Our Approach to Embodied Jewish Learning
Cultivating grounded presence, resilience, and well-being through the wisdom of the body.
We live in a time of profound intensity. Many people are navigating chronic stress, disconnection, grief, and uncertainty, often while being asked to move faster, produce more, and stay mentally engaged.
In these conditions, learning, leadership, and spiritual life cannot be sustained by cognition alone.
Embodied Jewish Learning exists because how we meet this moment matters.
Photo Courtesy of Peninsula Jewish Community Center
Our Mission
Our mission is to elevate the wisdom of the body as an essential resource for grounded presence, resilience, and well-being in Jewish life.
We empower, train, mentor, and inspire Jewish embodiment seekers and leaders to cultivate integrated wholeness, bringing together mind, body, heart, and soul as a lived experience of Jewish practice.
Why Embodiment
We live and exist as somatic beings. The body is not separate from learning, prayer, or meaning-making. It is the primary way we experience the world, relate to one another, and respond to challenges.
When we slow down, place attention on breath and sensation, and listen inwardly, we become present. From presence, resilience becomes possible.
Through the lens of the body, Jewish wisdom is not only studied, but lived. Teachings are invited to move, breathe, and take root within us, as we cultivate awareness, compassion, and agency. Embodiment allows Jewish life to be experienced as whole and holy, rather than fragmented or abstract.
What We Do
Embodied Jewish Learning offers training, mentorship, and community for educators, leaders, and spiritual seekers who are drawn to embodied practice as a path to well-being and meaningful Jewish life.
Our programs interweave movement, song, creative expression, reflection, and communal witnessing. We support participants in developing practices that nourish resilience, regulate the nervous system, and strengthen the capacity to respond to life with clarity and care.
Through our Advanced Teacher Training and the Embodied Jewish Wisdom Network, we cultivate a global community of leaders who bring embodied approaches into synagogues, JCCs, camps, classrooms, and independent Jewish spaces.
Why This Matters Now
Whole-being awareness is essential now more than ever. In moments of collective stress, trauma, and rapid change, embodiment offers a way to remain rooted, responsive, and connected.
By cultivating grounded presence, we increase our capacity to meet difficulty with resourcefulness rather than reactivity, and to stay connected to ourselves, one another, and the sacred.
Embodied Jewish Learning envisions a future in which embodied awareness is not a special or occasional experience, but a foundational and necessary element of Jewish life, leadership, and learning.
Our Values
Origins of Embodied Jewish Learning
Yoga, Art and Sacred Text: EJL's founding project for teens to explore embodied spirituality, Yoga, Art and Sacred Text was originally based at Midrasha in Berkeley between 2001 - 2005 and supported by the Tikea fellowship at Jewish LearningWorks (formerly the Bureau of Jewish Education) with continuing support from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. See articles about this project here and here.
Photos of students Jacquelyn Stuber, Lev Hirschhorn, and Sarah Asarnow from Yoga, Art and Sacred Text Classes at Berkeley Yoga Center, 2005
Yoga and Wholeness with a Jewish Twist: Piloted and based at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center (PJCC) in Foster City, California, EJL has offered several workshops and classes for embodying qualities for well-being in our lives: renewal and freedom in connection with the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashana and Passover, or lovingkindness, discipline, balance, perseverance, gratitude, creativity and grounding in connection with the qualities associated with the Counting of the Omer, between Passover and Shavuot, in her Embodying the Sacred Sefirot series. Read this article by Julie about the practice of Yoga and Jewish Wisdom as a portal to Wellness, and this article by Rabbi Lavey Derby about Jewish Wellness as a path to wholeness and well-being at the PJCC and the impact of this work upon students of all faiths.