At a sold-out Shabbat dinner in Brentwood, the potluck table had falafel, Israeli salads, noodle kugel and squash salad. Some guests brought yoga mats. Jordana Reim had already set pillows and knit blankets on the living room floor for about 40 people.
Her white West Highland terrier named Manny — short for Manifestation — walked around before the meditation began. Reim warned the group that during the meditation, there is a chance they might get licked by Manny. For the entire session, Manny slept.
The guests ranged from their mid-20s to their 50s. Some knew each other. Some arrived as strangers. People ate and introduced themselves for about an hour and a half before Reim turned down the lights and began the sound healing session.
After the session, people stretched. People sighed. There was no rush for phones. No phones went off during the session. That counts for something in 2026.
For Reim, who has built her work around mindfulness, meditation, sound healing and Shabbat, the point is direct. Reim calls the evenings “Light Gatherings.”
“If you chose to be there, you belong,” Jordana Reim told The Journal. “And that’s how I want people to feel. I want people to come into a Light Gathering and feel as though no matter their background, that they belong within it.” Reim began hosting Shabbat and sound healing gatherings in 2018. She estimates that 20 to 30% of people who pay to participate in her Shabbats are not Jewish.
Two weeks after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Reim hosted a Shabbat sound healing only for people who identified as Jewish. Reim wanted the first post-Oct. 7 gatherings to give Jewish attendees a place to speak without hearing other responses from outside the community.
“At that time, what we were feeling was minimized, or at least the feeling that I was feeling was anything I was feeling was minimized, not important, and there wasn’t space to feel it among many who were not feeling that.” The format includes food, Jewish wisdom, candle lighting, discussion and sound healing. “I realized that as a concept, and especially as I started doing it every month and the event became more and more popular, that this is something that I hope has legs beyond me.”
Reim’s road to the Light Gatherings can be traced back to her college years at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York, where she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at age 20.
“It really messed up my life at the time. It was very challenging. I nearly did not finish college because I was so sick. My last semester of my senior year, I mean, my entire colon was inflamed, and I was taking something like 25 pills a day just to be able to make it through the day. So that’s when I really leaned on my yoga practice and I understood what it means and how wonderful it is to have health because it was the first time that I didn’t have it.”
Yoga became the practice she leaned on when her health changed at Binghamton. After college, she moved into advertising and production, where she worked as an executive producer and built a career that included work for R/GA, Saatchi & Saatchi and Nike.
In 2011, she moved from New York to California. Los Angeles gave her more space for yoga and meditation, but it also brought a new kind of stress. She had never owned a car before moving to California, and driving in Los Angeles became its own strain.
“I used to get so anxious and I felt like I was doing a workout every time I was driving to work because I was clenching my jaw and probably every muscle in my body,” Reim said.
She left advertising about 10 years ago and took time to travel and figure out who she was outside the corporate world.
“I had just been in Nepal and met an incredible teacher who showed me sound healing, which was a meditation that I absolutely loved,” Reim said. “And I had done some training with him and I wanted to share that with people. So I started doing sound healing at first at my own events at Shabbat for my friends who would come over and then I would play a little bit for them afterwards.” Reim began hosting them each month, and knew she was on to something as they became more popular
“It’s a rest ritual in the hopes that in the future there are others who want to host light gatherings and maybe they’re sound healers or maybe they do something else, song or meditation or another, maybe there’s artwork involved, something that feels like a rest ritual that is done on Shabbat to make it special.”
She wanted to have “a space where we could share what we were feeling without hearing everything else that was going on,” Reim said. “We were feeling minimized — I was feeling minimized and not important. There wasn’t space to feel it among many who were not feeling that.”
At Light Gatherings, she opens with Jewish wisdom, then moves around the room with her brass Himalayan singing bowls, padded mallets, crystal bowls and tingsha bells.
“Primarily now I’m hosting these Light Gatherings where we bring people together for rest rituals that are rooted in Jewish wisdom,” Reim said. “And a big part of that is sharing Jewish wisdom at the beginning.”
Her work also reaches people outside Shabbat settings. Reim’s current work includes mindfulness, meditation, breathwork and sound healing in addiction recovery and rehab facilities, where clients may be in early recovery, detox or treatment settings.
“A big part of my work now is helping people in recovery with mindfulness and meditation and coaching,” Reim said. “And I started doing it because someone asked me to fill in and I thought, okay, is this something I can do? And the answer was yes. So I went and I did it and I realized how needed it was immediately.”
At the Brentwood gathering, after the lights came back on, people stretched and volunteered to share where the meditation took them. The room stayed with the pace of the night for a little longer, with most of the participants socializing afterwards for almost two hours.
“People often arrive curious, a little bit anxious,” Reim said. “I can sometimes sense that there’s some social anxiety and people leave happy, laughing, full, connected.”
For readers who will not attend a gathering, Reim offered a smaller practice: one minute, three breaths and a pause.
“Just taking a minute a day to just pause and to take three breaths and to start to tune into yourself,” Reim said. “There’s a meditation that we do just by taking a moment of silence to observe the flame and to look into the flame and to be mindful that this is Shabbat beginning and this is a time of pause and before we do anything wonderful, we get to pause first so we can really enjoy it. The true wellness that we can offer with Shabbat is slowing down.”
