I Am Prayer: An Embodied Yom Kippur Companion

I Am Prayer: An Embodied Yom Kippur Companion is a beautifully illustrated companion for reimagining Yom Kippur—not as a day of guilt, deprivation, and passive atonement, but as an embodied portal into transformation, prophetic action, ecstatic consciousness, and collective care. Through poetic essays, mystical reflections, somatic liturgies, and practice-based invitations, this collection asks what becomes possible when we approach the holiest day of the Jewish year with our full bodies, hearts, and imaginations.

Drawing on ancient Temple ritual, psychedelic understandings of fasting, embodied prayer practices, and a reappraisal of the prophet Isaiah’s call to “unlock the fetters of wickedness,” these writings explore Yom Kippur as a portal of awakening: a day for entering the Holy of Holies within ourselves, dissolving the boundaries between ritual and action, spirit and body, inner transformation and communal responsibility, so as to emerge renewed. Contributors envision a Yom Kippur that is both ancient and urgently contemporary, inviting readers to move beyond symbolic repentance and toward lived, embodied teshuvah.

Printed on high-quality paper stock with lush full-color artwork, this companion is an invitation to fast, pray, envision, heal, organize, align, and begin again.

Perfect for: spiritual seekers, mystics, organizers, embodied practitioners, psychedelic explorers, independent Jews, and anyone longing for a more transformative encounter with Yom Kippur.

About the contributors:

Eden Pearlstein is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary lan­guage artist and cofounder/editorial direc­tor of Ayin Press. Over the past two decades he has created an eclectic portfolio of audio, visual, textual, and curatorial works and projects. Eden is the author of Noth­ing Is for Every­one: Poems, edi­tor of Selah: A Bayo Ako­mo­lafe Read­er, and cre­ative con­trib­u­tor to SUR­VI­VA: A Future Ances­tral Field Guide by Can­nu­pa Han­s­ka Luger. Eden cur­rent­ly lives with his wife and two kids in Philadelphia.

Rabbi Nate DeGroot (he/him) directs The Shalom Center, carrying forth the prophetic legacy of the organization’s founder, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, by helping to steward and seed an emergent Jewish sacred justice. Nate lives in Detroit, Michigan with his wife and two kiddos, where he also serves locally as a part-time congregational rabbi, educator, and service-leader. Nate was ordained at Hebrew College in 2016 and previously worked at Hazon (now Adamah) in Detroit, IKAR in Los Angeles, and he founded Mikdash in Portland, OR.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author, scholar, ritualist, poet, dreamworker and midrashist, is the Director of Learning and Ritual at Beit Kohenet, a house of Jewish, mystical, earth-based, feminist seeking (beitkohenet.org) and the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial seminary (www.ajr.edu). She is the author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreaming, The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women, Return to the Place: The Magic, Meditation, and Mystery of Sefer Yetzirah, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (with Taya Shere), The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries, and a novel called The Moonstone Covenant.  She is the translator of The Romemu Siddur and of Siddur haKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. She lives in Manhattan with her family. Her work can also be found at jillhammer.net and themoonstonecovenant.net.

Marcia Meislin is a leadership coach and facilitator who draws on her training in Gestalt therapy to integrate body, mind, and spirit. She brings this lens to her Jewish practice and community, where prayer is infused with joy, music, movement, and creative ritual. Author of a memoir on food addiction and recovery, Marcia values meaningful connection and shares her enthusiasm for life with her beloved husband, children, extended family, and treasured friends.

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the fourth-most-popular queer neo-kabbalistic psychedelics scholar to have published a short story collection with Ayin Press. He has also written books about Jacob Frank, panentheism, and the redemption of ordinary sadness. For thirty years, Jay has practiced what Eden Pearlstein calls "Operation Bifurcation," which these days involves writing the weekly newsletter Both/And with Jay Michaelson (jaymichaelson.substack.com) and researching mystical experience at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. He does not own a parakeet.

Jessica Tamar Deutsch is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. Her work plays at the border of experimentation and tradition.

Book Details
Paperback | 20 pages | $18.00