SDI Multi-Spiritual Community Gathering – November 2026
November 9 @ 11:30 am – 1:00 pm PST
From the Desire to Receive to the Desire to Give
Kabbalistic Wisdom as a Map of Spiritual Transformation
What might ancient Kabbalistic wisdom offer to our understanding of psychological and spiritual
transformation?
This lecture explores the movement from a consciousness organized around the self – its needs,
fears, wounds, memories, and desire to receive – toward a more spacious way of being, capable
of awareness, relationship, empathy, and giving. Drawing on Kabbalistic ideas such as tzimtzum
(contraction), ratzo v’shov (running and returning), and the transformation of the desire to
receive into the desire to bestow, we will consider spiritual development not as an escape from
the self, but as a transformation of our relationship to it.
Bringing Kabbalah into dialogue with clinical psychology and transpersonal thought, we will
explore a simple but radical possibility: that the self need not disappear in order for
consciousness to expand. Perhaps the spiritual journey is the gradual discovery that we can
inhabit our individual form without being imprisoned by it – and that love begins when the reality
and desire of the other become as meaningful to us as our own
About our Facilitator:
Dr. Yossi Meidan is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist whose work brings together
depth psychology, psychotherapy, and the study of Kabbalistic and spiritual traditions. His
particular interest is in the meeting point between the personal and the transpersonal: how
psychological suffering can constrict consciousness around the self, and how relationship,
awareness, and spiritual practice can reopen the possibility of movement and transformation.
Drawing on decades of clinical experience, Dr. Meidan explores Kabbalistic ideas not only as
mystical concepts, but as a living language for understanding human desire, love, suffering, and
the movement from a self-centered toward a more relational and expansive consciousness
