Typically, homesickness plagues teenagers away on their first summer camp or soldiers far from family and safety.  But what I propose is that we all suffer a deep homesickness for the Divine- to re-experience that ultimate peace and clarity, acceptance and indubitably- ecstasy.  Can you remember a time the Sufis refer to as “the sweetness that was before honey or bee”; recognizing a time when your soul was together with God, the space and time between lifetimes, that brief taste of wholeness?  Was leaving paradise to be placed in a suit of flesh and blood so painful, bombarded with fears and frustrations that you chose to forget?

We project that insatiable longing in our obsession with romance novels and torrid Hollywood sex scandals we call entertainment.  We see the desperateness of this fever in the proliferation of phone sex, on-line dating and pornography.  Not that this plague of Divine desire has only touched modern man but it is modern man who has dismissed its importance.  Courtly love, the 12th century western ideal of romantic love idealized a spiritual relationship between men and women.  “It taught a rough knight to worship the universal feminine symbolized by the fair lady whom he served and adored.” (1) The passions of courtly love were lived inwardly.  It is modern man who has prioritized externalization- louder, faster, shinier and fails to honor the curves and cadence of nature.  We have lost our way back in our megalomaniac efforts to move forward. We have become scorned lovers taking our toys and tools to play in small cliques.  Our collective feminine voice grows faint as we enlist love and relatedness in the service of power and profit.  It is little wonder why 19 million American adults are living with major depression and about 5 percent of children and adolescents in the general population suffer from depression at any given point in time according to a report from the National Institutes of Mental Health.

We divorce ourselves from the idea of God and Evolution denying that ever choice was made to return to this earth school.  Mirrored in the marriage race that over 50% of western couples fail to finish; we yearn for a coupling a connection that makes us feel whole.  Our modern day icons speak of this universal theme.  Actress and singer Barbara Streisand spins our woeful tale in her song the Way We Were:

Mem’ries light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored mem’ries of the way we were

Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were.

Can it be that it was all so simple then
Or has time rewritten every line
If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we, could we

Mem’ries may be beautiful and yet
What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget
So it’s the laughter we will remember
Whenever we remember the way we were.

The way we were.

It is only in the deepest cellar of the subconscious mind that we discover the scattered pictures of this perfect love affair, our first love.  And what we discover is that all successive loves pale in comparison.  We in our self-imposed states of amnesia don’t understand the chronic disappointment in our mortal partners and hence the resentments begin to form bringing us further out to sea.  Underneath the shiny surface of the day to day there are ancient voices hinting at what was; we begin to feel separation anxiety. He comes home late and doesn’t call.  She spends more time confiding in her friends than in you.  The veneer of trust wears thin.  Along comes a mighty wind called Life and we are thrown overboard.  Wet and bitter we rail against our fate.  Ironically we turn back to God at the climax of crisis- WHY ME!  The broken heart not only experiences the failure of the current relationship but also grieves the original loss all over again.  Without a spiritual context in which to process the avalanche of emotion, we feel alone, powerless, unacceptable, overwhelmed and unworthy.

Psychologist and author Robert Johnson explains in his book WE how man seeks his soul neither in religion nor in spiritual experience nor in his inner life; but he looks for that transcendence, the mystery, that revelation in woman. Johnson tells us “passion is the one lane into the lost world of the gods.” Not only is this ill begotten attention distracting us from a life of contemplation and spiritual connection but also it becomes a destructive force by campaigning an ideal of woman based on romantic fantasy (a uniquely western epidemic), which is beyond the reach of the female majority.  This in turn becomes a disappointment for the men and a lifetime sentence of dieting, plastic surgery and low self esteem for women who fail to achieve this lofty goal.  High-end packaging trumps inner content and development.

Modern Day pill poppers and charlatans peddle sex as the cure-all in their appeal to the ego but isolating the physical properties diminishes the elixir’s potency.  “The soul grows bigger as it holds more thoughts, instead of shrinking them all down to the size of a single solution.” (2) A more holistic approach can be found in the Kama Sutra the infamous Sanskrit treatise on love and sexual technique.  The Kama Sutra -written between the first and sixth centuries- instructs its reader in the mastery of his/her senses.  It is not to be used merely as a manual for satisfying our desires. A person acquainted with the true principles of this science, preserves his Dharma (virtue or religious merit), his Artha (worldly wealth) and his Kama (pleasure or sensual gratification).  Important to note that women are instructed to study the arts (a repertoire of over 60 forms ranging from writing and drawing, binding of turbans to knowledge about gold and silver coins, jewels and gems, Chemistry and mineralogy) in combination with the sixty-four practices.

The ancient Indian tradition of Tantra also included sexuality as a spiritual act as part of a larger spiritual practice.  Today we have smaller sects practicing what they call Sacred Sexuality, which sees sex as a means of experiencing or communing with the Divine.  Sacred sexuality is based on the philosophy of sensualism: the idea that enlightenment is reached not by retreating from the world, but by participating in it fully which differs from hedonism, which does not recognize the Divine.  Hedonism is a philosophy of consumerism in which the individual is encouraged to indulge in material pleasure simply for the sake of indulgence.  We have become a herd of prodigal children (Luke 15:11-32).  In our self-indulgence, we have not only wasted the material possessions of our inheritance- our natural resources- but also through rebellion and foolishness, we have compromised or in some cases completely denied our precious relationship with the Divine.

