The View From My Living Room: Tel Aviv

Souk at Ben Yehuda, Jerusalem

The Absolute Best Iced Double Espresso, LaLoush Cafe, Jerusalem

Street Graffiti, Jerusalem.

Fogged in all day, Jerusalem (and, Tel Aviv too)

Kotel, Women's Side of the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

Old City

Souk at Ben Yehuda, Jerusalem: This pix gives me hope

This time the tears were from God

Yesterday I finally cut loose a lifetime of spiritual longing and pain. Of always feeling outside. Of always searching elsewhere and refusing to trust that divine intuition. Of being deliberately, defiantly, insistingly lost, always wandering, parched, in the desert of my own creation.

Last year, when I finally came here, to Israel, I was still caught in my own crossfire, not fully Yael, my given first name still on my old passport, Yael my middle name. I was not integrated yet, not whole.

This trip I arrived (!!) with a newly issued passport, Yael my first name, with entry into Israel its first stamp. The beginning of the ending of my disconnect.

It's no accident that my Hebrew birthday is the day before Erev Shavous. 4 Sivan. It's also no accident that this trip I landed just two hours before Shavous ended, and began this journey watching the sunset on the day Jews essentially became officially the Jewish Nation.

I had this fleeting image right at the beginning of reciting Ana Becho'ach yesterday of a barge piled high with all the issues I have been holding on to, the ones I've let fester inside, being set alight and drifting out to sea. My stubborn insistence of my outside-ness was the top heap on that burning barge. I remember thinking how tantrum-angry my separate self was at being no longer wanted, necessary or needed.

It was a momentary visualization and I didn't even remember it until today at the Kotel.

This morning I took the direct bus to Jerusalem and made my way to the Wailing Wall.  As I began to write my prayers to leave in the many overflowing crevices of the wall, along with so many others, it began to rain: huge, giant raindrops falling in a short, almost hot rain, a brilliantly timed downpour. Gesh'em. I tried to shield my letter from the rain, lest the ink run, and for a moment I felt like a little child afraid that God would not be able to read the smeared words and therefore not grant what I so long for. But it was perfect.  The rain blessed me and my prayers, permanently ending my parched wanderings and washing away any last bits of ash that might have fallen on me from the barge's final inferno.

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.

Anah Bakoach

It's so easy to listen to my soul here, and even easier to pay attention to what is being whispered so beautifully as the waves crash against the rocks and I sit in quiet meditation and recite the prayer for grateful completeness: you are home, you are safe, you are whole. You can let your fears go now. It's okay to be vulnerable, to trust, to change now. You can let go and just be.... and so of course, my automatic reaction takes over and I freak out at being so vulnerable and push it away with my brain on overload. Gently I am pulled back to silence and just being, grateful for the feedback and riding the waves of letting go.

...And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

 I am finally on the beach in Tel Aviv.  Really, literally, on the beach.  I wake up and the view from my bed is the ocean.  I fall asleep to the sounds of waves breaking on the shore.  My sunsets are beyond spectacular, and it's really, unbelievably, the view from my living room, from my balcony.

I am starting to detox from the constant state of hyper-alert that comes with being the kid taking care of the parents. It's been my daily and much more scary nightly existence in LA for over the past six years. Now my shoulders around my ears drop along with each setting sun, disappearing into the ocean. I've only just watched my 4th sunset tonight since arriving and my body, mind and soul are reacting to it all. Emotionally, this is like getting off the roller coaster while it's still going 90 miles an hour.

There is irony here: my state of hyper-alert is less in Israel than in LA.  Seriously. This country is the definition of constant mind-numbing adrenaline specializing in the "just-in-case."  My walls are tumbling down a short city journey from where the still standing Wailing Wall is the embodiment of the joy and pain of sacred devotion.

I can't seem to connect with any physical memory of my previous life in LA.  It only appears as spontaneous tears. These past couple nights it comes, making my eyes all swollen along with allergic reactions to the toxins leaving.  There is only now, and it is so disconcerting at times.  Maybe that is what being in Israel does to you: makes you let go of who you were before, beckoning you to become who you are meant to be.