My 20-year Initiation with a Great Teacher
You visit me in my dreams and find countless ways to speak to me. Yet I watched them bury your body in the earth almost two months ago after witnessing you for weeks between worlds. We were there with you when you passed into the next dimension. We spent countless tear-drenched hours sorting through your treasures and clearing your home—and even with all of that proof that you are gone, still it feels unreal, like you are simply away on a journey, soon to return… You are one of those rare beings whose imprint is so deep that you can never really be gone.
I remember the day we met so clearly…I was walking up Bhagsu mountain at the foot of the Himalayas after an all night bus ride. You were standing under a tree by the side of your restaurant just after dawn. The moment I crossed your path, chills ran through my entire body. Quiet confidence, strength and otherworldly magnetism radiated beyond your body. You were the strongest and most beautiful man I had ever seen, with mystic charisma dripping from your dark eyes.
I was 27 and so were you… I had come to the mountain to reunite with my teacher. Completely devoted to my temple dance practice and studies, very little could distract me… Like so many other travelers, you invited me to your restaurant, but I declined. One day I put up a flyer there for my Sufi dance classes, and you mentioned that you played the ney flute. I was intrigued and finally accepted your invitation, even though I was convinced you probably invited every woman who walked through Dharamasala.
Instead, when we finally sat down together, you told me something that surprised me — You had seen me running alone through the Pushkar ghats late at night in a bright yellow skirt a few weeks earlier in Rajasthan. You had asked about me then, and had quietly hoped our paths would cross again.
Our cup of tea became hours of connection. I imagined you were a Spanish gypsy and discovered you were a Yemenite Jewish Israeli. As a young girl, believing the path to world peace was through intermarriage, I had once confidently told my mother that I would never marry a Jewish man.
Life clearly had other plans.
That evening you translated a Hebrew lullaby for me. We spoke for hours about the Hebrew language, and traditions I had turned away from. Something inside me began to awaken.
At that point, I was intentionally taking a “fast” from relationships. I wasn’t focused on romance, and definitely not into public displays of affection. I questioned whether romantic love might pull my energy away from my devotion to sacred dance, temple dance, and the path I believed I was here to walk. Yet somehow, we found ourselves holding hands for hours. Before I knew it, we embraced and kissed in a moment that suspended time.
A few hours later, we went on our first date. On the way to the restaurant, three people stopped us. “Wow, how long have you been together? … How long have you been with your beautiful wife?” You answered, “a long, long time.” and I smiled and winked, cool, calm, as if it was all obvious.
We had less than two weeks together before your visa expired. When it was time to say goodbye, you invited me to visit you in Israel. I answered, “I’d only travel across the world for the father of my children,” expecting you to run away, after such an ultimatum. Without a pause, you responded: “I want to be the father of your children”..
With only the light in your soul, you called me back to the land of my roots on a journey to heal my lineage and initiated me into many mysteries, tastes, sounds & deepest of all, motherhood.
When I arrived in Israel for the first time, I didn’t only fall in love with you. I fell in love with your entire warm, spicy family. The music and endless tables of food. The feeling that everyone belonged to everyone. A deep welcome into a family I had never known.
And the friends—an entire tribe we effortlessly melted into, instantly familiar, instant soul family—who called me to understand what friendship truly is. Who sang melodies that awakened ancient remembrance in me, whose laughter opened gates in my soul, whose hearts touched mine in ways that forever changed the way I knew how to love.
And later, whose love and kindness supported me through the darkest times of my life. And somewhere within the life we were beginning to weave together, my wandering soul finally began to grow her roots, even if I didn’t know it yet.
