“If you’re yearning for God … just pause right in the middle of that ache and feel it and understand it as the innate language of the divine love for you.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Yearning as Divine Reciprocity

“As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning. Some spiritual teachers will even say that the yearning you feel for God is actually coming from the opposite direction; it is in fact God’s yearning for you. When we yearn, we come into sympathetic vibration with a deeper heart-knowing. The heart is an organ of alignment; it connects us. Yearning is the vibration of that connection.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p44.

“If you’re yearning for God and the beloved, sometimes it’s really wonderful to just pause right in the middle of that ache and feel it and understand that as the innate language of the divine love for you. And really feel it as coming in the opposite direction.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 3:54 disc3 track8.

“At the heart of everything, at the heart of originary being, the Chiastic epicenter of everything, is the yearning of divine presence, of divine knowing, to be known, to be seen, to be reflected, which is what consciousness means.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington June 2021, 34:00 03 – Monday Morning Gebser Teaching.

Yearning as Presence

“Yearning is not a sign of separation but a sacrament of presence, a sacrament that can be borne only at that outer level of stillness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christians, 23 Sunday Morning Teaching.

“As long as that yearning is there, anchoring you and calling you, you know there’s a bridge. So, trust your yearning. And you don’t relieve your yearning by getting to the goal. You relieve your yearning by learning to ride it.

“Yearning is not a means to an end. You know, yearning is an end in itself. It’s a cosmic relational bridge, particularly between the realms. And as soon as you can get used to that and ride it, knowing that as long as you’re riding your yearning and that it’s the riding of it that is going to be the immediate participation in the divine life. It’s not like God is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. God is the rainbow and the yearning is the rainbow.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence As Presence Feb 2025, 52:30 04 Silence Sat am teaching.

Yearning as Connection Between Realms

“Let’s not get rid of longing quite so fast, because that longing is the tether between the realms. Our yearning for the infinite is going to always connect us to the Imaginal world in which we’re surrounded and to worlds beyond that. So it’s holy and absolute and needs to be intensified and purified, not repressed or converted into love. It’s a form of love, but it has its own unique vibration. So we’re born to work in two worlds.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 10:00 Day2.1-Creating-Sun-In-Myself.

“We all have that yearning and it becomes so important to see it early, to understand it and to consciously weave the warp of your finitude and the weft of your infinitude into a single tapestry which connects the realms.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 36:00 0818 IWS TuesdayPM Q & A.

Embodying Yearning in Daily Life

“Having to earn a living, raise children, care for aging grandparents, all the stuff of human life is not a distraction from our spirituality. It is the place where we put legs on our yearning.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 17:05 Final Teaching Day 5.

“If you choose to become a conscious servant it is constant intentional suffering and conscious labor here. And you infold the particularity and individuality and yearning and brilliance, the soul you’ve come by honestly in this life, and dedicate it into the service of the next level along the transmission chain.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:29:19 08 – THU AM Teaching.

Purifying Yearning

“As you work on a path of altruism, there’s the need to be constantly working in the direction of making sure that the yearning to give comes from a purer and purer compassion in which you and your neighbor are deemed as equals. Or your neighbor as in the Samaritan is, you know, the one you’re helping is above you. So that altruism doesn’t become a game of condescension. It doesn’t become a game of entitlement, masking itself. It doesn’t become an easy game of making yourself feel virtuous. And as you can, watch those demons that will creep in and purify the motive in the ground of your beseeching.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, 34:14 RT 06 Aft Teaching 9:27.

“Conscious love is best learned by cultivating conscious presence. Functionally, this means one must develop a strong observing eye. About seeing when you’re in a lesser place, and to learn a yearning and a grounding in attention of the heart, which is the willingness to yield, to yield into the larger, no matter who is right or wrong.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 07:30 CL track03-disc12Retry

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Logion 6
His students asked him,
"Do you want us to fast?"
"How shall we pray?"
"Should we give offerings?"
"From what foods must we abstain? "
Yeshua answered,
"Stop lying.
Do not do what you hate,
because everything here lies open before heaven.
Nothing hidden will remain secret,
for the veil will be stripped away
from what lies concealed behind it.”

Logion 70
Yeshua says...
When you give birth
to that which is within yourself,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you possess nothing within,
that absence will destroy you.

Logion 24
His students said to him,
"Take us to the place where you are,
since we are required to seek after it."
He answered them,
"Whoever has an ear for this should listen carefully!
Light shines out from the center of a being of light
and illuminates the whole cosmos.
Whoever fails to become light is a source of darkness."

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Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus,  Shambhala Publications, 2008

Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.