God in Your Body
Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Your body is the place where heaven and earth meet.
The greatest spiritual achievement is not transcending the body but joining body and spirit together. But to do this, you must break through assumptions that draw boundaries around the Infinite and wake up to the body as the site of holiness itself.
This groundbreaking book is the first comprehensive treatment of the body in Jewish spiritual practice and an essential guide to the sacred. With meditation practices, physical exercises, visualizations, and sacred text, you will learn how to experience the presence of the Divine in, and through, your body. And by cultivating an embodied spiritual practice, you will transform everyday activities—eating, walking, breathing, washing—into moments of deep spiritual realization, uniting sacred and sensual, mystical and mundane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the gentle authority of a good yoga master, Michaelson, chief editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, offers not so much a mind/body lesson in Kabbalah as a map to a mindful, spiritually rich lifestyle. Having "chosen to emphasize those aspects of the Jewish and world wisdom that treat the body as a sacred site for contemplative practice," he uses a combination of simple meditations, prayers, Talmudic excerpts and wisdom from historic rabbis to guide those seeking to embrace the "God in your body." While most journeys begin with a single step, this one begins with a single breath. Throughout, he reminds us that "a practice is done 'no matter what' not for strictness's sake, but so it can be a prism which casts light upon the mind" whether that practice be one of breathing, eating, walking or even using the bathroom. Yet, the calls to practice are balanced with a fascinating cache of tidbits. For example, the Amidah, or Standing Prayer, is sometimes called "The Eighteen," referring to the 18 blessings within it that are believed to correspond to the body's 18 vertebrae. This book belongs as much on a shelf with other meditative, mind/body titles as it does among Judaica.
