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This is a deep and joy-filled journey that will assist us to heal wounds that we carry in our own being, and in our family lineages.
Six 90-minute recorded webinars
Overview of “The Mystic Tree of Life”
During this era of uncertainty and transformation, many of us are asking: How can we begin to heal the personal and ancestral traumas that keep pulling us back into negative cycles of reactivity, fear, and oppression of ourselves and others?
As if anticipating the urgent needs of our modern world, the ancient sages and mystics left us maps for navigating turbulent times on Planet Earth. One such template is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, a radical system that helps us restore our connection to our starlit pathways to heaven and our healing roots in earth. The archetypal Tree is timeless and carries the breath of the ancestors who remind us of our magical capabilities to heal past, present, and future—not only our own wounds, but the traumatic histories of our ancestors and the repercussions for those who come next.
In this 3-week experiential journey, we will employ the vivid archetypal imagery of the Tarot’s Major Arcana to help ellicit the ancient medicine of the Eitz Chayim, the Living Tree, in order to heal ourselves and the ancestral patterns that shape us. With all this ancient richness at our fingertips, we will balance the 4 worlds of our soul’s composition, open our central channel, and awaken our 10 Sephirot—portals of divine energy—to hear the guidance of our ancestors more distinctly. This is a deep and joy-filled journey that will assist us to heal wounds that we carry in our own being, and in our family lineages. As with all of Rabbi Tirzah’s courses, we take up the ancient wisdom to help us restore our inborn clarity, connection, and power—for the sake of the larger healing that is entreating us all.
The Mystic Tree of Life
Lesson Plan
Lesson 1:
What is the name of your God, and have you heard from Her lately?
We embark upon a potent journey of awakening, to discover and heal the ancient Tree of Life that exists within us and within our own ancestral family tree. After imbibing just enough of the remarkable histories of Kabbalah and Tarot, we are ready to attend to the numinous sphere/sephirah called Keter, the crown of the Tree that touches the cosmic impulse that called us into being. Using the Tarot’s powerful archetypal image of Judgement, we identify what blocks our faith, reconnect to our “Roots in Heaven,” and hear the call of our Higher Self to open our portals to the healing powers of our own soul.
- Learn the meaning of Kabbalah and the origins of the Tree of Life as its central archetype and template for wholeness
- Understand the Kabbalah’s Four-World system of reality and how it is reflected in the Tarot
- See how your Family Tree maps onto the archetypal Tree of Life
- Be guided into the imaginal realm and open the gates to the ancestral abode to perceive the unseen dimension and the healing it holds for you.
Lesson 2:
What are the life-giving roots in my family tree, and where are the ones that are poisonous?
We travel down the trunk of the Tree’s central pillar feeling the call to another set of roots, deep in Mother Earth. Here we discover the sine qua non features of our ancestral roots as we study the Kabbalah’s mythical portrayal of the Divine Feminine called Shechinah, who resides in the very ground of our being. In this module we draw upon Tarot wisdom from The World, The Moon, and The Star, as we delve into the life-giving roots of our ancestors to find the healing properties of our families’ original place, just as we also dig down to discover the dangerous roots that would keep us unwell.
- Grasp the dynamic quality of the Tree of Life’s three pillars
- Learn why the central pillar repeatedly calls us to become a channel for healing
- Understand the Kabbalists’ portrayal of Shechinah and the gravitational pull of the Divine Feminine in our era
- Discover the life-giving roots of your own ancestral lineage as well as the poison root beneath the family tree
Lesson 3:
How am I doing at visioning my manifesto and manifesting my vision?
Having visited both the heavenly and earthly root systems that feed the Tree of Life, we begin our study of the ten Sephirot/Spheres as portals of divine energy, a dynamic chakra system that works in threes for balance and equilibrium. The first internal system at the ground level is the Triangle of Manifestation (Netzach-Hod-Yesod), which governs our ability to channel our vision and enthusiasm into actual material form. Here the Tarot’s Magician, High Priestess, and Chariot are all instrumental, and we draw upon their powers as we visit the ancestral realm to examine the family patterns of prosperity, limitation and manifestation that may have landed in us.
