Intense Longing

There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel the separation from the Beloved, don’t you? ~ Rumi

"I was sitting in my kitchen when “it” awoke. My two-year-old son, in his blue plastic chair, was sitting beside me eating his lunch. Below my window, the well-worn cobblestones of our tranquil Milanese courtyard soaked up the midday sun. The city was quiet, doors closed, while people gathered for lunch and a moment of repose before returning to work.

Then out of nowhere it came. I felt the most intense longing arise within me. It was like a tornado unexpectedly appearing in the midst of a clear day, tearing through the countryside and rearranging the landscape. My heart and then my whole body started to burn with intensity. It seemed to force its way into my awareness, cracking through the surface of my contented life, leaving me aching with an inexplicable, inconvenient, overwhelming desire for love. I wanted to love and be loved — passionately, deeply, and completely— but in a way I had never considered.

The love I was longing for was not a love I had ever known, not the delicious thrill of romance or the companionable parallel paths of my married life. I wanted to dissolve and die into something far greater. And I could sense that it wanted me too. What I longed for had no face or name. Was it a person? Was it my deeper self? Was it God? I didn’t know. What I did know was that it was so vivid and real that beside it my life seemed pale and insubstantial…

When this longing first arose in my awareness, it shocked me and woke me up. I was fearful, apprehensive, but also fascinated. As a successful, married woman living a stable, comfortable life with my husband and young son, I didn’t want to admit (even to myself) how much I yearned for a deeper and more compelling experience of love and consciousness. I didn’t know how to find what I was seeking or if it really existed. I didn’t even know what it was that was flirting with me. Consequently, allowing myself to feelthe longing was the greatest risk of my life. But I let it in anyway, let it fill my awareness, and allowed it to swing like a wrecking ball through my comfortable life and leave me standing in the rubble … defenseless, excited, and facing the unknown. I allowed myself, as Rumi wrote, to “be silently drawn by the pull of what you really love…”

When I opened my heart to this sacred longing, I found it had the power to transform and transfigure me. Such fulfillment truly is possible, and some of us are capable of integrating this evolutionary impulse that calls us to a new order of love and relating — what I call “Evolutionary Relationships.”
After my marriage disintegrated — taking with it my family’s approval, my reputation, my community, and many of my friends — I had nothing left to hold on to but this divine longing.

So I let it lead me on an improbable journey, signposted by intuitions and coincidences, until I found myself visiting a large and soon-to-be infamous spiritual community in Oregon. There, I met an unusually awake, mystical man named Peter, who would reach into my soul and change my life forever. From the moment Peter and I met, something was set in motion that we couldn’t control. It was as though the pattern of our oneness already existed, engraved in the fabric of the cosmos, just waiting for us to stop resisting its gravitational pull.

When the spiritual community imploded in a much-publicized scandal just a few weeks after we met, Peter and Ireluctantly separated, but the intensity of my need to be with him soon overwhelmed me. Real love is shattering in a most magnificent way: destroying ideas, plans, and all our unconscious inner structures that create separation. True love is relentlessly humbling, reducing our defenses, displaying our vulnerabilities, and evoking an unambivalent “yes” to life.

As a result, within a few short months, Peter and I found a way to be together, allowing our mutual longing to penetrate layers of falseness, insecurities, fears, and separateness. There were times when, lying in his arms, I found myself cryingfrom pure relief — a total surrender to what I had been trying to find my entire life. With ultimate wonder, I began to understand what the longing was pulling me toward. It wasn’t just Peter; it was what our coupling revealed to me about the true purpose and potential of human relationships. Peter and I had entered into a state of “mutually awakening,” a spiritual state shared by two people, which I now realize is part of a larger movement of consciousness…

We sometimes forget that love is the most powerful force in existence. Popular culture has tended to reduce it to romance, desire or affection, and while those are some of love’s expressions, the force itself is much greater and more mysterious. Philosophers, mystics, and poets throughout the ages have understood and honored the power of love — its potential to draw us deeper and its ability to make us stronger and more courageous. This longing for sacred love unveils what some have called “the Beloved” and others call God. It is no accident that many mystics chose the language of human love and desire to describe their longing for divine union with the evolutionary impulse…

In the years Peter and I spent together, we experienced the divine love that Rumi wrote about. We existed not as two individuals but as a unified field —sensuous, fluid, and flowing. We were capable of feeling each other’s feelings and knowing each other’s thoughts before and as they arose. Effortlessly, we entered higher states of consciousness and were shown greater dimensions of love and reality…

Evolutionary Relationships are not limited to romantic partnerships. You can create one with a close friend, with a colleague, and even among a group of people, so long as each individual feels the same divine longing and is willing to surrender to its irresistible pull and commit to its fulfillment. Today, Evolutionary Relationships represent the unfolding edge of our development as a human species. In truth, the longing is not our desire for divine love so much as divine love desiring and needing us. This new dimension of love and more evolved consciousness needs our surrender and our wholehearted cooperation…

‘What in your life is calling you when all the noise is silenced … The meetings adjourned, the lists laid aside, And the Wild Iris blooms by itself in the dark forest ... What still pulls on your soul? In the silence between your heartbeats hides a summons. Do you hear it? Name it, if you must, or leave it nameless, But why pretend it is not there?’ ~ Terma Collective”

~ Patricia Albere, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening
It all started in 1971, when Albere unknowingly found herself working with cultural icon and transformational movement pioneer, Werner Erhard, Albere played an important role in expanding est’s reach into the world and developing and training the organization’s leaders. Her work with Erhard laid the foundation for Albere’s passionate commitment to facilitating real transformation, which, she affirms, is at the heart of what makes human life meaningful—“real transformation means that a person’s life is irrevocably changed in a way that empowers them to fulfill their highest potentials…”

A chance meeting with the man who would become her partner of four years opened up new experiential pathways for Albere to discover the life-transforming potential of sacred intimacy and the inter-communion of two souls. She experienced a dual awakening, one where the awakening was shared and catalyzed through a way of being together. They lived from a dimension of existence that holds the invisible and visible worlds together and through which flows higher communion and transfiguration. Albere’s awakening to this new paradigm of relatedness catapulted her onto the forefront of an evolutionary, spiritual and cultural movement, while inspiring her to create the Evolutionary Collective, a transformational work focused on discovering, cultivating and materializing what we’ve not yet imagined possible by way of creativity, connection, relationship and collective consciousness…

There are currently two main hubs for the Evolutionary Collective Yearlong Intensives, New York and San Francisco Bay Area. She is also on the faculty of THE SHIFT NETWORK and teaches virtual intensives on their global educational platform each year. Patricia is grateful to be Alexander Trumbo’s mother – an awesome DJ living in Los Angeles. She currently lives in Sausalito and New York City.”