Piazetzner meditation

I had referenced a meditation by the Piazetzner rebbe in another post and wanted to just spell out the meditation as I learned it.

This is a quieting meditation. The goal is to quiet the chatter of the mind and let the stillness fill the space.

Sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts. Every time you think of something, say to yourself: I'm thinking of [Whatever it is you are thinking]. Try to be specific. An example would be: I'm thinking of doing the dishes, I'm thinking of cracks on the dishes, I'm thinking about cooking food for dinner tomorrow, etc... Every time you name what you are thinking about, you are decreasing it's power over you and your thoughts and drawing the power back to yourself.

The analogy that always comes to mind is of my children who are always coming up to show me things. If I try to push them away, they get annoyed and talk louder, but if I acknowledge what they are saying and pay a moments attention to them, they go back to playing and don't bother me anymore. In this meditation, we are doing the same thing to our thoughts.

Once your mind is clear. Recite the Shema silently. As you say each word, visualize it and allow it to drop into the still water of your mind. I always visualized this as watching the words slowly fall into a still pool of water.

As the last word drops into the water, ask for a gift or ask a question. Then wait and see what comes.

It's quite a wonderful meditation and especially good for finding insight in stressful times.

Love or Fear - It's your choice

I talked to John the other night and he gave me some simple wisdom in response to my questions about how to choose the good inclination (יצר הטוב) over the bad one (יצר הרע).

He said it's really making a choice between fear and love. If you choose to live with love, then it will be easy to make the choices that nourish and support. If you choose to live with fear, then the choices will be ones of self-destruction.

So how, I asked, does one move from fear to love?

He answered that it's about learning to send love to your fears. Simple to say, hard to do. The example we talked about was dealing with old memories of times that were dominated by fear. We can't change who we were, but we can change our attachment to the memory.

In this particular memory, I had not realized how scared I was at the time it happened, but in retrospect, it was very clear to me that I was being controlled by my fear. I concentrated on the memory and then threw my arms around my young self to send love. As I did, the feeling of the memory changed. I think this is one I'm going to have to go back to a few times, but the fear was starting to change. And in doing so, I'm changing who I am now by changing my attachment to who I was.

I'm learning to send love to my fear, and in that way, give power to my self-nourishing inclination and remove it from my self-destructive one.

The warp and the Woof

warp and woof

The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric: “The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the warp and woof of the American nation.”

warp and woof. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/warp and woof (accessed: April 01, 2009).

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Yael today and it got me thinking about the warp and the woof of Judaism. The background is that I have been thinking (again) about going to rabbinical school and coming to the conclusion (again) that it's probably not the best place for me. As a friend said a long time ago: "I think you wouldn't learn what you are looking for in Rabbinical school, and the teachers wouldn't know how to teach you." I guess there are not many places to go to school to learn to be a Rabbi-healer, so I've decided I need to figure out what I think a rabbi should know and then put together a plan for learning it.

There are two aspects of my Judaism that make it difficult for me to fit into a standard program. The first is the shamanic way I experience Judaism and texts, as I've written about on this blog. The second is that I tend to approach things from the heart. Jews, especially the Yeshivot here in Jerusalem, tend to hyperfocus on the Talmud. I tend to think of the Talmud as Jewish Koan study and the result is critical thinkers who excel at dissecting texts and arguments in a relatively cold way.

I tend to approach things from my heart which means that I'm more interested in how to connect with the text, if it has power, and how it interacts with my life and thoughts. Talmud study, as I've experienced it so far, is very intellectual by it's nature, so the difficulty is learning to understand the complexity of it without getting lost in the abstract nature of the arguments.

In thinking of what to study, I came up with a list of the major texts: Tanach, Mishnah, Talmud, Shulchan Aruch, Zohar, and Hassidut. I thought to pick a starting point then just start going through the texts. The warp.

Yael looked at it and remarked, well that about covers Judaism. She was right, I had a simple list in which each could be a lifetime's study. She suggested that I pick topics and then follow them across the texts, learning each text as it arose in the context of the issue. The woof.

They are basically two different approaches to the texts. One focuses on how to understand and learn the texts, the other focuses on how to explore issues through the texts. I think they are both valuable, and the question is how to balance them to maximize learning.

I think there are certain texts, like the Mishnah and the Tanach, that are foundational to the whole tradition and need to be read from start to finish. But the Talmud is probably best done by topic.

I need a method for learning texts that results in a compassionate, heart-centered person, rather than a hyper-focusing one. If people have thoughts on how to do that, please let me know.