Tachles is, creatively speaking, one of my favorite episodes in Father. Mother. God. In which I remind myself of the nature of reality, the nature of holding creative tension. In which I remind myself that circumstances aren’t my ultimate reality - God is.
I’m having to remind myself of this a lot today.
Tachles is a Hebrew word. Yiddish, actually. It means cutting to the chase. Getting to the point. Brass tacks. The bottom line. The core purpose. I’m in the last few days of negotiating which items I will remove from my old house this week. What’s mine, what’s yours, what’s a fair trade. And tachles? It’s not about the items. It’s about my peace of mind. It’s about my liberation. It’s about refraining from harm, orchestrating a clean exit, and no matter what I’m feeling or how much I’m triggered, it’s about making amends to myself by being the adult in the room. Even more, it’s about letting the Divine be the adult in the room. Tachles? It’s not about the objects. And I don’t have to do this alone.
“God is in drag as each of us,” the eleventh episode says. “How often do I still fall for the disguise?”
My former partner? She’s God in disguise. Introducing me to the nature of reality, again and again. And so am I. But my disguise is changing. It’s been almost five months now that I’ve been living psych-medication free. Nearly seven months since the taper began. Seven months of taking away the chemical straitjacket that was cutting me off from the Divine. So here I am. In touch (again? at last?) with the fundamental human experience. It’s magic. And it hurts.
There isn’t a way around this hurt, only through it. And it’s up to me to contextualize it in ways that are sacred, and not pathological. To not pathologize another. To not pathologize myself.
“First we’re born, then the healing begins,” the comic says. I love that phrase. Even though the person who first said it to me is also no longer in my life. No longer an active teacher of mine. No longer an active friend.
There are so many goodbyes. Once the losses begin, they don’t stop. They pile up for the rest of our lives, until we are all grieving, all bereft. There’s nothing unique about this. But once the healing begins, it too, can pile up and multiply for the rest of our lives. With grief comes praise. And that’s what I’m focusing on now. What does it take to heal, my entire comic asked. And how far am I willing to go?
I’m willing to go all the way. Into the darkness, into the pain, into the breach. Into recognizing and taking responsibility for all my defense mechanisms and coping strategies. The features of my personality that traditional twelve step program often call ‘defects’ (the more trauma-informed programs soften this to ‘defaults’) of character. I’m willing to inventory them, own them, and then to do the often exhausting work of discarding and upgrading them. Why? Because I’m also willing to go all the way into the light. The blinding, dazzling, naked, clear, all-encompassing light.
I feel so exposed right now. Feeling everything. How many times as a child did my mother admonish me. You’re too sensitive, she’d say. As if my sensitivity were a liability or a flaw. In early recovery I literally wrote these words in my journal - I don’t have time for all these feelings. God, they’re inconvenient. But I’m facing them all now. I’m not running away. I’m not numbing them out. I’m not suppressing them, but neither am I indulging them. I’m bearing witness, and I’m giving them space.
This morning in my Psalms class, chanting and studying with Shefa Gold, we focused on what she calls ‘the path of comfort’ (one of eight pathways through the Psalms). It’s about moving into a place of receptivity to Divine grace and embrace.
On Sunday morning I was in a workshop with my mentor, Ellen Coomber1, doing intuition readings with my fellow classmates. When we observe the obvious using intuition - which is, at its most basic, simply whatever occurs to us before the rational mind enters in and attempts to discount it and sweep it away - we can uncover a profound amount of reliable information from the simplest of sources. A symbol, a circle. In this case, a single sentence. The prompt was to finish the phrase, “the next step for me to express my spirit in the world is…”
I wrote, The next step for me to express my spirit in the world is to relax. Relax into the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine.
I first did a variation of this particular exercise more than six years ago, and I’ve done it many times since. In other words, I knew what I was in for. I know how it goes. So I also know that there is no way to intuition-proof your answer. No matter what I wrote, my fellows would be able to read right through it, keying into all my limiting beliefs and concepts at play. Nonetheless, I thought, this time I did pretty good! What could be so wrong with relaxing into the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine?
A lot, it turns out. And it hinged on that one word, relax. First they pointed out how I think I have to relax, in order to be embraced by the Divine in the first place. That I make my relaxing a pre-condition. As if I’m not ALREADY in the embrace of the Divine, right here and right now. The fact that this embrace might not feel like I wanted it to, not how I expected it? That becomes my ego’s reason to reject it, to tense up, to put up a fight. To double down on the false idea that I have to somehow hold it all together until I can finally at some other point, not now, relax. I had heard someone2 say just the afternoon before in a song circle, “it’s not about us having to ‘hold it all together’ (as an individual). It’s about holding it all together” (as in, collectively. ALL of us holding ALL of us). Despite knowing this full well in theory, my simple little sentence the next morning still belied the fact that my ego was tenaciously clinging to a story of going it alone, me against the Divine. Ha, I mean, me against the world.
