Yearning and Nightmares – Marc Gafni

marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
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Good morning! Marc Gafni here. Monday morning here in Salt Lake City. Sun is shining.

The essay on imagination which is the core of this blog post is below; feel free to scroll down and skip my personal musings in the morning.

Musings…

How are you? Did you sleep well? Me …not bad. I had terrible nightmares last night, as I did almost every night for for the first 18 months or so after I left Israel in May 2006.

There is a profound idea in Hebrew and Buddhist teaching, and I am sure in other traditions, which holds that natural “closure” is important. That can mean closure in a relationship, a business, a stage of life, or even the proper closure of life itself.

When a person for example dies suddenly, the Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of the Bardo as the in between place where the person dwells, unable to “rest in peace.” Hebrew sources in the Kabbalah have conceptions very similar to the Tibetan Bardo. Whenever there is a rupture in our lives that is sudden and brutal, we are left in a Bardo until we are able to create closure and completion for that part of our lives.

There are people in my life, who, for a variety of reasons, I have been unable to create full closure with…. One of them is my former partner in Israel, Avraham Leader. There are others as well. People with whom I spent years in close if complex relationship, and who by force of karma and circumstance I am no longer in touch with. I miss them.

What to do…

The only practice that I know of which is effective and transformative is a kind of witnessing practice. Isaiah writes, “You are my witnesses,” meaning that to become evolved, divine beings, we must learn to witness.

In this case that would mean:

Step One: I am not my yearning, but I witness my yearning. I see it. I watch it rise and fall, ebb and flow. I learn from it. My yearning teaches me and guides me. But it never becomes me, so it can never consume me.

Step Two: I then move into my longing, my yearning. I seek to penetrate my yearning and I pray for my yearning to open itself up to receive me.

Step Three: At some point my yearning gives way and receives me, even as I allow myself to be penetrated by it, and I fall into divine yearning and divine longing.

Step Four: My yearning gives way and I fall into the sweetness of God.

Slowly, about eight months ago, the nightmares began to recede. I began to regain my natural energy and strength. I began to come back to life.

I still miss everyone. I pray that at some magical point, rupture may once again become rapture. But I understand that it may take many weeks, many months, many years, even decades or lifetimes.

I will wait.

And in the meantime, there is so much good for all of us to do….

-Marc Gafni