Embracing Longing

After practicing NVC for many years, I know that it is is not just a communication tool. It also offers a profound way of experiencing our deeper selves, a handrail into our deeper truth. What if spiritual experience was not something that you looked for “out there”, up in the sky, and beyond yourself, but something that you could also find in the depths of your heart, in your deepest longings? What if God, or the power, love and intelligence of the universe was to be found in the place of your “inner engine room”, where all your urges, dreams and loves emerge?

I have found NVC to be an amazingly useful support in going deeper and deeper into this. When I come to taste my deepest longings, I realise, in the words of a recent participant on one of my trainings, that “I’m a nicer person than I thought I was!” Deep down I intensely want to love and serve others, to love and serve the world, that’s where my deepest satisfaction lies.

“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

Albert Schweitzer

So, what if we could learn to trust our longings, indeed to embrace our longings, welcoming them as divine energy calling us from within?

A poem from Rumi explains this well:

Love Dogs

One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing you express is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
that whining is the connection.
There are love-dogs
no one knows the names of
Give your life
to be one of them.

Our habit is to look outside ourselves to meet our inner urges. All our biological urges move us in this way, and that’s how we survive physically. But we do not have physical needs alone. We also have social and emotional needs, intellectual and creative needs, and spiritual needs. For many of these needs, something wonderful can happen when we stop looking outside ourselves for fulfillment and instead taste the longing itself.

The longing for beauty, what is that? The longing for love, what is that, how does it feel? The longing for connection…. each of these needs, when identified can be experienced directly as something flowing into us; a living vital energy that seeks to bless us by urging us to bring more goodness into our life.

And, when we stop and have this encounter with longing itself, a miracle can happen. We can realise that we are already filled with beauty, we are already filled with love, we are already intimately connected with life. The longing is the connection.

This is “meeting our needs” in another sense. And it provides an alternative strategy to meeting our needs by manipulating the world around us.

We might nonetheless need to do that much of the time, but even then, being close to the longing that moves us, being accepting of it, is enriching of the whole experience. There’s a play of life at work.

I love what Emily Cadie has to say about this (she was a pioneer of the New Thought movement in the US at the turn of the 20th century, which spawned several new churches and the whole practice of positive thinking and affirmations, etc.)

From The Complete Works of H. Emilie Cady

“What is desire? Desire in the heart is always God tapping at the door of your consciousness with His infinite supply – a supply that is forever useless unless there be demand for it. “Before they call I will answer’ (Is. 65:24). Before you are ever conscious of any lack, of any desire for more happiness, or for fullness of joy, the great Father-Mother heart has desired them for you. It is He in you desiring them that you feel, and think it is only yourself (separate from Him) desiring them. With God, the desire to give and giving are one and the same thing. Someone has said, “Desire for anything is the thing itself in incipiency”; that is, the thing you desire is not only for you but has already been started toward you out of the heart of God; it is the first approach of the thing itself striking you that makes you desire it or even think of it at all.

The only way God has of letting us know of His infinite supply and His desire to make it ours is for Him to push gently on the divine spark living within each one of us. He wants you to be a strong, self-sufficient man or woman, to have more power and dominion over all before you; so He quietly and silently pushes a little more of Himself, His desire, into the center of your being. He enlarges, so to speak, your real Self, and at once you become conscious of new desire to be bigger, grander, stronger. If He had not pushed at the center of your being first, you would never have thought of new desires but would have remained perfectly content as you were.

You think that you want better health, more love, a brighter, more cheerful home all of your very own; in short, you want less evil (or no evil) and more good in your life. This is only God pushing at the inner door of your being, as if He were saying, “My child, let Me in; I want to give you all good, that you may be more comfortable and happy.

In my three day Embracing Longing workshop, I’ll be seeking to convey these insights and more. I’ll offer some solo practices such as journalling and guided meditations, as well as work in pairs and small groups to support a growing awareness of longing as a friend to be embraced.

Doing this inner work is, I believe, essential to learning and being able to use NVC. This consciousness can create a shift in where we stand in relation to our own desires, and thus to the world around us: a flexibility and an openness. This, more than the specific language skills we use, will create a new way of expressing ourselves to others.

Here is some feedback from a three day Embracing Longing training held near Inverness in June 2009.

“The Embracing Longing workshop with Leo was carried out in an intimate residential, rural setting. For me, this was the perfect residential venue for the 8 of us on the course to fall/retreat into stillness on the theme of embracing longing.

Leo led a meditation to connect us with Embracing Longing and for me this was possibly one of the most powerful led meditations I have done. The clarity and journey I undertook fully connected me with a way of being and life purpose. It turned longing into a powerful and positive aspect of living, one to be embraced and cherished.

The workshop contributed to me by enabling me to face fears with compassion for myself and others, to accept what previously I had seen as things I needed to ‘get rid of’ (longings) and provide a new, more harmonious way of being (with myself)”

“Being in a workshop led by Leo is always a gift. I like the way he leads without taking control, allowing learning to emerge in himself and in others. I feel both inspired and safe in the way he models the richness of NVC beyond “technique” and “jargon”, revealing its essential simplicity. I have felt gently invited to the life-enhancing process of “scary honesty”, touching the underlying spiritual truth of all our lives, our nature and our needs.”

“Leo’s insights hugely assist transformation of my pre-conditioned pejorative notions. ‘Embracing Longing’ fairs justice to two long decried aspects of the human experience. I continue to endeavour (as an ongoing process) not to consider ‘Feelings and Needs’ as superflous, selfish or unnecessary but as loving prompts – both honouring Humanity and indeed recognising the Divine within Humanity assisting our journey Home …”

See calendar right for details of my next Embracing Longing workshop.