The High Holidays embody the spiritual significance of Awareness Through Movement. Or is it the other way around?

By Josh August 19, 2014 Embodied Spirituality No Comments
The High Holidays embody the spiritual significance of Awareness Through Movement. Or is it the other way around?

If you’re Jewish, and you take the High Holidays seriously, you might have had the experience that, as the Days of Awe progress, you’re just beginning to touch something, just beginning to see and feel your life for what it really is, just beginning to realize what it is that you need to do to really turn over a new leaf in the new year… and… then it’s all over. the final shofar blows, and … you feel lighter! The Holidays have worked their magic once again.

But what of that glimpse? What was that possibility of redemption? Of transformation? Of some fundamental shift in your relationship to the way you inhabit your life?

And what does this have to do with Awareness Through Movement?

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Embodied Teshuvah: the original class description

By Josh August 21, 2004 Embodied Spirituality No Comments

I have always felt a connection between Jewish spirituality and the Feldenkrais method. Maybe this is because Moshe Feldenkrais was Jewish (he spent his childhood in a traditional community in Europe, and came from a line of important Hasidic rabbis). Or maybe it’s because I discovered the Feldenkrais Method and Jewish spirituality at about the same time. Over the past few years I have felt both this connection and some tensions between the approaches most keenly around the High Holidays. This is hardly surprising, since on a certain level Yom Kippur and the Feldenkrais method seek to do the same thing: to provide a space for change in our habitual ways of living.

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