The wheels rose up with them,
For the living spirit was in the wheels.
— Ezekiel 1:20, trans. Rabbi Julia Watts Belser
CWs: Ableism, brief mention of Kristallnacht
I. By Rabbi David A. Cooper, redacted by M. Campbell
Adapted from Rabbi Cooper’s walking meditation
“[Wheeling] meditation is one of the most useful techniques in all of contemplative practice. Most of us are lost in thought when we [wheel] from one place to another, [vigilant for any barriers that may make themselves known to us]. Yet, whereas we usually must arrange a special time for a sitting meditation, [wheeling] is something we [tend to] do many times per day. Once we learn how to bring a contemplative aspect to our [wheeling], the opportunities for daily meditation multiply dramatically.
In many ways the [wheeling] practice is similar to sitting meditation. The objective is to focus attention on the experience of the body. However, while the focus of sitting meditation is typically on the breathing — feeling the chest or stomach move with the breath — the focus of [wheeling] meditation is primarily what is happening in [our body, our chair, and the earth itself] when we are [wheeling]. And a great deal is happening!
When we practice [wheeling] meditation, it is usually preferable to select a fairly level place about [twenty or thirty] feet in length. The idea is to experience the process of [wheeling], but not to be going anywhere. When we think we are going somewhere, it is much more difficult to concentrate on being where we actually are, that is, here in the moment. When we have nowhere to go, then we can be fully engaged in the contemplative [wheeling] experience. So, pick a place for [wheeling, a place where your wheels are at home and you and your chair sing and dance together, where you know every detail of the terrain to the point you’ve memorized how to navigate it, to the point the very earth itself joins as a third partner in your ballet], and then please follow along.”
II. [Wheeling] Meditation
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Before you begin, take the time to check in with your body and make sure it is willing to accompany you for this meditation, in this moment. If it is not, gently and compassionately grant your body the gift of rest and softness and consider trying the meditation at a different time. Likewise, if any of this process is inaccessible to you, please modify it to whatever degree you choose and tell me about it!
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Sit in your chair, at one end of your chosen strip of land. Put on your brakes. With curiosity and gentleness, explore the feeling of sitting on your wheels. Consider the way the seat holds you, the back bends slightly as you lean into it, the wheels shift as you move as if waiting with bated breath for you to begin rolling. Consider the way it is a conduit to the earth, touching the ground so you don’t have to.
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Listen for the sounds your chair makes as you sit in it, its little messages to you and the world. Think about the way in which it maintains balance for you, the way in which even if you were to lean left, right, forward, back, it would hold you. Feel the way in which the wheelchair as physical object is an extension of the physicality of your body.
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Do not move yet, but start to think about it. Think about the physical processes necessary to undo your brakes and begin to wheel. Hold that intention in your mind as vividly as you can, but do not yet enact it.
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You will now undo your brakes. If your chosen piece of land is not flat enough to prevent you from rolling, combine this step with the next. Take your brakes off slowly and thoughtfully, observing what exactly your body is doing to perform this movement. This may be deep attention to your arm’s stretching sinews as you reach down, it may involve observing your finger movements on your controls, your head movements, your breath. Whatever method is used to control your chair.
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Now we begin to wheel. Unlike walking, wheeling is continuous, it is not divided into the rhythmic tattoo of steps. We will go slowly and thoughtfully, but it will not be broken up into a series of slow steps that we acknowledge individually. Instead, begin to move and feel the way in which you are pushing through your inertia with the help of your chair and being set into motion. Continue, with curiosity, to observe and contemplate the physical process of your wheeling, whether the movement of your arms on the wheels, the breath or head movements required, or the experience of being pushed by someone else and your physical relation to that act. Pay as fine and focused attention to these physical process of movement as you can, returning to a contemplation and appreciation of your wheels themselves when you get distracted. Feel, in the words of Rabbi Belser, “two intertwined bodies becoming one as we roll”.
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As this physical meditation develops, as you move up and down your chosen land, extend your contemplation further outwards. Consider not just your body in relation to the wheelchair. Consider you and the wheelchair in relation to the ground below you. Consider the way in which — on familiar terrain, free from the burden of ableism — the earth reveals itself not as a barrier but as a divine dance partner in your movement, even if that movement is difficult. Contemplate the deep relationship you have with the space around you, the way in which you think so deeply about navigating the world, the way in which you and your chair are, together, so powerfully rooted in this earth.
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You may, if you wish, recite or think a phrase that helps you maintain mindfulness in these actions. This can be physical contemplation, for instance “forward, grab, roll, release, back” for the process of wheeling a manual chair. It can be something more spiritual such as a mantra or the letters of the tetragrammaton. It can be nothing at all. If you do choose to recite something, ensure that it is guiding you and not distracting from the focus on the physicality of your wheeling.
