By Mary Ann Gray Voorhies
Somatics, in the tradition of Thomas Hanna, is a powerful new discipline in the field of health care. Somatics (also called Clinical Somatic Education) gives us the technology and the tools that enable us to learn to control our own physiology. Now, for the first time in history, we have the POWER to change our own bodies in relatively rapid ways that can dramatically improve our health and well being. For the first time in history, thanks to Thomas Hanna, we have at our disposal simple ways to become victorious over the negative effects of accumulated stress or trauma on the human body.
The fall of the temple symbolises the exile of the Erotic energy. Where did it go? The erotic is exiled in the sexual! We have to understand, that the sexual models the erotic, but it doesn't exhaust the erotic.
Listen to this audio clip from the Erotic and the Holy audio series by Dr. Marc Gafni.
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Join Dr. Marc Gafni in this free short audio clip exploring the inner meaning of sacred sexuality versus fallen sexuality. This audio clip is from the Erotic and the Holy audio series.
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In this audio clip, Dr. Marc Gafni explains what real Eros is and what pseudo-Eros is. Pseudo-Eros is how we try to avoid emptiness.
LISTEN TO THIS 4-MINUTE FREE AUDIOCLIP featuring Dr. Marc Gafni from his Erotic and the Holy audio series!
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Listen to this free audioclip by Dr. Marc Gafni in his Erotic and the Holy audio series.
The second quality of the Erotic of Shekinah of the Zohar is fullness of presence. This is not the same as being on the inside. You can actually be fully present, but not in the inside. There is a story about a 19th century Kabbalist master, Levi Isaac of Berdichev, who was able to be fully present. Once a Jewish girl joined the convent and that was completely unaccepted at that time so she shouldn't have been there. The community sent all the wise men of the region to the convent to persuade her to leave. On one day Levi Isaac of Berdichev went there and sat behind a tree and started to wait. He had been waiting for three days altogether. Two days went by and nothing happened, but on the third day, the woman walked there after the convent and she said: "Oh, it's you! Thank you for waiting!" What did she sense in the temple? What did the master do? Dr. Gafni explains it in this audio clip, along with the notion, that Eros is about presence.
Berdichev was present; the woman sensed it and responded to that presence. Presence is about fullness, the opposite of emptiness. The ability to hold the fullness of presence even in the face of emptiness. We always seek fulfillment in our culture - we want to be full and filled at any cost. Life is what we do with our emptiness. Not the Buddhist emptiness, but the simple emptiness. We have a difficult time to stay in the void, we therefore do a-void-dance, but the only way is not dancing around it, but going through it. And we can do this by precisely staying in the emptiness.
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“This movement of love and Eros, which is visible in third person from the simplest cellular level to the most advanced human level, is at all times felt in the second person as love. In the realized human being, love breaks out. This is, finally, love revealed. Because evolution is the constant increase of complexity””paralleled on the interior by the constant increase of consciousness, whose inner relational quality is love””in the evolved human being who has reached the level of self-transcendence, the operation of love itself breaks into consciousness and becomes a prime motivator for individuals.”
Your Unique Self
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 120For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org.
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of this phenomenon: “All are conscious of attaining to a higher self posession. It shines for all.”
In Jewish mysticism, this is called the voice of the Shekinah–the feminine face of the divine, which in the Hindu traditions is called Shakti. Jewish mystics who wrote in the third century taught, “Wherever ten people gather with clear holy intention, the Shekinah speaks.” Or as Matthew said, “When two or three gather in my name I am in the midst of them.”
Modern Hindu mystic Aurobindo called this “the evolution of truth consciousness in which [they] feel themselves to be the embodiment of a single self.”
Theosophist Rudolf Steiner said, “People awake through each other …. then real communal spirituality descends on our workplace.”
Finally, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, one of the key founders of modern evolutionary spirituality, describes this collective spiritual awakening as “sustained, certainly, by the individual person, but at the same time embracing and shaping the successive multitude of individuals.”