- Understand the Tree of Life as a dialectical chakra system that can help us balance and heal our energies
- Grasp the relationship between the Triangle of Manifestation and the Divine Feminine
- Study your family tree for its relationship to the material world, ability to create, and resilience
- Learn from the Tarot’s archetypes of High Priestess and Magician for insights into personal power.
Lesson 4:
Wherein lies the path to the “ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken?”
We move up the Tree to the locus of the heart as we delve into the skillful use of our personal energies and the ecosystem that keeps us healthy. With the help of the Tarot’s archetypes of Sun, Death, and Temperance, we examine the dialectics of love through the Triangle of Relationship (Chesed-Gevurah-Tiferet) and how to bring our heart into its most skillful settings so we might give and receive in equal measure, maintain wise boundaries, find our sovereignty, and be attuned to the love that awaits us. With the help of The Lovers archetype, we explore our ancestral beliefs, behaviors and byproducts regarding all matters of relationship, and in the ancestral realm, find the wisdom we need to hear.
- Learn the Kabbalah’s view of the heart and the connection between truth and beauty.
- Study your own ecosystem and how your internal feedback system guards your precious energies
- Explore your family tree for balanced loving relationships and areas of ill-health that left intergenerational imprints
- Journey into the ancestral realms for reflections and wisdom about our growing edges relating to love.
Lesson 5:
Encountering Divine Wisdom and Bringing It Home
Our final modules bring us to the transpersonal facet of the Tree, where we touch the Divine Imagination in the form of the Triangle of Illumination (Chochmah-Binah-Daat) and see how we might jump off the wheel of karma, as in the Tarot’s Wheel of Fortune, enabling us to more freely create our own destiny. To assist us, we engage the Elders of our bloodlines, and inquire about the supreme directives of our lineages. And we touch the Axis Mundi or World Tree, the vertical center of Mother earth that binds her and all of her creatures to the sacred realm. In Module V instructions are given for a ritual in nature to bring the blessings from the archetypal Tree back to our ailing earth.
- Study the powerful Spheres/Sephirot that bring us into contact with Divine Wisdom
- Learn how the mythical World Tree shows up in folktales and art around the world.
- Connect with the Elders of your lineage and receive their healing talisman
- Clarify your deepest prayer and prepare for your personal earth ritual
Lesson 6:
Ritual Practicum: Sweetening the poison root of the Ancestral Tree
Beneath the surface of the earth, no tree stands alone. The root systems of trees are interwoven, communicating to and assisting each other for miles on end. In our final module, we join together as trees in a forest, connecting to and uplifting one another in a powerful guided ritual, as agents of blessings and transformation, to sweeten the poison root that is corrosive to our ancestral trees. Drawing from a key principle of Hassidic and Kabbalistic sacred practice, that harsh legacies must be sweetened with understanding and compassion at their very root, we enter the imaginal realm and enlist the potent archetypal forces we have been stirring throughout the course, to help us heal and transform the future of our lineages.
- Witness each other’s earth rituals through art and photography
- Understand the Kabbalistic healing practice of sweetening harshness at its root
- Know the power of your own focus, love, and compassion as an agent of transformation
- Experience the uplifting camaraderie of our global ancestral healing network
About Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, PhD
Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, PhD, is an author, Jungian psychotherapist, leader in the international Jewish Renewal Movement, and a renowned Jewish scholar and teacher. Widely known for her groundbreaking work on Kabbalah, depth psychology, and the re-integration of the feminine wisdom tradition within Judaism, Rabbi Tirzah lectures and teaches nationally about spiritual and ancient wisdom practices that are honed to assist us at this critical time in world history. Her latest work, Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma (Monkfish, 2019) is the recipient of the 2020 Nautilus Book Award Gold in Psychology and the Jewish Women’s Caucus of the Association for Women in Psychology 2020 book award. New paperback edition with Reader’s Guide and Forward by Dr. Gabor Matè on bookshelves October, 2022.
Rabbi Firestone has been teaching ancestral healing practices in communities around the country, from San Quentin to our nation’s capital. She lives with her husband David in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. www.tirzahfirestone.com | @tirzahfire
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