The quiet art of New Year's longing

Moving beyond resolutions into the space of gentle possibility

Since maybe my early teens — if that — I’ve never been much of a fan of New Year’s resolutions. When occasionally mentioning this in conversations over the years, I’ve got the impression that a lot of people feel the same: why bother making ambitious ‘promises’ that you never end up keeping, anyway?

For many years — and again, I suspect I’m not the only one — I kind of threw the ‘New Year’s’ bit out with the ‘resolutions’: I didn’t see the point of declaring anything, so I didn’t bother.

Later, as I kind of fell into the inner growth realm, the concept of a new beginning, at least of sorts, took on other qualities. It started being less about resolutions, assertions, aspirations, and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, and more about longing. And this in turn brought in the aspect of letting go of some things in order to make space for whatever I was longing for — which then created a need to first have a rearview-mirror type sum-up of the year that just passed, to know what I was letting go of.

Now, the concept of evaluating the past year and setting goals for the one that’s just starting can easily bring back the sense of judging and ambition that often accompanied my childhood’s New Year’s resolutions (usually cloaked by a optimistic surface quality of ‘This time, I’ll make it happen!’ which lasted a week or so). For this reason, the initial portal into my new take on things was an important aspect: Longing.

Longing: scary, sacred, vulnerability

For the first decades of my life, I might have dismissed ‘longing’ as a lazy and agency-challenged substitute for actual planning or doing. I might have admitted to longing for someone or something I knew was on the horizon (only I’d have preferred it to come sooner). However, as for longing for things that weren’t, that sounded a touch weak and soppy. Powerless, even — a range of perceptions that I preferred to keep at arm’s length. If I wanted something, it was my job to make it so. Unless I was in a position to, it felt like a waste of time. If I’d have bothered to look under the hood at the time, I might have found that beneath that label, something more true was hiding: for me, being reduced to ‘longing’ indicated a vulnerability I was not going to invite voluntarily.

Wanting, I could do. Wanting is a gut thing. Planning — or even, at a stretch, dreaming — were OK, too, mind activities as they were. With my signature Eight makeup, those were the domains I typically hung out in. Longing, by contrast, is a quality of the heart. It is gentler than the urges of our instinctual centre; less structured, and possibly much vaguer and subtler, than planning or dreaming. It was too much like an unreliable quagmire for my taste. But then, slowly, I started befriending my heart, and longing took on another flavour for me.

I realised that while the wanting of the gut was a good thing indeed to be in touch with, to be really tuned in to that, I also needed to access my heart. I needed to open to the possibility that what it might introduce in my life were things that I actually needed, things that were required for me to be a human being, not just, as the saying goes, a human doing. And I needed to learn who this human being was.

That’s a bit of a shocking revelation. I mean, come on, I knew who I was. Hello. I knew what I wanted and where to go, and if I didn’t, I knew where to find out. Or so I thought. However, it turned out that there was a piece missing. And like for most of us, that piece was obscured behind all the rubble and debris of the defences, old and new, that I’d put in place to not have to risk being vulnerable.

Maybe this sounds familiar? Because here’s the thing: whether we’re in the ‘assertive’ group and thus ‘heart-repressed’, or whether we are any other Enneagram type (including the ‘heart-types’ themselves), those defences will be there. Some of us write the heart off as mushy, unreliable softness. Others might well use the heart for guidance — but, on closer inspection, the guidance is doing the ego’s bidding. And yet others might be very emotional people, their feelings frequent guests and, possibly, a fair bit of their self-image tied to specific bits on the emotional spectrum. But whichever of these traits is the strongest in us (and we usually have a bit of everything, but we tend to be stronger in one of these), no one operating on the average ego level of awareness will be too keen on listening, really listening, to the quiet whispers of the actual heart centre, sans the various ways our egos tend to utilize it.

The first portal: Longing

Which brings us back to the sense of longing that this article is about. It’s not about exploring feelings of unrequited love, or mourning loss, or any of the aspects of the heart that sometimes come suspiciously close to ‘doing’, or at least a deliberate processing. The activity we’re after is stiller, quieter. It’s about taking time to be with the heart — not venting or channelling various emotions, exactly, but rather just inviting the subtler aspects of longing, or wishing. It’s more meditative contemplation, less melancholy yearning. It’s very gentle. It requires us to listen inwardly, rather than make lists of what we’d like to have, or do, or be.

