Yoshi Silverstein: You know you've gotten to this place of new embodiment where you are able to center, you are able to discern the different options available, and to respond in kind. And so how do we get there? Practice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Practice. Practice. Practice. Yoshi Silverstein: Practice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I am so happy to welcome back today Yoshi Silverstein. Yoshi is the founder and the executive director of the Mitsui Collective, and we're going to be talking a lot more about the collective in a few minutes, so we'll unpack it there. And Yoshi is a returning guest. Welcome back, Yoshi. Yoshi Silverstein: Thank you. It is so, so good to be here after all these years. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: After all these years. Oh, boy. And what years have they been. Yoshi Silverstein: I should say years, decades, unclear. Yeah, it's been... What is time? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. So just a little context for our listeners. Yoshi was a guest on this podcast. We recorded the episode in March of 2020. Yoshi Silverstein: I seem to remember certain things happening in the world in March of 2020. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: A few things. So Yoshi and I had only known each other for I think less than six weeks. We had met at the very last public... No. Yoshi Silverstein: One of the last, yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: One of the last public convenings, a really, really wonderful gathering considering the intersections of Judaism and democracy, and had just connected over so many things. And this was one of the many ways that I wanted to develop the relationship and stay in touch. And so in the intervening years, boy has that happened to really wonderful effect. Yoshi Silverstein: It has, yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We started recording a lot of episodes, because at the beginning of the podcast, excuse me, at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw trends in the wider world that people were listening to a lot of podcasts, and we heard from listeners that podcasts were helpful. And so we reached out to you. Where were you in March of 2020? Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, that was a world away in so many different ways. So Mitsui Collective, we had been around in different forms for a couple of years at that point. As I like to say, we launched our Instagram in 2018 and was doing different side gigs, et cetera. But it was really just late 2019 that I was really making the jump to really building and launching Mitsui Collective as an organization. And we, meaning my wife and I and our daughter, we had just moved back to Cleveland only about six months before. We were still living with my in-laws. So I remember I was in the basement of my in-laws at our last conversation. So as we were saying pre-call, the only thing that is the same is that we are in the conversation together and I have the same microphone. Everything else around has changed and obviously the pandemic... And I mean the world has shifted in so many different ways and it's quite a moment to take stock of how much has happened in the last few years. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yes, and we aim for usually evergreen episodes. And I want to locate us in time in our conversation that we're recording in the middle of October, not that long after the events of what are being called Black Saturday, the Hamas. I'm going to use the word terrorist attack in Israel. And we're in the midst of Israel's response to that. And with so much unknown and just as the pandemic remade so much of our world... I think we were talking earlier, we have a sense that this is remaking so much of our world. So I want to register that earthquake that we're in the midst of. I think maybe I want to take back the word earthquake because of what's going on in Afghanistan, that kind of remaking. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, yeah. I mean language is hard. I think that moment of shifting right there I think just speaks to me of how language is so imperfect and how we're striving to put into words that which ultimately can never be fully reflected in our words. And I think as I think in this moment of everything that's been going on for me, I think that's what it boils down to, is there is so much happening in my body and all of our bodies that is not ultimately anything we can fully put towards. And yet we have to try, because that is so much of how we communicate to each other. We're not going to spend the whole conversation talking about this, but thank you for naming that moment. I want to say very clearly that the attacks by Hamas were absolutely horrific and there's no justification for that violence. Period. Full stop. And then I also want to recognize the ways, certainly for me and I think for a lot of us, of just how many different things can be going on in our bodies at once when something like this happens. And there is the fear, there is the grieving, there is anger, all of these things completely justified and probably to be expected. And so I think a lot of what I've been trying to hold in these last 10 days or so, last couple of weeks, is just how do we make space to really attune ourselves to what we are experiencing it so that we can see it really clearly and understand how it's impacting us. And we've got layers of, there's what's happening this moment. We've got generations of inherited trauma. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Trauma. Yoshi Silverstein: We are responding from our trauma, both of this as a traumatic incident, and of decades actually, centuries of trauma that lives and passes on through our DNA and our epigenetics and all of that in our cultural DNA as well as the biological DNA. So it's a lot to hold. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's a lot. For folks who aren't familiar with you and your work, let's actually just talk about Mitsui Collective. I'm honored to be on the advisory committee. Yoshi Silverstein: We're so honored for you to be with us. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So just in one sentence, the Mitsui Collective endeavors to build resilient community through embodied Jewish practice and somatic anti-racism. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I want to just call up that when you and I met at this convening in February of 2020, we were both really leaning hard into the language of resilience. And even as this Hashivenu, we still focus in on resilience as well. It's really opened up in a much more expansive way. And I think the focus of Mitsui, there's a deepening and there's a greater, but both wider and more surgical or deeper. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. The mission is evolving. First just the note on resiliency. I do think resiliency is still absolutely core. It's such an important skill and trait. And then I think the context of pandemic and then the racial justice uprisings, of course the murder of George Floyd, that also was one of those really critical junctures, seismic events that really shifted a lot of things. We started to hear people, I think rightfully push back against the language of resiliency and being like, "I am tired of being resilient. I want to be nourished and cared for and not have to be resilient." And so for me, that's a hundred percent Shamati. I hear that. And I think that there are deeper layers of resiliency that we don't always talk about when we talk about resiliency. Well you do, because you have a whole podcast, but in the broader society, one of the ways we can talk about resiliency is the ability to withstand pressure, to withstand stress without breaking. And yeah, I think that's an element, the ability to... That sense of bouncing back. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's the core definition of resilience. The images, like a twig that can bend, but not break. Yoshi Silverstein: Uh-huh, exactly. So like bamboo, on that biological definition, bamboo is a very resilient, it has high tensile strength, so it can withstand pressure and bend, bend, bend, bend, bend without breaking. Whereas a number of hardwoods that can't withstand a lot of that without snapping, and so there's that brittleness. And so one, it's what are the underlying factors that create brittleness versus resilience, and I think part of what we've, I think and hope, gotten better at as society, is understanding more of those underlying contributing factors and laying less of the blame and or responsibility on the individual and understanding, yeah, there's so much going on that contributes to whether somebody... Nobody with even the most basic of botanical understanding, would expect that if you don't feed and water and nourish and properly care for a plant, that it's going to be its most resilient, thriving... We get that for plants. It's so straightforward and yet we so easily forget that for humans even though... Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So easily, especially under stress. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, exactly. There's so much. At the end of the day, we respond in the same way to both literally, are we being fed, are we getting nourished? And also in the emotional and the spiritual and all those other elements. So whatever, we could keep on talking about resilience. I think the one other thing I'll note though, is resilience is also about our capacity to adapt to change and to expect a changing environment and our ability to navigate that is also a really core part of what I think about with resiliency. That being said, so I have a lot of thoughts about resiliency. That's not the core though of what we're really thinking about with our work at Mitsui Collective. And so now the way that we are really talking about our work and as our mission and vision have been evolving, is that we cultivate pathways to Jewish embodiment, and we think about embodiment as being our way of being. Our embodiment is how do we be in the world, how do we move through the world? What are we expressing through our actions, our behaviors, the ways that we are existing in space and with those around us. And so Jewish embodiment is our Jewish ways of being. And so that is both how are we expressing our Jewishness and also how does our Jewishness influence who and what we are embodying? What are our core Jewish values? What are our traditions, our wisdom, all of that, and how do we use that to move ever closer to embodying our core best selves, to really think about our shape in the world, by which I mean both our physical shape, that's where the embodied practice really comes in, and also our metaphorical shape. What are the shapes that we're expressing in how we move through space and relate to each other. And so that's how we're- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Individually and collectively. Yoshi Silverstein: Exactly individually and collectively. And so when you meet somebody as an individual, there is so much that you immediately start to pick up on through their embodiment. Sometimes we talk about that as body language, and yes, body language is a part of it, but there's other things too. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's an energetic hit that you get. Yoshi Silverstein: There's energetic, there's just... The tone of the person's voice. I mean, there's some very physiological things of like, is this person smiling or not? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We teach rabbinical students about [inaudible 00:13:10] self. Coming into a conversation with your arms crossed is not going to... When you want to have a hard conversation is going to... Presenting yourself as barricaded and defended is not going to help with a transformative conversation. Yoshi Silverstein: That's right. Those are very literal shapes that we make with our bodies that tend to communicate things to others whether we intend for them to or not. So there's that level of cultivating our awareness and all of that. And then we also look at what are we expressing and how we are moving through space. Something like do we have deep listening skills, for example? Yes, there are certain physical postures that you can use to show that you are listening deeply. And that's not purely a physical position. It's an embodiment of am I actually doing the thing of deep listening, and people can tell whether that's happening or not. So we're talking about all those things when we talk about embodiment. We also talk about our embodied knowledge, the knowledge that we hold in our bodies. Sometimes we can put that to words and often it's really hard to put into words, but these are