Sometimes we recognize an inner experience before we understand what it means. I felt an unexpected pang of homesickness while I was on my way home. A scene from The Holiday became a companion image as I explored spiritual disorientation and the possibility of staying present when familiar ways of connecting no longer work.
Taking an Inner Snapshot
Recently, I found myself in a moment of tender reflection on the way to the airport for a return flight home.
As my Uber driver pulled away from the Mercy Center, where I had been attending a contemplative wisdom school, I was suddenly surprised by a subtle but strong perception. An intuition. A knowing. It was the unmistakable felt sense of homesickness.
Tears quietly filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. I was leaving something dear to me.
I was at a loss about how to respond to this pang of homesickness. There was no one to run to, nothing practical for me to do but remain fully present. Rick Hanson describes savoring as a way of letting a meaningful experience register more fully within us.
By felt sense, I mean the body’s subtle, preverbal way of knowing: something sensed before it can be fully named or explained.
I tuned into the somatic sensations and took an inner snapshot: the metaphorical “hair on the back of my neck” rising, a warmth and ache in my heart, a familiar gravity in my solar plexus.
Once buckled into my airplane seat, I took out my journal and wrote these questions:
What is this sense within me that says I’m leaving home when, in the outer world, I’m heading home?
Who or what is my heart attuned to at a level imperceptible to my conscious mind?
A Rom-Com Becomes a Portal to Wisdom
As I sat with this experience, a scene from The Holiday returned to me.
In a moment of disorientation, on the heels of a breakup, Amanda swaps homes with Iris, a woman from a small village outside London. Both women want to spend Christmas far away from home.
Though Amanda expresses that she doesn’t want to be around any men, the Universe delivers a kind, lovely widower to her doorstep: Iris’ brother Graham. There’s an immediate connection, and although awkward at times, Amanda and Graham find themselves very unexpectedly smitten with one another.
Along the way, we learn that Amanda has not cried for years, not since her parents split up when she was in middle school. Graham, on the other hand, is deeply in tune with his heart and recognizes the depth of his feelings in a way he can clearly articulate.
While Amanda is drawn to Graham, she does not have language for what’s happening inside her and has little experience relating authentically amid the vulnerability that always accompanies love.
Their time together comes to an end, and it’s time for Amanda to return home to Los Angeles. As Amanda and Graham prepare to part ways, with no clear plan for when they’ll meet again, they agree not to say “goodbye,” but instead sign off with “be seeing you.”
On her way to the airport, we see Amanda sink into a moment of tender reflection. Surprise, relief, and a conscious taste of aliveness rise and melt the defenses she has understandably erected against loss. The tears she has longed for finally spill.
In my imagination, her tears say:
You are home.
And she listens.
Amanda asks her driver to turn around. She gets out of the car and runs back to the little cottage, where she finds Graham having a good cry of his own.
I adore the turn Amanda’s story takes. She chooses one more step toward Graham in this unexpected entangling of hearts rather than receiving a vague promise of an amorphous “happily ever after.”
Her tears recognize something before her mind can explain it.
Staying Present to the Absence
If I close my eyes now, I can still sink into that moment and tune into my felt sense of it.
I knew.
I know.
But I can neither hold onto nor articulate specifically what I know. There’s an absence that still lingers in me.
Until recently, I felt somewhat responsible for this absence. It’s not unusual for me to feel this way when my tried-and-true ways of connecting don’t seem to be “working” anymore and I’m being wooed into a new context of relating.
As I wrote in Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul, my discomfort and guilt around spiritual restlessness often lead me to blame myself to the tune of a Taylor Swift lyric:
It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.
Language for My Experience
There’s a quote from Cynthia Bourgeault’s Eye of the Heart that has always felt familiar to me. I recognized that it gave words to my experience these past few months:
“You have to endure the tedium till something emerges in it,” is how Rafe once put it to me. If you really want to find out what lies behind the mind, the first step is simply to stay present to the absence, not try to fill it with something more familiar, like joy or despair. And yes, at first it feels like death; everything is so deathly monotonous minus that constant roaring and churning you mistake for being alive, but if you push through and watch very closely, something does indeed begin to emerge, bearing the faintest scent of “that other intensity.”
—Cynthia Bourgeault
An Initiation into Subtle Perception
I think the gift of wisdom school may have been a stripping away of another level of habitual dross.
Another fresh encounter with the parts of me that do not yet feel safe.
Another invitation to notice when I am bracing, so I can choose to soften into a grace that I can neither earn nor fall out of.
This is not the gift I’d hoped for from wisdom school, but it seems to be the one I needed most. What felt like a problem to solve became an initiation into subtle perception.
I have compassion for myself as I reflect, knowing that this is the way humans learn and become. The spiritual life is a series of opportunities to open incrementally to being loved and to the risk of loving.
So, like Amanda and Graham, I’m meeting this next moment with a heart as open as I can muster, taking a step into the unfamiliar. I’m releasing the compulsion to understand how it will all fit together and unfold.
Questions for Reflection
What is intuition like in your body?
What somatic sensations do you associate with knowing?
What’s it like for you when spiritual restlessness or disorientation arises?
A Blessing
Wisdom meets us in so many ways, right in the middle of our lives.
It can find us through a movie or a song, as we witness an act of courage or tend our houseplants.
May we have eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to perceive, and the patience to let it ripen in us at its own pace.
Love,
Kirsten
If you’re living through spiritual restlessness or an absence you cannot explain, spacious accompaniment can offer a place to listen without rushing to fill it. You can learn about spiritual direction and schedule a free exploratory conversation here.
