Sitting with the Sefirot:
A Kabbalistic Journey for Deepening Your Jewish Mindfulness Meditation PracticeFebruary 6 – June 5, 2025
Live Zoom sessions Thursdays, 1:30 – 2:45PM ET
Do you have a regular, ongoing meditation practice? Deepen your practice in a Jewish spiritual framework.
IJS is delighted to offer a new live course, Sitting with the Sefirot: A Kabbalistic Journey for Deepening Your Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Practice. Taught by senior core faculty member Rabbi Sam Feinsmith, this course will help you take your daily meditation practice to the next level through the Kabbalah’s mystical sefirot — lenses to help us channel, focus, and reveal the sublime light of consciousness.
This course is designed for individuals who maintain a consistent meditation practice.
In two-to-three-week units, you will systematically explore each of the seven lower sefirot as a foundation to:
- Expand your capacity to feel and extend love
- Strengthen your discipline in practice
- Develop greater attentional balance
- Stabilize your meditative concentration
- Cultivate devekut, connection with the Divine
- Take your practice into your daily life to support wise, compassionate action
The sefirot provide a systematic structure and Jewish spiritual framework for deepening our meditation practice skills while connecting to Jewish wisdom—all in the context of a supportive, online community of practice.
The option to select a chevruta (practice partner) will be available.
Learn how to recognize your own divinity and live in alignment with your highest truth
Curriculum
The program consists of two-to-three-week units per sefirah, with an opening introductory session and a closing wrap-up session to frame the course. A minimum of 30 minutes of each weekly session will be dedicated to sitting meditation practice. The units are as follows:
Session 1
Mochin and Middot
This session includes an orientation to the entire structure of the ten sefirot and how we’re going to use the seven lower sefirot to channel and focus the light of awareness as we practice meditation.
Sessions 2-3
Chesed
Chesed (Expansive Love): Divine love fills the world—deepening our capacity to receive and extend Divine love
In this unit we learn how to feel held in a field of expansive Divine love and compassion and open our hearts more readily—with warmhearted curiosity—to the full spectrum of our experience.
Sessions 4-5
Gevurah
Having cultivated a sense of expansive Divine love, we now give that love shape and focus by channeling it through the practice of discipline. In so doing, we bring our attention to how we hold our posture, relate to the wandering mind, and establish rituals and routines that support us to cultivate greater regularity and steadiness in our practice, especially in the midst of daily life.
Sessions 6-7
Tiferet
In this unit we learn to identify imbalances in the body and mind, and find the balance point that allows our posture and attention to be relaxed yet vibrant, focused yet expansive. Such a quality of balanced attention supports us to deepen our concentration and clarity in the unit that follows.
Sessions 8-10
Netzach
In this unit we learn helpful tips for stabilizing our single-pointed, meditative concentration, and brightening and pacifying the mind when it falls to either extreme of either dullness or agitation. We also explore the importance of right effort in maintaining our meditative concentration. In doing so, we are able to overcome coarse distractions and remain attentive to our meditation object uninterruptedly for longer and longer periods.
Sessions 11-12
Hod
Hod (Acknowledgment, Surrender): Bittul hayesh (releasing the self)—resting in devekut (connection with the Divine) and surrender, the practice of non-effort
As a complement to the work of developing right effort in the previous unit, in this unit we learn how to release effort altogether and surrender to the light and wisdom of the soul through the practice of devekut. Learning how to rest in the innate luminosity of the mind, we learn the meditation practice of non-meditation.
Sessions 13-14
Yesod
Grounded in nondual awareness, we learn how to dissolve the supposed boundaries between body and spirit, subject and object, and experience the singular Divine Reality even as we engage with the objects of this world.
Sessions 15-16
Malkhut
In this unit we learn how to engage in a practice of discernment that enables us to act mindfully in the world and make choices from a grounding in our innate wisdom, clarity, and compassion rather than the ego.
Session 17
Integration
In this session we have an opportunity to review our arc of learning and practice, and harvest any key insights we can take into our meditation practice and lives beyond the course.
Live Sessions
Rabbi Sam Feinsmith of the IJS senior core faculty will teach this course through 17 live sessions on Zoom. All sessions will be recorded for those who cannot attend. The dates are as follows: Thursdays, 1:30 – 2:45PM ET on the following dates:
February 6, 13, 20, 27, March 13, 20, 27, April 3, 10, 17, 24, May 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, and June 5.
Registration Closes February 4, 2025
IJS is pleased to offer this course at three tuition levels.
We encourage you to pay at the highest level you can, which will enable more students to participate.
Abundance Level
$449
Basic Level
$349
Reduced Level
$249
This course is designed for individuals who maintain a consistent meditation practice. If you are interested in our beginner or open level offerings, we invite you to learn more about The Gift of Awareness and our Free Offerings.
Meet your instructor:
