The Healing Gaze of Love

Throughout one’s life, there are moments—critical ones—where we turn our heads, looking to see who is watching us. Am I being seen right now? And more poignantly, How am I being seen? And sometimes being seen can be the most vulnerable and scary thing. It is my

belief that our redemptive healing is through allowing ourselves to be seen by people who love us. 

“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship.”

- Harville Hendrix

I’ve spent most of my life wondering how I am being seen. Growing up in a neglectful home, I never felt seen as a source of joy, and love. The look in my parent’s eyes was always a gaze of stress, anger, and shame. It’s been my soul’s journey to reclaim my own inward eye to one that I interpret to mean: Yes! You are good. You make me so happy! You are complete and perfect exactly as you are.

Water as Elixir.

I think of the waters of Miriam, which poured out like honey from a hard place, sustaining a broken people. Miriam did not run away from the pain and suffering; she listened, stood steadfast, keeping her brother safe in the waters of the Nile, and with her nourishing waters she poured love and compassion. Throughout our travels in the unknown desert, we drank water and bathed in the mikvah sustained by her waters from her rock. 

The first powerful mikvah experience I had was when I went to the mikvah in a lake in Connecticut with my friend’s older sister. I remember dipping into the cool waters and she looked at me from the dock, and declared as clear as day: “Tehorah Hee” — “She is Pure” — referencing me! I felt her power, her words, and her declaration shift something deep in my fabric, like a chiropractic adjustment to my ancestral lineage of shameful gazes. I all of a sudden felt right again. And I emphasize again because in that moment it became clear that I was always pure, that I was once seen by God as a pure soul, and the vision got muddled along the way, until this divine sister, in her eyes of compassion, witnessed me submerge into the primordial womb of living waters and emerge renewed. Her words never left me and have stayed as a loving balm whenever I forget my origin story, my beginnings of beginnings. Tehorah Hee. Rub that on my heart: I am pure, I am pure.

After that, I became fascinated by the power of mikvah, and specifically the role of the mikvah attendant as witness—how her aperture has the opportunity to expand and lighten the frame in which I stand, and how her words set in motion my destiny. Pure. You are pure. You are good. In her lips and eyes there is a larger becoming that I feel I can tap into, deepening my own inner eye of self-love.

The connection between two women—one on the verge of death and renewal, plunging into deep waters, floating into nothing to arrive as something completely new, while the other, a space holder, an expander, the gatekeeper of thresholds—is an ancient holding of the finest order. As Jewish women, we have embedded in our DNA the power to see, love, lift up, and cherish our fellow sister. May we always receive the nod and embrace of love and kindness from those that watch us pass over to the other side of whatever we are moving towards.

“Relationship in any form teaches us about our capacity to accept, endure, and survive suffering, our own and every being's: thus the creation of our developing compassion. Our compassion completely depends on our experience of each other, our relationship to the whole."

-Toward the Unknown: An Interview with Janet Adler, by Annie Geissinger

For anyone like me, who was not seen in love by their origin parent or family, or during their most critical self-identifying milestones, I invite you to reimagine the role of your mikvah witness. Allow all your parts—all the nakedness and all the deaths and pain—to be turned over to the gaze of a woman whose eyes are fixed on seeing you more lovingly, on alchemizing all that pain into pure honey, into the origin of who you are: the honey from a hard place.

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An invitation to the witnesser:

I offer this invitation: You have the power to allow someone to be in their most authentic self. To rediscover their own ness, as I like to think of it. Each month peeling layers of parts that we have become through the gaze of others that we ingested and defined ourselves by. A mikvah attendant’s witnessing can offer an opportunity to bring in something new, if we allow it, if we open ourselves up to that alchemy.

As a witness, your role is that of quieting, emptying, allowing.

Affirmation:  I am here with eyes of love like God. Let me expand my vision to pure love for this woman.

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An invitation to those immersing in waters:

I offer this invitation: How would you like to be witnessed, and what blessing would you like your witness to declare as you arrive back on land? As you take your first breath? Is it “Tehorah Hee” (“She is pure”), “You are loved,” “You are accepted,” “I see you, and it is good”? You can choose these words and co-create the vision with your mikvah lady. Try it—offer a deeper viewing beyond the strand of hair lingering on your back.

Affirmation: I am worthy to be seen in all my pure light and love.

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Rikki Klein is the founder of luxury Mikvah Lifestyle brand, Sodi and Podcast host to Do you Feel Yourself? Sodi offers the finest ritual products designed to support Jewish women in moving through states of consciousness, transformation, and renewal through their Mikvah practice. Rikki lives in Miami, Fl with her husband. 

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