Living Kabbalah [Paperback]

I wrote Living Kabbalah after nearly 12 years of study which alternately fascinated me and drove me almost batty. It seemed that all the books on the subject were about different systems and nearly all of them were far too complicated, time-consuming and contradictory.

Kabbalah is best understood through discussion rather than reading because then you can make the teaching personal and see how it links bits of your own life together instead of being a load of dry theory. However, Hamlyn thought there was a pressing need for a book which really would be understandable from the very basics – and it was both a huge challenge and a real privilege to write it.

My editor at Hamlyn was kind enough to say that she understood all of the book up to chapter eight – and most of it after that (!). As she had no particular interest or knowledge of spirituality I was really chuffed.

My own teacher, Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi, has written 10 books on Kabbalah and I managed to understand four of them: The Work of the Kabbalist, School of the Soul, Kabbalah and Exodus and Kabbalah and Psychology in the first two years of study, so I can recommend those if you would like further reading.

I’m not affiliated in any way with The Kabbalah Centre in London – ‘The Kabbalah of the Famous’. I don’t know very much about the way they learn the tradition although I do know they use a system of Kabbalah which was developed in the sixteenth century. I believe we all (eventually!) find the right path for us and the one I needed – and now teach - is based on the original tradition, dating back to the very earliest times of humanity.

When I started learning about Kabbalah, I thought it was going to be too intellectual and 'stuck in form' for me but I knew I wanted to investigate it to understand more about what it was that Jesus himself would have learnt (I had huge problems with Christianity after my first husband - an athiest - died).

It was really joyful to find that Kabbalah helped me to understand myself, holistic thinking, religion and the Gospels in a completely different manner - and to appreciate and be able to work with Jesus' teachings outside of Christianity. It was so utterly flexible, within a clearly understandable structure, that I was free to be who I wanted to be – but also that I had a spiritual discipline to refer to, and companions on my journey.

My first Kabbalistic book came out of that realisation - The Book of Deborah (Time Warner) is a novel about a fictional adopted sister of Jesus who was raised with him and shared his life from the age of six to the crucifixion. She married Judas, which opens up that whole story with some different insights too.

Writing and researching Deborah - including discovering what life was really like for a woman in those days - was incredibly healing and I've been so pleased to hear from people who have read the book and who have found it helped them too with any problems or pain they felt around the New Testament teachings.

You can find Deborah and the follow-up novel Into the Kingdom on Amazon.co.uk.

I do hope you enjoy Living Kabbalah. It may help you decide that you want to study the subject more, or it may help you realise that Kabbalah simply is not a path for you – and that’s just as good because you won’t need to put any more energy in that direction and can go off and find the system that works perfectly for you.

And if you should want to know any more, my website is called Tree of Sapphires. I think I'm allowed to say that...