Parallax Video & Audio Podcast Unique Self 2.0–Year 2 Portal 2: Beyond Shame–Identifying Your Unique Wound of Desire
Watch the YouTube Video Here or Scroll Down to Listen to the Spotify Audio Below
Beyond Shame: Identifying Your Unique Wound of Desire
The Ontology of Touch and Wound (Nega)
In his pre-course podcast with Andrew Sweeny, Dr. Gafni begins by pointing to a core realization in the interior sciences: the original Hebrew word for touch is also the word for wound: Nega.
This is not a coincidence; it is an ontological truth. The wound is where your connection to the real has been broken.
“My wound is, I haven’t been able to touch… I haven’t been touched… The wound is the wound of desire. When my desire has been wounded, when I can’t access and trust my desire, I literally begin to deaden.”
The deepest desire of every particle of existence is to prehend (to touch) all prior experience. Your fundamental desire is to touch that which is real—significance, value, and aliveness. When this unique capacity to touch is rejected or thwarted, a unique wound is created. To heal, you must engage this wound directly.
The Divine Nature of Desire (Nachash/Messiah)
We live in a world where desire is often demonized, shamed, or hijacked by advertising. This course offers a radical re-reading of our most foundational myths.
Dr. Gafni explains that a deeper reading of the Garden of Eden story reveals it as a tantric text—a trickster story where non-rejection is key. The snake (Nachash) is not the voice of evil, but a disguise for the new human (Messiah).
- Desire is the Name of God: The realization is that desire itself is the animating force of reality. The clarification of your unique desire is, therefore, a divine process.
- Cosmic Eros: Reality is not a mechanical system but an erotic process unfolding every second. From the precise “rates” of chemistry that lead to life (abiogenesis) to the movement between two beloveds, it is all an unfolding of unique eros. Your life is literally a product of reality’s unique erotic intention.
The course is about engaging this truth. You must clarify your unique desire, which means engaging the fundamental ways in which your desire has been wounded.
Clarification: The Path to Wholeness
You cannot achieve mental health, fulfillment, or joy without desire. The transformation of your unique wound is what literally births you into reality, turning devastation into a deeper capacity for wonder.
We live in a world that is “always already home” and yet is ripped apart by war and suffering. This course holds that tension—the unbearable joy of Eros and the unbearable intensity of suffering—as the only way to become whole.
A new Parallax course with Dr. Marc Gafni in Collaboration with the Unique Self Institute
Starting Sunday, November 16th, 2025
Course Description: The Essence of the Wound
In this three-week journey, participants confront the wounds that shape their lives—the unique ruptures that call us from despair into wonder, from alienation into intimacy, from devastation into divinity. Each person’s wound is singular, tied to their shadow, their desire, and their unique self. This course guides students to trace the root of their wound, recognize the false core it may have created, and begin the heroic work of transforming pain into power, shame into insight, and contraction into love. We explore personal, familial, and cultural wounding, and the path of the wounded hero, learning to step into authentic presence and the intimate communion between hero and the wounded God.
This 3-week course will guide you to:
- Confront the wounds that shape your life.
- Trace your wounds back to their root.
- Recognize the false core sense of self your wounds have created.
- Begin the heroic work of transforming pain into power, shame into insight, and contraction into love.
The Rapture of the Wounded Hero
“There is no human being who is not wounded. The wound is not an accident. The wound is the intention of Cosmos to be wounded and to transform the wound into wonder—the rupture into rapture, the alienation into allurement, the collapse into covenant, the pathology into power, the devastation into divinity. Evil comes always from the untransformed wound. What is a wound? How do we understand that? What is my unique wound? A wound is not generic. A human being has a unique self—my unique gift, my unique quality of intimacy, my unique perspective, my unique beauty, my unique presence. And a person also has a unique shadow, and a related but not the same unique wound. The path to unique self is through unique shadow and unique wound.
Our focus in this course is your unique wound. You cannot be alive without identifying your unique wound and beginning to walk the path of its transformation. There is nothing more tragic than to die with your wound unrecognized and untransformed. To look away from your wound is to ignore the call of the infinite, the divine calling. If I do not engage the wound in this lifetime, the wound festers and emerges, replaying itself in the next lifetime again and again. To identify my unique wound, I need to trace it back to its root and heal it there. There are ten major approaches to wounding; some address my unique wound, others address different forms of wounding that are not my own. I cannot heal my unique wound without taking my unique risk. My unique risk is essential; really, the only risk is not to take it.
The unique wound can be personal, tribal, collective—the unique wound of the tribe, the family, the couple. Identifying, articulating, and telling the story of the unique wound is the beginning of its transformation. One cannot be a hero without transforming one’s unique wound. There are no heroes who are not wounded heroes. When the hero bypasses the wound, the hero explodes and often becomes the villain. To be a hero is to be a wounded hero; to be a king is to be a wounded king; to be a queen is to be a wounded queen. And the context of all of this is a wounded God. Who is the wounded God? What’s the story of the wounded God? What does it mean to trust the wounded God? What is the encounter between the wounded hero and the wounded God? Who is the hero and who is God? What is the nature of their intimate communion?
The essence of the false core, both individual and collective, is the unrecognized wound. The unrecognized wound becomes the false core. It is only by recognizing the false core that it is brought into the light. The false self built upon the false core can begin to be deconstructed, and the authentic, unique self can emerge, allowing me to play my instrument in the unique self symphony, to take my place, to take the armor off, and for homo armor to become homo amor. This is the path from contraction to love, from pettiness to power, from hate to healing. Every insult is actually a wound of love.
The wound of culture today is the failure of value, and the recognition of that failure was shame—shame itself as a unique wound. Your unique shame is your unique wound, your unique distortion of your unique configuration of desire.”
– Dr. Marc Gafni
Harville Hendrix 
Helen LaKelly Hunt
Lori Galperin
Dr. Marc Gafni