Opening to Presence:
Where Jewish Mindfulness meets Lived Disability Experience
With Rabbi Lauren Tuchman
Thursdays, April 23, 30, May 7 & 14
At 09:00-10:15 PT // 12:00-13:15 ET // 17:00-18:15 UK // 19:00-20:15 Israel
On Zoom
This course, intentionally designed by and for practitioners with disabilities, offers a space to explore the intersection of Jewish mindfulness practice and lived disability experience. Out of an acknowledgement that too often practice spaces have been inaccessible to practitioners with disabilities, we will together co-create a field of practice and learning in which all parts of ourselves are warmly welcomed as they are. We need not choose between a richly Jewish practice and honoring the wisdom of our lived experience in all of its multifaceted truth.
Through cultivation practice, we will together explore tending to our inner garden, planting seeds of supportive mind states and qualities like pleasantness and compassion. Living in times as challenging as these, it is even more important that we touch into and resource ourselves to meet our experiences with gentleness.
Too many people with disabilities have been conditioned to believe that we are separate, unlovable and that who we are is fundamentally wrong. Through practice, we aim not to engage in spiritual bypass—pretending away this conditioning or meeting it with insincere platitudes. Instead we meet it with gentleness and love, opening ourselves slowly and gradually to the deepest knowing that non-separation applies to us too.
The Jewish tradition teaches that every human being is created in the Image of the Divine. There are no exceptions to this. We, too, are included. Practice can help us have a felt-sense of our belovedness and help us remember who we truly are.
Cultivating a field of practice that honors us in our wholeness, just as we are, in this body, can be tremendously supportive, and especially when external causes, conditions and circumstances proclaim the opposite.
Our month of practice together coincides with the month of Iyyar, the only full month of the year in which we count the Omer each night, journeying from Pesach to Shavuot. This is a particularly spiritually potent and alive time as each day brings us closer to receiving revelation once again.
Who is this course for?
This course is an affinity practice space for practitioners with disabilities. All meditators from beginner to advanced are warmly welcome. We welcome a wide range of practitioners living with many types of disability—sensory, physical, learning and other. We also warmly welcome folks living with chronic illness and/or pain who find affinity with disability spaces to be supportive. We recognize that access needs are incredibly varied and that under the umbrella of disability is a wide range of lived experiences. We understand that no two people share the same experience of and relationship to disability. We further recognize that there are many people who are just coming into understanding themselves as part of the disability community and we honor it all. If you consider yourself to be part of this vast and broad tapestry of human experience, you are welcome to join.
Course Outline:
Session 1: Foundations of practice
We will begin with foundational grounding practices. The intention is to allow our systems to settle in whichever ways are most accessible as we begin to build inner foundations for our month of practice together. We will work with an anchor and move from there to work with feeling tones, gently noting aspects of our experience as they arise.
Session 2: Intending Towards Joy: Taking In the Pleasant
We will move into practices cultivating pleasantness through an exploration of Dr. Rick Hanson’s HEAL practice. We will frame this practice as a tangible way for our systems to make note of the pleasant, allowing ourselves to take in a wider field of daily experience in practice and in life.
Session 3: Blessing Practice
Blessing is a core spiritual practice in the Jewish tradition. We will together explore how our intentions can support us in offering blessings towards ourselves and other beings as well as how the act of making a blessing allows for a tiny intentional pause that can open us to noting our interconnection with the world.
Session 4: Opening to the flow of Chesed
We will seal our practice together by opening to the flow of chesed, lovingkindness. As we approach Shavuot, preparing ourselves to receive revelation again, our practice can support a felt-sense of ourselves as vessels for kindness and generosity. We might experience these states in formal practice and also as we go about our days, knowing that we can touch back into our deepest nature as a being infused with this divine quality.
Meet Your Teacher
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Rabbi Lauren Tuchman
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman is the first blind woman to be ordained as a rabbi. She is notable for her contributions to inclusive Torah and advocacy for disability justice.
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman is a sought-after speaker, spiritual leader, and educator, who was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in 2018.
Based in the Washington, D.C. area, she teaches, consults with, and provides workshops and trainings to individuals and organizations across North America on a variety of matters pertinent to disability access and inclusion. In 2017, she delivered an ELI Talk entitled We All Were at Sinai: The Transformative Power of Inclusive Torah. Rabbi Tuchman completed the SVARA Kollel in 2019 which nurtured her love of rabbinic literature. She brings a deep commitment to radical inclusivity and a belief in the ability of anyone to take hold of Torah and contribute their unique insights to all of her teaching.
Choose your Rate
At Or HaLev, we believe in the spirit of generosity as an essential part of practice. We also acknowledge that financial abilities differ for everyone. We strive to make this offering accessible to those who wish to participate, regardless of ability to pay.
Please consider paying at the highest rate that you are able to. Your generosity enables this course to happen and helps support Or HaLev's activities and grow our community.
Standard Rate
Sustainer Rate
Scholarship Rate
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Any questions? Please email Zac Newman, at zacn@orhalev.org
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