Confession: Are you there God? It's me, Melody.

Nov 10, 2023

To understand my relationship with God, you have to know how I got here. I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1982 during the Iranian (Islamic) Revolution where the secularized and modernized dynasty under Shah Pahlavi was toppled and replaced by an Islamic republic. The situation in Iran at that time was grim for everyone, but especially for Jews, which is what my family and I are. Why was it hard to be a Jew in Iran during the Iranian revolution? Because Jews were subjected to government-sanctioned discrimination and violence (including execution). It’s no surprise that there are less than 10,000 Jews left in Iran today. Thanks to my parents’ willingness to leave the only home they’ve ever known so that I could have a better future, I am not one of them.

My dedication in The Shift.

How did we leave Iran in 1982? Not legally. Jews were not allowed to leave, and roads leaving the cities were closely monitored. My parents did the only thing they could do: they left literally everything and everyone behind, paid a smuggler, and got us the hell out of the country by taking back roads to Pakistan. An important side note: this wasn’t their first attempt to leave the country. They had paid a smuggler previously but my dad got sick so they missed that attempt at escape. Everyone who went with that smuggler died.

Was it easy? Did it go as planned? Hardly. The smuggler promised a three-hour journey that took six days. Along the way my dad fell off a motorcycle and injured his back, and I, only three-months-old, had to drink water from a stream to stay alive and got extremely sick. Despite the challenges of our exodus, we endured, because we were lucky enough to have somewhere to go that would accept us without question: Israel.

My mom and me, shortly before our escape from Iran.

In Israel, we went straight to the hospital, where I stayed for ten days. I remind you, I was three months old. My story almost ended there. Imagine my parents in this hospital, how shell-shocked they must have been. My mom was only 22. Somehow, we all survived. A year later, we made our way to Los Angeles, the place I’ve called home ever since.

Being Jewish absolutely dictated the unfolding of my life. If my parents weren’t Jewish, we might still be in Iran now. When we landed in Los Angeles without friends or family or jobs or community, it was the local Jewish temple that gave us a home, and continues to nearly 40 years later. When we struggled to find our footing as immigrants in an incredibly foreign land, the rituals and values of Judaism grounded us. We still celebrate Shabbat together every Friday night, and share our prayers and our gratitude as we light the candles just as our ancestors have done for millenia.

Today, in truth, I’m more secular than I have ever been. But I’ve never felt more inclined to tell my story, not to persuade anyone to take a position in an ongoing war* where terror abounds in ever direction, but to claim the very thing that my parents risked everything to protect: my right to be me. My background doesn’t inform my opinion on this war. But the war is increasingly making it riskier for me to openly be who I am.

My book, Self Love Poetry, is written for both left brain thinkers, and right brain feelers, which many may think is a call to choose one side or the other. In truth, as you’ll read in the introduction, I wrote the book for myself: because I am both the left brain thinker, and the right brain feeler. And it is in that duality that I often find myself struggling not just with the concept of religion, but with the existence of God, itself. My left brain screams at me to see all the division and polarization caused by God and religion. My right brain reminds me of the many prayers I said as a child while I glanced up at the moon and smelled the orange blossoms that permeated the night air. Each day on social media I see grief and anger mounting in all directions. I see the very antisemitism that caused my family to leave once before. I never thought we would be here again. Are you there God? Can you make this stop?

Of course whether you believe in God or not, we can all agree that God isn’t a genie that can be summoned with a little rub to grant wishes. But if that’s not what God is, I’ve been wondering: what is God? And more than that, where is God, when we’re inundated with so much pain and loss?

Self Love Poetry: For Thinkers & Feelers.

The left-brain thinker in me has of course asked these questions before. Even though I grew up with a beautiful, yet very traditional explanation of God, I’ve had to modify it to make sense to me. In my opinion, this is God: the energy that ties us all together, the thing that can neither be created nor destroyed, the true sixth sense that we all have but are usually too distracted or numb or enraged to acknowledge. The thought that the human body contains an energy system is not unique, or new. Chinese Medicine is grounded in this idea and has been practiced for over 3,000 years.

What if we truly are more than our matter? I find that idea not only to be liberating, but also unifying. It feels like so much of religion up until now has been grounded in matter — what you’re born into, where you’re born, what you’ve been taught or exposed to. What if instead we are all inherently energized the same way — and as such are capable of all being connected equally and lovingly? What if we are all holy? What if it’s not God that is going to stop the pain — but us?

Ram Dass eloquently shared his practice of loving awareness as a way to honor the fact that we’re all a manifestation of God, and capable of the higher love we all need right now.

