Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

what Rabbi Huna is saying here is that our attitude actually changes the nature of reality. If we accept suffering with love, it becomes suffering given out of love. If we don’t, it doesn’t. It’s just suffering.

It’s a frightening thing to think that the world depends on our becoming who we are, and it is even more frightening to feel the power of that. Don’t run away from that fear. Collect yourself and stand up to it. The reality is that you can hold it.

The first letter of the Torah is the veit (V or B) of the word Breshit—“In the beginning.” The last letter of the Torah is the lamed (L) of the word Yisrael. The letters lamed veit spell the word lev, “heart” or “center.” So the beginning and the end of the Torah are quite literally its center.

Every day of our life, as we meditate, we engage in the exercise of inhabiting the house of God—of Yud-heh-vuv-heh, of being in the present tense, of absolute becoming, past, present, and future—until we have saturated the present moment of our life with consciousness. Then cosi revaiyah, this consciousness spills over from the act of meditation it

The practice is simply to be consistently aware—of the Torah, of the process of reading it, of our life. These are not different things.

God is never encountered in either convention or habit. God is encountered in reality, precisely the ground of being—the present-moment reality that convention and habit obscure.

Many of us are driven to lives of ceaseless activity by a deep fear of stillness and the intimation of the great stillness at the end of life it carries with it. Shabbat enables us to befriend this stillness, to see that it doesn’t threaten us after all, but is simply part of the natural rhythm of our lives.

This, I think, is the most significant moment of personal transformation we ever reach in our lives—the moment when we realize that the thing we can’t stand about ourselves is our divine name; the moment when we realize that the thing about ourselves we have been avoiding, the thing we hate to see, is the very thing that makes us unique, that gives

More than once it has occurred to me that the main impetus for the precipitous burgeoning of interest in spirituality among members of my generation might be that we were the first generation of fathers invited into the delivery room as a matter of course, and the first generation of mothers in a long time who experienced the process of birth witho

The felt sharing of another human presence encourages us to imagine that our awareness is not really ours after all, but rather something we share, a part of a larger awareness that will continue beyond us whether or not we endure as separate selves. It is the prison of our individuality that the presence of another frees us from.