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As you continue, you may speed up slowly. It is typically harder to maintain mindfulness when moving quickly, so take the time to accelerate at your own pace and make sure you are maintaining the contemplation as best you can during the process.
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Just as slowly, come to a stop. The timing of when you’re done is up to you. Aim for a length of meditation you can handle comfortably without physical detriment afterwards, however short that may be. Stop as slowly as you began, decelerating to motionlessness and feeling the texture of that deceleration through you and your chair. Take a moment (if possible) and then put your brakes on again, contemplating the extraordinary movements required to do so.
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Sit, for one moment longer. Think again of your chair holding you, supporting you. Think of the way it connects to the earth, the way it connects to other people. Thank it. Thank the earth. Thank your attendants, if you have any. Thank yourself.
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Go in peace and safety.
III. Commentary
Near the beginning of Rabbi Cooper’s excellent book on Kabbalah, God is a Verb, he is discussing the idea of awareness. Awareness, to the rabbi, is a fundamental characteristic of the mystic mind. In typical fashion, Rabbi Cooper illustrates this with a story. He discusses a man who received a traumatic brain injury during Kristallnacht, thenceforth being unable to speak and needing to be fed. To Rabbi Cooper, this man’s disabling saved his family, as it prompted them fleeing Germany. However, “the cost was dear, beyond calculation, as his mind had been utterly destroyed.”
Rabbi Cooper presents this story, which he understandably seems quite horrified by, as a reminder of the importance of awareness, that “nothing comes close to its value in our lives”. That is to say, those who “lose” awareness are a lesson to us about how much we should value it.
Without minimizing the sheer horror of what happened to this man, the trauma and lasting scars of Kristallnacht, I absolutely must resist Rabbi Cooper’s assertion, the tidy lesson to the abled he presents disability as. Let’s discuss further and then return to this story with some awareness of our own.
Religion, spirituality, and mysticism are rife with deeply embedded ableism. This is understandable - they are a reflection of societal imagination and society is often intensely ableist. However, I feel that the specific methods of ableism in spirituality are often underdiscussed. My intention in this commentary is not to present a Formal Study on Ableism in Religion, but simply to reflect on a few specific types of ableism in spirituality that we can wrestle with and, fingers crossed, use as an impetus to develop our own disabled theology.
In Buddhist tradition, it is described that the Buddha possessed the “32 signs of a Great Man”, physical marks that represent the authenticity of the Buddha and his spiritual achievement. While one could pick at the various signs as examples of ableist thought (see, for instance, mention of the Buddha having a well-proportioned body and sure feet), that is not my interest here. Instead, I want to think about the relation I as a disabled and transgender person has to the idea of physical signs of spiritual perfection in general. That is to say, by listing signs of spiritual perfection that show on the body, we are inherently engaging in an ableist logic. Even if we interpreted, re-translated, or rewrote every sign to mention wheelchairs and autism and missing limbs and bent backs, it would still be grounded in an ableist framework.
To describe the physical as reflecting spiritual perfection is ableist, regardless of the specifics of that description, because one is still tying bodily nature to the implicitly moralized results of an inner process. I do not think that this means Buddhism is inherently ableist or anything of that sort, but rather that the way religion and social normativity come together often produces ableist spiritual structures that we must acknowledge.
In her powerful book, Loving Our Own Bones, Rabbi Belser discusses Leviticus 21, a chapter that is troubling for disabled theology. In this chapter, it is described what qualifies a priest to perform the full spiritual duties of performing sacrifices in the temple. In addition to moral and relational qualifiers such as marriage practices, it lists a number of traits and disabilities that disqualify you from performing the full priestly duties of your abled companions. These “defects” include visible differences such as having a limp, being a little person, and so on, but also include curiously invisible disabilities like having crushed testes, and purely aesthetic differences like having boil scars.
As Rabbi Belser points out, there seems to be an implication that there is a dual concern on the part of the Biblical writers. On one hand, there is a concern with the way the gathered Israelites would react to the idea of a “blemished” spiritual leader. On the other, there is an equal concern with the way G-d would. That is to say, if the kohanim are a direct conduit between the people and G-d, their bodies themselves must match both the people’s and G-d’s aesthetic preferences of clean-ness, symmetry, abledness, and so on. And since nothing is hidden from G-d, this includes aesthetic preferences that would be invisible to the gathered congregation. To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is an objective fact about G-d’s aesthetic preferences (if such a thing can be said to exist), but that this is something the scribes of Leviticus were thinking a lot about as they wrote and redacted their holy texts.
