How to do the Gestures.
The gestures are meant to help you bring about the shifts in awareness. After all, it is possible to investigate the ephemeral nature of reality without actually getting it. You may imagine the name of God and imagine that the king is present; but you might not be able to hold the thought or focus. The idea of the king might leave you cold. The gestures help you concentrate your mind and make it reach down into your physical and emotional dimensions. The mind can think, but only when the heart and body awaken do spiritual truths become real. This reminds me of something I heard in the name of the Rebbi of Ishbitz. The Rebbe was heard to tell God “If you had really wanted that people should do your will, you should have put heaven in front of their faces and physical temptations in books. Instead you put heaven in books and temptations in front of their faces!” The point of meditating is to adjust the ratio between this-worldly experience and the light of truth. When your heart and body begin to respond, then you know you are getting the light. And again, please understand. Nothing is automatic. Believing in God means that you will trust in Him as you search, wait and wander. You can choose to find God, but you can’t force God’s hand. Also meditating with the gestures can look pretty strange, which is another reason why many zaddikim preferred going off into the forests by themselves. Eventually you may find that very small gestures can be more powerful than big dramatic ones. It seems sometimes that the smaller the gesture the greater its impact. But of course there is no right way or wrong way to do them. You have to go with what works and trust that G-d is drawing you close as you search for Him.
The Shulhan Aruch supplies the basis for using gesture to bring about the transformation of consciousness (OH 48:1) “The pious customarily move about while reading the Torah, since the Torah was given in trembling. Similarly this is done while praying as well, in fulfillment of the verse ‘all my bones will say: Hashem, who is like you!’” while some authorities claim that the amidah prayer is best recited without motion, the Mishna Berurah concludes: “It all depends on the person. A person who focuses well through movement should move about. A person who does not, should just stand and pray making sure to focus the heart. Some of those who move about do so improperly. They keep their bodies stationary and move their heads back and forth in a haughty gesture, which should not be done.” By the way, I have never seen anyone just move his head. I wonder if perhaps the head movers were performing some left over Abulafian practice, which has since faded from common use. Rabbi Avraham Abulafia originally instructed his students to use elaborate head movements. Perhaps the Mishna Berurah was unaware of this tradition, or thought it to be an aberration. Since I want to stick with describing things that I have actually seen in a Hassidic worship, I will not expound on the head movements.
When you perform a gesture, you need to put your whole mind into it. This takes some practice and concentration. I like to think of a gesture as a riddle or a maze that one can solve by going into it and feeling it from the inside. You will experience the gesture as physical movement, as emotion and as thought. It will take you beyond thought as well. As the ancient philosophers noted, there is something in movement which defies logical categories. As you immerse yourself totally in the gesture, the hope is that you will open yourself to the larger process of which it is a part. Rising to the light of truth is a process intrinsic to being in the world. That is why the gestures are drawn from movements that happen spontaneously as a natural part of life. The light of truth is found in the ordinary. In describing the meanings of each gesture what you may discover in them I do not intend to offer a definitive and final statement. The fruit of the practice ripens when you find something new. If you find something other than what I describe, rejoice! It means you are walking the paths for real and encountering what is there.
