meandering around on this self inflicted spiritual safari: all the searching I've done for comfort outside of myself did nothing except create static between me and the voice I have been listening so hard to hear. My looking to others who claimed to be holy-know-it-alls definitely showered them with undeserving Guru dust, and dis-empowered me.

I have been afraid all these years to draw boundaries with those who wanted to change my belief system for their own holier-than-thou perks. They were only interested in their power over me, not me finding my spiritual strength on my own.

The reality is that no one has your spiritual back except God.  Not the Sikhs that promised Karmic salvation with each Breath of Fire, nor the Chabadniks who tried to ma-carv (make religious) me. I've no longer any interest in becoming a denim skirt wearing Baalat Teshuva, or a white turbaned follower of another religion.  And there is no way I am ever, ever again going to allow a Talmud rejecting screaming hypocritical spiritual-but-atheist-Yogi to humiliate me for my Jewishness in my own home.

I am connected now to the Source that I've known all along to be there at the place where it all began.  It's realizing that even though I am in Israel where this is, as the joke goes, a local call, that whole-ness, that holiness is always within me, and it will be there, even on the plane back to LA.