Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

Pachad refers to projected or imagined fear. According to Rebbe Nachman, suffering is the state of being afraid of something that we don’t have to be afraid of. This

this relationship was clearly the beginning of my productive life. I had been floundering through life up till then, but suddenly I felt nurtured and enabled in a way that brought out all my most important talents and allowed me to express them. It opened the possibility for my becoming who I am, who I always was, who the world needed me to be.

It takes a long time to learn to distinguish between cosmic effulgence and gastric distress (and to learn that they are of about equal significance),

The point of spiritual practice, I think, is simply to prepare us for the great moments of leave-taking life will bring us, and to help us make constructive use of them.

Yet something in us aspires to heaven, something in us is always reaching beyond the limits of our earthliness, and we only ignore this heavenward impulse at our peril.

As children, we are born to a world of breath and pure sound. At first everyone responds to our breathing, and then to the noises we make, but as time goes on, and little by little, these sounds acquire form and become words and concepts. No one pays attention to the sounds we make anymore. We become so infatuated with, so attached to language, con

was I weeping because to meet someone only at the moment of their leaving life was an unbearable reminder of the impermanence of all life, of all things, in a week so scarred by impermanence, in a week when death had erupted into the midst of life so rudely at Ground Zero.

How little we seem to be able to control after all, I thought. We expend our life energy trying to get our children to become what we think they should be, and they turn into something else altogether. We work and work, weekends and evenings, but still feel unappreciated or undone by our own unconscious compulsions. In the words of the Indian mysti

What we call suffering is often just the differential between how life really is and how we wish it to be. A