Aaron
Abush

I was born into a Chabad Jewish family in 1985.

Some of my earliest memories of spirituality are not grand revelations.

They are family.

Shabbos and Yom Tov meals around the table. Going to our local Yeshivah shul. Ice cream on Shavuos. Shaking the lulav and esrog on Sukkos. The warmth and energy of a Jewish home where G-d was not only something spoken about, but something woven quietly into the rhythm of everyday life.

And somewhere inside all of that was a curious little boy.

I remember thinking:

If G-d is really here, then He can see me. He can see everything I do. He can even hear my thoughts.

So I spoke to Him.

Mostly one-way conversations, as far as I understood them then.

I wondered about existence. I explored my own mind. I looked at the world around me and felt, without knowing how to explain it, that what I could see could not possibly be all there was.

I did not have mystical language for any of this.

I was simply curious about G-d.

And G-d felt present enough to relate to.

That curiosity never really left me.

As childhood became adolescence, curiosity met rebellion.

I pushed boundaries. I made friends outside the community, some of whom were not always good for my growth. I wanted to experience the world beyond the environment in which I had been raised.

Yet I never completely severed the thread.

I still went to shul for minyan.

I still took part in farbrengens.

I still had close friends who understood the particular world we had grown up in together.

Something in me could rebel against religion without quite abandoning G-d.

At eighteen, that thread led me to Israel.

I studied at Ohr Tmimim in Kfar Chabad under Rabbi Gafni and Rabbi Bolton and found myself immersed in the deeper waters of Chassidic learning and practice.

And something inside me opened.

Too much, too quickly.

Kabbalah gives us two words that have become central to the way I understand my journey:

Or — אור — Light.

Keli — כלי — Vessel.

Light requires a vessel capable of receiving it.

At eighteen, I believe I encountered experiences for which I did not yet possess the vessel.

During my time in Israel, I began hearing what I would later understand through Jewish mystical language as maggidim. I experienced what seemed to me like souls or presences around me.

But I did not yet know how to place these experiences.

I knew earth.

I did not yet understand Shamayim.

When what felt spiritual became entangled with my perception of the physical world, I became confused and overwhelmed.

Some experiences felt profound.

Others were frightening and painful.

My thoughts could become intense. Shadow material surfaced before I had the maturity, grounding, or discernment to work with it.

Whatever combination of psychological, neurological, and spiritual processes was unfolding within me, I could not yet integrate it.

My time in Israel was cut short.

I returned to Sydney after six-months and entered psychiatric treatment.

That became one framework through which my experiences were understood for many years.

Over time, I came to believe something more nuanced.

Modern psychiatry can be invaluable in helping people navigate distress, instability, and mental health challenges. But it does not necessarily possess a complete language for every spiritual or anomalous human experience.

At the same time, I do not believe every unusual experience should automatically be declared spiritual.

Both reductionism and romanticisation can obscure the truth.

What matters is discernment.

Sometimes an experience is psychological.

Sometimes neurological.

Sometimes spiritual.

Sometimes it may contain more than one of these dimensions.

And sometimes we simply do not yet know.

I have become comfortable with that mystery.

The years that followed were not a straight path upward.

They were messy.

Human.

Difficult.

Alive.

I worked in restaurants as a kosher supervisor. I spent weekends at parties with friends and went to music festivals. I battled substance addiction and entered rehabilitation clinics multiple times.

My relationship with Judaism moved in cycles.

There were years when I tried intensely to become the tzaddik I believed I was supposed to be, keeping halachah as completely as I could and sometimes isolating myself from the wider world in the process.

Then there were other years when observance fell away.

I entered the world.

I met parts of myself I had been trying to avoid.

Sometimes I ran from my shadow.

Sometimes I fought it.

Eventually, slowly, I began learning from it.

The inner work had already started, even before I knew to call it inner work.

Then came 2014.

After an eleven-week hospital admission, at the age of 29 I found myself in public housing with the possibility of homelessness hanging over my life.

There are moments when life removes almost everything you thought defined you.

That was one of mine.

And yet somewhere in that descent, another life began to form.

At thirty, I became completely sober.

Then I entered the digital industry and began rebuilding my life from the ground up.

With a largely self-taught background in project management, I worked my way into operations and leadership. Within three years of my first full-time role in the industry, I was helping lead an agency of up to thirty-three people.

From the outside, this chapter may appear unrelated to the spiritual story.

I no longer see it that way.

I was learning how to build a keli.

A vessel.

Structure.

Responsibility.

Communication.

Leadership.

Accountability.

Discernment.

The ability to hold complexity.

The ability to show up when other people depended on me.

The spiritual life can become fascinated with light.

But light without a vessel can overwhelm us.

Sometimes the sacred work is much quieter:

becoming someone capable of carrying what life gives you.

Around thirty-nine, Sacred Bridge began taking form.

But before I could fully understand what it was becoming, another descent arrived.

Years in the digital world eventually culminated in burnout and breakdown.

Then, during 2025, I entered one of the deepest dark nights of my life and was admitted to hospital three more times.

I do not give those experiences more drama than they need.

They were hard.

They were disorienting.

And they became part of a period of profound inner change.

By the time I reached forty, something in me had shifted.

Not because spiritual experience was suddenly new.

It was not.

What changed was my capacity to be with myself.

I realised I was okay being alone.

That sounds simple.

For me, it was not.

Solitude stopped meaning only isolation.

It became space.

Space to listen.

Space to look inward.

Space to meet my own shadow without immediately escaping from it.

Space to grow.

Space to meditate.

Space for Torah.

Space for prayer.

Space for G-d.

And space for teshuvah.

תשובה — Teshuvah — Return.

That word describes much of my life today.

A return to Judaism, yes.

But also a return to myself.

A return to sincerity.

A return to G-d without needing to recreate every version of religion I had once tried to force myself into.

I began putting on tefillin again.

Davening.

Learning Torah.

Meditating.

Keeping a form of Shabbos that I can presently hold with honesty.

Listening to music.

Creating.

Building things.

Vibe coding with AI.

Doing inner work.

Learning to be still.

The spiritual experiences that had once felt fragmented also began, in my own understanding, to take on greater coherence.

What I experienced as maggidim became more distinguishable - they have names and are souls I had learned and heard about when I was younger.

Visions involving ancestors became deeply meaningful to me.

What once felt like scattered pieces began to feel more like a language I had slowly learned how to hear.

I do not ask anyone who comes to Sacred Bridge to interpret these experiences exactly as I do.

That would defeat the purpose.

My experience belongs to me.

Your discernment belongs to you.

What matters most is what has grown around the experiences:

greater grounding.

Greater self-knowledge.

Greater responsibility.

Greater gratitude.

Greater compassion.

And a deeper relationship with G-d.

There is something beautiful about looking back.

As a child, I wondered:

If G-d is really here, can He see me? Can He hear me?

Today, after everything I have lived through, the simplest way I can describe my faith is this:

I feel that I know G-d personally.

I do not mean that I understand the Infinite.

I do not.

I do not mean that I possess some final truth.

I do not.

And I certainly do not mean that my relationship with G-d should replace yours.

It should not.

I simply look back across my life and perceive a Presence running through it.

Through the Shabbos table.

Through Kfar Chabad.

Through addiction.

Through rehabilitation.

Through hospital rooms.

Through public housing.

Through sobriety.

Through leadership.

Through burnout.

Through solitude.

Through return.

Through every fall that somehow did not become the end of my story.

I feel that G-d has been guiding my steps all along, including during the years when I could not see where they were leading.

And when I look at my life today, more than anything, I feel grateful.

I believe humanity is standing at a threshold.

I sometimes call the possibility before us the Golden Age.

You may use completely different language.

That is okay.

To me, the Golden Age is not about escaping the Earth.

It is about becoming more fully human upon it.

More conscious.

More compassionate.

More truthful.

More awake to our interdependence.

More capable of holding difference without hatred.

More able to recognise the sacredness of life.

More willing to take responsibility for the worlds we create together.

People everywhere are searching.

Some are undergoing dark nights of the soul.

Some are questioning the religion they inherited.

Others are returning to it with new eyes.

Some are exploring consciousness.

Some have experienced things they cannot explain.

Some are fascinated by mysticism.

Some feel stuck inside lives that look successful from the outside.

Some have spent years feeling different from the world around them.

Some are simply curious.

They want to understand spirituality more deeply.

They want to know what the wisdom traditions have been trying to tell us.

They want to understand themselves.

They want to understand G-d.

And sometimes they just want to know that they are not alone in asking.

Sacred Bridge exists for them.

Not to create another doctrine.

Not to convince humanity that one tradition owns G-d.

Not to ask you to reject reason.

Not to replace medicine, psychology, science, religion, or your own discernment.

Sacred Bridge exists to bring worlds into conversation.

Ancient wisdom and emerging knowledge.

Judaism and universal mysticism.

Psychology and spirituality.

Shadow and light.

Technology and consciousness.

Heaven and earth.

The visible and the invisible.

The human and the Divine.

And perhaps the most important bridge of all:

the bridge between you and yourself.

Before we speak about awakening humanity, raising consciousness, or entering a Golden Age, there is someone much closer who requires our attention.

You.

I believe unconditional love must begin with learning to love yourself.

Not narcissism.

Not ego.

Not spiritual superiority.

I mean learning to sit beside the parts of yourself you were taught to reject.

The frightened parts.

The ashamed parts.

The parts that made mistakes.

The shadow.

The child.

The person who survived.

The person you are still becoming.

Love yourself enough to meet yourself truthfully.

Love yourself enough to stop abandoning yourself.

Love yourself enough to become responsible for your own healing.

Then turn that love toward G-d with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.

And from there, turn toward your fellow human being.

Torah gives us the extraordinary instruction:

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

Ve’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

Those final words matter.

As yourself.

We speak endlessly about loving humanity while remaining at war with the person in the mirror.

Perhaps one of the sacred bridges humanity needs most is the bridge back to a self we have finally learned how to love.

There is something I want to make unmistakably clear.

I am not your guru.

I do not have all the answers.

I am not a replacement for your relationship with G-d.

And I never want Sacred Bridge to become a place where you surrender your discernment to another human being.

I am still a student.

Still learning Torah.

Still doing teshuvah.

Still encountering my shadows.

Still asking questions.

Still creating.

Still learning how to love.

Still building the vessel.

Still crossing the bridge.

What I can offer is what my life has given me.

The traditions that nourished me.

The experiences that challenged me.

The mistakes that humbled me.

The darkness that changed me.

The questions I could not stop asking.

The wisdom I found along the way.

And the love that somehow remained beneath all of it.

Sacred Bridge is my attempt to place those things in service of something greater than myself.

So if you arrive here feeling lost, I will not promise you every answer.

If you arrive curious, I will not ask you to leave your reason at the door.

If you are walking through darkness, I will not tell you suffering automatically makes you spiritual.

If you experience life differently from the people around you, I will not tell you that a label contains everything you are.

And if something inside you has begun whispering that there may be more to this extraordinary existence than what immediately meets the eye, I will not tell you what you must call it.

I will meet you at the bridge.

And perhaps we can walk a little of it together.