If I start from there, from the listening stillness and presence, the more sensitive parts of me can be heard more easily. And again, some of you might feel like you’re sensitive enough as it is, thank you very much, and don’t need to foster this quality. This, of course, might be true. But also, it might be that the sensitivities towards the outside world that you sense in yourself have had you ‘toughen up’ ever so slightly — and completely understandably — in defence? Take a closer look, ever so respectfully. Can you allow some sensitivity to show up, just for you? Not making yourself available to the horrors of the world, or to the needs of others, or to outer demands of any kind, but to your inner longing? What would you, in your heart of hearts, love more of? Less of? Softly, compassionately — just listen.

If you know right away and feel ready to write a list, literally or figuratively, it’s likely this is a more superficial layer talking than the one we’re after. (If you are very used to this kind of sitting, maybe not, though. But you’ll know.)

To me, the possibly scary part of this listening is realising I’m longing for things that I don’t know how to provide for myself or that maybe I don’t trust are there for me to have. Again, that feeling of vulnerability. If this is you, too — again, tread slowly. Be curious. In all likelihood, regardless of Enneagram type and regardless of your usual inner work routine if you’ve got one, your heart will be ever so grateful for your willingness to give it this space and for even asking. What am I longing for?

When you notice something in response to this question, it might be that at first, you register the quality of longing itself, rather than the object of it. Allow that. Don’t push. Notice this quality, and maybe even find the quite courage to relish it. This is your heart speaking to you. Maybe this is as far as you go this time. Maybe you can be magnanimous and brave enough to not even know what the longing is for, exactly — just knowing that it’s there and having allowed yourself to feel it, opening to the uncertainty of not knowing. In my experience, this is how you get to find out, in time.

When you get a sense of what the longing is about, you might see if you can get a complete sense of it, centre-wise. As in, if or when this longing is fulfilled, what would you be doing? What feelings would it bring? What would your thoughts sound like? Maybe you find this isn’t yet possible, as the longing is only a vague sense at this point — and if so, this is fine, don’t worry. When you have an idea, to whatever extent of clarity, you might want to make an inner or actual note of what your heart seems to be longing for, and put that to one side for a little bit.

The second portal: A compassionate backward glance

The next step is looking back over the last year. Again, it’s not an evaluation, and you’re not meant to be judging or grading your own performance (or those of others, or life’s in general). For me, it’s helpful to have a peek back through my calendar. What actually happened this year? I have a naturally forward-focused mind, so my initial response to this question, without the calendar, is somewhat blank. If your orientation is different, it might be that you can rattle off your whole year from memory, in which case obviously the calendar might not be needed.

And we’re not writing a memoir or report. Some bigger events might stick out, but other than that, personally and for this little exercise, I’m more interested in the overall flavour or the year than specific occurrences. Taking the perspective of each centre of intelligence separately might be particularly helpful. What thoughts and concepts did I keep coming back to? What emotions kept resurfacing — maybe being repeatedly pushed away, or perhaps, on the contrary, dwelled upon? What courses of action did I return to again and again — either in doing them, or attempting and failing to? The key here is themes.

The third portal: Letting go

Quite likely, you noticed a palpable shift in quality between the first and second portals. The first, heart-immersed step doesn’t seem to connect very well to the second, rather mental review. And this is where the third step comes in, in true Enneagram, Law-of-Three fashion.

From the mental standpoint, looking at what the flavour of your past year from the point of thought, emotion, and action, you might notice some patterns or themes that seem to oppose, or at the very least not really invite, what your found yourself longing for going through the first portal. Don’t beat yourself up over this — it’s you and me the rest of humanity. (If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be missing the bit we find ourselves longing for. So, while this may not be an ideal predicament from a feelgood point of view, it’s completely par for the course.)

So here, we are likely to find some things that we might want to let go of. Maybe there are letters of goodbye, or gratitude, or boundaries, that we need to write. Maybe we want to do a ceremony for a more concrete sense of closure where some things are concerned. Maybe we just need to notice that something is gone, and it’s not even really a question of letting to — and perhaps, haven’t been for some time.

Don’t rush this step. And another thing: You might notice that we can’t really make anything go. ‘Letting go’ doesn’t mean ‘throwing away, so we’re rid of it’. It means opening your hand and allowing whatever it is to leave us when it’s good and ready. It means not actively holding on to it.

For this reason, while letting go can sometimes be surprisingly swift, it can also, at other times, be a process. And here — in the in-between window of time when you have opened your hand and stopped holding on, but whatever it is still doesn’t leave — lies the greatest challenge. The fact that it’s still hanging around might have us believe we still need to engage it, as in feed it or probe it or turn it over. However, we don’t.

Here, someone might protest, ‘But I was told if something lingers, there’s still work to be done. I was told that ignoring things just makes them fester. How will I know whether what I notice lingering is in this category of the one you are just talking about?’ And these questions (and any possible slight exasperation that accompanies them) are completely valid. To say something about this, we need to take a closer look at the heart and the gut — or the emotional and the instinctual centre respectively.

Holding on and letting go — the dance of the gut and the heart

When talking about the topic of forgiveness and letting go, the heart usually features strongly. It’s clear for us, quite spontaneously, that these features are heart qualities.

However, something interesting happens when we find ourselves unable to forgive or let go. Because any time we hold on, while there may or may not be others, too (such as ingrained patterns of reasoning, or issues pertaining to self-image, prestige, the need for approval, and so on), there’s always an instinctual component. Perhaps, without thinking about it, in describing our predicament, we’d even use phrases like not being able to ‘move past’ or ‘digest’ something. This is tummy talk! And the core of it reads resistance. When we are stuck — in a memory, state, situation, or whatever it might be — and not able to move on or let go, it’s because we want whatever happened to have been different. We’re holding on to it in a futile attempt to change what already happened. But obviously, the events that took place, whatever was said and done, our reactions to it … all of it is in the past. Holding on to any part of it, including our own and others’ behaviour and responses, is completely pointless, as it changes nothing. Whatever happened will still have happened. Whatever was lost will still be lost.

But even if we let something go, we don’t necessarily forget it. If we lost something that we loved, we can still remember it, love it, and be grateful for it. If we went through something painful, we will still have gone through it, and we will remember the experience. But when we have truly let go, in neither of these cases will our memories be coloured by resentment, grief, anger, fear, or any such painful emotions. That’s one of the beautiful things about this let-go: it leaves any feelings of joy and love in place, while the painful ones fade. (This doesn’t mean the latter never return, but it means they no longer follow the memories like an obligatory shadow drowning out the lighter ones.)

Now, again, while the let-go that we long for is found in the heart, the holding-on that’s preventing it happens in our gut. When there is no more instinctual resistance to what happened — attempts to enforce boundaries that weren’t respected, to keep what was already lost, to defend what was already violated — the gut stops holding on. And it’s only at this point that any let-go in the heart can be realised.

Rumi is often quoted with the words, Our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within ourselves that we have built against it. This is exactly what need to happen here. It’s useless to attempt letting to if we’re not addressing the holding on that happens elsewhere. It’s like opening the tap for the garden hose wider in an attempt to have the water come through, when the real reason it’s not is a crease mid-hose. The heart might be wide-open; we might have processed any chinks on that level. But if we’re still resisting the past being what it is, this ‘crease’ will prevent the flow.

So, where am I holding on? And can I gently, perhaps in the smallest of increments, ‘un-crease the hose’ so that love, truth, and presence with what actually is can flow freely? When something I thought I’d dropped lingers, these questions will tell me whether there’s still work to do, or whether I just need to let whatever it is leave when it’s good and ready. As the question is not so much, Is it still here?, but rather, Am I still holding on?

The final portal
(which is not actually a portal at all)

So after having searched our heart for longings, our head for mapping out what we are carrying from last year, and our gut for any residual resistance and holds, it’s time for the last step — which isn’t really a ‘step’ as such, as it might require the rest of this upcoming year, and possibly beyond that.

Here, we utilize all three centres (as always, obviously — but bear with me). We allow the heart to come back online and remind us what we long for. We allow the head to make sense of how any lingering resistance blocks that. And we allow our instinctual centre to invite us into any movement that allows us to travel the next leg of our journey into what our heart aches for.

And the fine thing is, so long as we remember to revisit the heart and our inner longings, the rest of our job will be presented to us as we go. When it does, rather than feel like a failure for not having achieved it already, you might feel grateful that you are now noticing, and giving it space.

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As you can see, attempting to finish this fourth step in any given sitting is a tad optimistic. Then again, as I said — some things take their leave almost immediately with we allow them to take flight. Others, just like with people, take their sweet time.

Depending on which types of egos and psychological structures we are dealing with in our particular life-situation, some of these portals might be seen as red flags by the ego, whereas others are regarded as invitations to go on an instinctual/emotional/intellectual spree. If you want to navigate this process with at bit of guidance, maybe you feel like booking an individual session.