How Jewish Spirituality Outsmarts the Anxious, Stressed Brain

Renew Your Soul

Instead of letting yourself become chronically stressed, burned out, or exhausted by the pressures and responsibilities of your daily life, you can renew your soul and your body at crucial moments during a busy morning, afternoon, or evening with this Jewish practice of saying a sincere, heartfelt word of appreciation. Rather than dismissing what’s going right in your life (and only noticing what’s going wrong or what’s incomplete), you essentially send your nerves, muscles, and arteries a healthy dose of joy and vitality each time you stop for a quick moment to notice something wonderful or awesome as you offer up thanks to the Ultimate Source of that wonder and awe. Or in the words of the twentieth-century Jewish scholar and teacher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and wrote several highly regarded books on how to live each day with greater purpose and joy), you begin to practice “Radical Amazement.”