What a mythic journey we shared in those four years before you got sick—traveling through countless countries on adventures made of fairy-tale dust, through the darkest shadows and the brightest light. I loved you with my entire being. I remember once watching you breathe as you slept, so overwhelmed by your beauty that I had an orgasm without you even touching me. There was something extraordinary about the simple, ordinary, everyday life we shared. Listening to you play the oud, the ney and the Persian setar while I did my practices and danced for hours each day; riding on the back of your motorbike through the sweet Goa night air, feeling so incredibly safe, held and in love – we would spend hours together in silence, each immersed in our own practice. Our home was always filled with special people from across the world who would come to eat your hummus or drink coffee with you. In all of that time, we didn’t need to exchange many words. On the material plane, in a way, we barely knew each other—yet somewhere beyond language, it always felt as though we had walked together many times before.
After moving between India, Spain and Israel together for a couple of years, and supporting me with my Traveling School of Sacred Dance, we journeyed to Sinai & the Red Sea; it all felt like a dream. From there, I went home for a few weeks to visit my parents in America. One afternoon, while walking with my mother, I found something extraordinary by the side of the road: a dead hawk, strangely and perfectly intact, lying there in the most beautiful form. I was mesmerized by its beauty and stood there for a long time, studying every detail of its magnificent body. There was something haunting and sacred about seeing such a powerful creature so completely still, its form untouched, as though it had simply laid itself down and left.
That evening, when we spoke on a video call, I was bursting to tell you about the hawk I had found. But you were equally excited, insisting that you had something to tell me first, something you found while walking in the forest in Romania that day.
You told me that you had come upon a clearing in the woods, and there, in a small circle of light, you found a perfectly intact dead white owl.
We were stunned. On opposite sides of the world, on the very same day, each of us had encountered one of these magnificent birds, both mysteriously intact in death. Neither of us had ever encountered something similar. At the time, we could only wonder at the mystery of it. But when I began researching the symbolism of the hawk and the white owl, it felt as though something was speaking to us from beyond the visible world.
Looking back now, I can’t help but feel that all that was about to unfold—the passages between life and death, the great portal we would walk through together, the ways we would be asked again and again to see beyond the visible—was somehow already written in the stars.
The very next day, I discovered I was pregnant. We had opened that door to new life intentionally only once, and she came through us immediately. Our daughter had been conceived on that magical journey through Sinai.
And just a few days later, I was told that my beloved father might have only weeks, perhaps months, left to live. It was a passage I would have to walk alone. You had a black stamp on your passport from having once overstayed your visa that prevented you from entering the United States, so there was no possibility of you joining me there.
We had planned to reunite at Boom Festival in Portugal. Instead, I stayed in New York alone, to accompany my beloved father toward the threshold of death. A couple of months later, when I was three months pregnant with our daughter, he died in my arms—another profound crossing, bringing me into intimate contact with the mysteries of death at the very moment I was carrying new life within me.
We reunited in Spain after those life-changing months, taking a road trip from Barcelona to Andalucia as we stepped into this new chapter together. Six months later, our daughter was born in our sweet little casita overlooking the Alhambra in Granada.
You loved me with extraordinary generosity, even when the definitions changed—you would do everything for me: bandage my wounds, rescue me when my car broke down, cook for the women who attended my trainings, support my dreams and my wings. You always encouraged me to say yes when an opportunity came my way, to fly, assuring me that you could take care of our daughter while I was away. You proudly introduced me to strangers as though I were the most extraordinary woman in the world. You found me dance jobs simply because you believed in me so deeply.
We also navigated some shadows and big differences, yet when our daughter was born, it felt as though we were living inside a dream. I was so deeply in love with you and with our little baby. You were an extraordinary father. Every night, you insisted that I sleep while you stayed awake soothing her, softly playing mystical instruments beside her for hours.
Three months after her birth we traveled back to Israel for what was supposed to be a short visit, so your parents and enormous Yemenite and Kurdish family could finally meet her. It was an epic homecoming, bringing our daughter—and the first of their grandchildren—home into the arms of her grandparents.
But then everything changed. We had no idea how profoundly the mysteries that had already begun weaving themselves through our story were about to transform our lives. Not long after arriving, you began struggling to breathe.
