The heat of our soul, that fire in our belly or the part of us that burns with love. All of us on the path of healing, awakening, and spiritual growth have that inner fire burning, or we would not have even started this journey. We need to be on FIRE for our own transformation; something inside of us needs to BURN if we want to step out of the dream of separation and awaken into our true selves and connect with Source. This path we are on (whether we call it awakening, liberation, union with the Divine, or fully surrendering to God’s will), requires 100% of our energy, commitment and engagement! It is a radical path. That is not to say harsh or angry, but radical, as it often takes us where we wouldn’t normally go if left to our habitual egoic tendencies: into what scares us, and what can be mentally, emotionally and spiritually challenging.
Rumi, the famous 13th century Persian Poet said it this way: “My heart is burning with Love, all I can see this flame, and my heart is pulsating with passion. Should Love’s heart rejoice unless I burn? For my heart is Love’s dwelling.”
In the Christian tradition it is called “Holy Unrest.” St Augustine, the 4th century catholic mystic said: “You have made us for yourself, oh God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
That deep longing in our heart, that restlessness, that passionate desire (Remember the Song: “Desire” by U2, and Bono screaming: “DESIIIIRE”?) is planted right into the very structures of our heart, mind and body by a divine plan. It never lets us forget that we are made for ecstatic union with the Divine and others. We are made for “Agape,” for unending BIG Love; and this desire, this longing is always waiting to take us deeper into the mystery of this Love. It creates a certain tension inside of us which keeps us moving and keeps us from being complacent. We experience this at every level of our being: spiritually in our thirst for God, aesthetically in our thirst for beauty, psychologically in our desire for love and unity with others, emotionally in our desire to feel a oneness with others and with all things, intellectually in our thirst for experience and truth, and physically in our sexual desires.
So let’s not be disquieted at the “unruly” passions of our heart; let’s instead embrace them and trust that they are a vital and necessary force in our lives, meant to be channeled upwards to the vertical, and be offered to Love’s refining fire. Let’s celebrate as human beings who are always somehow searching for an all consuming and infinite Love and unity. Let us burn in this Love.
