Elul - The Path Back Forward
By the time I was about to enter into my first legal psychedelic experience, my intention was crystal clear. Before this session, I was instructed to refine my goals and hopes for what the encounter could bring in order to focus and ground the work ahead. What I wanted most was to return–to reanimate and awaken one of the critical aspects of my existence, my sense of obligation to my spiritual practice. If what brought me to a life of intimacy with Spirit was a spontaneous mystical experience in the desert, perhaps one occasioned by a psychoactive substance in a carefully curated environment could help bring me back. “I wish to return to my true nature as a partner with the Divine.”
My intention was a true moment in desiring teshuvah–to undergo the process of positive self-discovery and affirming one’s own agency in seeking out the way we truly wish to inhabit our own lives. There was no plan or vision to realign myself with my Source, only a deeply felt sense that I had drifted too far from shore, and it was time to turn around. This sense, that all I needed was to simply retrace my steps and let my soul settle back in to where it had previously dwelt is a model of teshuvah which is well-attested in the writings of many spiritual teachers, most notably in the writings of Rebbe Nachman on this final month of the Jewish calendar, Elul, the time for reflection and renewal before the High Holidays. He writes, “One should know that teshuvah is returning something from where it was taken.” In this model, there is always an authentic, ideal, hopeful self that gets lost in the process of living, yet remains standing by, waiting to be reinhabited.
The challenge of simply “returning” to that prelapsarian state seems awfully daunting to me. While I revere Rebbe Nachman’s hope in the promise of getting back to where we once belonged, I tend to see this teshuvah model much like Alice Fogel in her poem “Forgiving the Darkness”:
“Darkness is not a loss but the thing misplaced
not the hammer but the nail in its curved emergence
from wood's grasp, not the storm's insurgence
but the limbs broken off from their miraculous
suspension in a storm out far, beyond us.”
Yes, we can return, yet the ambient energy of the impact, the transformative moment of departure, leaves an indelible trace. We may go back, but not further back than the bent nail, the fiery sword blocking the Garden, that moment of separation, bending, or breaking.
In his ability to hold multiple truths in the same field of experience, however, Rebbe Nachman also indicates a second type of teshuvah,
With strength and love for the path back forward,
Z
