Who Is Gili Man Wolner?

Gili was born in Tel Aviv to a secular family. As a child she had experiences she couldn't explain and had no name for: conversations going on inside her, and a sense of energy in objects. After a defining event with her son, she understood that she "knows that she knows".

She was standing there with an honors degree, a marriage, a house in Tel Aviv, children and a career that meant something. All of it achieved. And instead of satisfaction, she describes feeling for the first time in her life what it means to have your heart break. What she understood along with it: the things themselves don't give you the feeling she was looking for.

On a Saturday night after Shabbat, her son Yair fell down a flight of stairs and was badly hurt. Gili says that in those moments she heard voices in her head saying to her, "Wake up, this is your child."

Gili defines herself as a "lighthouse". She's a vessel in service, one that sees the point where a person is standing and the point they need to reach, and gives them tools to get there. She doesn't do the healing herself. She compares it to a car that's low on tire pressure or missing a connection, and her job is to help the person start moving forward again.

There is what you know that you know, like reading or writing. There is what you know that you don't know, like a foreign language you never studied. And the really fascinating part is what you don't know that you don't know. She uses that to explain how, after achieving everything in life, she found out that she hadn't actually understood a thing, and that was the starting point of her journey.