Quotes about Longing

"We all share the wound of fragmentation.  And we can all share in the cure of unification.  Healing is the unification of all our forces -- the powers of being, feeling, kwowing, and seeing.

I look in the mirror and I look out the window and I see myself and others struggling to be in our bodies.  Struggling to know who we are and what we need.  To like ourselves, rather than wanting to be somebody else, or somewhere else.  I see our inability to relate, to communicate from the heart, to overcome our distance and alienation from one another.  I see us avoiding each other's eyes, at a loss to know what others need.  I see people searching for direction, trying to summon up their personal power, longing for the strength to be independent.

The wounded healer in me knows that healing our driven selves comes from our ability to empower our bodies, hearts, minds, souls, and spirits once more, bringing them into vital unity.  Spiritual healing means taking responsibility for being a whole person.  We have to take responsibility for being a body, for having a heart, for possessing a mind, for awakening our soul, for opening to our spirit.  We need to do right by our body, purify our relationships, use our mind for creative freedom and not enslavement, free the soul from the ego, and undertake the spiritual journey.  A whole person is an inspired person, one who embodies the spirit.

Disease is inertia.  Healing is movement.  If you put the body in motion, you will change.  You are meant to move: from flowing to staccato, through chaos into lyrical and back into the stillness from which all movement comes.

If you let your heart be moved, be open to the risk and the adventure of feelings, letting them work through to completion, you will change.  Tears turn into smiles, anger into embraces.

If you free your mind to experience and complete each of your life cycles, integrating their teachings and tasks, you will change.  It's when you stop moving through life that you get caught out of place, that you react to adult situations with childhood emotions.  Moving completely through your life makes you whole.

If you awaken your soul, you will change.  Engage your characters.  Watch yourself act them out.  Master them, and you're free to be, feel, think, and act as your distinct self.

The spirit in motion heals, expands, circles in and out of the body, moving through the layers of consciiousness from inertia to ecstacy.  Open to the spirit, and you will be transformed.

Movement is my medium and my metaphor.  I know that if a wave of energy is allowed to complete itself, it yields a whole new wave, and in fact that is all I really know.  Riding these waves means joining the cosmic dance that, as Dante says, 'moves the sun and the other stars.'"

In spiritual life, in the search for truth, in the search for God, desire is everything. Desire is a force that moves you, not only in spiritual life, but it moves you from one place to another in this material world. The situations that you create are largely based upon desires. So just as much of your material life is created by your desires, so is your spiritual life, because it is only by spiritual desire that one makes spiritual advancement in meditation.

Sometimes when a person goes within and begins touching upon a deep place, they cannot help but cry because of an incredible longing that it brings. Some feel it is like coming home after having been away for  so long, and it might feel like a sadness and a happiness at the same time.

For many people, to get in touch with their emotional side is a wonderful thing – to finally not be inhibited to let go, to express themselves in that way. However, for those that do not feel this, there are so many ways to truth; the ways vary so greatly. Don’t think that you need to follow the same path as the next person.

If you have not yet succeeded on an inward journey, be
gentle with yourself. Give yourself time. Gently let
yourself go deeper. Whatever experience comes to you,
let it take you over. Welcome it. Relish it.

- GOURASANA

And he who has considered all the contrasts on this earth, and is no
more disturbed by anything whatever in the world, the Peaceful One,
freed from rage, from sorrow, and from longing, he has passed beyond
birth and decay.

Dear Gorgeous Genius...

Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change....

Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics....

You're hungry for the infinite and the infinite is hungry for you.

Do not steal something that already belongs to you or pine for people who are sitting right next to you.

If you bury your face in your tear-stained pillow and beg God to please send you your soul mate, may you not slur your words in such a way that they sound like "cell mate."

This is a perfect moment.

It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because you and I are waking up from our sleepwalking, thumb-sucking dumb-clucking collusion with the masters of illusion and destruction.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their wars and tortures,
their crimes against nature,
extinctions of species
and brand new diseases.

Their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water.

Molestations of God,
celebrations of shame,
stealing our dreams and
changing our names.

Their cunning commercials
and blood-sucking hustles,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.

Thanks to them, from whom the awful teachings flow, we are waking up.

~~

Their painful blessings are cracking open more and more gashes in the shrunken and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." And through the fractures, ripe eternity is flooding in; news of the soul's true home is pouring in; our allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring us to become smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

We are waking up.

As heaven and earth come together, as the dreamtime and daytime merge, we register the shockingly exhilarating fact that we are in charge of creating a brand new world. Not in some distant time or faraway place, but right here and right now.

~~

As we stand on this brink, as we dance on this verge, we can't let the ruling fools of the dying world sustain their curses.... We can't afford to be consumed with our anger; we can't be obsessed and possessed by their danger. Our mysterious bodies crave delight and fertility. Our boisterous imaginations demand fresh tastes of infinity.

In the new world we're gestating, we need to be suffused with lusty compassion and ecstatic duty, ingenious love and insurrectionary beauty. We've got to be teeming with radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and ferocious thanks.

~~

So I'm curious, my fellow creators. Since we are in charge of making a new world - not just breaking the old world - where do we begin?

...Here's what I say: We will ignore the cult of gloom and doom and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, and summon the brilliance to praise and create. No matter how upside-down it all may temporarily appear, we will have no fear, because we know this secret: Life is crazily in love with us - wildly and innocently in love with us....

Pronoia is our word of power, the spell we cast to shake ourselves awake again and again.... It's the brazen perception that all of creation is conspiring to shower us with blessings.

Pronoia means that even if we can't see and don't know, primal benefactors are plotting to emancipate us. The winds and tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The fire and rain are scheming to steal our pain. The sun and moon know our real names, and the animals pray for us while we're dreaming. Do you believe in guardian angels and divine helpers? Whether you do or not, they're always wangling to give you the gifts you don’t even realize you want....

~~

...Some people argue that life is strife and suffering is normal. Others swear we're born sinful and only heaven can provide us with the peace that passes understanding. But pronoia says that being alive on the rough green and brown earth is the highest honor and privilege. It's an invitation to work wonders and perform miracles that aren't possible in any nirvana, promised land, or afterlife.

I'm not exaggerating or indulging in poetic metaphor when I tell you that we are already living in paradise. Visualize it if you dare. The sweet stuff that quenches all of our longing is not far away in some other time and place. It's right here and right now.

Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew the truth: "Earth's crammed with heaven."

YOU'RE ALIVE BECAUSE OF LOVE. YOU'RE *MADE* OF LOVE.

Every thirst gets satisfied except
that of these fish, the mystics,

who swim a vast ocean of grace
still somehow longing for it!

You will never feel fulfilled until you have found a full state of awareness -

and even then the sweet longing for home never leaves your soul.

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

Who can depart from his pain and aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day, bit a skin that I tear with my own hands...
Yet I cannot tarry longer.

Words are not important in themselves, but as resonators for a center.  Rumi has a whole theory of language based on the reed flute...  All language is a longing for home.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain!  Let's buy it.

Traditionally we are taught, and instinctively we long, to give where it is needed - and immediately.  Eternally; woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim

For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us.  This belief has strained our longing disastrously.  This is so lonely since it is human longing that makes us holy.  The most beautiful thing about us is our longing;  this longing is spiritual and has great depth and wisdom.  If you focus your longing on a faraway divinity, you put an unfair strain on your longing.  Thus it often happens that the longing reaches out towards the distant divine, but, because it over-strains itself, it bends back to become cynicism, emptiness or negativity.  This can destroy your sensibility.  Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing.  If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Yearning: It needs to hurt in order to be worthy of the word. Otherwise it is just wanting.

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God's love; but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God.

I did not know I was on a search for passionate aliveness.  I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life in search of meaning.  There is a hunger in people to go to those deep depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love.  It is a yearning to be all the we can be.  A longing for what is real. 

There is a void in your soul,
      ready to be filled.
You feel it, don't you?
You feel the separation
      from the Beloved.
Invite Him to fill you up,
      embrace the fire.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

I think everybody longs to be loved and longs to know that he or she is lovable and, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they are loved and capable of loving.

I am calling to you from afar;
Calling to you since the very beginning of days.
Calling to you across millennia,
For aeons of time-
Calling-calling. Since always.
It is part of your being, my voice,
But it comes to you faintly and you only hear it sometimes;
"I don't know," you may say.
But somewhere you know.
"I can't hear," you say, "what is it and where?"
But somewhere you hear, and deep down you know.
For I am that in you which has been always;
I am that in you which will never end.
Even if you say, "Who is calling?"
Even if you think, "Who is that?"
Where will you run? Just tell me.
Can you run away from yourself?

Longing is a compass that guides us through life.  We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.

The proper posture for the creature is one of receptivity. In Perelandra we see several ways in which this posture could be corrupted or destroyed. First it is always possible to seek ways to assure ourselves of repeating the pleasure. This is what makes money so suspect in Lewis' eyes - it is a means by which we assure ourselves that we can have the pleasure whenever we want it. It provides a measure of independence. One no longer has to throw oneself into the wave. Second, even when one pleasure is given, it is (as the Lady discovered) possible to turn from what is given to something which is (thought to be) preferred. And this, in turn, is what makes a life oriented toward the future suspect for Lewis - to commit too much of one's hopes and happiness to the future will make impossible the posture of receptivity appropriate to a creature.

In either case-whether we try to secure means for repeating the pleasure at will or turn from what is given to something else which is desired - Lewis thinks that we will eventually lose the capacity for delighting in what is received. For to treat a created thing as something more than that is to destroy its true character. To seek in any created thing a complete fulfillment of the longing which moves us is to make of it an object of infinite desire and, because it is only a created thing, a false infinite. It may still be sweet, at least for a time, because it is intended by its Giver to be a source of delight. But in the end it will be poison for the person who gives his heart only to it. Hence the constant temptation: the lure of the sweet poison of the false infinite.

We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly.

He whose longing has been aroused for the indescribable, whose mind has been quickened by it, and whose thought is not attached to sensuality is truly called one who is bound upstream.

The wise say that it is not an iron, wooden or fiber fetter which is a strong one, but the besotted hankering after trinkets, children and wives, that, say the wise, is the strong fetter. It drags one down, and loose as it feels, it is hard to break. Breaking this fetter, people renounce the world, free from longing and abandoning sensuality.