At first we thought it was just some respiratory virus. But within weeks you were admitted to the hospital. Only hours later, I was told by the doctors in the ICU that your lungs had collapsed. You were in a coma on full life support. I was told there was a good chance you would never wake up.
I was a new mother, alone in a country whose language I barely spoke, where the people who would later become some of my closest friends had only recently entered my life, holding our baby who was not yet six months old. Although it felt as though we had already traveled lifetimes together, we had actually only just begun our epic love story. We were so young when I lost you the first time, with so many shared visions and dreams, a whole life yet to live. We were both only 33 years old.
Just months after holding my father in my arms as he left this world, I now breastfed our beautiful daughter while simultaneously watching you exist in another dimension for all those weeks.
What I experienced during that time, suspended between the worlds — a midwife between life and death — was an education for my soul that is almost impossible to transmit in words. It was during those late hours of the night, when our baby was asleep, that some of the most potent practices I would later teach around the world were received.
Then, after many sleepless weeks, and watching your mother literally open the sky with her prayers, day and night beside your bed, against every expectation, six weeks later you came back. It was a miracle. And it happened, no less, during Hanukkah—the holy days of miracles and light, when against all odds, a small flame continues to burn long beyond what should have been possible.
Yet, the truth is… that was the first time I lost you. Because although your body returned after that six-week coma, something had already changed. And because of your request for privacy, and the vulnerability that came with so much of what had changed, I never felt free to share our story, or to speak about that moment when all of life as we knew it crumbled beneath us. I rarely spoke about the side effects of the treatments, about learning that we would not be able to have another child together, or what it meant to quietly let go of the family we had imagined. Nor did I speak about the gradual loss of the physical intimacy that had once been such a revelatory language of our love, or the immense loneliness and grief of slowly losing parts of you while you were still beside me. I never truly allowed myself to grieve what had been lost, because you were still here. You had come back from death itself. How could I grieve losing you when I was so grateful that you had survived?
You came back, yet you carried more physical suffering than anyone I have ever known, almost always silently, with the graceful strength of the warrior that you were. Your soul longed to fly and do so many extraordinary things, while your body kept you tied. When we went through your belongings over these last months, we found books filled with your poetry and art—windows into your mystical inner world, revealing the longing of your big, big soul to be free even as everything around you was breaking down. They were filled with words of love for me and for our daughter, but also revealed depths of suffering you had rarely allowed us to see, perhaps trying to protect us from the full weight of what you were enduring.
Finally I can grieve the greatest loss of my life, and say thank you for the fifteen years you stayed against all medical probability, through all the suffering and heartache that somehow became your destiny to endure. Understanding what you passed through in order to stay with us these fifteen years, I see that you too were going through an initiation—that your soul was so much bigger, more powerful and stronger than what this human body could possibly contain. My perception of our entire journey is reorienting now, as it becomes more clear that I was walking beside a great teacher all these years. So many things you shared with me, so many words you spoke, and so many things we experienced together are revealing new layers of meaning now that I have the perspective to see our journey as a whole.
Those fifteen extra precious years you gave us were fifteen years of loving your daughter with every part of your being, with every ounce of strength you had. Despite everything, you showed up as an extraordinarily loving and present father, giving our daughter more love than many children ever even get even a taste of. Looking back now, I understand that you stayed to give her roots, security, and that deep inner safety of knowing she was loved. That you could give her all of this under such impossible circumstances feels beyond human to me.
And only when she was grown enough, and when I finally felt strong enough to stand on my own, did you finally let go. You waited until you knew we would be okay. And then, in the most precise moment possible, you left your body, leaving a trail of signs behind you that you were still taking care of us. I literally received the key to our new home on the same day you left your body; your soul was whispering to me “Zola, it is time to start again.”
There was something strangely precise about the timing: at the very moment you were transitioning, I was being led back through the archives of our life together as I packed up and moved out of my house. As you were leaving this world, I was rediscovering love letters and treasures from our journey together—things that had been tucked away for years, fragments of our love story and our life.
