What does your heart long for?

Tara Brach asks this question in her brilliant book, True Refuge. The answer my heart gave me was that it wants to feel connected to myself and others.

Sometimes it’s hard to fully feel our longings and yearnings because we can descend into self blame and shame for why we don’t have something, or don’t have enough of it, in our lives. The tendrils of shame can entangle almost anything.

I don’t think many fully realise the absolutely devastating effects of early and developmental trauma, particularly when it is perpetrated by caregivers, what is termed betrayal trauma. If you’re a little girl who is sexually abused by your father and your mother is complicit, what does your heart long for?

How can that little girl have a relationship with her parents when she is finally able to get away? Do people realise what it’s like having no family in this world and how people are judged and shamed for that? I think the stigma of being abused and neglected is much greater when it is perpetrated by a family member rather than by a stranger. To say that I find that perplexing is an understatement. Rather than having our compassion, abused and neglected children are judged and stigmatised for not coming from what many of us call a so-called “good” family.

Tuning into our heart’s longing makes us vulnerable. It opens our heart which can feel sometimes like our heart is breaking and that scares us. I also think longing is often paired with grief. We don’t long for what we have but for what we don’t or didn’t have.

Mahon Falls, Comeragh Mountains, Waterford, Ireland

Asking this question isn’t easy because of all the pain it can bring up, but it’s an important question, one that will tug at us all our life until we answer it. As with anything that’s difficult and painful, we need to find the sweet spot of leaning in just enough, not too much all at once and not too little, because then nothing changes.

Asking what our heart longs for connects us to ourself on a profoundly intimate level. What feels like a dark night of the soul or a breakdown can become a break through, there is nothing pathological about it. If anything, being open to asking this question invites a deep inquiry which can throw us off kilter for a while, even a long while. Jeff Foster describes the pain of a breakdown beautifully in his lovely book, The Way of Rest: The raw pleasure and the pain of it, unfiltered, at last! No longer numb, you will be as softly vulnerable as you were in the beginning.

Vulnerability opens us up to hurt but, as Gabor Maté says, there’s no other way to grow if we don’t risk being vulnerable, we need to shed the shell that has become too small and constricting and grow a bigger one to house our bigger, truer self.

At the same time, if you feel unable to answer this question for whatever reason, trust yourself. As Rainer Maria Rilke says: I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.