Transcript: Find your seat, a comfortable seat, feel your back supported or your bottom supported, feel the pressure on your bottom or your back, feet, feel your spine reaching out of the pelvis, nice and long. You might take just a couple of easy breaths, through the nose, out the nose or the mouth. So notice yourself settling in.
Resting again in this moment. Now I’d like to invite you to just open your hearing capacity, sense of hearing. Just see if you can notice sounds. Yes, the sound of my voice, but maybe other sounds in the room, outside on the street, in traffic, maybe sounds from the pipes. Maybe sounds of squirrels on the roof, who knows. You don’t have to identify the sounds, just notice. Just hearing.
Maybe there are even sounds in your own body that you’re hearing. Hearing as a way of connecting to this moment. A rising and passing of sound. A rising and passing of all phenomena. Just open up to a big 360, just receiving at a 360 degrees around you.
Nothing to do, no reaction needed, no naming. Taking in sound. Ar rising and passing, expanding and contracting. Maybe this is the meditation of listen, pay attention, hear. Allow yourself to be part of something much, much greater.
Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, Spiritual Coach, served as a congregational rabbi for seventeen years. She has also worked in the fields of Jewish community relations, Jewish education and Hillel. She has published widely on such topics as feminism, spiritual direction, parenting, social justice and mindfulness from a Jewish perspective, including in her books God Loves the Stranger: Stories Poems and Prayers and Surprisingly Happy: An Atypical Religious Memoir, and has contributed commentaries to Kol HaNeshama, the Reconstructionist prayer book. Rabbi Weinberg has taught mindfulness meditation and yoga to rabbis, Jewish professionals and lay people in the context of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She serves as a spiritual director to a variety of Jewish clergy including students and faculty at HUC-JIR in New York. She is creator and co-leader of the Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training Program. She is married to Maynard Seider and they have three married children and six grandchildren.
