How do I Manage this Holy Yearning and Holy Grief?

Many people are yearning for a deeper connection to spirit to help guide their lives in a more meaningful way. They want to step off this cruise ship for orphans, as Martin Prechtel might say; they want a way out of the culture of economics that substitutes “more” for “the beyond,” as psychologist James Hillman said. Years ago, social scientists identified loneliness as the main illness of western culture. Maybe that has been replaced by meaningless.

That deep yearning for connection with Spirit often feels like pain. Spiritual yearning has these two ingredients: the awareness of something larger and beautiful that brings meaning to life, and the frustration and grief that we can’t quite touch it or hold it for very long before it evaporates. The poet Rilke said, “So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”

It’s good to recognize that this particular form of grief has always been with humans. It's an integral part of being sentient. It’s not just you, not your personal flaw, or your weakness, or your inability to figure things out. It’s not because of your parenting. It’s not just our time period or culture. It is a fundamental energy of being a human being in a body, and it is a holy grief. 

This yearning/grief has inspired all religions and spiritualities, and it is fueling the transformation of consciousness that we are all now part of. Grief opens the door to every shift of consciousness.

It’s also good to allow this grief some room, and not push it aside, as we often want to do. When this holy grief lives in the unconscious, it manifests in two main ways. Pointed inward, it becomes depression or ennui - directionless dispiritedness. Projected outward, it becomes blame placed on others, or it becomes a fantasy that others have some secret magic key to happiness that we don’t have. That’s a recipe for falling into all kinds of go-nowhere spiritual compulsions.

In the early 20th century, for those esoteric teachers that called themselves “The New Age,” the very first rule for initiates was to shed the three human desires that manifest as evil in the world: the desire for status, possessions, and sex. Please don't mistake what I’m saying for "to be authentically spiritual is to live in celibacy and poverty." That's part of the old story. What the sages mean is, when we see those three desires as substitutes for spiritual power, we create suffering for ourselves and for the world. We are beginning to see this more clearly now than ever before.

The good news is this truth: you already have a deep, profound, unbreakable, nourishing relationship with Spirit; you already live in beauty and are made of beauty. 

The issue is you’re a human being, so you are constructed in two parts: the eternal essence which knows this connection and has no fear, and the constructed social personality which is made of fear glued together with those three desires mentioned above. The shamans say all of us come from the otherworld but we forget in the first few months of being in a body, because we get dazzled and dazed by this physicality. This inner wrestling match is in the human structure.

So, recognizing and honoring the grief as sacred energy is the first step. Then there is the question of how to create meaning.

Charles Eisenstein wrote a piece called “What is the Next Story” that was made into a nice little video. He lays out elegantly the “old story” that we are leaving and “new story” that we are bringing into being. For example:

“Old Story: I am a separate self: a bubble of psychology, a soul encased in flesh, or a biochemical machine.

New Story: I am a holographic mirror of all that is, a nexus point in an infinite web of relationship.”

He goes on and on elegantly. 

His article is about gathering meaning to yourself to help give you strength day by day. Even though we spend so much of our life energy wrapped up with status, possessions, and sex, we need a big story - something greater, non-physical and mythic to devote ourselves to, and to help pull us through the daily wrestle of life. The old stories have stopped working for many people, which has opened up a great smoking chasm of anxiety. Even many who fight frantically for the old stories don’t believe them – they just greatly fear that chasm of holy grief, and that doorway to the new story. In truth, the new story has already arrived in this world, and is now solidifying its new body.

All of my indigenous teachers, from the Mayan, to the Amazonian, to the Celtic, have said the same thing: every creature in this world is made of song - of music, of vibration. Quantum physics is remembering this too. Spirit is that living song, or as a Toltec shaman says, the only living being in the universe is life itself, and it constantly sings new songs into existence. Those new songs become birds, ocean sand, black holes, tarantulas, Anjou pears, and you. That one living being, life itself, is the connecting net of everything. We aren’t searching to find anything. We are already in the net, along with everything else.

I have found it helpful to remember that the yearning you feel inside you is the same ancient yearning inside the Spirit of Life. You are an aspect of the “only living being – life itself,” and it is always yearning to bring forth the next new song. That yearning that sometimes feels like pain is hard evidence that you and Spirit are in total communion. This is what the masters mean when they say, “You are perfect, right now. All is perfect, right now.”

Martin Prechtel, who I was lucky to study with many years ago, says that our main task as human beings is to help mend the net of life wherever we see it torn. He calls the mending of the net the shamans’ main job, but each of us are responsible for it in our own way. Look around and ask, “Where do I see the net of life torn, and how can I help mend it?” No single person can mend the whole net And we are past the old story of a messiah coming to do the work for us. But there are so many of us awakening to this grief and yearning, that each of us attending to even the smallest rupture in the net is a great service to life, Spirit, and the future.

So, “mending the net” is a good recipe for summoning daily meaning. And “solidifying the body of the new story” is also helpful.

The shamans know that it is crucial to support our great story with ceremony and prayer. This is how we send energy to the shift that we want to see, to the new song. We send this energy from this world to the otherworld, and it gives the otherworld energy to send its new song to us. Ceremony transmutes grief and yearning into the threads that are woven by Spirit into next shape of the world.

The simplest thing you can do is make offerings of beauty to that grief in you. Sing a prayer onto some flowers, a prayer song that acknowledges your yearning and your grief as holy energies. Sing for the release from the old story. Then ask Spirit to put its compassion, intelligence, and power toward weaving the body of that new story into this world.

Put the prayers on flowers, and give the flowers to mother earth - the energetic matrix that brings all things into physical form; in whose womb all possibilities of life on this planet are stored; upon whose loom all new stories are woven. Include in your prayer song some gratitude to Mystery for making you a human being with this beautiful holy yearning and grief. Then ask Spirit, the otherworld, to send you power to help you navigate this world.

This prayer can be done on your own, but it is especially good to do this kind of work in community. So, gather some people together to do it, and don’t forget to have some laughs too.

May your grief reveal itself to you as a sacred power of your deep love of life. May your yearning reveal itself to you as the best evidence of your complete harmony with the Spirit of life itself. May the new song, filled with the love and wisdom that we never imagined was possible for us, flow into the world.