Your Unique Self (In Press)
Dr. Marc Gafni
Page 330For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org
Love is a perception of the infinite specialness, the full uniqueness of the beloved. To love another is to say Yes to their Unique Presence, to their Unique Being and Unique Becoming. The greatest of love affairs begins with a simple imprint of Yes.
Remember, we come into this world trailing clouds of glory with core knowledge of our omnipotence, beauty, infinite power, and infinite potential. And then we hear a chorus of voices for the first ten years of our lives, and the only word they seem to be saying is No, No, No. We gradually come to associate maturity with saying No. When an idea or new direction comes up, our first response is why it can’t work. We are brilliant at it. Even the most simpleminded person becomes a genius when it comes to saying No. We can think up twenty reasons why it will not work before we can think up two reasons why it could. We have all become Dr. No with advanced degrees. ”¨But somewhere deep inside, the Yes remains, an eternal child of your Unique Self. We know on the inside of the inside that Yes is the answer.
One of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce spends reams of pages portraying the No reality encountered in the streets of Dublin by the main character, Leopold Bloom. Joyce masterfully maps the life of the archetypal human whose life is a series of unnecessary losses. The death of Bloom’s son and father, his daughter’s leaving, the passing of his youth, and finally the adultery of his wife.
Yet in the last scene of the book, Bloom returns home to his sleeping wife. Never mind it is a recently desecrated bed. Never mind he sleeps with his feet at her head. It is still home, the erotic haven of the inside. The book ends with a crescendo of Yes. As his wife feigns sleeping, we float along in her stream of consciousness, finally concluding with reminiscences of the early ecstatic hours of her and Leopold’s love. It is a definitive return to Yes:
And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
The Yes here is sexual. The sexual in this passage models the eros of life. The overwhelming perfume of this sexual Yessing signifies hope, promise, and possibility in the most expanded erotic sense. For the sexual is the full ecstatic urgency of the urge to merge and the urge to emerge throbbing inside of us. This final Yes has magically transformed the seven-hundred-plus pages of modern existentialist No’s. It was James Joyce who reminded us that Yes is a feminine word that signifies the end of all resistance.
The high priests entering the Holy of Holies once a year say Yes with his every step. The cherubs murmur to each other, “Yes, yes.” The Temples of God and Man are built with Yes stones. The Presence of God is a great green light that says, “Yes, you are gorgeous. Yes, I need you.” The Uni-verse is an open entryway, crowned by a neon Yes sign. To be lived as love is to know that””as Wallace Stevens reminds us.
After the final No comes a Yes
Marc Gafni
In those heart-opening moments when truth suddenly bursts through your everyday routines, you know that the purpose of your life is to uniquely incarnate in the story of your life the love-intelligence that governs the Uni-verse. Are you willing to utter a sacred “Yes!” to your conscious participation in the evolution of consciousness?
To awaken and say Yes to the unique invitation, delight, and obligation of your life is the reason you were born. It is the only authentic source of joy and meaning in your life. When you slumber and say No, your loneliness, fear, and contraction live in you, through you, and as you. When you awaken and say Yes, you are living as Source. When you awaken and say Yes, Source lives in you, through you, and as you.
Realizing your Unique Self will fundamentally change the way you understand virtually every facet of your awakened life. Once we’ve engaged the core teachings of Unique Self, we will look separately at how these teachings fundamentally reconfigure and dramatically re-vision our under- standing of love, joy, shadow, sexuality, parenting, death, relationships, loneliness, evolutionary spirituality, malice, ego psychology, and the inte- gration of East and West.
Your Unique Self is God’s love-signature written all over you. God loved you so much, He personalized himself as you. You are the indi- vidualized heart and mind of God. This is your Unique Self.
The creative process that mysteriously moves from nothing to something is the God-impulse. To live as your Unique Self means to align yourself with that process, with the ecstatic evolutionary impulse that initiated the kosmos, with the ecstasy of God, which re-creates all of reality in every second of existence.
Are you ready to respond to this invitation, to offer yourself to the infinite love intelligence that wants desperately to show up in the world through and as you?”
For more information on private study or to book a public teaching, contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org
(c) August 2011 by vudhikrai
“You need to find your Kali side,” I told Annie. You may know someone like Annie. She's a production manager at a local tv station, a single mom with a busy schedule, and a really nice person. She values yoga as a doorway into peace and well-being, teaches it to troubled teens, and always stresses the importance of equanimity and other yogic virtues -- non-violence, surrender, contentment, detachment.
But Annie's approach to yoga is like her approach to life: she is so conflict averse, that its hard for her even to admit that she has negative feelings. She rarely raises her voice, and she once told me that she can't remember the last time she felt anger. But at this moment, mired in a family conflict that involves missing money, elder abuse, and shady lawyers, Annie senses that her carefully cultivated tendency to seek peace over conflict is not helping her. She's called me for advice: she wants to be told how to keep a good relationship with her brother and sister, and still stop them from cheating her mother out of her property. In other words, she wants me to give her a prescription for non-violent conflict from the yogic playbook.
Instead, what pops out of my mouth is, “You need to find your Kali side.”
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New users may register below Click here.Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Mariana Caplan explore the the notion of a World Spirituality with Claudio Naranjo and ask him what type of spiritual practices he recommends to practitioners to help articulate the principles of World Spirituality.
Claudio Naranjo is an elder statesman of the U.S. and global Human Potential Movement and the spiritual renaissance of the late 20th Century. After coming to live in the United States, Dr. Naranjo was among the staff of the early stage of Esalen Institute, where he became one of the three successors to Fritz Perls. Later his life's pilgrimage brought him in contact with various spiritual masters including Swami Muktananda, Idries Shah, Oscar Ichazo, Suleyman Dede, H.H. the XVIth Karmapa, and, most decisively, Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche.
Mariana Caplan, PhD, is a psychotherapist, professor of yogic and transpersonal psychologies, and the author of seven books in the fields of psychology and spirituality, including the forthcoming: The Guru Question: The Perils and Awards of Choosing a Spiritual Teacher and the seminal Halfway Up the Mountain: the Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment. Her recent release, Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, won five national awards for best spiritual book of 2010.
Dr. Marc Gafni holds his doctorate from Oxford University and has direct lineage in Kabbalah. He is a Rabbi, spiritual artist, teacher, and a leading visionary in the emerging World Spirituality movement. He is a co-founder of iEvolve: The Center for World Spirituality, a scholar at the Integral Institute, and the director of the Integral Spiritual Experience, as well as a lecturer at John F. Kennedy University. The author of seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints and Mystery of Love, Gafni's teaching is marked by a deep transmission of open heart, love and leading edge provocative wisdom. Gafni is considered by many to be a visionary voice in the founding of a new World Spirituality and one of the great mind/heart teachers of the generation.
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by Sally Kempton
Originally posted on Patheos.
Roberta approaches me during a break in an urban workshop. Retreats and workshops, she explains, leave her feeling so wide-open that she'll often find herself picking up other people's energy and moods. She'd left the workshop the night before, gone out on the street, and felt overwhelmed by the Saturday night energy of the city. Not just the cars honking and the music, but the people who passed her by, and even her own boyfriend.
I look at her””tall and blonde and thin””and asked her if in general she feels vulnerable. She burst into tears. "I want to be open," she said. "But I feel so raw!" Raw, in this case, is another word for vulnerable. And Roberta's struggle is a real one.
If you've done much yoga, meditation, or even deep psychological work, you may have felt something similar. When I was first spending time around my teacher, the energy generated in meditation would sometimes leave me feeling weepy and irritable, hypersensitive, even overwhelmed. No one had ever told me that the first (and many subsequent) stages of opening the heart could feel like exposing a wound, or like taking the lid off of a Pandora's box of old, unprocessed griefs and fears.
Nor did I realize, until years later, that fielding these feelings of vulnerability is not optional, nor even personal to me, but an actual part of the yogic process. Yoga, after all, is not an escape from life, but a way of taking yourself into life's pulsing heart. As you do that, you will inevitably meet your own vulnerability. Just as vulnerability and rawness are synonymous, so are vulnerability and openness. In other words, to find your way to true openness of heart, you need to pass through the forest of vulnerability.
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New users may register below Click here.by Sally Kempton
In my late 20s, as a recovering existentialist in the midst of a life-crisis, I came across he Bhagavad Gita, and read for the first time Krishna's wordson dharma. You probably remember the situation: the warrior-prince Arjuna, paralyzed by confusion at the prospect of having to kill his kinsmen in a war, begs his friend and teacher, Krishna, for help. Though Krishna's response touches on every essential aspect of the inner life, from how to meditate to what to expect when we die, the lines that struck me were these: "You are a warrior," Krishna tells his pupil, "your svadharma, your personal duty, is to fight. Therefore, stand up and do battle. Better your own dharma badly performed than the dharma of another done perfectly."
Is it possible to read that sentence without asking yourself the question "What is my dharma?" I felt that I'd suddenly found words for a question I'd been trying to formulate my whole life. I made my living as a writer””was that my dharma? I'd just begun serious spiritual practice””was that my dharma? I had a life-long aversion to the conventional rules of society””was that a sign that I was out of line with dharma, or simply that I followed a dharma that was uniquely mine? Was there really, as Krishna's words seemed to imply, a blueprint for right action, perhaps lodged in my DNA, that could provide my own personal path to truth? Was that the clue to the question that had confused me for most of my life, "What am I really supposed to be doing?"
Years of practice have convinced me that there is such a thing as personal dharma, and that unless we're in touch with it, we're out of touch with our real source of strength and guidance. When we are inside our dharma, spiritual growth seems to happen naturally. When we aren't, we feel stuck and stymied not just in our work and relationships, but in our inner life as well.
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New users may register below Click here.by Leyna Roget
Terry Patten is a firecracker of a teacher, and yet every bit of the exuberant knowledge he imparts on us is lined with love. For him, integral living is about formulating a commitment to the social framework of humanity through raw honesty and integrity. Patten leads us in a series of yogic moves to enter into the sacred space of our bodies. Our three body centers (head, heart, center) are the three faces of God through which we can awaken to the ”˜I AM-ness’ of the divine and one another. We tap each limb of our body alive and our mind and heart follow.
Patten has such a poignant way of recognizing the mind-body connection as integral to realizing our full life force – individually and collectively. Through ”˜involution’ our human, personal experience is accessed and is able to evolve, because really, our ”˜involutionary given’ is that we are human AND humanity. With the birth of the cosmos, the big bang (or ”˜holy yes’ as Patten puts it, haha) “evolution is a single story line that unites all of human knowledge”. Maybe the big bang knew what it was doing because once we came to be complex forms of life we were able to see the process by which we came to be. So, evolution has become self aware through us, and we are witnesses to our involution of self. Think about the universe having the gift of life, but not realizing it until billions of years later. Now think about your birth and being written a check by the universe, totaling the infinite sum of your worth to the world, and now, to be present means cashing it in yourself for all you have always been worth. OMG.
It wasn’t enough for Patten to be enthusiastic in his delivery, there was a certain amount of tenacity to his urging us to “make a contribution, be a part of that which is a healthy human adaptive response to this moment”¦anything less than that is unacceptable and you know it in your heart”¦you have to find a way to validate your own existence”. Amen. What’s the first step to validating our BEING-ness? “Be willing to feel all of it un-buffered, and be seen in it” – in that gritty, scary, revealing, shameful, beautiful, honest, unique you.
Patten gets to the heart of this breathtaking dialogue by asking, “what does it take for us to be real with one another”¦to touch and be touched”¦to be trustworthy?” This leads us into a series of group exercises that entreat us play and share in a space of vulnerability, with interpersonal communication anchored in love. We sit intimately close, in circles of four people. Being utterly present, we take rounds to concisely address a single question or statement: How are I feeling? … What is something that will allows others to know me better? ”¦ What I’m ashamed of is ”¦ The tension I’m living with is ”¦ A commitment I’m willing to make right now is”¦ Wow. What a remarkable exercise in letting down your guard and TRULY getting to know people! We connect through these fears, evolutionary questions, and the desire to take our “involution” seriously.
I’ll forever cherish the challenge to take a chance with presence by “being dangerously real” and “listening with a beginners mind”. We are reminded to author and narrate our divine reality. Patten’s invigorating approach to human / humanity wholeness is energizing. What happens matters, what you do matters, in this moment – own it!
Leyna Roget networks with community organizations and businesses to introduce the inspiring stories of Planet Progress and the developing works of iNDIGO PROjECT MEDIA. She captures on and off camera images for Blog posts, Twitter updates, and various other engaging platforms to bring the viewer into the company’s interconnected sphere. Leyna creates new outlets and sustainable community events that invite the public to interact with iPM.
by Leyna Roget
We’re still at that settling in stage of the retreat, which makes our morning yoga/meditation courtesy of Mike Brabant a refreshing, group energy bonding experience. Not to mention, a little comedy with your down dog never hurts, as we fan out our palms into ”˜alien hands’ for stability. Marcy Baruch greets us this morning, appropriately setting the tone for togetherness with her melodic words, “I am the space behind I am”¦we are the space behind we are”. While we sing to honor many voices, this intimate retreat is as much a challenge to individual purpose, and in so embodies the third principle of world spirituality: growing up.
John Welwood initially coined the term “growing up” in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening in reference to becoming psychologically whole. Marc Gafni explains, in the model of world spirituality, this description of growing up is more synonymous with our understanding of the awakening or ”˜waking up’ stage. Therefore, growing up means the ability to move through higher and higher structures of consciousness in our life. As we age we organize and understand our experience of reality through a lens, our consciousness. For example, a child will have a distinct way of connecting the dots of self and experience in this world, versus an adult. Consciousness as a structure progresses from egocentric (limiting outlook to focus mainly on oneself), to ethnocentric (identification with the needs of a specific group), to world-centric (valuing the needs of humanity). Thanks to Terry Patten’s presentation of the next stage as “cosmocentric” (empathic identification and compassion for ALL that is), I’ve just had my consciousness blown open beyond the constraints of our natural world. Ironically, many religious texts operate from a love for the cosmos perspective, but the authoring person(s) is still bound to their egocentric view so the narrative shows up through a popular ethnocentric lens.
Being a Sustainable Human Presence
Growing up is about being an awakened form of consciousness in this world, “the next expression of the human race, the homo-noetic”. What I appreciate more than anything is how no-nonsense Patten is about telling us grow up, and own up to our call as spiritual practitioners. We must honor a sustainable human presence and be “authentic to the health of the fabric of the whole human system”. Everyone is capable of breaking through to an epic life purpose, as long as they are willing. “It’s about getting right with God and the call to exemplify greatness…When we tune into the profoundly good news of our divine nature, we begin towards oneness, and concurrently discover an urgency to care for humanity with love and activism”. Every person, in their individuality, has the ability to fill in the gaps towards elevating humanity to a functioning system of interconnectedness. This feels like a YAHTZEE kind of moment!