things that our bodies, just the experiences and memories our bodies hold. Also just our neurological pathways, the things that our bodies just know how to do, which might be, we might try to put a step-by-step, here's how this works and it's actually difficult, but your body still knows how to do it. All of those fall into the embodied knowledge. And then the last thing I think I want to say, which is important is that we also think about what are all of the different formative elements that have shaped us over our lifetimes? And hopefully many of those are nourishing, supportive, have allowed us to grow into our fullest, freest, most expressive selves. But we know that those are not the only things that form us. And so we have all sorts of constricting, oppressive elements that have constricted us. So whether that be systems of oppression or different oppressive patterns interpersonally, toxic relationships, societal expectations that are constricting, all of these things that have actually limited how we can grow and actually shaped us in certain ways that then impact both how we then move through the world, how free we feel to move through the world, how others perceive us and how we perceive others. And so that's where, again, there are some very physical elements to that. And that's where we spend a lot of our work within the world of what we sometimes call somatic anti-racism or just looking at racialized identity, which literally has so much to... The ways that we are racialized are not only about our physical characteristics, but they can't be untangled from physical characteristics. That is how racialization works, is by making associations with shared physical characteristics and then layering all sorts of other assumptions onto that. And so that impacts- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Cultural constructions. Yoshi Silverstein: Exactly. The cultural constructions, the ideologies, the assumptions that if somebody looks a certain way that I can know anything else about them, like their intellectual ability, et cetera. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Interests. Yoshi Silverstein: Their interests, their hobbies, their culture, all sorts of things. And so that impacts how we interact with people and how we see others and how we are perceived by others. And so that's also a really core and important element of our work, is cultivating our awareness around how that shapes our interactions. And then ultimately the work of transformation, which is to understand, okay, here are the patterns that are serving us to become more free, to become more liberated. And then here are the things that are constrictive and how do we interrupt the patterns of oppression and create more space to cultivate the patterns of liberation and freedom. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, so powerful. So powerful. So we cooked up the idea of you coming onto the podcast because I was out in Cleveland in early October for this amazing planning retreat. And we got it on the calendar pretty quickly and the world is shifting as we said. And this morning as I was looking over my calendar and thinking, "What are we going to talk about and I don't have time..." It's been... This is the least of it, and it's just been a really crazy time the last 10 days or so. And I had this fleeting thought of maybe we cancel this, maybe we defer this. What are we going to talk about? And then I pretty quickly did a scan of all the ways that I am shut down or impaired or constricted in my body that I just keep getting reminded of and thought, "Oh, this is the most important conversation we could have." I'll share just one example where I was... In my meditation practice, most of the time I just do an insight inspired practice of just focusing in my breath and noticing and trying to let go. And Shabbat morning, I was in a really triggered and heartbroken place and I thought if I'm left to my own for even five minutes, let alone a longer practice, I will just perseverate terribly. And I decided to do a guided meditation. I chose well. And in the middle of the meditation she urged us to do some box breathing, which I do often and I teach sometimes. I even recorded a special episode, a little mini episode of Hashivenu to teach it to people. And we'll drop a link to that in the show notes. I would love to talk more about the importance of embodiment and the importance of practice and maybe even do a little with you. Yoshi Silverstein: I love that. I also practice and sometimes teach box breathing as well. Folks should definitely check it out, check out the link to that practice. I mean essentially box breathing is... Thinking about, there's about four sides to the breath, an inhale, a pause, an exhale and a pause. That's the basics. And then you can map different number schemes in terms of the count or how long each of those are. Often a four or a five beat to each side is typically comfortable for folks. We will sometimes do a practice that we call seven layer box breathing, where we'll do something where... Sometimes it's helpful to put a timer on. And so we'll do one minute of just one beat per side, which is actually pretty quick. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Yoshi Silverstein: It's actually hard in its own way. And then minute two we go into two beats per side, et cetera, all the way up to then minute seven, we're doing seven beats per side, which is actually difficult. It's hard to... The container feels both expansive and sometimes stretched. And when I lead this practice, I also tell folks, "If you're getting to four or five or whatever and it feels like adding that beat is going to be too much, stay where it feels good." So I'd rather people stay there. It's more about being in the practice than pushing it beyond what is comfortable. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: The goal is actually about re-regulation and toward a certain calming down. And if either the physical experience or the emotional experience of not being able to breathe is really painful, then set it aside, it's not the right practice. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, we don't... Pain is an important signal to listen to. I think it's important to name its not always about calming down, it's about navigating what is happening in our nervous systems, and about... Often we talk about these as centering practices. It's allowing us to find our center, settle into our center, or in our Jewish language we talk about, we'll say this, "The sacred center," and we'll talk about the seven dimensions of place is one of our core frameworks. Sukkot, which feels very long ago but wasn't, is such a perfect holiday because we actually see two examples of this. We see the shaking of the lulav, which is that bundle of plants that's basically this rain dance. And so we shake it to the front, to the back, to each side above and below. So those are six dimensions or six directions. We can think about six sides of a cube and then we bring it back to center each time. So the center is that [inaudible 00:22:12]. So it's really seven dimensions, it's the six sides and then the seventh and the center. And then the Sukkah itself is kind of an inverse. It's like the Sukkah creates the empty space that we step into and then say the blessing, leishev baSukkah, which is to sit or to dwell in the Sukkah. And that's what actually activates the space. It's an empty space until we actually enter and activate it. And so leishev, to sit to dwell, which is like [foreign language 00:22:43], Shabbat, the seventh day. All of these, that is the seventh dimension, the sacred center. I think a lot about when we're doing centering practices, it's allowing us to connect to that sense of presence and activation of space and knowing that our presence really matters. So a practice like box breathing... I mean what's actually happening, not to go into too much of a deep dive into the neuroscience, but when we inhale, we are actually subtly activating our sympathetic nervous system, which moves us not into fight or flight, but in that direction that people might be familiar with. It's an activated ready state where we're ready to respond. So that's a sympathetic, and then an exhale moves us into parasympathetic, which is that rest and digest, social very... That is the calm, comfortable, nervous system state. And we are very subtly moving back and forth between those two states, every single cycle of breath. And sometimes you can actually feel this with your heartbeat that when you take a long inhale, you might actually feel your heartbeat subtly increase. And then as you exhale, you'll feel your heartbeat subtly decrease or slow down. And so we're just modulating between those two things all of the time. And then what happens, I think when that feeling of being off center is maybe that feeling of there being an imbalance. And so something like box breathing helps us to re-presence ourselves, to orient ourselves back into our bodies and the space around us through that technology of breath, which is one of our most accessible ways to tap into... Having a sense of being able to influence those internal nervous system states. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: First of all, what an amazing unpacking of and judaizing of the importance of embodiment and pathways and practices toward embodiment. Yoshi Silverstein: Can I say one more sentence, which is... Just to make it even that much more Jewish, Judaisized, it's like... There's the Sukkah. We can also think about the Mishkan as sacred space. So a practice like box breathing is shaping the Mishkan of our body so that we can then step into the divine presence of our own body. It's re-articulating and redefining the physical as well as the spiritual shape of our body as a container for the divinity that is our soul. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So very lovely. I feel like that's the... Going back to the conversation we were having about resilience, again, less a focus of the podcast now, but when I was starting to conceptualize it and think about how to do this, looking at what is it that social science, and you were actually talking about hard science there, in the neurological findings and how does it intersect with Jewish wisdom and Jewish practices that are age-old. And sometimes that means a reconstruction of those practices. It's likely that our ancestors, after they would say the [foreign language 00:26:15], that there was maybe some breathing practice attached to it. Was it just an assertion? But even Rabbi [inaudible 00:26:24] teaches, "[foreign language 00:26:27]." Even just the Hebrew word for breath, which is also the Hebrew... [foreign language 00:26:32] is breath, [foreign language 00:26:33] is soul. They're so intertwined. Just in the saying it, if you lean into the last syllable, you're doing that parasympathetic piece. So whether or not there was a more robust practice that was widely available. So I mean for me, part of it also is just when I would do something like box breathing, which is... Definitely, there are breathing practices that people do every single day, but the practice that I try to do every day is my gratitude practice, a breathing practice I do when I'm in crisis or when things are feeling out of control and it's a tool. If I'm at the periphery and things are really kind of crackling and then it is a way to bring it more toward the center. And it's lovely for me when I do do the box breathing and then I sing one of the many versions of [inaudible 00:27:23] that I know. And sometimes I don't do the Jewish piece, I don't add in layer in the Hebrew piece. I don't think that we're mandating that it must be Jewish, but I think what we're pointing to is how inherent this is, how our ancestors had these among other insights in how they conceptualized the world. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. So what I do... You asked me to lead us into a practice and I totally went down the rabbit hole of box breathing. So I do want to give us a moment of being in practice. This practice itself, this is a short one and it's pretty accessible to do in most contexts, which is why I think it's valuable. It's not explicitly or inherently a Jewish practice, but I'll guide us in it and name where I have learned it from, but then I want to connect it to Jewish wisdom after. So this is a practice, it's called orienting. I learned this from one of my teachers, Resmaa Menakem, who is really one of the leading figures and teachers in the world of what he calls somatic abolitionism, the ways in which we get free through our bodies and build culture that is healthier and more free for everyone. And so this is a very simple practice, it's called orienting. And basically we orient to where we are, what's happening around us. And the way it works is basically you look down, and you notice what is underneath you. You can also feel the floor or the ground beneath you, but it's really, you can just do it by looking, and then you look up and again, notice what is above. And we're not analyzing or critiquing or judging, we're just observing what is around. And then we turn 180 degrees to look behind us, again noticing what is behind us, what is not behind us, what's there. Turning the other way, mainly just to even it out, but also to catch anything we haven't seen from that side. And then the final piece is looking around all of the rest of the space and pausing, in particular if you're inside, pausing to really notice where the windows and doorways are in your space. And if you're outside, this can be the... Where there are pathways that you can see, routes that you could follow versus let's say walls, trees, things that contain space versus things that open up pathways. And that's the practice, that's it. It's basically looking around, but with more intention and with the intention of, "I am observing what is around me so that I can articulate what is happening and particularly my sense of safety." And hopefully if you are in a safe space, this practice helps elevate what is... Our bodies are consciously subconsciously scanning. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Reminding us that we are safe. Yoshi Silverstein: It's reminding us of the safety, because our bodies are constantly scanning for danger, but that happens on the subconscious. And so when we do this, we bring it to the conscious level and basically it does calm down the lizard brain. It's like, "You're safe. There's nothing dangerous around you." By the way, if there is something dangerous, then it helps to say, "Do I need to respond to this? Is this an urgent danger?" In which case, yeah, you should respond to that danger. Most of the time... Well, it depends on the context. If we're just in a meeting or something with work, there's probably not urgent danger, but there might be things that we need to attend to that we're saying like, "Oh, there's something I don't need to attend to that literally in this second, but I do need to attend to that later." So it helps it put it in the right place in our minds. And then that act of looking at the windows and the doors, that is helping us to understand, if this place becomes unsafe, that's how I get out. That's literally my exit route. And unfortunately as Jews of any other identity, most of us know that all too well that possibility of needing to escape, of needing to get out. And for those of us in this conversation and who are listening who are people of color, we know that our racialized identities increase the possibility of being in unsafe situations. So this is particularly effective for people of color and people of any marginalized identity really, to be able to see and to orient to that and to assess, 'Yeah, I may not be a hundred percent safe in this moment, but I am safe enough that I can carry on with what's happening with this conversation, this activity, whatever." And just sort of have that sense of, again, orienting to what's around me. Here's the Jewish connection, which is there is so much in our rituals, our understanding of the world and the cosmos, and in our practices, in our wisdom, that I think serves to orient us to where and when are we, which in our at Mitsui Collective, we tend to refer to as the Jewish space time continuum. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, the year cycle and the... Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. Exactly. Where in time are we in the yearly cycle? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Yoshi Silverstein: There's so much about Shabbat. Like, we mark this moment in time of Shabbat is starting here. Now we have ended Shabbat. It's like we are orienting to... There's so many examples of orienting to time. And then there's also ways which we're orienting to place, sometimes to historical place or to our cultural memory of both time and place. All of these things that I think serve to then help us to become more present with where and when we are now, because we're also connecting, because we're orienting to, okay, here's where we are in a calendar, here's where we are in the world in relation to our personal and collective past, which then allows us to notice where... Again, that was then and this is now, and which is also so much of talking about treating trauma, is like anxiety about what's about to happen or getting stuck in the past. There's so much of trauma work from... I'm not a trauma expert, but from what I understand is helping people to orient to being here. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right, and not in the trauma. Yoshi Silverstein: Exactly. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's how I understand it too. So I want to say that I... It's both about gratitude and there's this element of sobriety that... So reconstructing Judaism and the reconstruction rabbinical college is, we're in an old beautiful mansion. So many lovely elements to it. So many things that are a pain in the butt about a hundred year old building and one corner's hot. The other side of the building's freezing and that kind of thing. My office, because I am the president, is the one that probably looks the most when it was a private home and it was the master bedroom and it's a beautiful, beautiful space. And I have six windows. I have six windows. So when you were urging us to look around and especially pay attention... Except for when I'm freezing cold in the middle of the winter, because it's really hard to heat, I'm so grateful for the windows and there's a lot of woods. Especially the way my desk is oriented, I see a lot of trees. So that gratitude, and then it's so interesting when you... And this is nothing I ever imagined talking about and it feels... I hope it's no more germane, but in emergency planning, this office could be cut off from... There are a couple of different egresses, there are a couple of different ways to get out and this office could be cut off from it. And a couple of years ago I said to the facilities team, which is one or two people, it's not a huge staff, but I said, "Would you please get an emergency ladder so that if I ever need to get out, there's a way that I know." So also within my, what's it called, line of vision, I see the emergency ladder, because I have it... Most people I don't think know what it is, but it's right by a window and it's right where I can get to it really quickly. And it does, it means that I crossed it off the list and I don't have to worry about it again. It was a way to manage that. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. Which sounds to me like a very reasonable precautionary step to take. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: For natural reasons and God forbid for other reasons. Yoshi Silverstein: Right. Exactly. And I think that's to me where the role of discernment comes in. Cultivating our awareness and our attunement is really what comes first. And I mean awareness and attunement to what is happening in and around our bodies and so many- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Can I just talk about the grief just over [inaudible 00:37:30] and our talking about that. If we're having an episode about embodiment, the grief that I feel just that... Obviously this was something that I thought about a while ago. I think it well predates 2018 and the Tree of Life campus and then also just the... Part of my racial equity journey has been registering these kinds of calculations that my friends who are people of color, who are black and brown have to think about this all the... This is a constant scanning and a constant... So just feeling it for a second. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, thank you for naming that. Yeah, it is... Right, these are part of the ways in which we walk through the world and what we have to hold and carry and so that informs our shape, and then sometimes in very overt physical ways, but it also in all these more subtle, often not visibly obvious ways, but it's just like if somebody always had to carry around a 50 pound boulder on their back, we know what the physical impacts of that would be over time and it would impact how they move, let alone their health and their wellbeing. And so when we have to carry around these emotional mental loads because of different aspects of whether it be our identity, in ways that are marginalized, our personal traumas that people may have experienced, all of that, of course that's going to impact our shape in the world, often in very subtle ways that are not going to be visibly obvious, but are still completely present. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: First of all, I'm thinking about what it did for me in naming the grief and feeling it for us a serious minute as opposed to just shutting it down, which is how I was raised to act, with no criticism of my parents, and how tense I get. And there was actually a softness in naming the grief and a suppleness. And then the libratory piece, when the DOMA decision was struck down in 2013, I would not have said to you... I identify as white and I'm middle class and I have so much privilege, and my wife and I, who was... I guess I probably didn't use the language of wife then, even though we had had a [foreign language 00:40:29], a Jewish ceremony nine years prior to that. I felt like I was in support of gay marriage because of what it could mean for people who were more marginalized and the kinds of rights and privileges. And when that decision was handed down and I got the news, I felt this lightness that I didn't even know. I didn't even know that there was a heaviness. Literally I looked around, it was exactly the boulder image. And that's an identity where transformation really can, and legislation really can alter that load. Yoshi Silverstein: Right. So maybe this is a good time to transition to talking about the role of practice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, I think this would be a great time to talk about practice. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah. So when it comes to embodiment, practice is not only important, it's critical, because there's our current state of embodiment and then there is what we are working towards. We've also been talking a lot about this question of what are we embodying? And I mentioned this at the beginning, our core values and for us at Mitsui Collective, we really prioritize our Jewish expressions of justice, equity, belonging, compassion, resilience. These are the things that we see as being part of our collective culture that we're really trying to build and co-create together. And in our embodiment, there are, for all of us moments, when we are deeply aligned with our core values and beliefs. The actions and behaviors, the ways that we're moving are fully expressing a value or belief that we hold to be important to us. That's when things are going really well and it feels really good. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And easy. Yoshi Silverstein: There's an ease to it. It's like right, maybe there's a sense of flow, because the channels are open. And then there are moments which we all have inevitably because we're all human, when there are gaps, when we act and behave in ways that do not align with things that we genuinely do hold as core values and beliefs. And that's where... And often there's a lot of real heart wrenching struggle, tension, pressure, et cetera. So this brings to mind a quote that we use all the time in our work, and I know a lot of people are familiar with this. It's from Viktor Frankl who is an Austrian philosopher and neuroscientist and holocaust survivor. So talk about a... Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Extremist. Yoshi Silverstein: Unimaginable extreme circumstance, and in spite because of that, this quote comes. "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." And I'll also just note when we talk about choice, my bar mitzvah portion, [foreign language 00:43:51] is also, Moshes is in his final words and is saying, talking to people, Israel as they're about to... He's not going to go with them and they're going into the promised land, et cetera. And he says, "I set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse. Choose life that you and your descendants may live." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I wrote a vision statement, I guess as I graduated, and that was the [inaudible 00:44:18], that was the verse that I chose to reflect on. Yoshi Silverstein: Oh, beautiful. And then it was my bar mitzvah portion and here we are speaking [inaudible 00:44:24]. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: How lovely. Yoshi Silverstein: Are there any actual accidents? I don't know. So when they talk about embodied transformation, they talk about your ability... We have these conditioned tendencies, which are the ways in which we default, our default responses to pressure. And pressure can be from negative places, but it can also be from positive places too, but some sort of external pressure or presence that is coming in. So this could be anything from you get a really challenging email that you have to respond to. That would be a negative pressure. It could also be my daughter who right now is six coming up and being like, "Daddy, I really want to build a castle with you right now." And that's a beautiful pressure of being in relationship. And I'm like, "I..." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I got to go record a podcast. Yoshi Silverstein: Or it's my night to cook dinner. I mean, this happens all the time, because usually it happens at the same time that dinner needs to be made. Do you want to eat or... So that's also a pressure coming from a very positive place, but still it is then I need to respond to this in some way. And so we have these default condition tendencies. And so when we think about, okay, what are the ways in which we want to shift those responses so that we are able to take on the shapes that serve us and those that we love in better ways, in healthier, more productive, resilient, whatever ways that then you go through this work where you know you've gotten to this place of new embodiment where you are able to respond under pressure in accordance with those core values and beliefs. And so how do we get there? Practice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Practice, practice, practice. Yoshi Silverstein: Practice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. So interesting because really used to using practice as a commitment, something I say I'm going to do and I'm going to follow that, and I forget that it's also about sport practice or piano practice. It's also about learning to get better. Yoshi Silverstein: Yeah, we think about it as building skill and building capacity. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think about the meditation, don't think about it as an end in and of itself. Think about it as a thing in and of itself, but it's both. Yoshi Silverstein: It is both. It's also that we can practice to... Yes, the process is important and being in the practice and present is valuable in and of itself. And practice also helps us get better at things. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Including being present and being our best selves. Yoshi Silverstein: Presence an actually... Our ability to presence, to be present, to presence ourselves... We can think of it, it is an actual skill that you can become more skilled at. So yeah, a hundred percent just playing the piano, right? It's like, "Can I sit down and play whatever I am able to play in the piano and is that a nourishing thing to do in a moment?" Yeah, and I can also practice in order to gain more skill and ability and capacity in that thing. And so our embodiment work is the same. And so we think about practice as A, what are we practicing? Because also guess what? What we practice becomes what we are. So we are actually always in practice. I think about from Adrian Marie Brown emergent strategy, "That which you pay attention to is what grows." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Christina, my wife, who focuses in on positive behavioral support, and the whole thing is it's against a punishment model. If you're paying attention to the negative behavior, that's going to increase. Yoshi Silverstein: That's constantly the dynamic that's going to be happening. Yeah, and so we think about practice in that we're putting our energy and our time, we're thinking about the cultivating of skills. And also the more we practice, we also grow our internal capacity to hold more, to be more present, to push into our stretch zones of discomfort, to... Our carrying capacity, especially when we do that in relationship to others. And that's where there's the collective element where our community is also... A community of practice is not only about each individual becoming more skilled and capable, it's also about the community, that collective body itself becoming more skilled and able to hold more. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's so interesting. I'm so glad you talked about community of practice, because when we were talking, I was thinking about how the mandate toward community is so strong within Judaism, and it is so seriously eroded by the American commitment to individualism and fueled by consumerism. And I was thinking about community as practice and that part of... Like inviting people, it's not always easy, but we have to get better at it. Showing up and being part of, and I think it's community of practice and also community as practice. Yoshi Silverstein: Right. Yeah. Everything that's worth doing, we can get better at and practice helps us get there. And I think the last thing I want to say about practice is there's intentional practice where we're saying, "Okay, I'm going to make the time. I'm going to enter a space whether physically or just mentally where I'm like, 'Okay, now I'm practicing the thing.'", whatever that is. In our work, we talk about that as studio reps. So we get reps, repetitions in, you get reps in, and that's how you... At some level, you got to get your reps in if you're going to develop your skill in something. So we talk about studio reps of like, "Okay, I'm going to get into the studio. I'm going to spend this time in practice, hopefully with other people, maybe in person or virtually, whatever it is, and we're going to work on stuff. We're going to be in movement, we're going to be in our breath practice, we're going to be in [foreign language 00:50:50] like embodied partnership learning, because that's also, we're not only practicing this thing of tossing a ball back and forth, but we're also practicing being in a relationship with another human being. Practicing our response when I drop the ball. Our response to quote unquote failure, but also being in that learning and growth mindset. There's so much that we're practicing. There's so many