Once longing is awakened within the heart it is the most direct way home. Like the magnet it draws us deep within our own heart where we are made whole and transformed.

This is why the Sufi mystics have always stressed the importance of longing. Your whole life must be one of longing.

Yet our present Western Society is so divorced from this mystical thread that underlies every spiritual path that we have no context within which to appreciate the nature of the heart’s desire for Truth.

There are many people who feel the unhappiness of a homesick soul and yet do not know its cause. They do not realize the wonder of their pain, that it is their heart’s longing that will take them Home.

Longing draws us from separation back to union, from our fragmented sense of self to the deeper wholeness of our true being.

The longing of the heart is the sign of the deepest fulfillment, and yet it terrifies the mind because it does not belong to this World.

There is no visible lover, no one to touch or to control. It is a Love affair of essence to essence that was born before the beginning of time.

Our culture has forgotten and buried the doorway of devotion, and the lover is often left stranded, not even knowing the real nature and purpose of the longing that tugs at the heart.

It is easy to think that this discontent of the soul is a psychological problem, to mistake longing for depression or identify it as a mother complex or the result of an unhappy marriage.

We need to reclaim the sanctity of sadness and the meaning of the heart’s tears. For the longing of the lover is a longing to return to the source in which everything is embraced in its wholeness.

If we can create a context of longing, then those whose hearts are burdened with this quest will come to know the true nature of their pain. They will no longer need to repress it.

Fearing it as an abnormality or a psychological problem. We need to be able to collectively affirm this inner secret: that the heart suffers because it has not forgotten its true Love.

If we follow the path of any pain, any psychological wounding, it will lead us to this one primal pain: the pain of separation.

Being born into this World, we experience being separate from oneness, from God, from our heart’s Beloved.

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 ourself, it will takes us deeper than any psychological healing.

Love and suffering are powerful transformative agents because they embrace the mystery of being Human.

Longing is Love‘s call to return to the root of the root of your own Self, to the place within the core of our being where we are always whole.

Love can not be understood by the mind just as it can not be contained by the Ego. Love is the power that opens and transforms us, that intoxicates and bewilders us.

Love leads us deeper, away from the prison of our limited self to the freedom and wholeness of our divine nature.

Never turn away from love, not even love in a human form, for love alone will free you from yourself

Sufi Saint Jâmî