Gevurah she'b Gevurah
הָיום תִשְׁעָה יָמִים שֶׁהֵם שָׁבוּעַ אֶחָד וּּשְׁנֵֶי יָמִים לָעוֹמֵרֹToday is nine days, which is one week and two days of the Omer
Constraint in Restraint
Examine the aspect of discipline in your life. Is it bounded or is it excessive? Does it include the other six aspects without which discipline cannot be effective or healthy.
Our focus this week is on the sefirah of Gevurah, placed on the body at the left shoulder, which brings us to explore a greater awareness of emotional form. The second day of each week brings Gevurah into the sefirah of the week, so today is Gevurah in Gevurah.
Emotion has to do with the energy behind our feelings. Gevurah is the sefirah representing the form of that energy. Today we wish to delve deeper into the forms which carry our emotional energy. All our patterns, our roles and our creations limit the energy of our feelings, giving them shape. Gevurah limits emotional energy to enable you to find its true form.
We judge habitual limitations to be negative and fight against them, but what we resist persists. To encourage expansion, honour all those forms with which we are able to express ourselves. To step fully into our future, we need to take responsibility for our past choices, finding grateful acceptance of who we are, that we might move beyond them.
To honour the current emotional expression of our energies is the challenge of this day. Such acceptance is the key that frees us from old cycles of expression and experience. When we honour ourselves and our past creations, we bring new flexibility into those forms that they might expand into the future full of Life and endure.
As I become aware of feelings or thoughts of condemnation, for myself or anyone else, that I carry, I place each of them in their correct position.1 I continue to repeat this process—remembering that I am a created being, that can experience with my feelings the Greater Creative Presence which lives in me and as me… until the flow of my feelings and thoughts is clear. Then accepting my current experience, I open to receiving an expansion of feeling, enabling new forms of energy to emerge that express my authentic being. I bless the flow of Creative energies that I am gifted with.
Reflections
Constraint in Restraint could mean constraining the restraining element—in other words, in effect, an act of mercy, or release. Or it could mean the constraining of restraint, and thus in allowing it free reign (another act of mercy). Or it could have a hint of absolute control, almost like a doubling of restraint, as in a constraint that restrains.
Footnotes
Placing things in their place produces forms, images and objects, that we can then assemble into actual form. As all identifiable objects are made through the interplay between the light and the dark. ↩︎