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COURSE

The Kabbalah As A Path of Awakening

With Zvi Ish-Shalom

In this 30-day course, Rabbi Zvi draws from ancient Hebrew mysticism to guide us on a step-by-step path to work through suffering, awaken consciousness, embody Presence, and experience more inner freedom in everyday life. In each lesson, new metaphysical teachings and experiential practices are introduced, outlining a universal process of deepening into Presence and personal healing. With clarity and compassion, Rabbi Zvi shows us how the ancient mystical teachings of the Kabbalah and Hebrew mysticism guide us towards spiritual realization of the non-dual nature of reality and the integration of that awakened perception into everyday life. Healing the traumatic imprints of our personal and collective wounds is undertaken as a communal path of interpersonal process and practice, outlining a fun and profound path of inner freedom for all people, regardless of one's tradition, culture, or background.

Learn how to work through suffering and experience more inner freedom in everyday life.

30 Days

3.9k students

4.8 stars

15 min / day

English

About this course

Contemplative Hevruta

Breath Focus

Light Body Meditation

Meet your Teacher

Zvi Ish-Shalom

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Boulder, Colorado, USA

Rabbi Zvi Ish-Shalom, Ph.D., is a spiritual teacher and scholar of Kabbalah and world mysticism. Zvi is a professor of wisdom traditions at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and is the founder of Kedumah, a contemporary mystical school that teaches a step-by-step approach to spiritual development.

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30 Days

3.9k students

4.8 stars

15 min / day

English

Lesson 1

The Primordial Torah

In this session, we will learn a few simple techniques to connect to Presence, the state of palpable “is-ness” and primordial spaciousness that abides when we are not identified with our historically conditioned thinking mind. We will learn how the state of Presence serves as a doorway to our innermost primordial nature and explore how this is reflected in ancient Hebrew texts that describe a “primordial Torah” that existed before the creation of the world.

Lesson 2

The Five Journeys

Yesterday, we saw how the spiritual journey calls us to shift out of the confines of the thinking mind and into the spaciousness of Presence. Having explored some simple ways to connect to Presence, in today’s session we will learn ancient Kabbalistic teachings that outline the five primary journeys of Presence on the spiritual path. These five journeys of contraction, expansion, wholeness, vastness, and freedom, represent the dimensions of human consciousness and serve as portals into deeper states of freedom.

Lesson 3

Dimensions Of Freedom

In today’s session, we will explore how the five journeys of Presence provide us with a roadmap to inner freedom. Drawing from Kabbalistic teachings on the relationship between the dimensions of consciousness and the Torah scroll, we will learn the chief characteristics of freedom through guided teachings and practices.

Lesson 4

The Breath Of Life

In the ancient Hebrew tradition, the breath is what animates our consciousness; it is the carrier of Presence. In today’s session, we will learn how to bring awareness to our breath in a manner that connects us more deeply to Presence as well as to the primordial spaciousness that abides in the spaces between our breaths.

Lesson 5

Total Being

The most common divine name found in the Torah, and the most important one in the Kabbalistic teachings and practices, is the YHVH, commonly known as the tetragrammaton. The YHVH represents the totality of Being, including the formless inner nature of existence as well as the infinite variety of ways that the formless mystery expresses itself in the world of appearances. In today’s session, we will learn how to channel the wisdom of Total Being through the breath as a powerful contemplative practice to unify the infinite and finite aspects of reality and to invoke a nondual state of consciousness.

Lesson 6

The Light Of Being

Just as the breath serves as a medium through which Total Being intersects with the human body, so too, Total Being reveals itself through the human body in the form of light. In this session, we will learn an ancient somatic meditation practice that opens up the belly center of consciousness and the reservoir of cosmic light that animates our body and soul.

Lesson 7

Cosmic Birth

Drawing from the Kabbalistic and Hasidic teachings on tzimtzum, we will explore the mystical paradox of concentration and spaciousness that arises in meditative consciousness, and how this dynamic helps us understand the purpose of creation and the human being’s role in the cosmic process. As our practice deepens, the Presence Body awakens, and our inner path to freedom is birthed.

Lesson 8

The End Is In The Beginning

In this lesson, we will explore how our suffering is not a mistake that needs to be fixed, but rather is part of the intelligent design of creation itself, which is the expression of the freedom of reality to manifest itself according to its all-possible potential. Through connecting this metaphysical perspective to meditation practice, we will see how it is possible to wake up to our true nature precisely in the midst of suffering, which we discover is inseparable from—and in a state of absolute unity with—the totality.

Lesson 9

The Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil

Yesterday we explored the origins of suffering from the cosmic or macro perspective. In today’s session, we will examine suffering from the personal, or micro, vantage point. How did we develop into the human organisms that we are, with our limited range of perception and experience? Through unpacking the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden, we will see how the ancient mystics understood psychological development in childhood as the process through which human suffering is formed.

Lesson 10

The Mother Of All Life

Yesterday we saw how our psychodynamic issues and conflicts are expressions of a dualistic, contracted view of ourselves and reality. In this session, we will see how working with our psychodynamics becomes a crucial doorway into more expanded modes of Being. By understanding our psychic structures and their limiting influence on our perception, these structures can then unwind and be seen through, ultimately returning our consciousness to its original pristine condition of unobstructed perception.

Lesson 11

Awakening The Presence Body

In the movement from the journeys of contraction to expansion, we begin to experience the transformation of the physical body into the Presence Body, characterized by the paradoxical density of Presence and the spaciousness of light. We see this process reflected in the Garden of Eden story in the book of Genesis, and the teachings on the Body of Light. In this session, we will learn a simple technique of embodied intimacy to begin to awaken the Presence Body.

Lesson 12

Purification Of The Limbs

The technique that we learned yesterday connects us to the Presence Body by linking the inner channel of Presence that extends from the lower belly center, out through the arms and legs. In today’s lesson, we will build upon yesterday’s teaching by learning an ancient kabbalistic mystical practice called “purification of the limbs,” that trains the limbs of the body to become more engaged vehicles for the experience of embodied Presence.

Lesson 13

The Presence Vehicle

In today’s lesson, we will build upon yesterday’s teaching by introducing the ancient mystical concept of the merkavah. The merkavah represents the potential of our consciousness to become a mystical vehicle of perception, that seamlessly integrates the physical realm of form with the invisible realms of formlessness. Embodying the merkavah is the gateway back to our original primordial nature, the nonconceptual source that is always-already present in the here and now of our ordinary experience.

Lesson 14

The Tree Of Life

In the Kabbalah, the term merkavah refers to an inner vehicle of consciousness that is used to journey through the many hidden dimensions of reality. It is also a code term in the tradition for the constellation of the sefirot - the divine qualities that make up the Tree of Life, the central map of consciousness in the Jewish mystical tradition. In this lesson, we will build upon our exploration of the merkavah by learning how to embody and integrate the mystical wisdom of the Tree of Life in our inner experience.

Lesson 15

Wake Down To Wake Up

In yesterday’s lesson, we saw how at the heart of every contraction is the vast light of Being, and how this light is the portal to the divine qualities, the cosmic branches of our individual tree of life. In the Hebrew mystical tradition, this process of journeying into the darkness of contraction is called yeridah k’tzorech aliyah, which means “going down for the sake of going up”. In today’s lesson, we will explore how this principle can help us drop more deeply into our experience of suffering so that we can open up the inner light of spaciousness and love what is hidden within it.

Lesson 16

Erotic Awakening

With the awakening of the Presence Body and the activation of the merkavah, the journey deepens with the integration of the sacred impulse of “wanting.” This is revealed through the heart, in distinct developmental stages that correspond with the three levels of soul, as outlined in the ancient kabbalistic texts. The heart’s desire fills out the Presence Body and reaches its zenith with its erotic desire for the Divine and its curiosity to know the truth for its own sake.

Lesson 17

Now The Truth

Orienting our consciousness to seek out and inquire into the truth as a path of spiritual awakening has its roots in the mystical meaning of the Hebrew word emet, meaning “truth”. In this lesson, we will unpack the mystical secrets contained in this Hebrew word and apply its wisdom in the practice of connecting to Presence through dropping into the present moment of the eternal Now.

Lesson 18

The Primordial Scream

To what degree are we able to acknowledge the depths of our vulnerability as human beings? Allowing the raw vulnerability of the truth of the precariousness of life, marks the beginning of the transformative process of waking down, of transforming our contractions into expansion. In this session, we will learn a powerful practice that uses the primal energy of our voice to help us shift from the suffering of contraction into the freedom of expansion.

Lesson 19

The Mouth That Speaks

With the reclaiming of our inner voice, the process of waking down can now progress to include the power of our speech as a way to further facilitate the transformation of contraction into expansion. In this lesson, we will explore ancient kabbalistic teachings on the role of speech in the creation of the world and its function on the spiritual journey. We will also learn practices that integrate the power of speech with the Presence Body and the merkavah, thereby deepening our embodied experience of expansion.

