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God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice
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.
266 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2006
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162 people want to read
About the author
Jay Michaelson
29 books56 followersRabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the author of ten books, most recently "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth." He is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and holds a Ph.D in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Dr. Michaelson is also a regular contributor to New York, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, and other publications. His journalistic work primarily focuses on the Supreme Court, religion, law, and sexuality. And he is a senior editor and podcast host at Ten Percent Happier, a meditation startup.
Dr. Michaelson is also a regular contributor to New York, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, and other publications. His journalistic work primarily focuses on the Supreme Court, religion, law, and sexuality. And he is a senior editor and podcast host at Ten Percent Happier, a meditation startup.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 27, 2016
This is an excellent extension of Michaelson's wonderful book, Everything is God. What's interesting about Michaelson's writing is that it's meat and potatoes traditional Kabbalah sort of masquerading as radical. I don't mean this critically. I suppose what I'm describing is the heart of Neo-Hasidisim or Jewish Renewal---taking the most inspiring authentic parts of Jewish mystical tradition but removing them FROM their contexts and removing FROM THEM supernaturalism, superstition, ethnocentrism and misogyny.
To my mind, this is ideal. And so this book functions as a practical corollary to Everything is God…if we accept Ein od Milvado…what do we, as modern Jewish practitioners, DO? This is where we get back to my initial comments about Michaelson: what we "do" is kosher, shabbos, prayer, sex, kavannah, blessings for the bathroom…That's a list of pretty much standard Jewish traditional practice. Michaelson's strength is in aligning these practices with the Ein od Milvado ideology AND focusing much more on their experiential validity than upon cosmic authority.
Take his section on Kashrut for instance. He quickly dispenses with the outdated notion that Kosher laws were instituted out of practical health concerns. He spends no time discussing how much time one should wait between milk and meat meals. He doesn't discuss dishes. Or hechshers. Most of the chapter is devoted to explaining how Kashrut is designed to foster mindfulness in eating---the food does, after all, become US. This fits well with his Everything is God starting point. Then he provides a very useful and wonderful 7 or 8 step mindful eating meditation with which one should aim her heart when trying to eat in a kosher way. Indeed, you can find other books to tell you where to eat kosher food, what's kosher and what isn't, and how to kasher your silverware. Michaelson is more interested (as am I) in what it MEANS to eat "KOSHERLY" (my term, not his) than the means to eat kosher.
His take on Shabbat is short but equally interesting; he suggests that while Shabbat IS a weekly holiday from Friday night to Saturday night, it is a STATE OF MIND one aspires to ALL the time (which he describes in detail).
In any case, highly recommended...
To my mind, this is ideal. And so this book functions as a practical corollary to Everything is God…if we accept Ein od Milvado…what do we, as modern Jewish practitioners, DO? This is where we get back to my initial comments about Michaelson: what we "do" is kosher, shabbos, prayer, sex, kavannah, blessings for the bathroom…That's a list of pretty much standard Jewish traditional practice. Michaelson's strength is in aligning these practices with the Ein od Milvado ideology AND focusing much more on their experiential validity than upon cosmic authority.
Take his section on Kashrut for instance. He quickly dispenses with the outdated notion that Kosher laws were instituted out of practical health concerns. He spends no time discussing how much time one should wait between milk and meat meals. He doesn't discuss dishes. Or hechshers. Most of the chapter is devoted to explaining how Kashrut is designed to foster mindfulness in eating---the food does, after all, become US. This fits well with his Everything is God starting point. Then he provides a very useful and wonderful 7 or 8 step mindful eating meditation with which one should aim her heart when trying to eat in a kosher way. Indeed, you can find other books to tell you where to eat kosher food, what's kosher and what isn't, and how to kasher your silverware. Michaelson is more interested (as am I) in what it MEANS to eat "KOSHERLY" (my term, not his) than the means to eat kosher.
His take on Shabbat is short but equally interesting; he suggests that while Shabbat IS a weekly holiday from Friday night to Saturday night, it is a STATE OF MIND one aspires to ALL the time (which he describes in detail).
In any case, highly recommended...
January 31, 2011
For someone beginning in Kabbalah this might be a nice introduction but I found it way too practical without the background to understand the why of the practices. It does include specific meditations for all of our major daily activities which are clear and easy to follow so again if you are looking for a simple place to begin, this book might be the ticket.
November 17, 2014
This book is about making sacred every activity that one is part of each moment of the day. Each day we can be bogged down in the many tasks we must perform. It is easy to lose track of what is important, and the beauty that is around us. The author does this through Zen mindfulness practices and reciting blessings at key points throughout the day.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews