The Sacredness of Yearning

Photo: Barbie Robinson

The most ancient of invocations of the Divine was the sensation of Yearning. Yearning is a passionate and ferocious domain. Where we have evolved into times of instant gratification, this sensation is almost impossible to value and hold in our Consciousness.

Yearning is almost the opposite of instant gratification. Even in our spiritual paradigms we have destinations and milestones—it has become an exercise of achievement. We “attain” enlightenment”, become “awakened” or some other spectacular milestone that enables us to recognise, and be recognised, at a certain “level” of spiritual progress.

Nevertheless, for many of us these milestones do not appear to stop that “seeking” within. And so, we continue along the path of “more” spiritual knowledge, bringing the acquisitive paradigms of our usual mental consciousness into a domain which is supposed to offer us liberation from those very paradigms.

Yearning is the holding of desire, longing and seeking, in an expression of eternal incompleteness. This is a radical proposition amidst the popular celebration of spirituality as “completeness”. Yearning is the movement of a sensation that, when we allow it to emerge, is primeval. It makes no “sense” to speak of this in words, and complete sense when we experience and move this sensation. Our longing and desire are unconditional—it is never fulfilled by an instrumental approach of destination. We yearn to stop the yearning, because it is coloured with grief and pain.

At the same time, Yearning is also the movement of passion. It is what propels abandon, that ferocious dance in the present that forgets time. Liberated from destination, Yearning infuses us with the Truth of the moment, the essence of Reality which is what flows through us in the Now. Presence is not a sensation-free zone, rather it is drenched in poignancy, beauty, love and longing in equal measure. Therefore it is a dance, a multi-dimensional expression of our body-led intelligence.

In ancient times, Yearning is an alchemical dance incantation. Dancers flung it into the world so that people tasted the essence of Reality and learnt what it was to be unafraid of eternity.

In reclaiming Yearning, we move from the periphery to the centre, from dominion of Earth into Her pulsating passion, from mechanical techniques of the mind into artistic body, and from separation into the dance of the wind and the song of the birds.