Torah Yoga

Craig and I are each enrolled in three classes. We're taking the Talmud class together, which is great! The teacher is a lawyer by education, but has a passion for teaching. She is enthusiastic and extremely knowledgeable, and the class is interesting, challenging, and rewarding.

I am also taking a course on personalizing prayer, and a third class on Shabbat. The Shabbat class meets only twice a week (though for a whopping 2 1/2 hours at a time). It is both practical and theoretical. We read and discuss the texts on which the practices are based. I am ready to tackle any and all questions about Friday night candle lighting and Kiddush! By the end of the summer course, I'll be a Shabbat expert :)

The personalizing prayer class is taught by a wonderfully enlightened woman. We go through the prayer book and discuss each prayer in an effort to understand why it is part of the canon, and how we can connect to the words. TODAY in this personalizing prayer class, we experienced Torah Yoga.

Now, as some of you know, I am allergic to yoga. I concluded that I have an allergy to yoga after I woke up the morning after trying a yoga class with my mother with a fever that I battled for three days. Anyway, I'll try anything, so I participated in 90 minutes of Torah Yoga with the woman pioneering this practice.

Based on my limited experience, I surmised that Torah Yoga is about three things:

1. Yoga (we enjoyed creating the Hebrew letter Aleph when we made Triangle Pose)

2. Relating to the text of the prayers through movement (fully creating the Mountain Pose while saying the prayer for waking up/standing up/straightening up).

3. Being aware. And here, to me, is the essence of prayer, or at least spirituality. The Torah Yoga pioneer, and our instructor for our 90-minute session, said that yoga is about many things: stretching and strengthing and balance and relaxation. However, at its essence, Yoga is really about awareness. This came up when someone noted how challenging it to think about tucking your butt while lifting your pelvis while turning your foot and raising your chin and breathing just so. The instructor said that it is all about being aware of your body.

Well, isn't religion all about awareness? When we say prayers of appreciation, we are recognizing that we are aware of everything for which we are grateful ("thank you for the Earth" shows an awareness of the beauty of the Earth, and/or an awareness that the Earth came from somewhere). When we say a prayer atoning for sin, we demonstrate that we are aware of our imperfections and our transgressions. When we discuss the history of our people during a holiday, we are making ourselves aware that we are a product of our forefathers. In this way, all religions (this is certainly not specific to Judaism) are ultimately about being aware.

For more info on Torah Yoga, check out this webpage:

http://torahyoga.com/

I suppose that I don't actually have an allergy to yoga, as I feel just fine now (7 hours after the yoga experience), but I don't intend to pursue the pratice (I am way too fidgety). Still, I appreciated the experience, and I enjoyed my revelation that religion, like yoga, is about awareness.