What does it mean to actually experience connection, rather than just feel it or think about it? At a panel discussion before a screening at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, Danielle described what happened after spending a week in silence: ‘You come away realizing that I am bound up with all of life. Not as an idea—as something you experience in your body.’
Before my first retreat, I thought of meditation as something in the head—a way to find calm, maybe. I never imagined it might open my senses to feel more love, connection, and meaning.
We use the word ‘connection’ constantly now—it’s become almost meaningless, like ‘wellness’ or ‘mindfulness’ or any of those other words that get smoothed down by overuse. But Danielle was describing something different. Not an idea about connection. Not even a feeling of connection, really. But an experience of it, in your body, as fact.
Rabbi James Jacobson-Maisels, who leads these retreats, came to meditation through suffering. In college, dealing with chronic pain and depression he hadn’t yet named, there was a fog between him and the world. “I was just really suffering a lot,” he recalls. “I was looking for a way out. I didn’t really know what that was.”
Through meditation and eventually retreat, something shifted—not all at once, but gradually, in ways he describes as fundamental to how he now moves through the world.
But how does this actually happen? I’d tried meditation for years without much success—it never really clicked. Then I attended one of these seven-day silent retreats with Rabbi James. By the fourth day, something I can only describe as “getting it” occurred. Everything I’d been searching for, somehow on this retreat I was able to find. I went back, both to sit again and to film what I could of this strange alchemy.