Malchut she’b Gevurah
Day Seven of Week 2:Receptivity in Restraint
Discipline, like love, must enhance personal dignity (see week one day seven). Discipline that breaks a person will backfire. Healthy discipline should bolster self-esteem and help elicit the best in a person; cultivating his sovereignty. And that does not compromise the discipline; on the contrary it fosters and enhances it.
We are concluding the second week of our journey. The week in Gevurah ends by bringing in Malchut, the lowest sefirah. The channel of Light reaches from the left shoulder to the base of the spine.
Malchut is the Kingdom. It is the sefirah of our earthly existence, receiving the energies from the entire Tree. In most kabbalistic sources, it is the place of the indwelling presence, called Shechinah, the feminine aspect of the Divine One. It is our task to build a holy temple for Shechinah to reside in this realm. This is done through the reintegration of Holy Energies in our lives.
Malchut seems like the land of limitations—limitations that we impose by measurement and judgment. It is the place in which we become dissonant and lose ourselves in unconscious drives and desires. At the same time, we are called upon to remember in this land of forgetting. We are the ones with the freedom to awaken in the land of the sleepers.
This whole week in Gevurah has been filled with the challenge of realising the necessity of limitation, to perceive the appropriateness of the forms through which the One might speak. In Malchut we are surrounded with forms that seem silent, so it is our task to learn to listen more carefully, to become receptive to that which is hidden right in front of our eyes.
Malchut brings to Gevurah the ultimate expression of Its form. In Malchut we need to challenge Gevurah to hold less tightly to the structures it creates, that the worlds which follow might know growth and evolution.
Each of the seven weeks of our counting concludes with the focus at Malchut. If we can balance ourselves here, we can bring heaven and earth together.
The way is to bring shalom, peace within our selves is to balance our internal and external lives, the inner tensions of awareness and confusion, and the external tensions of material existence with its unending needs and desires.
In order to bring balance within ourselves, we need to balance our internal heaven and earth, our inner tensions of awareness and forgetting. So the last day of this week holds special promise. In our meditations, we celebrate the awakening of Malchut in Gevurah.
I release my insistence that things be better than they are, that I might realise the blessings whispering through/hidden within the everyday events of my life. There are higher forms which now manifest through me and around me, to hold more fully the energies of holiness flowing from their Source. I am now more aware of an underlying sense of Peace and Love reflecting through the world which is my present abode, but in which I know I have a deep sense of purpose.