Longing is a Songline Calling us Home
To open the door to vision, you must surrender fully to your deepest yearning.
- Bill Plotkin
Many clients arrive at our first meeting yearning for something more meaningful in their lives - a sense of purpose and contribution. While they can't quite put their finger on it, the longing feels like something is calling them into a deeper conversation with life.
What's the source of our longing?
While desire is often focused on short-term gratification and driven by the ego, longing is a soul-centric impulse that seeks to align our lives with truth, beauty, and goodness. It can remind us that we are living out of integrity with our gifts or wandering further from our true aim.
Longing is the name for the distance between our surface life and the seed of our true purpose. It's what we can experience when living in unconscious (or conscious) exile from the sacred ground of our being, our destiny, nature, spirit, or any name that each of us may have for the Mystery.
Longing is the name for the distance we feel between our surface life and the seed of our soul's purpose calling us home.
How to explore your longing.
Longing is a powerful force that draws us toward our true center, like a compass needle pointing north. As we explore purpose terrain together, I always encourage clients to first connect with their longing, and explore its roots and where it's leading them. There are many ways to connect with and apprentice to our deepest yearning. These include self-inquiry, contemplation, prayer, vision questing, free-flow journal writing, and soul encounter practices.
If you follow the thread of your longing with wholehearted intention it can eventually lead you to what Lakota Medicine Man Black Elk referred to as "the lament" - a deep prayer and cry for a vision for oneself and the community.
Longing is the soulful songline calling us home to ourselves, our relationships, and life.
Practice One / Self-Inquiry
Time: 30 Minutes
Guidance
Sit quietly for 10-15 minutes
Let your sensed experience of longing rise in you. Where in your body do you experience it? What does it feel like? Just notice what is alive in you.
Next, choose one question for deeper exploration.
What is my deepest longing?
What is the source of my longing?
Where does my longing want to lead me?
If I had to be honest, I am truly longing for…X? (Clarity. Freedom. Sovereignty. To be seen. Wholeness. Meaning. Purpose. Etc.)
Slowly state the question out loud or silently within, and then imagine dropping it like a pebble in a well.
Sit for another 15 minutes. Wait and listen with your heart for a response. An insight might arise at the moment. But a reply might also take days, weeks, or more to find you.
Thank Mystery for holding your question. Bring your session to a close.
Keep alert, stay curious, and listen for guidance about your question.
Practice Two / Soul-Centric Journaling
Time: 20-30 Minutes
Overview
This approach to journaling provides a simple and direct path for facilitating a dialogue with soul—the heart of your essential nature.
GUIDANCE:
Grab a journal, a pen, and a timer.
Similar to the first practice, formulate/choose a question about the longing that’s alive for you right now.
What is my deepest longing?
What is the source of my longing?
If I had to be honest, I am truly longing for…X? (Clarity. Freedom. Sovereignty. To be seen. Wholeness. Meaning. Purpose. Etc.)
Where does my longing want to lead me?
Your inquiry here_______________
Write your question.
Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Without thinking about an answer, just let your hand move across the page. You want to keep your hand moving for the full 15 minutes, even if you are just writing the same words over and again. Eventually, a truth will emerge on the page.
Mine for gold: When your 15 minutes are up, go back to your writing and highlight any word/s, ideas, sentence fragments that capture your heart’s attention.
Write about any insights that surfaced during this exercise.
You can practice this daily and rotate your questions.