H2O: Holding Opposites

by David Sanders

Dedicated to Robin Glickstein

Ten years ago we introduced into our curriculum a course on Holding Opposites. Within a year, the course was developed into a year-long curriculum. Many students have told me that what is taught in Holding Opposites indelibly informs their thinking and their worldview. This core teaching of Kabbalah finds expression in the ancient texts of Buddhism and Hinduism and such modern-day storytelling in the fictional films of Star Wars and the animated films Inside Out. There is no light without darkness, joy without sadness and sweet without bitterness. We are, as Rumi put it, a guest house of differing, and at times opposite, emotions and selves.

Based on valuing the Holding of Opposites, two of our students, Robyn Loup and Elyn Moldow founded Moving to Our Center and offer bridge-building programs that enhance conversations which foster dialogue and challenge the tendency to polarized positioning. Circumstances as they are, with the growing intolerance of hearing opposing views, finding a center position is more important than ever.

Why is it so difficult for us to be proficient, let alone master, a more balanced approach to life? Why is black and white thinking so prevalent? The 18^th century Hasidic master, the Ba’al Shem Tov, provided the following insight: “When we see a blemish in the other we need to see how our judgment reflects back to ourselves.” This is a most difficult task. The willingness to admit that what we see in the other reflects back a capacity or actuality of what we are unwilling to see in ourselves, as feared or wretched as it might be.

“Polarization,” says therapist Esther Perel, “is the inability of people to hold the complexity of a subject…to hold the ambivalence, the contradictory parts of the issue inside of them.” That is the spiritual work of holding opposites. When we live in that core awareness, we can have more honest and direct relationships with all aspects of others and ourselves.

There are spiritual teachers who suggest that our goal is to annihilate the ego. There are spiritual teachers who advocate for the elimination of anger or the eradication of sexual desire. Living harmoniously, finding a peaceful balance, requires acknowledging the bitter and the sweet, the flawed and the fabulous in each one of us and in the “other.”

Holding Opposites, aligned with the Sefirah of Tiferet in the Tree of Life, is the 5^th Kabbalah Awareness Practice.