In 2018, a group of 21 Kabbalistic, Jewish seekers got together and asked the question “What would our spiritual life look like if each of us had the deepest possible connection to ourselves, to each other, and to G-d?”

The Sacred Tribe was birthed in response to that question.

Kabbalah is a simple invitation: feel the fullest human emotional experience. Truly, deeply, feel your emotional, somatic (body) self.

There is a silly modern idea that our ‘highest self’ is a self that only feels some small portion of the full human emotional experience, commonly whittled down to joy or love or happiness. Other emotions: anger or grief or bitterness or… are cast as negative or low or dark, and we’re made to feel less-than for having these ‘bad’ emotions.

Kabbalah offers a different moral binary than most faith traditions. Instead of looking at the world through the lens of good/evil or right/wrong, we are asked to view the world through the lens of connected/disconnected.

Does a particular feeling or action or choice lead you to feel more connected to yourself, your community, or G-d? That’s the core question we explore at the Sacred Tribe.

Fundamentally, all emotions connect us – they are the root of empathy, of communion with each other, of our sense of belonging. It is absolutely the truth that each of us comes with a different story, and that story will likely be impossible for another to fully ‘get’. We are all so different: We are of different race and gender and, perhaps, religion. We grew up in different families with different parents, went to different schools, lived in different cities or countries, read different books, asked different questions, took different paths in life.

We are all so deeply different from each other.

And, yet, if you put your story and my story aside for a moment and ask how the events of our lives made us feel… All of a sudden, those differences disappear. Every one of us knows what it’s like to feel audacious and empowered and hopeful. Stoked, jazzed, joyous, loved, graceful, accepting, reverent.

And also aggravated, gloomy, jealous, nervous, remorseful, and bitter.

Now, imagine meeting a person who said “I’m so in touch with my highest self! I never feel any of those silly ‘bad’ emotions. I never feel irritated or sad or petulant or…” Is that someone you have anything in common with? Would you want to talk to that person for more than 30 seconds?

Far from separating us, our ability and willingness to truly, deeply, unashamedly feel ALL of our emotions is THE thing that brings us together, that deepens our sense of connection to ourself, and helps us to truly grok this thing we call oneness – not G-d as this thing living up in heaven, separate from us, but G-d as the thing that is all of us, the shared spark of the divine that lives in every person.

The Sacred Tribe is the living embodiment of a thousands-year-old tradition that invites us to:

• Feel our emotions, deeply and authentically, in the space of community.
• Integrate those felt experiences into our shared life, so that we may find the ways all emotions (perhaps especially the challenging ones) BUILD connection to self, community, and G-d.
• Broaden each of our capacity to feel, using several access points:
  • Breathwork
  • Ecstatic sound and movement
  • The use of Sacred (Psychedelic) Sacrament
  • Immersion in nature
  • Immersion in art

All of which, of course, are held in the space of ‘together’.

That is our story.