When I first opened a book on the Kabbalah, I wasn’t looking for answers.
I was looking for shape.
A language to describe what was happening inside me that didn’t sound like a diagnosis.
What I found was something older, darker, and deeper than I expected.
I found a map.
A sacred one—torn in two.
The Tree of Life—with its glowing Sephiroth—promises structure, evolution, ascension.
Each sphere is a stage: mercy, beauty, wisdom, discipline.
The soul rises by walking through these patterns, by seeking balance, truth, and the divine spark.
It’s beautiful.
It’s aspirational.
And for a while, I tried to live there.
I tried to reach upwards.
To embody harmony.
To rebuild myself through light.
But here’s what the Kabbalah also shows you, if you’re really paying attention:
There is no ascent without descent.
There is no Tree of Life without the Tree of Death—the Qliphoth.
The Qliphoth is chaos.
Shadow.
Shells of broken light.
It’s the version of you that clings to ego, fear, lust, control, guilt, illusion.
It’s the underworld.
I realised I had lived there for years—without knowing the name of it.
Not because I was evil.
But because I was fragmented.
I had chased affirmation. I had clung to power where I could find it.
I had wrapped pain in performance and shame in silence.
Studying the Tree of Death didn’t scare me.
It clarified me.
I wasn’t lost because I was weak.
I was lost because I hadn’t accepted that the fall was part of the path.
You don’t reach the crown (Kether) by bypassing your shadow.
You get there by walking through it—one cracked vessel at a time.
I’m not a mystic. I’m not a rabbi.
I’m a man who hurt others, who hurt himself, who sought something beyond punishment.
And what the Kabbalah gave me was this:
You are not either the Tree of Life or the Tree of Death.
You are both.
You are mercy and guilt.
Beauty and destruction.
Forgiveness and consequence.
Your task is not to escape the shadow.
It’s to carry its truth with reverence.
So now, when I feel the shame rise—when the headlines echo in my chest—I remember:
That’s part of the descent.
That’s the Qliphoth speaking.
And my job isn’t to fight it.
It’s to walk through it—eyes open, spirit steady.
Because every light I’m building now is one I had to retrieve from darkness.
And that, more than anything, is what the Kabbalah taught me.
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