When you understand the difference between longing and desire, it will change your life.  

Opening ourselves to longing activates powerful forces that will move our lives and life itself towards higher possibilities of love and evolution.  

 Longing arises from a dimension that is deeper than your individual sense of self – deeper than your soul – it arises from the unknown and comes through us into this world. Longing comes from the divine forces of love and evolution, itself, bringing new potentials into existence. Something greater waits for us, needs us to awaken and surrender to its power, love, and creativity. If you pay close attention, when you begin to feel the longing, you can sense that it’s a two-way affair. Something is longing for you and through you, and that is where the immense power (and beauty) lies. 

Generally, we focus on our individual human desires. People ask us what we want and need. We are told to feel our desires. Desire, however, comes from our limited sense of identity, from our survival and egoic patterns. Of course, it’s important to understand ourselves and care for our needs, but there is something so much greater that can move everything and create possibilities you can’t imagine.    

In life, our desires give us a kind of menu to order from. Longing puts things on the menu that don’t exist inside our current reality. It reveals potentials that are waiting for us to open into, potentials that don’t fit into the life we have, but transform us and attract what we need to live from our true purpose in being here. Longing brings us together in the manifestation of a kind of humanity that lives beyond what we have been for five thousand years. Longing can be counted on to shatter the compromise in our lives and activate our true potential.  

Longing has an interesting quality of making us restless and hungry for something we can’t explain.  

In the reflection you are about to do, focus on listening to the edges of your experience. That’s where longing is trying to lure you and bring you beyond where you are. In this practice, I suggest that you let yourself feel and long for what you truly want, for love, life, and humanity, even if it seems impractical or unlikely.    

What if it were possible for humanity to move beyond the divisiveness, narrow-mindedness, selfishness, deceit, fear, and laziness that we assume is human nature? 

What if it were possible for humanity to exist inside a shared consciousness where love, kindness, and compassion were normal? 

What if our human ambition were collectively devoted to what I call divinizing our world, or making it more good, true, and beautiful?

Can you sense the deeper evolutionary longing within you that is tired of power structures, insensitivity, competitiveness, and other elements that we assume we have to live inside of with acceptance?  

You may discover a smoldering passion and a fire within you that wants to risk everything for something greater that honors all of who you are and all of what you can give, with others like yourself.

Real revolutions begin with longing. I have a dear friend whose Aunt Betty was Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. This book was first published in 1963, and it ignited the modern-day women’s movement. Betty felt a restlessness and longing for something more than the traditional roles available to her as a woman. She was not alone in experiencing the stirrings of discontent, but fortunately, she allowed the longing to emerge and burst forth into the light of day. She wrote the book and welcomed others to awaken similarly. The longing grew, allowing many to be liberated in ways that began to create a new reality, which is still evolving today.  

Now we need to welcome the longing for how humanity can evolve and how we can actualize a new humanity.  

There’s a whole new dimension of love and consciousness that will shape our world that comes from unity, intimacy, and interconnectedness, if we can embrace it.

Longing leads us to the unknown, to something greater that is reaching towards us. Longing allows us to grope our way forward and to be a vehicle for evolution.

Let yourself long for how love could be in life and in our world.

Go beyond acceptance and sense into the realm of possibility.

Evolution has taken us from light to matter to life on earth, from being single-celled creatures to Shakespeare and space travel.

Don’t you think we can actually evolve beyond our competitiveness, selfishness, and fear?   

Let yourself long for the kind of world we would actually feel at home in. 

In Unity,

Patricia