In earlier blogs I have talked about intimacy as shared identity. It is precisely this expansion of self which is ecstatic. The move from I to We is the greatest joy of a human life. The circle expands however beyond the We of intimate relationship, ...
Archive for the ‘Blog – Spiritually Incorrect’ Category
Falling in Love: Part Twenty Two: Marc Gafni
In Ecstasy The perceptions of falling in love is but one expression however of a broader kind of perception. This higher way of seeing is the path of Ecstasy. Ecstasy, from the Greek word ex-stasis, means “to move beyond stasis,” that is “beyon ...
Falling in Love: Part Twenty One: Marc Gafni[
The Wisdom of the Womb Fifth century masters tell of an angel who comes and teaches all the wisdom of the world to us as we are growing in the womb. But upon our birth, that same angel puts its finger to our lips, and we forget all that we have learn ...
Falling in Love: Part Nineteen: Marc Gafni
Continued from yesterday. Good morning everyone. A gorgeous day to you all. This pattern of arousal from above, followed by a fall to which we need to respond with avodah — human work — is not only the pattern of love in relationship. It reveals ...
Falling in Love: Part Eighteen: Marc Gafni
“Joy whose hand is ever at his lips, Bidding adieu.” (Keats) Suddenly finding ourselves having to work for what was first experienced as a gift of magical purity can be infuriating, until we realize that losing paradise is not a cruel personal pu ...
Falling In Love: Part Seventeen: Remember The Night You Fell In Love: Marc Gafni
Vessels and Light Light is the symbol of love. When the vessels are repaired then they will once again be able to hold the light. So falling in love is somewhat like gazing directly into the midday sun: we cannot contain the light without first prepa ...
Falling in Love: Part Sixteen: Marc Gafni
So picking up from yesterday. There are three reasons for this essential pattern of the spirit rooted in the sexual and expressed so powerfully in love and Eros. One: Kabbalists begin from the clarity of personal experience. We do not work to fall in ...
Falling in Love: Part Fifteen: Marc Gafni
Hitting Ground The only problem with falling in love, or so it would seem, is that we are never able to keep falling: eventually we always hit the ground. Much like the initial core certainty of parental love, romantic love is often lost and needs to ...
Falling in Love: Part Fourteen: Marc Gafni
So the baby and the child and then the teenager get stuck behind these walls that we have come to call ego. In fact, as a society, we support and prop up these walls with phrases like “healthy ego,” “strength,” and the like, but, despite the ...
Falling in Love: Part Thirteen: Marc Gafni
We all know the throbbing raw pain which we call loneliness. We feel essentially disconnected — our very essence is misunderstood. Misunderstood We call this misunderstanding loneliness. Loneliness is, on one level, the inability to share my soul p ...
Falling in Love: Part Twelve: Marc Gafni
Before Boundaries Maternal love is the movement from onement to separation. Romantic love is the move from separation to onement. -Erich Fromm ‘The Sane Society’ What is the inside of the falling in love experience? In the first months of life, t ...
Falling in Love: Part Eleven: Marc Gafni
As in Sex, so in Love In both love and sex, this is the necessary and elegant erotic pattern. It is enormously important to fall in love. It is a true erotic perception. Everything it teaches us is true. And it is enormously important to fall out of ...
A Response from a Second Wave Feminist to a Jewish Leader
The following is a response to a Jewish leader who has from a spiritual leader and teacher holding the voice of the sacred feminine. Dear Rabbi X, You ignored virtually every point we made in our letter. We stated clearly that the relationships forme ...
Falling in Love: Part Ten: Marc Gafni
Falling in love is not only purposeful, it also invests us with a sense of intention, meaning and energy. The love fall breaks the alienation of cosmic loneliness in our hearts. It ends our isolation and breathes us full of inspiration. Falling in lo ...