The Jewish people as a collective body has experienced much trauma to the physical dimension of our lives over the centuries. This awareness is poignant when we recognize that physical experience is the grounding of any lived life. The bible understands sensory experience as integral to the spiritual life. Yet, exile from the land, destruction of the physical places of worship, and years of developing Jewish practices in ‘exile’ and in the wake of the willful intention to destroy our physical existence during the holocaust of the previous century, have pushed Jewish experience largely into the realm of the intellectual as a ‘people of the Book’. It has not felt safe nor possible for many Jews to ground our lives in the physical dimensions of our experience, even as we are physical beings who actually do experience our lives, including our spiritual lives, our intellectual inquiries, and our sense of God, as felt from moment to moment in our bodies.
In raising up body awareness as a core spiritual practice, the IJS seeks to restore a sense of physicality and sensual awareness to our emotional, intellectual and spiritual lives. We create spaces and practices in which participants can begin to explore or deepen their relationship to their bodies as a safe and valuable component of the totality of their lived experience and as a grounding foundation in which to evolve as an integrated and balanced human being. Moreover, we in contemporary society are immersed in a fast-moving, digital age, dominant culture that is increasingly disembodied and divorced from the natural rhythms and flows of the body. Body-based practices that help us learn to notice, trust, and value our body’s intelligence, are a vital component of tapping into the sources of life energy which spiritual, intellectual and emotional practices seek to enhance.
Why We Teach Yoga
The IJS has chosen the practice of hatha yoga as a primary form through which we seek to connect awareness to embodied experience. Through yoga, we can work with physical postures and movements in the body with attention to breath and sensation, that cultivate a deep awareness of how we literally embody spiritual life from moment to moment, from one gesture and breath to the next. We teach yoga on retreat as a way in which to fully embody our Jewish spirituality. As the IJS aspires to deepen the experience of the sacred in all realms of life, attention to the sacred nature of our bodies and how we inhabit them is a core strand of our offerings. The Institute provides a model of spiritual life and leadership that assumes physical integration and integrity as part of a whole and balanced existence. Incorporating yoga practice as a core value helps us achieve this end.
What We Do
“Yoga” means to “join” or “yoke,” and it seeks profound integration of the self within a spiritually meaningful context. The branch of yoga that is most directly utilized on retreat is that of hatha yoga, in which asanas or physical postures are held with deep attention and focus. We work with our physical bodies by intentionally assuming poses that stretch, lengthen, and strengthen the body. We learn to pay attention more fully to sensations in our bodies as they move into various shapes and forms, and to the breath that flows in and out. Over time our bodies and our awareness become stronger, more flexible, more balanced, and more relaxed. As we release tensions and blocks in the body, even at the cellular level, there is often release of tensions and constrictions held in the mind and the emotions as well. As this process unfolds, we can experience more spaciousness and renewed capacities for movement and growth in our lives. As we return to the yoga mat to practice regularly, we learn to ground ourselves in awareness of the moment and in our attunement to details of our inner lives as they show up in the stretching, holding and releasing of the poses. And as the surface constrictions give way to a more expansive sense of possibility underneath, spiritual awakenings and movement can happen as well.
While on retreat, we encourage our participants to cultivate this kind of heightened awareness in all of the work that they do. We stretch ourselves in mindfulness meditation as we hold the pose of silence; we challenge our balance and flexibility as we assume new postures of thought in study, or cadences in prayer. During our daily yoga practice, we work with our bodies to experience these teachings concretely in the moment, and we renew ourselves physically. We demonstrate on retreat the value of daily renewal not only of the mind and spirit, but also of our bodies. We bring awareness to the physical body as a sacred vessel, a site from which to seek, and perhaps to know, the Divine in our lives.
