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/