God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice

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GodinYourBody.com, 2007 - 247 pages

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.

 

Contents

Eating
1
Praying
21
Breathing
35
Walking
45
Sex
63
Mirroring the Divine
77
Exercising
97
Dancing
115
The Five Senses
169
Embodied Emotions
183
Sickness and Health
191
Life Cycle
201
Just Being
211
Notes
217
Glossary
225
Bibliography
231

Fasting
125
Washing
137
The Mikva
145
Nature
159

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About the author (2007)

Jay Michaelson has taught Kabbalah, mindfulness, and embodied spiritual practice at Yale University, City College, Elat Chayyim, the Skirball Center, and the Wexner Summer Institute, among other institutions. Chief editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, he is a regular contributor to the Forward, the Jerusalem Post, Slate and other publications. He holds a JD from Yale and an MA in religious studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is currently a doctoral candidate.

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