Relation to Other Core Practices
While many engage in yoga as a physically based contemplative practice, in the IJS program it is carefully integrated with the other core practices to enhance and echo the larger goals of fostering increased Jewish spiritual connections and awareness, individually and communally. During all yoga sessions, basic yoga postures are taught within a Jewish framework, utilizing Jewish terms and references. In so doing, the experience of developing a yoga practice can be “felt” Jewishly. Thus, for example, as participants spread their yoga mats at the start of a session they are invited to see these mats defining their sacred space. They are encouraged to envision their mat as a kind of mizbeach (altar) upon which to offer their most sacred and holy selves.
Each session is developed around a theme that is being taught during the retreat, the selection of postures reflecting that theme. Each posture is offered as an opportunity for a physically embodied prayer and as a vehicle through which to “ground” the spiritual teachings tasted in other contexts. As a spiritual concept that is central to Hasidic thought is grappled with in text sessions, and practiced during meditation, we explore what this Jewish spiritual principle might mean as grounded in our bodies. So, if that concept were, for instance, bittul hayesh (self-nullification), we might practice a series of postures that flow one into the next in rapid succession, paying attention to the fluid nature of the sense of the physical as we first assume a form, pour ourselves into it, and then consciously, delicately, release that form, letting the body return to stillness, but for the breath flowing in and out. There is no separate body, no separate self moving, holding and releasing; only the flow of breath, only the movement of intention. This awareness would be sealed in the final release of the day, in a final “relaxation” pose, in which we experience the emptying out of the self in a most concrete and direct manner.
A different example might involve working with the concepts of constricted states of mind, mochin d’katnut, and expansive states of consciousness, mochin d’gadlut. On retreat we seek to become more attentive to how our awareness of God’s presence in our lives ebbs and flows during the course of a day, a season, a particular context. Our study might be Hasidic texts describing this experience and how to work with it. Meditation practice might be to develop more skillful attentiveness to these flows of awareness, and prayer might afford devotional openings towards expansive states. In yoga practice, we can ground this central Jewish spiritual teaching kinesthetically, to teach that in the body, too, we can know God in more constricted or more expansive ways. So, a practice session might involve a carefully selected sequencing of postures designed to help one become aware of the places of tightness and constriction, numbness and habitual patterning in the body. From this awareness, we can work with the play between tightness and opening, as we gently move through a session’s postures to support the body’s growing more flexible, more open. Again, the asana work is introduced in a prayerful and mindful way that focuses the participants’ awareness on the Jewish spiritual concepts that they now are going to stretch and move with on their mats.
How We Support Our Participants
We have selected yoga as the form of body awareness of the IJS, and include it consciously, prominently, in the daily program of our retreats. Our expectation is that, barring disability or injury that would preclude this physical activity, our participants will take part in this part of the program. We are careful to frame each session, indeed, each posture with the instructions that invite each person to seek both the outer limits – the growing edge – of their ability and to know the limits of safe endeavor. In this manner, this practice engages wise discernment, capacities that we seek to develop in mindfulness meditation and Spiritual Direction as well.
To support our participants beyond the retreat, our staff provide them with support in finding appropriate yoga studios where they live. We are attentive to the unique manner in which we teach yoga, so deeply intertwined with Jewish concepts and practices. On returning home, we are committed to helping them learn how to support a Jewishly focused yoga practice while in one’s “regular” life. To that end we have produced two CD’s - one for beginning, and one for more advanced, practitioners - offering Jewishly framed yoga sessions. Further, we are developing more resources modeling how to integrate yoga, as body prayer, into davenning; and how to study, and teach, spiritually focused texts with yoga.
What this Practice Leads To
We are dedicated to raising body awareness, through yoga, as a core practice of the IJS to help open gateways of perception towards the sacred in our lives. We wish to raise the awareness that through a touch, a breath, a sigh, a stretch, a silent gaze, we can know God’s presence. Yoga can be a potent tool to help become more attentive to these experiences, another lens through which to “know God in all of our ways.” We seek to continue nourishing this growth, on and off the yoga mat.