Elul 5786: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

As this year winds down, I find myself thinking about all of you—the people who have sat with us in Oregon and Colorado, the community members walking this path in ways large and small, everyone doing their own quiet work of opening and returning. And I keep coming back to a question I hear in some form from nearly everyone: how do I actually continue to integrate an experience like this once it's over. What am I supposed to do with it. For how long. Why does something that felt so clear and so certain in the moment start to slip through my fingers within weeks, sometimes days. This is one of the most persistent and least-discussed struggles in psychedelic work—the confidence gap between having a profound experience and trusting yourself to steadily carry its lessons forward. But it is also, almost exactly, the struggle of teshuvah. The month of Elul asks the same thing of us every year, in the weeks leading into the chagim and in the quieter days that follow them. I want to share five not-so-easy lessons I have learned by supporting this work for the last six years, and I beg you to have faith in yourself to engage with them all fully in the year to come.

i. Teshuva/integration is a confrontation with the hidden self, not just an accounting of deeds

Whether examining our past behavior or exploring the content of a journey, we may fall into a trap of creating yet another list of action items or resolutions that feel like we are "doing something" to be better than we are at the moment. But real teshuva or integration isn't a checklist. It reaches past what we did or didn't do, past what we're willing to commit to going forward, toward the thing generating it all in the first place—the same pattern of anger, avoidance, appetite, or fear that shows up year after year, regardless of which specific incidents make this year's list. Many of our sages call this "ha-ne'elam," the hidden, unexposed core of the person that becomes revealed to us in moments of heightened awareness. Are you willing to actually sit with that hidden self behind all of the action or inaction instead of simply reaching for the next resolution? To inhabit it as fully as possible before moving on to the next thing?

ii. Spiritual and behavioral change is inherently unstable for most people

Who do you want to be? "More….," "better…," "deeper…," "less…." Built into the common frameworks for teshuvah and integration are a forced sense of striving to change some aspect of ourselves and have it become our new baseline. Yet, so often, the center cannot hold, and we revert to the person we were before the season of change, perhaps now with some sense of shame that we could not arrive to an improved version of ourselves, or worse yet, we do not acknowledge the reversion and continue to live life in unconscious entropic inertia. For an ordinary person, demanding constant intensity and consistency will not work. Exploring and accepting the unevenness of our experience of growth, with faith that "this is ok" can also make room for God's grace, the Spirit of the Universe, the flow of time to be part of our own maturation and not punish ourselves by thinking that the matter relies solely on us.

iii. The struggle is real and permanent and holy

This once happened to the Baal Shem Tov: a certain person in the town was renowned as great. The students wanted to know by what sign they could tell whether they were truly a great person or not—they wanted to test them. The Baal Shem Tov answered them, in his holiness, that they should ask this person's advice on how to be rid entirely of stray thoughts, diversions, and unwanted confusion. If they gave them such advice, then they would know the person was a fraud—because there is no advice for being rid of these entirely. We will never overcome distractions which prevent perfect teshuvah and integration because, as the Piaseczner Rebbe writes, they are actually the quiet and subtle yearnings within our soul that have nowhere to rest. They may present as mindless snacking or doom scrolling or banter. When we pick up the crackers or the phone, the Rebbe suggests we visualize, with great imaginary intensity, powerful moments and feelings within our journeys or spiritual practices, and really inhabit them for as long as we can. This strengthens our capacity to feel more, by giving our soul somewhere to land.

iv. Holiness (and therefore the raw material of change) is not confined to the refined or elite parts of a person

Perhaps it is the transcendent quality of psychedelic experiences, or the profundity of sitting in ceremony, that we may come to believe that our integration must focus on "the big stuff"—childhood or intergenerational trauma, healing our bodies, our relationship to our roles, our place in the cosmos, "seeing the face of God," achieving contemplative mastery of our habits. These are noble and exalted pursuits, yet this is precisely where the trap resets itself. We trade the checklist of small resolutions for a checklist of enormous ones, and end up no closer to the ground we actually live on, where God lives. The Baal Shem Tov's teaching runs in the opposite direction entirely. Before him, holiness was mostly understood as light passing through a vessel, and the vessel itself, the body, the ordinary and unglamorous parts of a life, was treated as something to minimize so it wouldn't get in the way. His revelation was that the vessel is made of the same light. Focus on how you feel when you look at your body, how you speak to your children when you're tired, how you load the dishwasher, what you do with an idle hour, your irritability when you haven't eaten enough. None of this is beneath the work. It is where God lives.

v. Faith is most visible in continuing with irritation unsoothed

A story from Rav Osher Freund: Once someone had a stone in their heart and it bothered them greatly, and it embittered them. They wanted to get rid of it, but didn't know how. They tried different strategies yet nothing worked. They asked others who gave them all sorts of common, but unhelpful advice. It hurt even more, making them wonder what they could have done to deserve being burdened with a stone like this. How would they ever get rid of it? They went to a sage and asked how to remove it from their heart. "Don't remove it," the sage replied. "Carry it." Faith in our own ability to integrate and do teshuvah is the desire to be near the Divine, the ache of not managing it consistently, and the willingness to hold the discomfort of never arriving at a state of permanent resolution. As we learn to consciously carry it, the hope is that we can expand more around it rather than get stuck holding it so tightly.

Wishing you an Elul of sacred struggle. I trust in your process and have faith in you—accepting you exactly as you are.

Bivracha,

Z