One love letter in particular, which you wrote to me for my birthday before you got sick, said: “One day we will be old and sit together on a bench somewhere, holding hands. We will look back at our life together and say, ‘What a fucking life,’ and smile.”
I shared these words at your funeral, standing around your grave among some of our deepest companions, the ones who have walked beside us through this journey. And as I looked around at all of them, I had a profound realization: I will not be sitting on that bench only with my memories of you. Through our love, an entire community of extraordinary soulmates was given to me—We are each other’s roots, each other’s ground, each other’s family.
Now I find myself grieving so many different versions of you.
The passionate love of my life, whom I lost fifteen years ago and whom, after all this time, I finally get to grieve; the extraordinary friend who remained by my side, who would have done absolutely anything for us; and the great teacher whose magnitude I am only beginning to fully understand now that I can look back upon our journey as a whole.
Almost twenty years walking together—you have been my earth, my ground, my ride or die since the day we met, the one I could always count on until your very last moments on earth. No one has shaped my life as you did. I would not be the same person if we had never met. My heart has never known grief like this. It feels as though I have cried enough in these last weeks to fill the sea.
Yet beneath the sorrow there is also relief. Your endless suffering is over. No more cycles of unbearable pain. No more endless procedures or harsh medications. No more battles between your high soul and the bitterness and darkness that came with all that suffering. No more confusion weighing down your pure heart. No more grief over how we were suddenly thrown into different timelines and cast out of our Garden of Eden—leaving me with so much heartache and guilt, never wanting to hurt you, caught in endless cycles of holding on and letting go, while somewhere inside knowing that I needed to keep moving forward, to fully inhabit my body, my life and my destiny. What a fierce education of the soul this life has asked of us both.
For someone who never took medication, who was happiest in the desert and the mountains, seeing you in hospitals hooked up to so many machines always felt like a crime against your nature. Now, finally, you are beyond all of it.
You are finally free.
You came back from the dead more than once, returning again and again when everyone believed you were gone—beyond all medical probability, each return a miracle in itself. Seven years ago, before your lung transplant, I was crying uncontrollably and I came to the hospital prepared to say goodbye since there was a fair chance you might not survive the procedure.
You looked at me with so much love, totally cool and fearless, and simply said, “Zola… maximum, we’ll meet next life.” You made me laugh even then.
We got to share one last Shabbat with you before you left your body. I got to hold your hands and sit beside you on the sofa for a few precious hours. And in your final days, you were surrounded by us—your parents, your siblings, our daughter, your closest childhood friends, your soul brothers, and all those who loved you most.
And at your funeral, after your burial, some of the few who have known us and walked beside us through this entire story over the last two decades—gathered around your grave to sing to you and play the music you loved most. It was one of the most sacred and otherworldly moments of my life. It felt as though something moved through all of us together—a collective transmission of love, grief and spirit unlike anything I had ever experienced before.
And now, as I feel you strongly from the other side, I can finally grieve what was lost all those years ago and cry it out to the stars as I release you, understanding what an immense gift our journey has been for me.
To have loved you, lived with you, co-parented with you, and walked beside you was an initiation of the highest order. I feel your protection and guidance even more powerfully now. You will live inside me always—your strength, your humility, your generosity, your kindness, your intensity, your warm, spicy nature, the way you always showed up—the person I could call at any hour to bail me out of any crisis, even when you could barely stand up.
כפיר Son of Lions, Guardian of Owls, Warrior of the Light, Father of my beloved daughter, my teacher, my catalyst, my friend, my protector, one of the deepest soulmates of my life journey beyond condition and definition, beyond this world and time.
May your memory always be a blessing.
“Like a lion in his strength, like a melody in its purity, his soul continues to shine throughout all the worlds.”
ת.נ.צ.ב.ה.
תהא נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים
Tehe nishmato tzrurah bitzror hachayim.
“May his soul be bound in the bond of eternal life.”
