When Life Is Lived from Deeper Understanding
A Student's Story of Her Path into Balance, Rhythm, and Inner Transformation
The following reflection is written by one of my advanced students who has been walking the dedicated spiritual path of Universal Qabalah with me for over eight years.
In her own words, she shares how life’s challenges became a doorway to a deeper way of living—not as a response to crisis alone, but as a profound transformation from weakness into balance and transcendence.
Her story is offered here as it was written, as an honest account of how life can be understood and lived through deeper spiritual knowledge, expressed in real experience.
I invite you to read her full reflection and witness this journey of growth and inner transformation, and feel free to leave a comment below.
With Love & Compassion,
Mika Ichihara, M.S., L.Ac., B.Phar., LLM, LLB
Integrative Healing Master - Teacher of Spiritual Knowledge
Love & Compassion Integrative Health and Healing
Deepening Life through Walking a Spiritual Journey
When Life Changed Without Preparation
My confidence and love is seeded by my Chinese mother and Australian father, whose 50+ year marriage was not only inter-racial but inter-religious.
Our international travel and friends exposed me to beliefs that mixed and created my own mélange of virtues and strong sense of self. But nothing prepared me for mid-life without my parents.
Passing Through the Darkest Period
“Dark Night of the Soul” in Qabalah, describes a crisis of faith or an extremely difficult, painful period which propels you from one phase of life into another.
You feel your soul leave your body and can’t breathe. Nothing alerts you that this is coming.
In fact, you probably haven’t heard of the term until after you’ve experienced it.
Survival is instinctual but there is no preparation adequate to navigate the crisis because it is karmic. It is your soul’s path. You simply must go through.
While I experienced this crisis, I reached for support in the conventional ways; psycho-therapy, medication, family and friends, books, and journaling.
I grasped for everything that could oxygenate my soul and make sense of the pain which incapacitated me.
My goal wasn’t self-preservation, but to be well-enough to care for three young children under the age of eight by myself.
Why was this happening?
How will I go on?
What did I do wrong?
I asked all these questions and hundreds more as my body and mind struggled to get through each day.
So much pain and there was no end in sight. Not a linear timeline like a project where I could see a viable end or solution to work towards.
It was dark, excruciating, and unknown. And I felt alone in my suffering. Life, love, loss, pain are not linear.
Finding a Path to Walk
I discovered Qabalah through a serendipitous search for Reiki healing at Love & Compassion with Mika Ichihara.
Her office was the first to return my call and I accepted the earliest appointment available.
That moment ignited my eight-year spiritual journey that guides me today.
I completed the “Qabalah Level 5” course in December 2025 and my studies serve as a way of living life, rather than a prescription for crises.
My curiosity and energy is stoked through the teachings and practices of the “Tree of Life”.
What is the spiritual practice of Qabalah?
For me, the question is much like asking the difference between watching someone live, or actually living life.
It’s energetic and yet experiential in real life.
The practice is experiencing the circuitry that runs through the “Tree of Life” between the paths of ten specific energy centers like wisdom, strength, beauty, mercy, and splendor, just to name a few.
The Tree of Life incorporates the feminine and masculine on either side, and centered in the middle is our foundation and balance we channel down from the Divine, the Source.
From Understanding to Living
One specific “Sephirah” in the Tree of Life explained so much struggle I have experienced.
“Tiphareth” is in the middle of the tree, the true center. It represents “balance”.
I had none…
Throughout my youth I lived in the clarity of life compartmentalizing black or white.
Gray or indifference was not an option or desire. Right or wrong. Good or bad.
The discernment gave me control over confusion and fear and a way to cope through ambiguity and disappointment.
But my “Dark Night of the Soul” crisis proved that life is not binary and I needed to understand and accept this principle in order to heal and grow into my new advanced self.
So my “work” began with this energetic understanding of harmony on any level in any manner.
Beauty, harmony, and balance is the lesson to work through here and there was much digging deep into my life to learn lessons so as to not repeat them and heal.
Learning Balance from the Inside
In addition to the energetic areas called Sephiroth, there are “Seven Hermetic Principles” that describe the nature of everything.
Understanding these principles helps me navigate my daily life, relationships, and challenges by moving with the flow instead of against.
Take the first, the “Law of Rhythm” which in nature, explains the rise and fall of tides, transition from night to day, the change of seasons, creation and destruction, birth and death.
The pendulum swings, the cycle continues.
The life lesson for this law? Enjoy but don’t be attached.
Transform the desire to control or receive and observe the Law of Rhythm in your emotions throughout the day, then try to neutralize it.
More Sephiroth, more pathways in between them, more principles revealed and applied to real life.
This is what it means to “do the work”.
The work exposes my weakness, vulnerabilities, shame, and regret.
The work begins from awareness and moves through to responsibility and acceptance without judgement.
To experience this transformation is in the work. It takes time, reflection, and daily practice but the healing is in the feeling.
My soul knows the difference now and sings with joy.
Living with Rhythm and Continuity
I begin my ninth year of my spiritual journey and “Tiphareth” is no longer a focal point for my pain and daily work.
Balance and rhythm is achieved more easily with mindful queues and quick pivots in my thoughts and actions.
These are just two examples of the spiritual teachings of Qabalah that transform my life.
My journey in the Tree of Life deepens as life progresses and I put learning into everyday practice experiencing more authentically and fully.
Such is my path…
SEB
December 21, 2025
New York
Mika Ichihara, M.S., L.Ac., B.Phar., LLM, LLB, is the integrative healing master | teacher of spiritual knowledge and founder of Love & Compassion Integrative Health. For over two decades, she has helped thousands of patients from all over the world with her unique integrative treatments and spiritual teaching of the East and the West.
Her services include Japanese acupuncture, herbal medicine, Energy Soul Therapy, spiritual healing/reading, and Feng Shui as well as teaching meditation, Reiki/energy healing and Universal Qabalah. Services and teaching available online as well as in-person in Charlotte, NC and New York City.