Plenty of books have covered the Kabbalah, but choose psychologist/healer Catherine Shainberg's Kabbalah And The Power Of Dreaming: Awakening The Visionary Life if what you seek is a practical application of Kabbalah principles to daily spiritual purposes. There are practices used by seers, sages and prophets to control dreams and visions: Shainberg uses the ancient Sephardic Kabbalah tradition to blend in stories from around the Mediterranean, to be used as examples for readers seeking to develop their own dreaming powers. A fine, specific exploration based on solid spiritual foundations.
Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming is a magnificent guide to putting soul back in the body and walking a path with heart. Catherine Shainberg is a profound spiritual teacher who reminds us that dreaming is not only about what we do when we sleep but about waking up to a deeper life, remembering and navigating from our sacred purpose, tapping into Source energy - including the images that speak to the body and can make it well - and being present at the place of creation. Her book contains a panoply of practical exercises for transforming fear and anger into heart-centered energy, liberating ourselves from the rule of habit and healing the wound between Earth and Sky.
Extemporizing on a common dream image, she incites us to stop being "passengers" on the train of life and instead become "switchmen" - which means catching ourselves every time we start giving our energy to a pattern or emotion, monitoring where the train is going, throwing the switch to take ourselves off the track of repetitive behavior or a negative emotion, and steering consciously toward a desirable destination.
She knows that dreaming is a discipline, one of the most vital and powerful that our kind possess. "True dreaming calls for rigorous training", to take us beyond the snares of illusion and protection. When we grasp that "imagination affects the physical, and vice-versa" and that "the mind exteriorizes itself" and turn these insights into daily practice, we can consciously dream and re-vision the reality that takes form around us.
Catherine Shainberg was drawn to Kabbalah by a chain of dreams and synchronicities that led her to study for many years in Jerusalem with Colette Albouker-Muscat, an extraordinary personality who was a leader of the French Resistance in Algiers in World War II and a lineal descendant of both Isaac the Blind (a medieval kabbalist in Provence) and Dona Gracia Mendoza (one of the leading Jewish women of the Renaissance). Though people sometimes think of Kabbalah as a bookish approach, heavy on numerology and difficult texts, Colette Albouker's fundamental teaching was that the Book of Books is within us, and is to be accessed through images, after we have cleansed the windows of perception, and anchored in the wisdom of the body.