“I have a practice in which I say to myself, I am loving awareness.” To begin, I focus my attention in the middle of my chest, on the heart-mind. I may take a few deep breaths into my diaphragm to help me identify with it. I breathe in love and breathe out love. I watch all of the thoughts that create the stuff of my mind, and I love everything, love everything I can be aware of. I just love, just love, just love.
I love you. No matter how rotten you are, I love you because you are part of the manifestation of God. In that heart-mind I’m not Richard Alpert, I’m not Ram Dass — those are both roles. I look at those roles from that deeper “I.” In the heart-mind I’m not identified with my roles. They’re like costumes or uniforms hanging in a closet. “I am a reader,” “I am a father,” “I am a yogi,” “I am a man,” “I am a driver” — those are all roles.
All I am is loving awareness. I am loving awareness. It means that wherever I look, anything that touches my awareness will be loved by me. That loving awareness is the most fundamental “I.” Loving awareness witnesses the incarnation from a plane of consciousness different from the plane that we live on as egos, though it completely contains and interpenetrates everyday experience…
Awareness and love, loving awareness, is the soul. This practice of I am loving awareness turns you inward toward the soul. If you dive deep enough into your soul, you will come to God. In Greek it’s called agape, God love. Martin Luther King, Jr., said about this agape, this higher love: “It’s an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative … the love of God operating in the human heart.”
When you can accept that kind of love, you can give that love. You can give love to all you perceive, all the time. I am loving awareness. You can be aware of your eyes seeing, your ears hearing, your skin feeling, and your mind producing thoughts, thought after thought after thought. Thoughts are terribly seductive, but you don’t have to identify with them. You identify not with the thoughts, but with the awareness of the thoughts. To bring loving awareness to everything you turn your awareness to is to be love. This moment is love. I am loving awareness.

Ram Dass. (Listen to the meditation version of this mantra spoken by Ram Dass below)

Art by Pleasure Paradox.

As an empath, I’ve spent my whole life navigating energy exchanges. I can feel someone’s energy whether they’re standing next to me, or sending me a DM. Whereas when I was younger I would absorb it all without barrier, and would give all of mine out without question, now I’m more selective. That’s why I have no problem muting social media accounts that give me anxiety, or redefining friendships that no longer feel like an even exchange. But with so much charged energy flying around right now, it’s hard not to want to retreat into my shell and hide from it all. I wonder sometimes if my autoimmune disease was born of being too open energetically for too long.

But if I’m saying that God lives within that energy that bounces within us and between us, I have to open up and be part of it. Which is why I’ve written this post today.

If you follow me on social media, you know that I don’t post on any social events for my mental health, including this one, even though it is so closely tied to not only my heritage, but also my very existence on this planet. As I detailed above, without Israel, it’s possible I wouldn’t be alive today. AND it feels important to say in the same breath that I believe Palestinians also deserve a safe place to call home where they are free. Palestinians are living through horrific trauma. They don’t have access to basic necessities to survive like food, water and shelter. They live in fear that they might die at any moment, not at all unlike the experience my parents and I had when we fled our home country for a chance to survive. Meanwhile, most everyone I speak to with ties to Israel knows someone who was either killed or kidnapped during the terror attack on October 7th. In my case, I’ve lost my second cousin. She was only 20. The trauma and grief is so overwhelming in every direction — all I can do is remain firmly rooted in the AND of this moment. As I’ve expressed in my poetry, I am all the others. I refuse to separate myself into boxes, or to separate myself from anyone else.

Maram and me at Maram’s 26th birthday party back in the 2000s.

But my story isn’t the only story that you should read today. You should also know about my dear friend Maram. She is a Palestinian Christian whose family hails from Bethlehem, Palestine. We’ve known each other since attending USC together 20+ years ago. When the war broke out, she was one of the first (and truly only) people to reach out to me and ask how I’m doing. Since then, we’ve been talking. We’ve been exchanging questions, ideas, compassion, and above all else love. We don’t have the solution other than to know that succumbing to the polarity of this moment is the worst thing we can do. So we practice loving awareness. We practice loving kindness. We put down our grief, our fear, our thoughts, our egos. We practice higher love.

The Shift.

So rather than sharing a flurry of social media reposts and yelling into an echo chamber of like-minded individuals, I’m sharing my story, and Maram’s. I hope you’ll find someone who isn’t from your bubble to have a loving conversation with today and experience true compassion as defined so beautifully by Pema Chödrön:

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

Many Jews are experienced antisemitism right now unparalleled since the Holocaust, and while I haven’t experienced it personally, I know writing this post will make it more likely that I do. And yet. To hide who I am out of fear isn’t what my parents brought me to America to do.

The energetic exchange I’m hoping this post initiates is one of love, of compassion, of connection, of the godliness and higher love that is possibly within all of us. God, please bring us closer to each other. God, please bring us peace.

*A note on my use of the word war: when I sent this newsletter for Maram to review since it includes her story, she noted that the term war is in itself a conversation. She shared that many Palestinians don’t see it as a war, but rather as an occupation. For her, the word catastrophe resonates over war. Our conversations continue. I hope yours do, too.

Confession: Are you there God? It's me, Melody.

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