A Sealed Center: Making Room for the Soul

A Sealed Center: Making Room for the Soul
from our Sefer Yetzirah meditation circle at Der Nister

In our ongoing Sefer Yetzirah practice, we’ve been slowly “building a world” from the inside out - beginning with the first movements of creation: breath, wind, water, fire. These are not ideas to understand so much as experiences to inhabit: breath that arrives before meaning, water that receives without explanation, fire that clarifies without burning.

And then, something shifts. The text turns toward incantation, toward a felt sense of structure and protection: the sealing of the six directions. Above and below. Before and behind. Right and left. Not as a map “out there,” but as an inner compass...

There are times when the soul needs a boundary of protection that doesn’t harden into armor. A container that doesn’t become a cage. A protected space that still has breath in it.

This week, we entered that practice through a short poem—spare as a single match struck in the dark:

I bring forth voids

By Beatriz Miralles de Imperial
Translated from the Spanish by Layla Benitez-James

I bring forth voids
within my hands
I make an abyss of myself
underlining the limits of things:

I always wind up surrounded by nothing.

Sefer Yetzirah has a name for this “nothing.” It calls it belimah - a holy void, a sacred spaciousness. Not emptiness-as-lack, but emptiness-as-possibility: an open field where something true can be inscribed.

Sometimes the most protective thing we can do is not to fill ourselves up with more effort, more certainty, more trying, but rather to make room. To become a wide interior sky, letting what is real arrive.

Sealing the Six Directions

In our meditation, we moved through the six directions gently, without strain, as if tracing the edges of a sanctuary.

In each direction, we paused long enough to notice: what is the inner weather here?
Is there fear? Tenderness? Fatigue? Longing? Static? We didn’t try to fix it. We simply acknowledged it, and then sealed the direction with letters.

Seal Above — a trustworthy roof of sky

י–ה–ו

Seal Below — feet, floor, ground that holds
י–ו–ה

Seal East / Front — what you face, what you’re meeting
ה–ו–י

Seal West / Behind — what follows you, what lingers
ה–י–ו

Seal South / Right — warmth, giving, outward flow
ו–י–ה

Seal North / Left — restraint, quiet strength, inward receiving
ו–ה–י

You don’t have to force imagery. You don’t have to see anything dramatic. In fact, in Sefer Yetzirah practice, nothing appearing can also be faithful practice: staying close to the void without panicking, staying open without collapsing.

And Then: Seal the Center

After sealing the directions, we return - not to the void as abyss, but to the void as potential.

This is the moment that matters most for so many of us right now. Because it’s one thing to imagine a world held in six directions. It’s another thing to feel your own life held that way - to feel the soul seated at the center of itself, protected enough to soften.

So we seal the center as a gentle strengthening of the inner home.

May this space be firmed up, real, inhabitable, free from what harms.

May it be a dwelling place for the soul.

In a time when so much feels porous, when the world enters us faster than we can metabolize, this sealing practice offers a different possibility: a protective environment that still allows aliveness. A sacred perimeter. A calm interior. A way to remember: I have a center. I can return.

And when we’re ready, we don’t stay sealed forever. We “unseal” gently, stepping back into our day not as an exposed nerve, and not as a fortress, but as a person with directions… and a steady center.

If you’d like to sit with this practice with us in real time, I’d love to have you join our next gathering at Der Nister or via Zoom. Come exactly as you are. The practice will meet you.