“Falling Through the Tree of Life” is a deeply personal and experiential journey through Kabbalah

A gushing love letter to Kabbalah (I will use the author’s spelling for the purposes of this review), full of wonder and joy, Jane Meredith‘s Falling Through the Tree of Life: Embodied Kabbalah invites the reader into a full-body, full-sensory, ecstatic experience of living in, around, and through the Tree. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this book to read late in 2021 (it’ll be released in July), and it is truly a feast for the mind and the spirit.

Jane Meredith meets the reader not as a lecturer, but as a guide, pointing out signposts while inviting the reader to chart their own, unique, embodied understanding of the Tree through art, ritual, and trance. With multiple suggested ways to engage with the material, including reading chapters in whatever order suits the reader, this work meets the reader exactly where they are and lets them choose their own path, while weaving in the author’s lived experiences with the Tree of Life.

One thing that particularly impressed me about this book was the sheer variety of magickal experiences offered to connect with the Tree of Life. Each section covers some basic information on each sephira, suggested workings and trances, the opportunity to create your own artistic rendering of the sephira in the form of a cardboard disk you can use in ritual, an overview of a related aspect of the Tree of Life, and a personal memoir detailing the author’s lived experiences with that sephira. I’ve previously recommended creating your own Tree of Life in both this blog and my book, but I am intrigued by her suggestion of creating it one sphere at a time, and on a set of separate disks you can use to create an adjustable-size ritual space for one or many people to step through the Tree of Life.

I’ll be returning to this book again and again as I deepen my work with the Tree.