In this talk given in March of 2006 at Discovering the Divine: a week-long Jewish meditation retreat, Sylvia Boorestein speaks of the merits of a meditation practice and the ways that this practice improves the quality of our relationships and our lives.

The Awakened Heart Project’s approach to Jewish meditation comes out of a desire to cultivate an awareness of the Divine Presence along with the particular qualities of wisdom, compassion and kindness from a Jewish perspective.

The Ground of All Being

The practices we include under the rubric of Jewish meditation are designed with this direction as our reference point. The wisdom accessible through Jewish meditation supports the understanding that the Divine Presence is the ground of All Being, and the ground of All Being is part of a singular interconnected web of being. Read more

Questions abound in our teaching and learning. Questions abound in our effort to establish and clarify a vocabulary that we can use to communicate with each other and to commune with the resources of the past. What is meditation? What is mindfulness? What is spiritual practice? What is prayer? What are mitzvoth? What is authentically Jewish and what is not? And, of course, what is the relationship between any of these things and the others.

There are two fundamental ways to approach these questions. The first is “What do we do?” and the second is “Why do we do it?” I find the “what” question a question that opens into multiplicity and the “why” question one that leads to unity. In other words, there are multiple forms of meditation, prayer and spiritual practice but ultimately they tend toward the same or similar aims. We may use different language to describe these aims, but I would suggest that they are different ways to speak about the same thing.

What are we speaking about? What do we hope will be accomplished by spiritual practice? Here is a list of aims or intentions that may be all pointing at the same center.
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