The Wounds of Love: Part Seven – Marc Gafni

marc gafni
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The Wounds of Love: Part Seven

“In all of their pain, I am in pain…” cries out the Hebrew mystic Isaiah, and we feel her caress.

There is a deep heart within all of us which knows how to hold others in their pain. That deep knowing is our birthright. It is the Shekina who lives in us, yet is only realized when our own overwhelming hurt is transposed into overwhelming compassion. This is what the Hebrew mystics in the Zohar referred to when they spoke of “the Shekinah which is called I.” In our evolved realization, we are, each of us, none other than the unique face of divine compassion herself.

So, complete Surrender enfolds us into the feminine face of the divine–the most expansive, compassionate and full lover a being could hope for. Shekinah holds us in infinity. In the redemption of her arms, pain is none other then compassion itself.

Most people do not know how to make love because they do not know how to truly open to emotional and physical pleasure. In the same way, most people do not know the felt experience of true compassion because they will not allow themselves to enter so deeply into hurt that pain itself gives way to the sweetness of the Shekina’s embrace. Whenever you truly collapse into your soul’s pain, the pain itself collapses into the infinite goodness of existence itself. This is its mystery.

The pain of sexual and romantic heartbreak is an intense and exacting model for how we can engage pain in every facet of being. The sexual models the erotic. In the sexual, whether in her pain or pleasure, all the sacred secrets are held. It is only in opening ourselves to her wisdom that we can resist the temptation to turn secrets sacred into secrets sordid.

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As I said at the outset, there was a time when I believed that there was a way out of the pain of Eros. Some people may believe that I didn’t try hard enough; others are correct in ascertaining that I didn’t succeed. But I can tell you that I believe in a version of love that is fulfilled not only through clarity of intentions and shared power, but also through commitment which includes betrayal, through loving gestures which disappoint, and through allowing for the fullness of the other’s expansion and uniquely weird complexity.

I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again.

The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved.

When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt.

If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth.

We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain.

Feeding our sense of being wrong.
Feeding our feeling of betrayal.
Feeding our anger and above all our hurt.

Marc Gafni