BREAKING OPEN
The Alchemy of Longing
opening
So far, this incarnation has been fraught with losses, rife with disappointments, heavy with heartache. There have been untimely deaths of loved ones who seemed to be about to cross the threshold into a beautiful and interesting life, not out of it. Serious health diagnoses that changed the way you navigate space, relate to food, see your self-image. Love affairs that once contained all the seeds of your joy and then withered before your eyes. Hands on your body that had no right to be there, making you mistrust the hands you really wanted on your body. Betrayals by colleagues or cousins, financial ruin, debilitating addictions.
When you breathe into the pain of your losses, you detect the presence of a smoldering ember you thought had been snuffed out years ago. But there it is, fragrant and warm. If you blew on it now it would burst into flame. Longing. Longing for God. You don’t even believe in God anymore. Not as a personified entity that grants wishes and smacks you down. And yet this burning yearning has never really gone away. In your broken-open state you remember what it feels like to feel separate from the One, to want union, to want it with every fiber of your being. This longing confounds you, and you don’t know what to do with it so you press it back down.
At first, you will not recognize the radiance hidden in all the darkness that has befallen you. The grief, the longing. You will not be equipped with the skills required to translate the secret Welcome Home sign planted in your soul’s ravaged landscape; it will look like Keep Out. If someone were to tell you that your losses were your passage to a voyage across the sea of samsara, the suffering of illusion, to the land of Nirvana, the bliss of awakening, you would not believe them. Even if twenty people—or a hundred—told you this pain was a blessing, you would not believe them (you might want to hurt them). You will think you are doing it wrong, that your suffering is not redemptive; it is messy and awkward. Unspiritual.
Your discovery of the restorative root system underlying your ruined life will come later, in the inevitable springtime, when the small green shoots of compassion muscle their way up and out of the charred earth and begin to spread and bud and flower and propagate themselves. You will eat, because you will be hungry. And then you will feed the world, because you will not be able to resist the impulse to share the bounty.
Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,
how it sings of separation:
Ever since they cut me from the reed bed,
my wail has caused men and women to weep.
I want a heart that is torn open with longing
so that I might share the pain of this love.
Whoever has been parted from his source
longs to return to that state of union. RUMI
Sometimes it appears as if it is only when we are most radically shattered that the boundless grace of divine Love comes pouring in. Loss is a fire that takes down everything extraneous, including our cherished beliefs. We must be stripped of all our opinions on the matter if we hope to have a naked encounter with the truth of divine Love. Our annihilation is both the necessary and the sufficient condition for the privilege of union with the source of divine Love.
I did not come up with this system.
I might have designed things differently.
And yet I suggest that we shift our perspective from the familiar and macho lens of retribution to the more feminine frame of compassion. Our loved ones did not die because we required a wake-up call. Our marriages do not go up in flames as a result of our pesky little attachments. We do not endure sexual abuse and institutional oppression on account of our dualistic preconceptions.
Shit happens.
This is the human condition. Incarnation involves being separated from what we love sometimes and other times having to put up with things we’d do anything to get away from. The Buddha told us this. But he also told us that we could search the whole world and we would never find anyone—not a single being—who is not also engaged in this dance of clinging and aversion. It is by showing up for the full encounter with reality that we discover our hidden wholeness, which was, of course, present all along.
MUSTARD SEED
Which reminds me of a story. It’s about how we can take refuge in the human experience, how there’s power in that truth. You may know this one. But like any good tale, it stays alive and seems relevant each time we tell it. Here’s my version.
During the lifetime of the Buddha, there was a young mother named Kisa Gotami, who went crazy with grief when her child died. Kisa careened through the streets of her village, begging everyone in her path to give her the medicine that would bring her child back to life.
But there is no cure for death.
Her neighbors were sympathetic, though they had no access to such a magical potion. If they had, their own loved ones would still be alive. Yet their dead remained dead.
Finally someone encouraged Kisa to make a pilgrimage to the Buddha and ask him to restore her son’s life. And so she did. Carrying the body of her child in her arms, Kisa made her way to the forest where the Awakened One was teaching the dharma. When the distraught young woman broke into the clearing and dropped to her knees at the feet of the master, he suspended his discourse and gave her his full attention.
“Please, Great One, they told me you could bring my baby back to life.”
The Buddha’s eyes filled with tears (as they were wont to do whenever he beheld the pain of the world), and then he closed them for a long moment. “Try this,” he said, opening his eyes again. “Return to your village. Gather a mustard seed from every household that has not been touched by death. With these seeds I will concoct a remedy that will bring your son back to life.”
Mute with anticipation, Kisa shifted the burden of her child’s body from one shoulder to the other and raced back to her village. She knocked on every door. But everywhere she went, whoever greeted her at the door was compelled to admit that, while they would have gladly contributed to her cause, they did not meet the Buddha’s only criterion, for someone they had loved had also died.
When Kisa had knocked on the last door at the outskirts of the village and learned that the inhabitants of that house, too, had been touched by death, her fractured heart cracked all the way open. She lay her baby’s corpse on the ground beside her, and she prostrated herself in the dirt. She wept, and she screamed. She tore her sari and clawed her own breasts. Exhausted, she grew still. And then she got it. What breaks our hearts is also what connects us: the exquisite impermanence of the phenomenal world; our longing to keep what we love the same forever; and our desire for that which we can’t stand to go away and never come back. It is the same way for everyone. And Kisa got that it wouldn’t hurt if we didn’t love and that love is worth the pain. That even knowing that loss is inevitable she would not hesitate to love all over again, love with her eyes wide open, her heart wide open, her mind as present and spacious as the horizon.
Acceptance, Kisa realized, does not mean not caring that terrible things happen. Of course we care! We must care. Caring is what rescues us from the lie that this world is nothing but an illusion to be transcended. Caring links us to the world as a crucible for cooking up the elixir of mercy. Acceptance means being with things as they are, not turning away and not trying to shape them to our will. This renders it possible to make of our pain an offering of love. This blesses all ground as sacred ground.
Kisa Gotami buried her baby and returned to the Buddha’s grove. She became one of his most cherished and awakened disciples. Unlike most of his colleagues, the Buddha accepted women students. Not only did he believe that women are as capable as men of attaining liberation, but maybe he also saw us as uniquely shaped to navigate the Great Way, because our two wings of loving-kindness and wise discernment are especially balanced. We can lift off and soar. And we can make a safe landing. We know how to enter the heart of every kind of suffering and stay with it until it gives way to any kind of awakening.
Reclaim Longing
I have always been struck by how much loss resembles longing. Grief strips us of attachment to things that do not really matter (how my butt looks in a pair of jeans, for instance, or whether my work is acknowledged in the way I’d hoped). Grief reorders our priorities, reconfigures our values. Grief dispenses with bullshit and replaces it with emptiness. Please do not confuse emptiness here with lack. The classic Buddhist concept of sunyata is actually closer in meaning to “boundlessness.” At least that’s how my friend Joan Halifax, a Zen roshi (priest), translates it.
It is this sacred spaciousness that most spiritual technologies, engineered over millennia and across the religious spectrum, have been designed to uncover. Nakedness of soul. With the garments of our habitual attachments in a pile on the ground at our feet and our sense of self in tatters, we can step into the arms of the Beloved.
Which is usually the last thing on our minds at times like these. When we are grieving, we are not interested in ecstatic union. We long for our dead baby to come back to life. We ache for our ex-spouse to stop loving that new person and resume loving us. We desperately want the blood test to be revealed as a false positive so we can get on with our life as it was, climbing mountains and saving the world. In fact, it would be monstrous to suggest that someone in the throes of fresh loss seize it as an opportunity to consummate her longing and make love with the Divine.
It is only gradually and tenderly that we may begin to breathe into the shattered space of grief and catch the fragrance of the holy that is wafting on the breeze of our abandonment. Little by little, when we are weary enough to stop trying to fix our brokenness, we may glimpse the unbrokenness that undergirds the catastrophe of our loss. We recognize that the charged atmosphere of a loved one’s dying feels just like the charged atmosphere when a baby is born. The pain of missing loved ones who have died, or a way of life that has ended, occupies a similar region of the heart where spiritual longing resides.
These boundary lands of life and death are bathed in beauty. This is where we are closest to our source, which is Love. It’s as if the heat of our grieving becomes a catalyst for mending our soul’s broken connection to the Divine. Grief can open the door to holy desire, which in turn leads us into the arms of that which we yearn for.
Mystics seem to have no shame about contradicting themselves left and right. They blithely proclaim that the cure for pain is in the pain itself and that the cry of longing is the sigh of merging. That’s because the path of the mystic reconciles contradictory propositions (such as harrowing sorrow and radical amazement) and blesses us with an expanded capacity to sit with ambiguity, to treasure vulnerability, to celebrate paradox as the highest truth. If we lean toward the anguish of grief and soften into the ache of missing the ones we love or of regretting the unfinished business between us, we may recognize the presence of the sacred permeating the field of the heart. Rather than pushing away uncomfortable feelings of yearning for that which we have lost—or maybe never had but pine for nonetheless—what about letting our hearts break all the way open?
Modern Western culture conditions us to step away from that precipice as quickly as possible. We are conditioned to see death and painful longing as problems to be solved rather than as sacred landscapes to be revered. We are encouraged to medicate our grief, to treat loss as a malfunction that needs troubleshooting, to satisfy our longing as swiftly as possible. We may feel obliged to employ any of dozens of spiritual methods, from meditating ourselves into a trance to conjuring up “the power of positive thinking,” in order to bypass our direct experiences. We buy into some bullshit notion of “the law of attraction,” which asserts that difficult life experiences are the result of faulty beliefs and that if we simply focus on what we want, the Universe will fall into place to meet our every need and grant our every wish. From this perspective, we can’t help but consider loss and longing as cruel and unruly, judging ourselves to be doing something wrong when we fail to get away from the pain.
Believe me, I am not a fan of tragic loss. I hate that my beautiful, blossoming fourteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, crashed my car and died (I talk more about her in chapter 11). It hasn’t been easy to witness loved ones suffering mightily as cancer ravaged their bodies, trapping them in its clutches and not letting them go until there was nothing left of them. I am a peace activist; I vigorously oppose the culture of death that manifests in the form of war. I embrace all that is life-affirming: poetry, art, healthy food, connection with nature, community.
But with this kind of messaging that pathologizes death and loss, of course many of us are going to mistake the fire of grief or longing for what we cannot have or can no longer have—for problems to be resolved—rather than as evidence of our holy membership in the human condition and an invitation to spiritual transformation. By “transformation” I do not mean transcendence (as you may have guessed by now). I mean the opposite of rising above the realities of this world. Rather, it’s about becoming so fully present that the line between sacred and ordinary is obliterated and the face of the Beloved shines from every face—humans, bees, juniper trees.
The Terrible Grace of Love Longing
The Dagger
The Dark One threw me a glance like a dagger today.
Since that moment, I am insane; I can’t find my body.
The pain has gone through my arms and legs, and I can’t find my mind.
At least three of my friends are completely mad.
I know the thrower of daggers well; he enjoys roving the woods.
The partridge loves the moon; and the lamplight pulls in the moth.
You know, for the fish, water is precious; without it, the fish dies.
If he is gone, how shall I live? I can’t live without him.
Go and speak to the dagger-thrower: Say, Mira belongs to you. MIRABAI
The poet-mystics of all traditions celebrate the transformational power of grief and loss and the terrible grace of love longing. My namesake, Mirabai, is an example of the alchemy of heartbreak. Mirabai lived during the same spiritually fertile time as the Spanish mystics I love, John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, but in a very different place. Mirabai was a devotional, or bhakti, poet from North India who relinquished wealth and status to track the invisible footprints of Krishna, the elusive Lord of Love. She wasn’t trying to be subversive. She didn’t stage a political action. She simply followed the music of love longing resounding in her heart. Sometimes it sounded like the roar of separation; other times, like a song of homecoming, a lullaby of belonging.
This inner music led Mira from the comfort of the family palace to the local village streets and riverbanks, where she sang and danced with anyone who would sing and dance with her without a whit of regard for socioeconomic status or religious affiliation. She welcomed high-caste scholars and untouchables with equal warmth. Hindus, Jains, and Muslims, traditionally separated by entrenched ideologies, were universally drawn to the beauty of Mira’s rapturous poetry and bhajans (devotional songs). Everyone resonated with the purity of her passion.
Mira’s relationship with her Beloved was not all drenched in bliss. Quite the opposite. Most of the time Mira was on fire with desire for Krishna, the one who had toyed with her heart from the day she first met him. From time to time he would reveal himself and then slip back into the shadows, enfold her in a mystical embrace and then sneak away while she was sleeping. Sometimes she felt close to him, but most of the time he eluded her grasp. I call this the Disappearing God Syndrome. It plagues and blesses mystics of every kind, but it is the poets who best express the paradoxical pain and joy of longing.
“ONE TO ME IS FAME AND SHAME”
Mira refused to let her public’s adoration go to her head or familial scorn bring her to her knees. “One to me is fame and shame,” she declared in more than one poem. This did not stop her husband’s family from condemning her—nor thousands of spiritual seekers from following her. Mira’s admirers may have included the legendary poet-mystic Kabir, beloved by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and likely also included the third Mughal emperor, Akbar. It was Akbar who stirred up a hornet’s nest of trouble at the royal house where the young Mira lived with her husband and his family. Knowing of the hatred Mira’s Hindu in-laws harbored for Muslims, the emperor disguised himself as a beggar and made a pilgrimage to pay homage to the young poet-saint of whom all of North India was speaking. Deeply moved by her singing, Akbar left a priceless jeweled necklace at her feet. When the family discovered this treasure and realized who had been sitting in their midst, they banished Mira from the household.
This was not her first conflict with her husband’s people nor her last banishment. Their association started off with a fundamental difference in opinion about the meaning of marriage. Mira had been betrothed to Prince Bhoj Raj for most of her life, as was—and in some places still is—the custom in India, and she was obliged to marry him when she was a teenager. The problem was, in her heart Mira was already married to Krishna. When she was a child, a family friend had gifted her with a small statue of the blue-skinned love god, and she was smitten. She carried her little lover with her everywhere, fed him milk from her own cup, and nestled him beside her on the pillow all night. Her heart had been Krishna’s from that moment onward, and so when the time came to consummate her arranged marriage, she found it impossible to give herself to her earthly husband.
Prince Bhoj Raj was not pleased about this, and his family was furious. He cajoled her; they threatened her. Mirabai went through the motions of a high-caste Hindu wife, but she burst into poetry and song at the slightest whiff of her Beloved, whose fragrance permeated her being. Mira writes about the various ways they tried to get rid of her. Her mother-in-law offered Mira nectar laced with poison. She drank it and found the concoction sweet and refreshing. Her father-in-law sent her a garland of flowers with a venomous snake hidden inside the blossoms. The serpent turned into a spray of lilacs.
After three years of domestic charade, Mirabai’s husband went off to fight the Mughals and was killed in battle. It was Mira’s duty to commit suttee, to burn herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. But since she considered Krishna to be her spouse and not Prince Bhoj Raj, she saw no reason to participate in such a violent act. She refused and was again exiled, this time for good. That suited her perfectly. Mira spent the rest of her life as a wandering minstrel, singing and dancing for her Beloved, and wherever she went people joined the stream of her ecstatic devotion and let themselves be carried into the arms of the One.
Which is all very nice. But the underlying story of Mirabai is a story of spiritual warriorship. This is a woman who defied social norms so powerful that her defiance could have cost her her life. Not only did she voluntarily renounce her inherited privilege to worship among the poor, but she lived as an exemplar of an empowered woman who chose the path of Love over convention, of poetry over luxury, of homelessness over imprisonment in the expectations of society. Mirabai offered herself to the alchemical flames of longing for God and was transfigured. Her example of abdicating social advantages for the sake of spiritual transformation is as relevant today as it ever was.
That’s why those of us who have shoes must take them off now and recognize that we are standing on holy ground. That’s why we who can afford to speak out need to risk unmasking the fake little gods worshipped by a culture of war and praise the God of Love with all our hearts, and with our minds and with our bodies. The brave women mystics who walked before us show us the way.
The Long Drought Is Over
My Beloved has come home with the rains,
And the fire of longing is doused.
Now is the time for singing, the time of union.
At the first thunderclap,
Even the peacocks open their tails with pleasure and dance.
Giridhara is in my courtyard, and my wandering heart has returned.
Like lilies that blossom under the full moon’s light,
I open to him in this rain: every pore of my body is cooled.
Mira’s separation and torment are over.
He who comes to those who love has remembered his promise. MIRABAI
Mirabai wasn’t the only one borrowing the language of love to express the pain of separation. We saw, a few pages back in this chapter, how the poetry of Rumi (a feminine mystic in the body of a man) knocks on the door of the heart to invite us into a special relationship with suffering as a portal to grace. This is the entire plot line of the Song of Songs, too, that peculiarly erotic biblical scripture in which the Bride—archetype for the soul in love with the Divine—writhes in the throes of longing for her runaway Bridegroom. Ultimately, he arrives at the door of her mother’s house, and the mother slips away so that the lovers may consummate in peace. In passion, actually. By the time the Bridegroom shows up, they are both so drenched in yearning that the doorknob drips with “sweet flowing myrrh.” As with many of Mirabai’s poems, in the Song of Songs the story crosses the threshold of longing into the ecstasy of union.
At night on my bed I longed for my only love.
I sought him, but did not find him.
I must rise and go about the city,
the narrow streets and squares, till I find my only love.
I sought him everywhere but I could not find him.
SONG OF SONGS 3:1–2
Bind me as a seal upon your heart,
A sign upon your arm,
For love is as fierce as death . . .
Even its sparks are a raging fire,
A devouring flame.
SONG OF SONGS 8:6
The Hindu epic poem the Gita Govinda, composed by Jayadeva in the twelfth century, is another spectacularly sensual piece in which any distinction between spiritual longing and sexual desire becomes irrelevant. The Gita Govinda describes the love antics of Lord Krishna, who gives himself to Radha, his divine consort in the form of a milkmaid (gopi). Then he messes around with all the other milkmaids—every single one of them, making love to each in whatever way she most particularly desires. But when Radha rebuffs him, he pines for her. In the end they make their way home to each other’s hearts, to each other’s bodies, and meld in ecstatic union, which is all the sweeter for their having suffered separation.
The lush language invokes the ache of the soul’s need to return to her source: Love. Here we have a taste of Radha’s urgency:
[She] declares each step she takes is to your feet: what fire the moon is when you’ve turned away: In Mādhava she dreads the love-god’s arrows: apart and miserable, she thinks of you.
And here is a glimpse of Krishna’s desperation:
Around and round about he sighs and watches, and fights, as bees in thickets, for his breath, and makes, remakes the bed, and still he watches: tired, by love bewildered, still he waits.
And this is what their fulfillment looks like:
Pressed round by arms, by breasts, by fingernails, by pounding hips, by teeth on lips, his head pulled down but mad to have the honeyed stream: how curiously will lovers take their joy.
In both the Western and the Eastern versions of this great love story, the lovers start off together, and then they are riven apart, and then they find their way back to each other. The journey of return can be harrowing. In fact, grief is the philosopher’s stone that transmutes the lead of longing into the gold of union. Wholeness is the healing herb that grows from the soil of loss. Myth upon myth, in culture after culture, from age to age, speaks to the power of romantic love to convey the relationship between the individual being and the One.
Something in our souls recognizes this dynamic of exile and return. We remember that our source is Love. We suffer from the illusion of having been pulled up from our soul roots. We long to go home. We engage every practice we can get our hands on to restore our birthright of belonging. And when we attain those fleeting moments of union, we realize we were never two to begin with. We were always one and always will be one.
The language of love is like a spaceship that blasts us through the layers of illusion and delivers us to the truth of our essential connectedness with the Divine and our interconnectedness with all of creation. There’s nothing like a passage of mystical poetry, incandescent with the fire of longing and besotted by the wine of union, to evoke our own burning yearning and reveal our capacity for melding.
This is why I have spent my life in the company of the mystics of every spiritual tradition. This is why I tuck a volume of the sky-clad poet Lalla or Shakespeare’s sonnets into my backpack when I hike, along with the apples and chocolate and sunscreen. Life in a separate body is a constant opportunity to forget who I am (the chosen lover of the Holy One, just like you). A good poem wakes me up, kissing my eyelids, when I drift back to sleep.
It’s not as if falling in love with the Divine rescues us from the travails of the human condition. Our partners betray us sometimes, and our dead remain dead. It’s that keeping the heart open, even in hell, makes space for the Beloved. It is in the darkest nights of our souls, when all we know is that we know nothing, that the presence of the sacred may quietly well up, mingling with our pain and connecting us to a love that will never die.
In her spiritual autobiography, The Book of My Life, Teresa of Ávila engages in a bold and intimate prayer:
“Why isn’t it enough for you, my Lord,” I complained, “to keep me bound to this miserable life? For love of you, I endure all this and resign myself to living in a place where everything hinders me from enjoying you. Here I have to eat and sleep and conduct business and carry on conversations with everyone. It torments me, my Lord, but I suffer it all for love of you. In the few moments I have left over to enjoy your presence, how could you hide from me, my Beloved? Is this compatible with your compassion? How can your love for me allow this? . . . Do not put up with this separation a moment longer, my Beloved! I beg you to see how much you are hurting the one who loves you so much!”
What do you want from the Holy One? Write a letter to your Beloved, stating your demands. Don’t censor yourself. When you are finished, read it to someone you trust. Make them promise not to offer any feedback, negative or positive, but simply to listen, bearing witness.