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Leonard Cohen, said that his favorite poet, García Lorca, taught him that he was “this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.”
“Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.”
“Longing is what Sufism is all about,” he exclaimed, lighting up. “The whole practice is based on longing—longing for union, longing for God, longing for the Source. You meditate, practice loving-kindness, serve others, because you want to go home.” The
Home is where that longing is, and you don’t feel good until you’re there. In the end, it’s one big yearning. In Sufism, they call it the pain. In Sufism, they call it the cure.”
Dr. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee,
All religions have their mystical branches, meaning those who seek a direct and intense communion with the divine, outside of traditional rituals and doctrines.
Conventional religious leaders sometimes dismiss mystics as woolly-headed or heretical or both—perhaps fearing that anyone who bypasses religious institutions and heads straight to God could put them out of business.
“Longing is the sweet pain of belonging to God,” he writes. “Once longing is awakened within the heart it is the most direct way Home.
‘Oh Lord, nourish me not with love but with the desire for love,’
‘Do not seek for water, be thirsty.’ ”
“If we follow the path of any pain, any psychological wounding,” he writes, “it will lead us to this one primal pain: the pain of separation. Being born into this world, we…are banished from paradise and carry the scars of this separation. But if we embrace the suffering, if we allow it to lead us deep within ourselves, it will take us deeper than any psychological healing.”
“Longing is the core of the mystery / Longing itself brings the cure.”
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.
The first journey is from God—the journey where you forget that you ever had a divine union in the first place.
second, of remembrance, is the moment of grace in which “you begin to look for the light. You look for prayers and practices to help you. In the West, this is known as spiritual
The final journey is in God—you’re taken “deeper and deeper into the divine mystery.”
“Longing is different from craving,” he explains. “It’s the craving of the soul. You want to go home. In our culture it’s confused with depression. And it’s not. There’s a saying in Sufism: ‘Sufism was at first heartache. Only later, it became something to write about.’ ”
longing not as an unhealthy craving, but as the feminine expression of love:
For the mystic, it is the feminine side of love, the longing, the cup waiting to be filled, that takes us back to God….Because
Because our culture has for so long rejected the feminine, we have lost touch with the potency of longing.
Many people feel this pain of the heart and do not know its value; they do not know that it is their ...
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“If you’re taken by longing,” he tells me now, “live it. You can’t go wrong. If you’re going to go to God, go with sweet sorrow in the soul.”
we have hunger because we need to eat, we have thirst because we need to drink; so if we have an “inconsolable longing” that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong to another, godly one.
none of his love affairs lasted; as an artist he “existed best in a state of longing,”
People who work in the arts are eight to ten times more likely than others to suffer mood disorders, according to a 1993 study by the Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison.
sadness is the only negative emotion whose musical expression uplifts us
The students who faced disapproving audiences created better collages than the ones who were smiled upon.
those who received negative audience feedback and had low levels of DHEAS—that is, the students who were both emotionally vulnerable and suffered rejection from the audience—made the best collages of all.
sad moods tend to sharpen our attention: They make us more focused and detail oriented; they improve our memorie...
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“Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.”
creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.
the quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression.
in the end, it really was about finding the light.”
people who simultaneously experience positive and negative emotions are better at making associative leaps and at seeing connections between apparently unrelated concepts.
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—the
Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” was a famously exultant work.
What if we simply took whatever pain we couldn’t get rid of, and turned it into something else?
We could write, act, study, cook, dance, compose, do improv, dream up a new business, decorate our kitchens; there are hundreds of things we could do, and whether we do them “well,” or with distinction, is beside the point. This is why “arts therapy”—in which people express and process their troubles by making art—can be so effective, even if its practitioners don’t exhibit their work on gallery walls.
immersing oneself in creativity, whether as creator or as consumer, via concerts, art museums, or other media, is associated with greater health and life satisfaction, and lower rates of anxiety and depression.
the simple act of viewing beautiful art increases activity in the pleasure reward centers of the brain.
It feels, says Zeki, a lot like fal...
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Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering—or find someone who makes it for you.
all of creation was once a vessel filled with holy light. But it shattered, and now the shards of divinity are scattered everywhere, amidst the pain and ugliness. Our task is to gather up these fragments wherever we find them. This philosophy made instant and perfect sense to me.
brokenness giving way to transcendence.
STEs are defined by transient mental states involving feelings of connection and self-loss.
it’s precisely during such times—including career changes, divorces, and the ultimate transition of death—that we’re more likely to experience meaning, communion, and transcendence.
A surprising number, says Yaden, “experience the most important moments of their entire lives near its very end.”
creativity seems to move in a spiritual direction during midlife and beyond, as artists straddle the intersection between life and death.
“Meeting the grim reaper may not be as grim as it seems.”