Adrift on the ocean of love it would serve one to dive beneath the waters surface to discover treasures that still inspire followers hundreds of years later.  Born in Afghanistan in 1207, and active in what is modern-day Turkey, Rumi’s poetry of mystical love has made him the best-selling poet in America — some 700 years after his death. This Persian poet is said to epitomize the Sufi Path of Love.  Sufism established fifteen centuries ago in Arabia is the mystical branch of Islam and is a path of love and devotion.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

-Rumi

The aim of The Sufis is the removal of all veils between individual and God, Lover and Beloved. The only energy the Sufis believe is capable of dissolving these barriers is Love.  Love activates the unconscious bringing us face to face with our own darkness, enabling us to purify the psyche and prepare a space where love and Beloved can meet. (3)...the tears we cry are the homesickness of the Soul. (4)

It is in the paradigm of love that we can do the deepest inner work.  The darkest shadows loom like moisture laden clouds over a broken heart and can be traced back to childhood and beyond.  “In a human love affair we can taste not only the bliss hidden in the heart, but also the pain of our separation from the Source.” (5) This bitter sweetness becomes an insatiable craving and for some it becomes an obsession.  For the latter individuals this fundamental need is often coupled with a sense of abandonment, for in the deepest sense they are the outcasts in this world, knowing in the depths of the heart that they belong somewhere else.  In exile there is an insistent and pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction, never enough despite accomplishment and possessions.  In hypnotherapy, by regressing back to the source of the presenting issue- dissatisfaction, feeling alienated, unworthy/unlovable, abandoned, separation anxiety, etc, we can discover what is real now and what would seem to be reverberations from childhood or whose genesis may be preverbal.  “Attachment and bonding are supposed to create a deep connection for us with those who are significant to us at those early stages in life.  If the significant persons are not themselves connected to Self/Spirit, then they cannot offer it to their babies...They are suffering what I call the ‘broken baby and lost spirit’ syndrome.” (6) How many of us are grown-up broken babies?

As adults these earlier traumatic memories get triggered.  When we are triggered our experience takes on a distorted nature because it is in fact a reaction to an accumulation of pain, rejection, loss etc.  Through the process of hypnotherapy we can release and reframe these earlier traumas emotionally disengaging the client from the memory and thereby diffusing the trigger.  “The ability to experience Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) is the key to accessing the resources of the archaic, archetypal and ancient memories.  The ASC is the key to deep psychic energy release and the consequent healing which accrues…As the roots of the Chronic Grief are systematically addressed and the turbulence i.e. the chaos in the system is addressed, the sufferer has fewer and fewer episodes of distress, and grief, and more joy.” (7)

Once the source traumas have been identified then a healing is possible.  It is common to approach the existential issue of Divine Homesickness as a grief recovery process.  Working through the stages of grief outlined below is used to resolve all types of loss- relationship, death, health, financial and even TRUST in God.

I. Shock - numbness
    Initial panic
    Denial fear and anxiety

II. Anger - hostility
    Mood swings

III. Depression
    Deep sorrow and “pain”
    Paralysis – helplessness, feeling victimized, hopelessness
    Inability to function as before the loss

IV. Preoccupation with and idealization of the love object – yearning for their return

V. Guilt and self reproach: “I should have …….” or “If only I had ……..”

VI. Acceptance – Feeling of freedom, new energies, spiritual peace, forgiveness of self and God
(Wellness Institute)

An example of this process is when I worked with a new widow.  Obviously the numbness was a way for her body to survive the shock of her husband’s death.  There is no need to rush this process of recovery but what lurks behind the semi-sheer curtain of numbness are the fears of a woman left to cope without the help of her husband.  She questioned her ability to make the right decisions regarding her children’s’ futures.  At the same time, she denied her feelings- her fears and anxieties- because she had to be the strong one in order to protect and provide for her children.  Upon identifying and owning her vulnerability she was also able to access an infinite resource of strength and inner wisdom that we all possess.  We spent many sessions harvesting this wisdom and creating a sense of safety, peace and inner-strength. 

The next phase targeted her anger.  She was able to admit, express and let go of the resentment that she had for her husband who suddenly left her, and at God who chose a father of two small children to have a brain tumor.  By casting this blanket of blame aside a much more tender and fragile women appeared.  She felt helpless that there was nothing she could have done to prevent his death.  We also explored the guilt that she felt for not being all she could have been to him while he was alive.  We were able through age regressions to identify other experiences of helplessness and hopelessness, shame and guilt, which were triggered by her husband’s death.  By reconnecting with these child parts (healing and integrating them) she felt more equipped to understand the needs of her children.

The gaping hole in her heart left by her husband’s death still needed to be addressed.  Our next job was to develop a means of connecting with his Spirit, which naturally evolved into the possibility of allowing other Divine energies to inspire her journey.  For someone without a spiritual practice or belief system this was a mighty step.  In addition to hypnotherapy we worked with her dreams, which also spring forth from the subconscious mind, to bring her guidance.  Her increased awareness of Self opened a channel for her husband to communicate and participate in his family’s life.  Through this process she was able to forgive her husband, God and herself.  Her husband’s death introduced her to a Love greater than she imagined possible.

By working through these layers of grief no matter the catalyst the ultimate destination is reconnecting with the Divine, a form of rebirth.  This great loving source awaits our return beckoning us through the sufferings he places in our path and the seeds of longing he plants in our hearts. 

“Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form . . . He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire . . . In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.”

~St. Teresa of Avila~

Bibliography

1.  Robert Johnson, We, (HarperCollins Publishers, 1985), 45.
2.  Thomas Moore, Soul Mates, (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994),142.
3.  Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Catching the Thread, (Golden Sufi Center,1998), 51.
4.  Ibid., 32. 
5.  Ibid., 159.
6.  Elaine Childs Gowell, Chronic Grief- Spiritual Midwifery: A New Diagnostic and Healing Paradigm”, (Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, Summer 2001), 314.
7.  Ibid., 318.