For a full rabbinic discussion of this topic, along with some potent suggestions for how to grapple with it, please do read the chapter in Rabbi Belser’s book. For now, the main thing I want to point to is the aesthetics of disability and how that collides with religion.
In Autistic Disturbances, Julia Miele Rodas discusses autism, and by extension disability in general, as a primarily aesthetic category. Her point is that all of the medical “characteristics” of autism, how we recognize, talk about, and diagnose it, are external aesthetic expressions. It concerns language, writing, communication, scheduling and socializing. There is very little in the DSM about the autistic’s internal state, because that is not open to the abled gaze, the aestheticizing gaze, in the same way.
All three of these points are the same point. They could be joined by a litany of other points: healing as a metaphor for coming to god in Christianity, bodily perfection in Taoism, miracle cures in European alchemy, and so on. For now, let us return to Rabbi Cooper’s story.
The thing that makes me shake when I read Rabbi Cooper’s presentation of this story is this aestheticization of disability as representing a deeper spiritual state. Because here is the truth: we do not now know anything about this man’s awareness. And even that is predicated on the idea of awareness being a coherent thing, which I am highly skeptical of. What are the things Rabbi Cooper tells us that signify this man’s lack of awareness, the grand tragedy of this man’s relationship to G-d being stolen from him? That he can’t feed himself and can’t speak. Is that it? Is our imagination of the mystic experience, whatever you choose to call it, so limited that we can’t possibly imagine that someone who can’t speak can’t have spirituality? That someone who has intellectual disabilities can’t? Do disabled people simply exist as a lesson for abled people to be pious and value the things they have? Are we the “here be dragons” on the map of your way to oneness?
This upsets me, and I write from a place of upset intentionally. Rabbi Cooper’s writing is gentle, warm, and powerful. He was a remarkable theologian and by all accounts seemed like a good man, may he rest in peace. In fact, I strongly suspect that if I had the opportunity to sit down with him and discuss this, he would be kind, apologetic, and understanding.
That doesn’t make it not hurt.
As a disabled and transgender person deeply interested in theology and mysticism, I am constantly reminded that I am seen as “impure” or “lower” by most spiritual mainstreams. At best I get to be a romantic disabled oracle with unique access to the truth which, frankly, is still intensely ableist, still sets me up to have my agency limited in service of the abled.
Wrestling with this is hard. It is understandable to forsake any organized form of spirituality because of this deeply embedded ableism. I am not here to proselytize at you, and my own approach to religion is pretty damn idiosyncratic. That said, the wrestling that I do as a person of weird body and mind with spirituality is important to me. I get something from it.
Because here’s the thing. At the end of the day, I think people are wrong. The idea of a spiritual experience that depends on ability, on race, on gender, on bodily or mental markers, on aesthetics, does not at all match my most profound experiences with spirituality. It does not at all match the theology that most tears me open, such as Rabbi Belser’s book. It does not at all match the way these mystics themselves talk about their experience.
I don’t think this is intentional, as such. I think that for all of human history we have been wrestling with the ineffable, and that wrestling is inherently tied into the way we think about and navigate personhood, normativity, and aesthetic experience. I think that, because religion is deeply concerned with the maintenance of the social, it can very easily become deeply concerned with drawing lines on who gets to be included in the social in the first place.
I don’t have a solution here, neither how to be religious as a disabled person, nor how to give up religion for your own liberation. There is much you can read on the topic. You can make your own conclusions. If there is one purpose to this piece, it is to work through some of my own feelings about the embedded ableist assumptions in the way spirituality is discussed and to say that it does not have to be this way, that we can struggle with that and come to a richer understanding. That there is a place for me, a place for you. That place may be out of spirituality entirely, it may not be. But there is a place. I promise.
And, finally, we can ask: If the mystic is so concerned with discovering something that can’t be expressed through language, that is truly universal and beyond our perceptions, why are they often terrified of the idea of difference in language or body or mind? Why does the transcending of our perceptions require those perceptions to have specific capabilities? Why does the transcending of our bodies require our bodies conforming to a specific form? What does it mean to open ourselves up, not to point to the disabled as being noble sufferers, but just as people with different spiritual tools. How do we find, not just disability theology, but disabled theology? What does it mean to perform wheeling meditation?
Bibliography
- Belser, Julia W., Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole.
- Cooper, David A., God is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism.
- Cooper, David A., The Handbook of Jewish Meditation Practices: A Guide for Enriching the Sabbath and Other Days of Your Life.
- Power, John. “The Body of the Buddha”.
- Rodas, Julia M., Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe.