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The Kabbalah of your Emotions

"An unexamined life is not worth living"  -Socrates

According to Jewish mysticism, the human (concious) psyche divides into two: the intellect and the emotions. The intellect is the mind, and the emotions are your emotional impulsive experiences. Learning about and mastering your emotions really means examining and mastering your life. It’s looking at yourself and looking at your relationship with G-d.  

When Adam hides from G-d in shame after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, G-d says to him, “Where are you?”( or using the biblical, “Where art thou?”) Now G-d knew where he was. No one can hide from G-d. Why would G-d ask, “Where are you?” G-d is saying, “I don’t recognize you—because you don’t recognize yourself. I don’t see you.”

Are you a leader or a follower? 

Thoreau writes, “Most people live a life of quiet desperation.” Are we ready to resign ourselves to just being an observer in life? To do damage control? To do the least and play it safe?

To go from narrow-mind confinement to mind-blowing expansion is no easy task. To go from Egypt to Sinai (from Passover to Shavuot), the person must transform his Egypt mentality into the disposition of Sinai. The person has seven weeks to do so, forty-nine days, from the exodus from Egypt to the receiving of the Torah (Bible) at Mount Sinai. Every one of the forty-nine days the person works on another attribute, refining, honing, preparing. The person counts his progress until the day – the day when the follower that was, becomes the leader that is.

The Seven Emotions

1. Chessed: lovingkindness, benevolence—anything that’s included within the family of love, and the warmth and nurturing that comes with love. It’s a feeling in our hearts. It’s our first and most fundamental emotion.

2. Gevurah:  justice, discipline, restraint, awe. If love is giving and flowing, there’s another emotion which is withdrawing, focusing, disciplining, channeling.

3. Tiferet: beauty, harmony and compassion. It’s somewhat of a synthesis of the first two, but it’s beyond that: tiferet has its own power, the power of compassion that goes far beyond love. You can have love for those who are close to you, those whom you appreciate. Compassion is for strangers and people who may not deserve it: mercy, or in Hebrew, rachmanut.

4. Netzach: endurance, fortitude, ambition. Netzach is the driving force behind every ambition.

5. Hod: humility, splendor, yielding. If the alter-ego of gevurah is chessed, where chessed is a flowing love and gevurah is the channeling, the measuring of it, then if netzach is ambition and drive and fortitude, hod is humility and yielding that balances the ambitions within us.

6. Yesod: literally means foundation but it’s an emotion called bonding. When you bond with something it’s not just that you’re experiencing it, you actually bond with it.

7. Malchut: literally it means nobility and kingship, but on the emotional spectrum, it’s sovereignty, leadership, the independence of a human being, the feeling that we are sovereign, that we have something to contribute, something unique about us.