Using Longing and Envy as a North Star to Find Where You're Going and Get There

An exercise I use all the time

“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”

-Meister Eckhart (1260- 1327), mystic and philosopher

I write in my book about the importance of Listening to ourselves, a seemingly simple idea that frequently causes a lot of consternation in practice because it’s just not something we’re taught. Some people don’t feel much connection to their gut feelings. Others express a painful struggle to delineate between their instincts and their old, habituated reactions. People have dreams that they are certain mean something important, but that they have no idea how to interpret. Few of us have elders to guide us as we come of age in the art of reading nature and our own bodies and dreams. Meanwhile, there’s a tremendous amount of noise in the world that can be nearly impossible to tune out.

To genuinely attend to the subtle information of our own beings, we have to start with the basic premise that the soul or unconscious self exists and that it knows things that the conscious mind does not. For many people, this remains a radical idea.

I sometimes think of the unconscious as that child in action movies seen pointing anxiously into the sky with one hand while tugging on their parent’s arm with the other, shouting “Look! Look!” They see something miraculous up above that their oblivious, distracted parent has not yet noticed, and likely would never have noticed without the child’s broader vision and curiosity.

Learning to listen to a deeper part of ourselves doesn’t just mean attuning our hearing. It means developing greater respect for those parts of ourselves that we might think of as childish or silly, annoying, or even brash and nagging. The perspective that we have of our own unconscious often shows up as our view of marginalized communities or of the people in our personal lives who may be desperate for more intimacy or connection. We can learn a lot about ourselves by what we leave on the margins or view as Other.

The more we learn to respect these other aspects of ourselves, the more that we can experience with profound clarity the intelligence of the unconscious and the wisdom it holds about our own futures. Our unconscious selves live in a different realm of time and can offer up precognition if we’re both humble enough and arrogant enough to actually listen; that is to say, we both need to trust what the unconscious is expressing and then have the confidence about our own futures to actually listen to what it says.

I use a simple exercise around this idea regularly with clients and also in my own life when I know I’m at a point of adjustment or major transition.

Whether I’m moving through it step-by-step or just keeping the awareness in the back of my mind, it has been one of the most useful tools for getting clear on where my creative work, and thereby my life, is headed. I think of it as a parallel to the ancient art of navigating by the North Star: you must first identify where the North Star is in the sky before you can begin to steer by it to find your way.

I thought to share this simple practice recently after reading the wonderful new book, On Our Best Behavior, by

Elise Loehnen

in which she devotes a chapter to Envy to unpack this often yucky, oppressive feeling. Elise works hard to turn the feeling of envy on its head in order to convey a truth that I hold dear: our envy is frequently pointing us in the direction towards which our souls most long to move.

That’s true about envy and about many other related feelings like longing, respect, romantic attraction, admiration, or a tendency to obsess over someone else’s life. There’s a through line of “I want” in all of these feelings that can provide valuable information about our own lives if we’re able to listen. Like the child pulling on their parent’s arm, these feelings can be indications of our unconscious trying hard to get our conscious attention: the tugging, pulling, or nagging feeling is trying to get us to go over there, the same way a magnet pulls with an invisible force.

As Meister Eckhart expresses in this quote, it often provides an image through someone else’s life to show what it wants: “When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”

The simple exercise goes like this:

Notice

Who has your attention?

Take note of who is grabbing your attention with feelings of curiosity, desire, respect, admiration, longing, envy, or jealousy. The feelings may be intense and uncomfortable (more often envy or longing). They also may be quite subtle (more often a sense of humble respect). Without judgment, allow a range of those emotions to express themselves in regard to other people.

These people may be dead or alive. They may even be fictional.

They may pop out at you immediately or require some research to uncover. The feelings about them may be whispers or loud sirens. But in some form, your soul is seeing itself in their lives and trying to grab your attention to say: this, pay attention to this.

Collect those names.

Don’t discard them because it seems “silly” or “stupid” or because “everyone likes them.” You can edit later. Begin by just noticing and collecting those names.

Explore

What is it about these people?

There is no right or wrong way to explore the allure of these people (or this one person) for you, but it’s important to be specific.

I mean specific, specific.

Why are you drawn to them? What is it that attracts you or that you envy and thereby experience feelings of irritation around? Look at this from a variety of angles as you explore your thoughts in relation to these folks.

Write whole sentences about each person without judgment. (You never have to admit to these feelings or share this with anyone else.)

Identify

How are they connected?

Look over everything you’ve written and see if you can tell immediately how they’re all connected. What are the specific ways in which these people overlap?

And is there anyone that doesn’t actually make sense with this group? We can sometimes include people in these lists who are flashy in some way and have captured our attention, but who are more part of the external noise of performance than of our own soul-calling saying: this is something I deeply want or need.

Accept

It may be impossible to imagine at first, but you are part of this community.

Your interest in these individuals and the specific ways in which they are connected is mirroring something to you about your own future in its truest form.

You are already part of this list.

What’s next is to genuinely accept that this is the case—that your very specific, beautiful life is being reflected in their lives—and that your job is to own that future and move towards it with hard work and faith.

Ritual

In addition to the reality of the work ahead of you, the work I speak of in my book as Building, you’ll need regular reminders about the future that is ahead of you in order to keep the faith. To those ends, you may need a little altar or ritual to pull you forward.

Print photos of these inspiring people and put them on your wall or on an altar in a corner of your room. If they’re artists, gather their artwork and place it all together somewhere, separate from the other art you may have up. If they’re writers, put their books together on their own bookshelf. If they’re musicians, create a playlist with just their music and listen to it regularly. If it’s something about their personal lives that is calling to you, their sexuality or relationships for instance, find ways to keep those images in your field of vision.

You get the idea.

Keep these people in your awareness and keep repeating to yourself that you already share their traits. You’re already part of their world. The work now is to step into it.

xo, Satya