Lesson 20

Speak To Your Children

Yesterday we learned about the metaphysical and experiential power of speech, and explored the practice of invoking boundless love through speaking aloud our experience of contraction. In today’s lesson, we will explore how to use the power of speech to work with our contractions, which have their origins in our early ruptures from Being that we experienced in childhood. In this way, we can begin to re-connect our wounded child-parts to Being, to re-member ourselves to our source in the primordial ground.

Lesson 21

The Inside Is Like The Outside

In the last few lessons we have been exploring practices that utilize the power of speech to transform our consciousness and to deepen our experience of Presence. In today’s session, we will learn an extension of these practices that utilizes speech in a manner that deepens our experience of the journey of wholeness, marked by a union of the light that fills, and the light that surrounds.

Lesson 22

Listen Up

In today’s lesson, we will shift from the art of speaking to the art of deep listening. We will learn the Shema, an ancient Hebrew chant that calls us to listen deeply and to experience directly, that there is no division in the fabric of reality, that the inner is the outer, the formless is the form, the transcendent is the immanent, the unmanifest is the manifest, the spiritual is the material, the infinite is the finite, that all is One.

Lesson 23

The Soulship

The Shema chant that we learnt last lesson, integrates the vertical and horizontal dimensions of reality, unifying the light that surrounds, with the light that fills. This reveals that the merkavah can be experienced as both an individual, as well as a collective vehicle of consciousness. In today’s lesson, we will explore the metaphysical underpinnings of the interpersonal practice of inquiry that embodies the ancient merkavah practices of the prophetic kabbalah.

Lesson 24

The Cosmic Womb

Wholeness is the embodiment of a total and unconditionally loving inclusivity, it is the wisdom of holding all of our parts – even our contradictory and difficult ones – in the cosmic womb of life, in the loving light of the Celestial Mother. In today’s lesson, we will explore a practice that will help us embody this principle of total and unconditional inclusivity.

Lesson 25

Love And Oneness

When we are connected to unconditional love, the soul can let go, rest, and abide in its center, even if we are experiencing contradictory forces of disturbance. This state then permits our consciousness to open up to nondual modes of perception, where all phenomena are unified in a seamless fabric of oneness. In today’s lesson, we will learn a simple five-step technique for stepping more fully into this nondual state.

Lesson 26

The Sound Of Silence

From this inner space that we explored yesterday, we can begin to discern how it is that the world of appearances is an expression of the primordial speech of god, of the innermost sounds of creation, of the vibrations that emanate from the hidden mystery of the infinite. In today’s lesson, we will learn an ancient kabbalistic sound meditation that opens our perception to the primordial sounds of creation and the hidden roots of consciousness.

Lesson 27

A Star Is Born

The inner journey into deeper states of silence and stillness brings us to a realm beyond the thinking mind, beyond speech and words, beyond all that is known. When we totally surrender to the unknown, we are able to perceive how it is that our innermost nature, the original light of our primordial being, always- already was, is, and will be, shining in the vastness of our inner space. In today’s lesson, we explore how to practice and meditate, while embodying the wisdom of abiding as this vast light of infinite space, which reveals our true primordial self.

Lesson 28

The Black Light

The backdrop of our star of light, our true self, is the deep black space of pure nothingness. In the embodied experience of this mysterious nothingness, all friction and agitation in the nervous system is silenced. All that is left is a palpable nothingness, a dense black space, so still and silent that not a single ripple can be found. In this state, there is the cessation of all phenomena, of all thinking, and of all sense of self. In today’s lesson, we will explore this deep space of mystery and silence.

Lesson 29

The Journey Of Freedom

As the dense black light establishes itself in our consciousness and we allow the experience of no-self to deepen, a more radical kind of emptiness or nothingness can begin to reveal itself. This radical emptiness serves as a portal to the journey of freedom, which is the fruition of all the practices and of all the journeys. In this lesson, we will explore some of the radical implications of this mode of experiencing reality.

Lesson 30

The Totality

In the journey of freedom there is the sense that everything is totally, radically equalized—the most profound experiences of realization and the most mundane particulars of life. This total way of experiencing reality is a necessary portal for appreciating and experiencing more fully the most hidden and invisible mysteries of reality, the infinite secrets of Ein Sof, the “no end” of the kabbalistic teachings. In this final lesson, we will explore the intersecting dimensions and parallel universes that reveal themselves in the infinite unfolding of the mystery of reality.