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I'm taking a Zohar class with Daniel Matt (see article below), and also learning to knit, and as it turns out knitting while listening to a lecture about the Zohar is an incredibly meditative experience. newsweek.com/2017/07/07/zoh…
And I don't want to read too much into this, but I think it's significantly lowered my blood pressure. I used to have really low blood pressure--to the point where looking down then looking up would make me dizzy--but stress has driven it up over the past few years.
And in the past few months with the knitting and other meditative activities, I've gone back to getting dizzy from bending over or standing up quickly. Haven't actually measured my blood pressure, but the feeling is familiar enough to make me think it's gone back down.
But yeah, the combination of listening to discussion of this particular text with physically meditative activity has been ...trippy. In a good way.
This class feels like sort of a corrective to stuff like the Kabbalah Centre and other Jewish-mysticism-as-self-help trends, in that it's defiantly unwilling to make any of this *easy* or turn it into axiomatic takeaways.
The community of people that's assembled around it is pretty incredible, too. There's that feeling of WHOA EVERYONE HERE IS SUPER-SMART and also willing to abandon the position of Expert for this.
And I find the experience of using a program that switches the screen to the camera of whoever's asking a question or talking, showing them in their homes, strangely, seductively intimate.
Also, it feels futuristic.
