Yesod
Foundations for Deepening Jewish Mindfulness Meditation
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Or HaLev Jewish Spirituality & Meditation are delighted to bring back Yesod: Foundations for Deepening Jewish Mindfulness Meditation.
Yesod, a ten-month online program, offers anyone with an established meditation practice a new, systematic, stage-by-stage approach to deepen your mindfulness meditation skills within an authentic Jewish spiritual framework.
More About Yesod
This program is built around four fundamental “gates” of awareness which we can develop in both understanding and practice:
The Gate of Love
Sha’ar HaHesed
This gate welcomes us into both our own and the world’s sacred essential loving nature. Through developing the ability to respond with softness, gentleness and loving acceptance to our experience, we learn to reduce our reactivity and meet challenging states of mind, heart and body with love and compassion.
The Gate of Joy
Sha’ar HaSimcha
This gate invites us to recognize the inherent goodness and delight of creation and ourselves. We shift from a habitual “what’s wrong mind” oriented to threat and protection, to a “what’s right mind” that enables playfulness and flexibility. We come to recognize that happiness is an inside job, available to us from within if we can release our preoccupation with reaching for something external to fill a void.
The Gate of Holiness
Sha’ar HaKedusha
This gate orients us to divine fullness and teaches us to glimpse our sacred non-separate nature and our natural luminosity. Showing up in the world more naturally and spontaneously we are greater able to respond wisely to the suffering within and without and allow our wholesome passion to flow more freely.
The Gate of Divinity
Sha’ar HaElohut
This gate orients us to divine emptiness and opens up to us the profound vistas of the radically open and empty (ayin) nature of divinity and our soul. Grounded in this insight of boundlessness, wonder, joy, and delight spring forth enabling a lighter and freer way of being in the world. We can show up for ourselves and others in an even more expansive, flexible, and unconstricted way.
Each gate prepares the ground for the succeeding gate and builds on the previous one. By moving through these gates of love, joy, holiness, and divinity and circling back through them, participants will be taken on a progressive course of deepening in their awareness, manifested in both understanding and practice.
Goals and Learning Outcomes
- A systematic framework for the understanding and practice of mindfulness meditation and mindful Jewish living, based in core Jewish mindfulness texts and terminology
- Key topics in Jewish mindfulness, including the relationship between meditation and other traditional practices
- Building a community of dedicated practitioners under the guidance of leading teachers in the field
- Transformational applications, including:
- Healing your relationship with body, heart, and mind
- Integrating practices into your daily life
- Applying meditation to address physical pain, as well as emotional and relational challenges
- Developing greater calm and equanimity, and reducing stress, anxiety, and anger
- Widening the heart to cultivate qualities such as love, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, awe, and joy
Meet Your Instructors
Rabbi Sam Feinsmith
As Senior Core Faculty at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Rabbi Sam Feinsmith directs the Clergy Leadership Program and teaches on the faculty of a variety of IJS programs. Previously, he taught Judaic Studies at Chicagoland Jewish High School, Illinois, and the Heschel School in NY, where he spearheaded initiatives to foster teen spirituality, mindfulness, and wellness. He is a co-founder of Orot: Center for New Jewish Learning, a center for contemplative Jewish learning and living. He served as a Kol Tzedek Fellow for American Jewish World Service, volunteering in Cambodia with their Volunteer Corps.
Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels
Rav James leads and directs the vision of Or HaLev. Ordained by Rav Daniel Landes, with a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago, he has been studying and teaching meditation and Jewish spirituality for over twenty five years. He was the founding Rosh Yeshiva of Romemu Yeshiva and has taught and innovated programs in Jewish thought, mysticism, spiritual practices and meditation at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Haifa University, Yeshivat Hadar and in a variety of settings around the world. He strives to integrate his study with his practice, and to help teach and live Judaism as a spiritual discipline.
Rabbi Dorothy Richman
Dorothy Richman serves as the rabbi of Makor Or: Jewish Meditation Center and is a founding faculty member of the Romemu Yeshiva, a six-week immersive program of spiritual study and practice. Dorothy’s work centers on the spiritual practices of Torah study, meditation prayer, and justice. She recently released an album of original songs, Something of Mine, largely based on texts from the Jewish tradition, available on BandCamp.
Since 1999, IJS has been a leader in teaching traditional and contemporary Jewish spiritual practices that cultivate mindfulness so that each of us might act with enriched wisdom, clarity, and compassion. These practices, grounded in Jewish values and thought, enable participants to develop important skills while strengthening leadership capacities, deepening their inner lives, and connecting more meaningfully with others, Judaism, and the sacred.
Founded in 2011 by Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels, Or HaLev was launched with the goal of giving people access to a deep meditation practice through a cross-denominational approach to Judaism. It is a destination for Jewish mindfulness that creates open and immersive opportunities for deepening spiritual practice across five continents, regardless of prior meditation experience or Jewish background.