The Heart of Longing

      Longing is natural to us as humans. It is a mysterious gift hidden within each and every heart, although, until we are initiated into it’s mysteries, we may not feel it as a gift. It may feel more like a thorn or an un-healable wound. Longing is different, deeper in some way, at least for me, from wanting, desiring, or needing. It feels like it comes from my soul rather than my humanness. You may have a different experience of your longing…take a moment to reflect here, to feel your longing if it is present.
      I have vivid memories of longing for my mother as a very young child. She had sent me to live with an aunt and uncle when I was less than three years old, and I never returned to her and my older sister, although I did visit them. As I got older, more aware of my situation, I would lie in my bed at night longing for her, for a sense of family. My little girl body ached with the longing that was always accompanied by deep sobbing and tears. After I started in St. Joseph’s Catholic School at six years old, I learned of the Blessed Mother and my longing shifted to Her and I became very devotional. I prayed, said rosaries, and made shrines to Her, begged Her with all of my heart to fulfill my longing to be with my mother, to be back with my family.
      In those days in Catholic School, we were told many amazing stories about Mary, Jesus and the saints and their astounding miracles, healings, and extraordinary encounters with the numinous. These stories quickened my longing and shifted it to longing for the Mystery, longing to be touched, inflamed by the Mystery. I became very devoted to the Mystery from that time on, the forms and images of it shifting through the years.
      Over my lifetime I have longed for various things: a sense of family, relationship, marriage, children, my own healing, a way to give and to serve, peace of mind and help for others, depending on where I was in my life’s journey and my spiritual awakening process. I have also longed for good chocolate when there was none around or for things to be different when I wasn’t happy with what is. For me, longing and devotion became interwoven and now I can’t feel any difference when I truly focus on the longing, no matter what the original object of it.
      Longing can feel like a fire in the heart, a throbbing, endless ache, a bottomless chasm waiting to be filled. Sometimes the physical sensations of longing are very intense, very deep. Longing can appear as a subtle whisper, a feather lightly grazing our heart, or it can become a fierce burning in its insistence, especially when whom or what we long for appears to be, or truly is, unattainable.
      We typically tend to focus our attention on the object of our longing, which could be a person, the holy, a physical object, an experience—the possibilities are endless. Even while longing seems so utterly rooted in our human relationships, the source of our longing is spiritual. Carl Jung wrote that our primary human instinct is ‘religious’ – from the Latin religio: to bind back to the source. Longing, no matter how it appears or what object we fixate our longing upon, has at the core of it the longing to go back to our Source, to the numinous.
      So even while our longings may be attached to outer things, objects, at the core is the longing for contact with the Mystery, the Divine Beloved, Spirit. Mystics have known forever that it is through our longing that the Beloved calls to us, and longing is one of the ways that we call to the Beloved. This is so often reflected in our human love relationships.
      In the secular world of conditioned mind and personality, we naturally focus on the objects of our longing rather than the longing itself. Doing Samyama has taught me to take my focus of attention away from the object, whatever it is, and place it into the longing itself.
      Focused attention on the longing, in our heart, breathing into it, inviting it to be as big, as deep and intense as it needs to be, not thinking about or attending to the object of the longing, can open us to direct experience of the Mystery, the Silence within. It also bring a sustaining level of deep fulfillment that nothing on the outer level ever can. For me, diving into my longing when it arises, giving myself fully to feeling it directly, as I just described, is like going to a sacred spring of the clearest, most thirst-quenching water.