Longing

Personal reflections

I believe it begins with a willingness to feel life.

To feel pain.

To be with grief.

Through this journey, you have become intimate with the truth that all life begins in the darkness of winter, in the underbelly of the earth.

Moment to moment, as it cycles through the various chapters and seasons of your life, if you are willing, you can feel the thread.

For it is this willingness to feel life that opens the heart, expanding your potential for desire.

This is at the core of the feminine principle.

Listening and feeling into the infinite nature of life, of your Love.

I believe that your loneliness is a precursor to your longing.

Loneliness in not claiming your truth - what you want, what you need, what you ultimately desire.

Yet, much like your feared neediness, you and I are conditioned not to admit the ache of our loneliness, of our yearning, let alone be curious enough to ask what it is our loneliness is hungry for.

There is an implication that loneliness is a hole.

A void that in some ways can never be filled.

And this is where I see that loneliness is connect to longing, but from a place of fear rather than love.

For to love our loneliness, instead of turning away from it, is what makes it holy.

It is this love, presence and acceptance that transforms loneliness into longing.

It its taking your needs and transmuting them until they are claimed as desire, as longing.

This is when the hole becomes a vortex, a magnetic force through feeling.

Upon further investigation, when I sit with my loneliness, there is a deeper, much bigger feeling which honestly rouses discomfort.

And that feeling is longing (yearning.)

It isn’t the person, the man, the children I desire, that I want to feel in this lifetime.

It is a longing for a knowing, a fully body knowing of what Love, divine love, really is.

It is a longing to know with every cell of my body, what this golden thread is, that weaves through every human emotion and bodily sensation.

It is a longing to understand how in the most painful moments, when I sit eye to eye with my grief, that there is a simultaneous feeling of pleasure and love that overcomes me (if I am willing to meet it and not name it)

It is a longing for meaning, not in the meaning making as we are so often told we do as human beings, but rather the longing for meaning that reveals itself to us when we are willing to surrender our hearts to the fullness of life, moment to moment.

How can one be with longing?

First, one must sit with their grief.

The death, the winter, the earth’s wisdom.

And to sit until the wisdom presents.

To practice patience, and acceptance.

To love.

To create the opening.

To give it space to be revealed.

Because when I get really honest, the two feelings evoke a similar current in my body.

To touch grief, is to touch all the unexpressed Love.

To touch longing and yearning is to the touch the Love we want to express and experience.

There is an aspect of being taken by this.

To surrender to its magnetic force.

If you are on the feminine path, and healing your relationship to Her, this may create a deep feeling of trepidation.

I know that I naturally contract, close up, panic in response to this level of surrender.

We have been conditioned to see a woman in full feeling, be it wailing in her grief, or wild passionate states of ecstasy, as a woman gone mad, a woman out of control, a woman who is then exiled from her community.

But upon deeper enquiry, what I really see a woman in a state of true total abandon, she has let herself be transported by the feeling, and in many ways she has left herself to come into Her Self.

I see an embodied state of feminine chaos, the pure dynamic force that She is.

And unless I am willing titrate this edge, and come to know the depths of such feeling, I will always remain afraid of it, of HER, afraid of the parts of myself that are capable of the magnetism I know I am capable of experiencing.

And the way in which I yearn to be seen in the chaos and have the witness stay and love me as I am, in the fullness of my being.

For this chaos is both light and dark.

This chaos is creation itself.

* longing has been used in this piece as a term that I would easily switch with yearning.