The body as the instrument

Every meditation in this app has, until now, been described from the neck up. Here is the other half of all of it.

The Kabbalah is unusually specific about what the body does. Not as symbolism laid over a practice afterwards, but as instruction: put your face between your knees; bring your feet together; bend at this word and straighten at that one; move your head with the vowel you are sounding; cover your eyes with your hand for the length of one sentence. These are not postures in the sense of a held seat. They are brief, asymmetrical, and welded to speech — the body doing something because a word requires it. Which is what you would expect from a tradition whose central claim is that the world is spoken.

The room draws a figure and has it do these things, at whatever speed you like, from any angle. Nothing here is required of you. Layer marks throughout: Talmudic material is one thing, Abulafia's manuals are another, the Hekhalot descent is a third, and the Zoharic and later readings are a fourth.