Then someone pointed out - which was even more amazing for them not knowing the Torah story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, not knowing how deeply I resonate with that story or how I consider myself a God-wrestler par excellence, by both vocation and birthright - that wrestling is also a valid form of embrace, and there’s no relaxation in it! That when I’m wrestling with God, beating my chest in anger, fighting back, that even THEN, I’m IN the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine. So my ego, my small self, my conditioning, says I can only be embraced when I’m calm, when in fact, the opposite is true. It’s IN the embrace of the Divine that I can relax, become calm, let myself BE calmed. But my limiting beliefs tell me it’s the other way around. Requiring a set of circumstances, most definitely beyond my control, to be a certain way before I can have what I want.3
My fellows said to me, you can be angry and be safe. Your CAGE (the Conditions, Assumptions, Guilt and Expectations that we construct our realities around. Thanks to Ellen Coomber for this acronym) tells you how you can express yourself, how you must express yourself, in order to receive love. So you filter pieces of yourself out, instead of letting all the parts of yourself be embraced and expressed right where you are. Yup. Guilty as charged. I sure do that.
They went on. You hold the Divine to very high standards, they continued. But your experience will always be filtered through the world, too. So searching for the ‘perfect’ Divine experience or perfect person as a conduit of the Divine? It’ll never happen. The Divine can come to you through anyone - including someone who is very broken. Oh, right. ‘God is in drag as each of us. How often do I fall for the disguise?…’
My CAGE tells me I have to do it alone. Especially without the meds, kid, it’s just just me against/with (is there even a difference?) the Divine. No other support. No other trustworthy options. And by giving myself the precondition of needing to relax first, I place the Divine far away. But the Divine is coming to me! FOR me! It is, and it always will be, coming to find me, to meet me. Is ALREADY meeting me, right here. My CAGE thinks I have to strive for it. To work very hard at being relaxed. To try harder, not softer. They pointed out how busy my ego is working to make peace conditional for me. Setting unrealistic, punishing standards as a prerequisite for peace. Oh yes, and at the last minute, raising the bar on myself. Not even the Divine is holding me to standards like this. No wonder it’s hard to relax. And thus, no wonder it’s hard to receive and experience the embrace of the Divine. One person put it this way. In spirit, these impossibly high standards are aspirations, or even, requests. No problem. Good to have. Creative tension. But in my CAGE, they’re treated like KPIs (key performance indicators, to those of you blessed enough not to know that term). And they’re cruelly enforced. And I’m always falling short.
Bottom line? The all-encompassing expanse cannot be approached through restriction. So in other words, fuck relaxing, just relax.
All this, from a single sentence that I said out loud once. THAT’s how intuition works.
So this morning, in Psalms class, there we were, focusing on the path of comfort. And one by one, the chants that we worked with reminded me of everything I re-learned about myself yesterday, giving me tools to enact and renew my commitment to meet the Divine, right here where I am, right now, in all the discomfort.
First we chanted about being held in the Great Mother’s embrace. Not being calm and then being embraced as a reward. Nothing conditional about it, being calmed by the embrace. Then we chanted about flying off to encounter the secret presence of God, the shekhinah, which is a central and divinely feminine principle of Judaism. Often the shekhinah is described as winged - wrapping us and sheltering us in its wings. But in this chant, we were the ones with the wings, flying to meet its embrace. When my mother died, I spent weeks sewing an elaborate pair of wings as an act of mourning.
They had become a sacred object to me already, but it was only today that I connected them to this particular manifestation of Divine love, the shekhinah. In the next chant, from Psalm 94, we leaned into the contrast between the wrestling and the relaxing - both forms of embrace in their own right. We heightened the tensions of our discomfort, singing in Hebrew, “when worries multiply within me, Your comfort soothes my soul.” I danced around my room. Shadow-boxing and wrestling with the air, accentuating the angst of the worries multiplying within. And then swinging my arms wide and letting grace flow into me, as the comfort soothed my soul.
Heightening the tension, heightening the contrast, puts my eyes back on the prize. An experienced creator loves tension. Because we know that tension seeks resolution - along the path of least resistance. My only job is to hold the tension. To even consider the tension a Divine embrace. Tachles? The Divine embrace is already happening. Right. Now.
https://www.ellendcoomber.com/ - Ellen is an absolute genius.
https://kjsong.com/ - KJ is another powerhouse human.
In my coaching work, this orientation is called Set A. Your ego’s perspective. The place where you spend all your time resolving your beliefs and your identity. It never goes away. But Set B, our spirit’s point of view, is always available. The trick is to notice we’ve slipped, and get back on the beam.
