Customer Reviews

The Holy Longing: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Yearning

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Dr. Connie Zweig's, The Holy Longing is beautifully written. It is eloquent and deep. It courageously weaves the author's depth of personal experience and clinical expertise with a comprehensive knowledge of the world's religions. And although the book deals with the deepest currents of the human psyche it is fully accessible and engaging. As a psychologist I find that at the core of my client's presenting problems there is often a profound Holy Longing that was misinterpreted as simply a psychological problem. In every mystical tradition saints and poets speak eloquently of the soul's search for the divine. Many of us experience the burning of this holy longing in our search for romantic love, a precious object, a child, the ideal home, a perfect teacher, or a community of like-minded seekers.

"It is because of this longing that we build Sistine Chapels, sculpt the David and compose the Messiah," the author writes, but "the longing for the light typically evokes its opposite: a shattering encounter with spiritual darkness."

Dr. Zweig asks, "What is the proper stance toward our holy longing?" She offers informed and compassionate insights into the universal yearning of the soul to transcend our skin-encapsulated individuality.

Religious yearning is the mother of all desires. Underlying all of our drives and aspirations is the urge to transcend the boundaries of individual identity and unite with the sacred. Connie Zweig does a magnificent job of describing and explaining this primal urge in all its myriad forms. Some authors have treated spiritual longing with disrespect, writing it off as some displaced psychological need. Others have treated it with such reverence that they ignore the potential dangers to which the holy longing can lead. Zweig's psychospiritual approach balances the light and the dark, standing as both a beacon for seekers to follow and a warning system to help them avoid the hazards. Its graceful writing, and its mature, sensible, and grounded approach makes it a welcome addition to the spiritual repertoire.

As a therapist, I must say that this effort by Connie Zweig is an important work. Beyond being a good read and filled with fascinating prose, the Holy Longing strikes at the heart of the problem with most spiritual practice. The bottom line is that people don't handle their issues, their defenses, their pain and their disowned parts. Instead of studying their conditioned mind, their own holy longing leads them into dangerous territory with others - seekers and teachers who also have not looked deeply at their own pain.

The result is what Ms. Zweig so adeptly calls a "shattering encounter with spiritual darkness." The Holy Longing is a flashing amber light along the spiritual path that can help us avoid pitfalls, disappointments and outright degradation.

The message she so wonderfully delivers is that there is no transcendence without shadow work. Those of us who want to skip that step will see it emerge dead ahead on our path to the Beloved. Read the Holy Longing and avoid that landmine.

If you long for something greater than yourself but believe it's a romantic partner or a spiritual teacher, think again. This book gets to the root of our restless yearning and urges us to follow it consciously, not unconsciously as most of us do. It tells the stories of yogis and saints, as well as folks like us, who reach ecstatic moments and also suffer dark nights, when their holy longing goes off track. In this book Dr. Zweig extends her brilliant work on the shadow into the spiritual and religious worlds, joining spirituality to psychology and shedding light once again into the remote corners of our lives.
Bravo!

Rebeccasreads highly recommends HOLY LONGING as an adventure in looking at your spiritual path.

Why do we search for someone to guide us to the holy of holies?
Why do we accept there's someone "out there" -- like a priest or a guru, who has the answers to how to get closer to God?
Why do we believe there's someone who knows better or more than us... about something so intensely individual as our experience of God?

Connie Zweig gently (& firmly!) takes us by the hand & shows us how to look back along our spiritual path to see the shadows & our loss of spiritual innocence, so we can look into the brightness of our soul's future, stepping forward, perhaps for the first time, in spiritual maturity -- "grown-up-ness".

If you have ever felt that HOLY LONGING then Connie Zweig's stories will feel like a coming home into yourself. Healing, mind-changing & well written, & simply... outstanding! I was grinning with recognition all the way through. Dare I say, great fun?

THIS IS A BRILLIANT WORK BY A GIFTED WRITER. THE WORK IS ACCESSIBLE AND AT TIMES DEEPLY MOVING. DRAWING UPON HER BACKGROUND AS A JUNGIAN-ORIENTED PSYCHOTHERAPIST, MEDITATION TEACHER, AND RESEARCHER, DR. ZWEIG BEAUTIFULLY INTEGRATES TEACHINGS FROM THE PERENNIAL PSYCHOLOGY WITH FINDINGS OF CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY TO LOOK AT THE UNIVERSAL LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS PROBLEMS AND PITFALLS. I CITE ZWEIG'S WORK REGULARLY IN MY LECTURES AND CLASSES AT VARIOUS JUNGIAN ORGANIZATIONS AND HAVE RECEIVED ONLY POSITIVE FEEDBACK FROM MY STUDENTS AND CLIENTS IN JUNGIAN ANALYSIS.

I found the book to be of little usefulness. The author jumped from topic to topic without any cohesion and intermingled stories that failed to make her point. I finished the book at laid in on the recycle pile.