How to Approach This Book

magical force. Working this way can open the doors to further Kabbalah study, reading, or magic.

The Kabbalah has often been presented as obscure, inaccessible, and dense, especially in books. Partly this is because it is an oral tradition, meant to come to life between teacher and students and the direct relationship between participants and the mysteries. Embodied Kabbalah asks us to recognize that we are alive! The Tree is alive! We are in direct communion with the mysteries, and our teacher is the divinity we were born from—and, on death, return to. Right now our living bodies are within the Tree of Life, and in discovering the wonders of the Tree, we discover ourselves. The Tree unfurls branch by branch as we inhabit, dance, and make love with this living magic. We fall in love at each step of the journey, meeting the world and pieces of ourselves in an unfolding map of the universe.

I’ve been actively working within the Tree of Life for more than ten years, though I don’t think I’ve gotten to the end of it yet. This book offers my own experience and doorways into this life-changing knowledge. For over twenty-five years, I’ve taught magic and ritual, mythology and personal development, and published seven other books. Yet in this work I find myself trembling at the edges of the starscape, witnessing the universe unfold.

By blood I’m half Jewish, although not at all by custom, culture, or observance. Yet this magic had always called to me. I had heard whispers of it—extraordinary claims, hints, in all sorts of corners and circumstances. Perhaps you are similarly drawn to it. I brought everything that I am to the Tree: my feminism and Paganism, my writer’s mind, my questions and yearning, and I found not just the Tree but myself, reflected back and then balanced, healed, changed. I understood my part in the universe—not intellectually, although that too, but viscerally, in my guts. I learned my part in the song of all things.

The Tree of Life has taken me and reshaped me and gave birth to me in the first place. I’ve seen the resonances in my dreams, how it’s wrenched my magic about and forged it with starlight and rooted it in the body and left it spinning maps and stories in my head. It’s freed me from everything and given me to everything and left me believing I understand something. Writing this book, I thought—if I can put this on the page, if I can offer this in digestible form, then all of my life makes sense. Perhaps I’m not qualified