layers of what we're actually practicing within all of this. So those are those times when we get into the practice, in order to then simplify the variables, saying like, "Okay, here's what I am practicing right now." And maybe it's not just one thing, maybe it's 10 different things, but it's like I've created a space in which I can be purposefully in that practice so that our bodies have practiced the internal pathways of all of the different ways of being and responding. So that when we are in the more just complex reality of just being in the world where usually it's not so simple as there's a ball coming towards me, but metaphorically there's maybe 12 balls coming towards me, I have practiced in my body the ability to center, the ability to see what is happening around me, the ability to discern the different options available, and to respond in kind. And what it looks like on the surface looks very different, but actually what is happening on the inside is far more similar than not. And so we talk about studio reps and then we talk about what we call life reps, which is like life is throwing you a pressure and you can be bowled over by it, or you can... I mean, you might get bowled over by it regardless, but you can just react to it, or you can reframe it as like, "Oh, life is giving me the opportunity to get some reps in, so let me take this opportunity to be in my practice as an ongoing..." There's no there there. We're never perfect, right? Practice in this case does not make perfect. Practice, just makes more skill, more attunement, more of the things. So that's the life rep. And I'll just say we're in a moment right now where... Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Lord, do we need it. Yoshi Silverstein: Wow, life is giving us a lot of life reps, and just throwing out that question of like, "Okay, what do we do with that? How do we discern what options we have in front of us and around us, and move with grace and compassion and love in our response to everything that's happening?" Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right, and to go back to something I said when we were talking about box breathing, life is throwing so much at us. There's such a sense of loss of control, and this is something that we can control. This is something where we can actually take some action and it has an impact. It has the possibility to make a difference for ourselves and for the people in our immediate circle. And if we believe that we all live an interconnected lives, that we're part of a web of connection and inter responsibility, then presumably it also in ways that we don't understand, in ways that are... It's not the only steps we could take, but that it makes a difference for the world as well. Yeah. So I'm going to wind us down and ask... I could talk to you for hours. This has been such a gift. Mitsui Collective, how does this come to life in the organization and what does it mean for... Especially the folks in Cleveland are so lucky that you're there and to have access to this. What does it mean for those of us who live in other places? Yoshi Silverstein: Without going into all of the ways that pandemic just shifted all sorts of different things and led us to all sorts of different places that in March of 2020, we would not have known. And so I think there's two main things. I already shared some of the ways we've been articulating our work in updated language really about embodiment as our overarching framework. We're going to be continuing our national work, helping to continue to research and look at our methodologies of Jewish embodiment, bringing folks together. We're available to come and do workshops in different communities. That's become a lot of bread and butter of what we've been doing. So we're continuing all of that and the really big growth areas that we recognize just as we were talking about the importance of practice, and we want to be able to support people in an ongoing, consistent practice of embodiment. And so we are in the middle stages of strategic planning in terms of how we're planning to roll that out. And so we're not quite able to fully fully share our plans, but a lot to come. And again, we want to be able to bring people together so that we can be in that space of practice, that we can be nourishing ourselves as individuals and our communities and growing towards a collective community and a collective culture in which all of us, everybody can be nourished, can be whole, can be held, feels that deep sense of belonging regardless, or in some cases because of I should say, all of their different identities that we hold together. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yoshi, thank you so much. This has been such a rich and nourishing conversation and I'm so grateful, whereas I had a flash, a moment of how can we do this? And now at the end of this, I'm so grateful that we did have this conversation. I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing in the world. Yoshi Silverstein: Thank you. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I can't wait to see how the work continues and all the different places that you take us. Yoshi Silverstein: Thank you. And likewise, I had moments too of like, "Oh, what am I going to talk about?" Just such a pleasure and likewise, really nourishing and humanizing to be in this space together. And I think may we all continue to find and create opportunities to be human together and just connect to each other's shared humanity and see and be seen and felt together as humans. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Amen. Amen. [inaudible 00:58:03]. May it be so. Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Yoshi Silverstein about so many things, including the importance of embodiment and the importance of practice. You can find more information about Yoshi's work with Mitsui Collective in the episode show notes, and also that little mini episode about box breathing. And you can find more on Hashivenu's website, which is hashivenu.fireside.fm. And you could also find a lot more resources on reconstructingjudaism.org and on ritualwell.org. Beautiful poems and prayers speaking to the current moment on Ritualwell and essays and articles on evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. Please, please remember to subscribe, rate and review us in Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience.