Igal* on spiritual teachers, collective trauma, and Jewish tradition

My guest today, Igal Harmelin, is an outlier. Unlike all of my other guests so far, he has devoted his whole life to a spiritual search and God.  ⁠Igal Harmelin⁠ grew up in Tel Aviv in the 1950s. Already as a teenager he was, as he calls it “infected by the spiritual bug”. He was introduced to ™, Transcendental Meditation, at that time a very popular movement founded by the Indian teacher Maharishi. Igal trained and taught for over 20 years in that tradition. He then moved on to study with Andrew Cohen, an American spiritual teacher, That community exploded after Cohen was accused by some of his closest students of psychological abuse and not practising what he was preaching. For the last 10 years Igal has been training with ⁠Thomas Hübl⁠, who is also my own spiritual teacher. In addition, Igal has been studying ⁠NARM⁠ , an advanced trauma therapy, and works as a certified Master NARM practitioner.  Igal lives in New York with his wife, Rabbi Lisa Goldstein. In our conversation we examine Igals path into spirituality and his strong longing for connection with the divine. We talk about his experiences growing up as the son of Holocaust survivors. Igal shares his relationship to his spiritual teachers, good and bad, as well as his current deep interest in collective trauma. How did his life unfold? What were the drivers behind his search and the specific teachers he studied with? For me, the grandchild of Nazi perpetrators, meeting and listening to Igal always has a special and I would even say sacred dimension. As Igal himself points out: "When a German and a Jew meet, the painful presence of the Holocaust is always in the room, even if we don’t address it explicitly." There is an absence, a gulf of overwhelm, shame, anxiety and not-feeling. I am very grateful for this conversation and hope you gain many insights from it too. ⁠https://www.igalharmelin.com/⁠ ⁠https://narmtraining.com/transformingtrauma/episode-063/⁠ ⁠https://thomashuebl.com/school-of-collective-trauma-integration/