Jewish Meditation, Jewish Yoga, Jewish Qigong

It’s not important to me that we define “Jewish Meditation™” or “Jewish Yoga™” as long as we just get more Jews meditating and doing yoga.

We can clearly stop looking for actual, useful yoga or meditation instructions in Jewish tradition, because it ain’t there.

BUT. Practice traditions exist in alchemical relations to particular earth-land-body configurations.

The Yogic Body is a thing. It has its own implications for diet, health, work, life on the land.

The Daoist Body is another such thing. They may be compatible, but they are not identical.

The Jewish Body is also such a thing.

An example: The LaoHuGong practice we tigers do is a sequence of movements anyone can learn. But the teachings explicitly relate them to particular medicinal and seasonal relationships.

I’ve found the “space” for learning those connections to be “full” when I try. Why?

The movements work perfectly well for me, but I struggle to incorporate an outside tradition’s teachings about what they “mean.” That is — I think — because I ALREADY HAVE associations about seasonal energies and diet and ancestral body stuff that are SIMILAR, but not THE SAME.

So it’s not that we don’t need Jewish meditation or movement practices. It’s that we can’t learn them from Judaism. YET.

We can learn them from other traditions, and do them, and incorporate them. But that IS building our own practices. That’s what it ALWAYS is.

The misguided version of “X, but for Y people” in au courant spirituality mashup culture is impatient and superficial.

We don’t have to design this NOW, OURSELVES. We CAN’T.

What we can do is start planting seeds in our own soil, and our grandchildren will see them sprout.

I need to put a sign on my wall that says, “I am not two-timing my ancestors. I am learning things they need to know.”