Demons and Dreams-D/s ramblings..: Something On Kabbalah I Found Interesting!

I've studied Kabbalah, the mystical part of Judaism for a couple of Years now and was looking through some old e-mails and found this, thought it was rather interesting and thought I might share it.
For anybody looking for light In their lives, or answers.. it might help?

Let Your Soul Take Control

New students often ask me to explain Kabbalah in a sentence. I tell them, 'I don't need a whole sentence—just one word—control.

'What do I mean by control? I certainly don't mean manipulating people or situations to suit your selfish wants. I do mean the ability to never be a victim and to always know how to transform a bad situation into a good one—for you and everyone involved.

In kabbalistic terminology, control is seeing the Light in every situation.

And that's where most people lose control. When someone in our life is filled with unpredictable venom, when emotional buttons are being triggered, when there seems to be nothing good that can come out of it, we feel like helpless victims and we relinquish our power.

Our challenge is to have the strength and character to always see the Light, even in the darkest situations. And we can uncover the Light by asking two questions:

1. Why is it happening to me?
2. What's the bigger picture here?

Asking 'why is it happening to me?' helps us focus on what the situation came to teach us and how we can use it to transform our chaos. Don't forget what you learned in Power of Kabbalah Level 1—difficult situations are simply Light contained within klippot (shells of negativity.) Avoiding the situation is essentially rejecting the Creator's gifts! Think about that one…

It means switching your pain response from, 'how can I get rid of this?' to 'bring it on!'

Asking the second question, 'what's the bigger picture here?' takes the focus off us and puts it on the other person—in a sharing manner. Instead of focusing on how the situation is hurting us, we need to ask what need is going unmet in the other person and how can we help them, if at all.

The beauty of this two-step process is that the moment we see at least one answer clearly, the situation begins to resolve itself. The reason is, when we see the Light at work in the situation, we have stepped out of 'victim mode' and into 'control mode.'

I have a wonderful student who has been working hard on herself, working on revealing who she really is—a powerful, caring soul. And she's been going through a tough time lately with her father. He's been verbally abusive and causing her to feel poorly about herself. In trying to help her, I recounted an experience I had with a person sitting in on one of my lectures during The Red String Book Tour.

The topic of the lecture was the mirroring effect, which stated simply, says that what we see in others is really a reflection of what is inside of us. One of the attendees raised her hand to tell me of a nagging co-worker who constantly gets under her skin.

'There is no way I am this obnoxious,' she told me.

I answered that she (the attendee) must be nagging someone else in her life—even if to a much lesser extent. She couldn't accept this but agreed to think it over. Well, she emailed me a week later, elated.

“I realized that I am doing the same thing to my husband. But I thought I was being 'spiritual' because I was nagging him to share, to be more forgiving, to practice meditation. But it was creating separation between us and if I wasn't so thoroughly disgusted with my coworker's behavior, I might not have gotten a grip on my own actions.

'So, in the case of my first student, the first question about: Why is this happening to her?—while she may or may not be acting as terribly as her father, the fact that she is going through this extreme experience is a wake-up call for her to prevent this cycle from continuing with her own kids (and that is just one possible answer.)

In terms of the second question, (What is her bigger picture?) maybe her dad needs to be given boundaries on how he can treat her, or maybe she needs to simply feel his pain, without allowing herself to be sucked into his movie.

And to the student's credit, she has treated her Dad with tolerance and human dignity. She has not run away from this problem and because of that she is revealing tremendous Light in other areas of her life.

This week, I'd like you to practice this procedure on every difficult situation you face. No matter how painful it is to look inside, no matter how tough it is to confront your issues, now is the time to take back the control that is your destiny and always has been. It's as simple as it is effective. Have a great week!