Answering the Call of Ecstatic Love
Living in a cosmocentric consciousness is about more than just being a global citizen. Marc Gafni illustrates this point beautifully with a discussion on the concept of obligation. The Hebrew translation for obligation is “ecstatic love”. This expression of love beyond limits is how we embody the seamless (but not featureless) source code of the world. When we perceive a cosmocentric existence, it is as though we experience the world as living in us. For many in a relationship with power, the message of obligation centers on what is “right” as opposed to what is centered on love and unity. It is the demand for to fulfill an obligation that often discourages authentic action. Gafni suggests that we must reclaim power as an expression of truth and change the dimension of obligation to be innate to our awakened unique self AND evolutionary urgency. It’s quite simple, obligation is created out of genuine need, recognition of a need, ability to meet the need, and seeing oneself as the only one able to meet that need. Therefore, obligation as a stage of developmental consciousness is actually embodied in our essence. Our waking up and growing up to our purpose is really to love ecstatically. Whether you understand your cosmocentric quest as a public or private practitioner, the shift of our internal structures in living in a state of ecstatic love (or obligation), has a dramatic affect towards creating shifts in the lives of others, and the heart of the cosmic source code.
We enter into the psyche this morning with Mariana Caplan to address the concept of unity, accessible through a focus on inward form. “Mind lives in the body” so that when you examine one through the other, with knowledge of aliveness, the body becomes a foundation for spirit. We first tune into the spirit of the group through single articulations of our state of mind in that present moment: transformation”¦open”¦receptive”¦ discovering… Many of our words begin to mirror one another’s and Caplan points out, the wonderful thing about spirituality is that often before we can articulate our experience of it, the feeling lands within us. There’s no doubt that spirituality is on all our minds and bursting from our hearts.
More and more, I experience the feeling of spirituality in the observations of external synchronicity and an internal calm-joy. While this is different and at times confusing for everyone, the principle of discernment is presented as a valuable tool in separating truth from untruth along our “spiritual path”. Discernment means continually developing a context within ourselves, through trial and error, that helps us to answer psychological and spiritual (psycho-spiritual) questions, in favor of our growth. When we apply discernment to our journey, we highlight the endlessness of our path and pierce falsity.
Caplan engages John Welwood’s initial concept of “spiritual bypassing” to shed light on how esoteric practices present esoteric results without truly tapping into the traumas or neurosis of the Western psyche. When we exercise spirituality apart from the body, we are likely to spiritually bypass and avoid dealing with psycho-spiritual issues that have been repressed deeply within the body. If we understand our physical parts as contributing to the whole of our form, and the whole of whom we are as part of the pulsating divine force, it becomes more clear how illness and disease can be physical manifestations of a spiritual disconnect.
A series of four interactive meditation exercises are performed with gentle guidance from Caplan, some with partners, as we “drop into the body” to perceive emotional breaks, without breaking ourselves completely open. Prana ( or life force) follows attention so that as we transition from focus on pleasure to discomfort, these respective energies emerge from our cells memory, free to reveal hidden stories of psychological trauma trapped within us. Caplan challenge us to delicately expose and release these emotional wounds while in meditation. We employ non-rejection tantra, which allows our darker spaces to be engaged comfortably before regrouping attention on pleasurable feelings in the body. I experienced some difficulty evoking coherent images of psyche in the meditation, but I solidified the discernment of trusting these embodied ”˜feelings’ as authentic to my spiritual self. I grew up with a lot of physical pain. I didn’t know it when I began yoga three years ago, but that was my introduction to embodied spirituality. Caplan explains, it is the postures or asanas that connect us to our body and not the move itself because holding a position is an internally motivated action. We are taking a ”˜seat’ within ourselves, and attempting to be comfortable in it. It was during this exercise of psycho-spiritual troubleshooting that I was able to articulate how I felt myself to be fully on the path to de-fragmenting my mind-body connection, and that’s the best place to be!
Dr. Marc Gafni has been on a two-week teaching tour in Germany and we are delighted to welcome him back to the states this week!While Dr. Marc was spreading the World Spirituality dharma, one of our good friends Mark Stollreiter, was able to capture and produce four beautiful teaching videos. He shared these rare teaching videos with us and we are thrilled to share them with our integral evolutionary community.
Originally produced by Mark StollreiterThis content is restricted to site members, you need a FREE membership to view the full content.
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