The daily prayer practice emerges in large part from a crisis in identity. Prayer seeks to answer, via experience, the question that Ramana Maharishi places at the center of spiritual work for his disciples: “Who Am I?” It is told that a certain ...
Archive for the ‘Tears’ Category
Tears in the Mystical Tradition of Cosmocentric Consciousness
Enjoy this excerpt from Marc Gafni’s Book Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion and Rosh Hashanah: Let me tell you a story of holy tears of this kind. A Hasidic story. Isaac, the Vorker Rebbe, was best friends with another well-known mast ...
L’Shanah Tovah U-Metukah: Re-Reading Rosh Hashanah
Enjoy this excerpt from the new book Tears: Reclaiming Ritual, Integral Religion, and Rosh Hashana by Dr. Marc Gafni that will be published with Integral Publishers. An earlier version of this article was published in 2008 as part of a longer article ...
Enlightenment of Fullness: The Great Mystery of Longing and the Tears of Union
From “The Path of Yearning” by Dr. Marc Gafni (Parabola Magazine, Summer 2006). In the world of Chassidut, all service begins with longing. But the Chassidim understood the great mystery of longing: that in relationship to God and to the ...
Wisdom for your Week: Divine Tears
Dr. Marc reminds us here that “in the inner space between the contradictions—that is where God lives.” And he narrates further that the Talmud, in the Tractate Hagigah, states about this: “That is in the inner house. That is in the outer hous ...
Emotional Mastery is Vital to Deep Spiritual Intelligence
by Marc Gafni From a work in progress, Dance of Tears: Our goal is to be able to access and listen to the voice of deep emotion and detect within it the voice of God. This is how these mystics read the text, “The masters are those who have mast ...
Marc Gafni: Tears of Angels: Marc Gafni
New Post begins in the middle of post below … I reposted some of the last two days so that you have the whole picture go to asterisk below if you want to only read today’s post. To retell Abraham’s tale So let us now help Isaac let go o ...
Tears of Angels: Part Ten: Marc Gafni
First a recap of weekend blog torah..and then a really big post for today… :) To retell Abraham’s tale So let us now help Isaac let go of his anger towards Abraham by telling another small piece of the Abraham story. We need to return to the ...
Tears of Angels: Part Nine: Marc Gafni
posted by Dr. Marc Gafni assistant The second way for Isaac and the rest of us to let go of anger at our parents is to have the profound epiphany/realization that our parents had parents too. Mom had a mom and dad and so did Dad. What a thought! It i ...
Tears of Angels: Part Eight: The Hoffman Process: Marc Gafni
Dad Had a Dad There are two simple ways to let go of anger at parents and become a lover. The first is to have children and to need to give them blessing. That is the Isaac story that we found by following the love word ra’ah through part of its bi ...
Tears of Angels: Part Seven: The Hoffman Process: Marc Gafni
Dedicated to the Hoffman Process: Anger or Intimacy? Now if you were Isaac, you might be pretty mad at Abraham for creating such complexity and even pain in your life. And it’s true that we are part of a generation with an enormous amount of anger ...
Tears of Angels: Part Six: Marc Gafni
Love is perception. Isaac cannot see — his perception is blurred. We can do many things in life with our love faculty of perception impaired. We can build a business, partner with a reasonable degree of success and navigate much of life successfull ...
Tears of Angels: Part Five: Marc Gafni
Unblocking the wells, unbottling the tears, can be a dangerous task. The question is, has Isaac left his genie bottled up too long? When the waters break forth, will they turn to deluge or blessing? The fairy tale talks of the danger of waiting too l ...
Tears of Angels: Part Four: Of Genie Tales and Stopped Up Wells: Marc Gafni
To Unstop the Wells (Stopped up Wells, Bottled up Genies) With Isaac, as with most of us, the situation is more complex. Isaac leaves Mount Moriah — the scene of his childhood trauma — and does not look back. Biblical text records that Abraham re ...
Tears of Angels: Part Three: Marc Gafni
Trauma that needs to be cried AND THEN MOVE ON! When is it vital to connect deeply with your tears of angels and when is it better to just let them go? Get on the Bus This question came into bold and somewhat comical relief for me one day some years ...