Longings, Part 1: A Preface

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. The following podcast was recorded at this year's Sage Hill training, an in-depth experiential training that helps people bring their heart to what they are called to do. To learn more, you can visit sagehilltraining.com. And the deeds are the things that feelings wake you up to. And these are the things you have to have fulfilled, done to, touched for you to live fully. The two most powerful needs are the need to belong and the need to matter. Now, the needs are things that you have to have fulfilled for you to live fully, And the need to belong and the need to matter are primary. I believe as equal to, sometimes even greater than food, water, shelter, and clothing, which makes them very powerful, which reflects back upon the powerfulness of us being emotional and spiritual creatures. The need for connection is greater than almost our need to breathe. And then feelings and needs make up the psychology of a person. What you can know about you, what you can know about others, what people talk about, stuff like that. Desire, this is the third root in the spiritual root system, the third characteristic of the heart. Desire is the nexus of your physiology and biology that meets your spirituality. Desire in and of itself is simply the craving for life within you. Everything that has life in it seeks life. It's sort of the DNA and the messages of the DNA that tell you what to go after to get your food. Does that make sense? Make sense? The DNA inside of you tells you what food to go after to make you full. And it tells you to go make more, make more of you, to continue you, to live no matter what it takes. You see desire in us is like even though like a brain stem, it's like the fight to live when somebody's holding your nose, that tendency to to drown someone else who may be trying to rescue you while you're drowning yourself. It's just simply reaction to survive. Straight up biology desire. So desire is is biological that that also is intertwined with how you're made to hunger and imagine life. K. It's the thing and the energy within you that in pursuit of you having your dreams come true, your life. Have your life. Desire in terms of its connection to spirituality is hooked into longings. That's where it goes into longings, kinda steps out of the biology and becomes the pursuit of what a human is made to have for fulfillment. See, the food that a human eats to live fulfilled is the food of emotional and spiritual connectivity and relationship. That's food to us. It's food. You think about, well, this is so dumb and silly, but if you invite a slug to dinner, like you're having a dinner party and you get some slugs, you've seen slugs? It's like just very not attractive, not attractive. So you have slugs and then you go to dinner and you bring the slugs, you put the slugs in chairs, and then there are four of you guys hanging out and five of you guys hanging out, and y'all have affinity with each other. Right? I mean, you you you know, you've sometimes you're with people you just like, like you look forward to being with them, and then you hang out with them, and then after you leave, you're like, God, it was so good. I'm glad we're gone because it's time to go, but it's like, I'm looking forward to doing that again. Do you know? It's like, this is this is good. You leave there and you are you have been fed somehow more than the food you ate. Right? And the slugs leave very disappointed. They got nothing. They just sit in the chair. Now, the slugs take you to a party. K? And you're hanging out with the slugs. I know this is dumb, but just stay with me. It's like you're hanging out with the slugs, and the slugs say, hey, come in and make yourself at home and everything. Y'all like hanging out with each other, and so we're cool with being with each other. And the slugs say, hey, you know what? This party last a week. Climb on. Get yourself some geranium leaves. Let's go. And they all climb up on the geraniums looking back at y'all like, come on. Let's have some fun. Well, at the end of a week, you're almost dying. And the slugs are just fat and laughing. Singing singing slug songs. Do you get that? Now, what's your point? Here's the point. That that that the food that actually feeds us is different from the food that feeds other living animated creatures. See, you're made to live off of and be fulfilled by a certain kind of food. Trees eat this, slugs eat that, porpoises eat this, possums eat this, and people eat this. And our food is predominantly emotional spiritual food that comes through connectivity of relationship and fulfillment and purpose in that relationship. Like, to be able to live a passionate life, and I don't mean go find your passion. Really, it's more like face your passion. Don't go find it, face it. It's in you. K. Remember, passion is a willingness to be in pain for something that matters more than pain. It's almost always connected to what you if you're not addicted, it's almost always connected to what you can't stop thinking about. Unless you're obsessive, compulsive, or addicted. It's like, I can't stop thinking about it. Did I turn off the water? That's not what we're talking about. So do you see that desire in a human that translates into the spiritual connectivity is going to be about emotional spiritual fulfillment. It's gonna be about living your passion, which is a willingness to be in pain for something that matters more than pain. And what's amazing about humans, we hunger to create and give ourselves so much that we're willing to do go and do extraordinary things that don't make sense in the animal kingdom for for those things we're hungering to create to come true. Sacrifice giving, risk taking, continue to stick with something when it's time to give up and quit and go home. Let it go. Stop. It's done. It's over. The closest thing to that being expressed in animal kingdom is the mother animal, care for the the the the baby animal. What they're willing to do to get, to keep, to have, to to hold on to that baby creature, But we have the capacity to do that with stuff that's off in the future, that we can see long off in the distance. That you'll hear a lot of the people say, at the end of their lives who fully participated in something, they say, look, I know we didn't get there. I know we didn't arrive. I'm so grateful to participate in something I'll never get to see. Or you'll hear the prayer of Simon in the New Testament, you know, he's he's like, how many years? How long to see this moment? And and now I have. I cannot believe I got to see this moment. But he was waiting on a future. And that makes us, a lot of ways, us. But if you're gonna wait on a future or move towards a future or have a passion in your life, you're gonna feel more feelings than a lot of other people want to feel. Does that make sense? Okay. That's fantastic. Now we're ready to introduce longings. Let me tell you what longings are, but as a preface to that, would you rather know a whole lot about how the brain chemistry works so that you understand all the moves you make? Or would you rather know about how life works even though it remains unpredictable every step you take? Which would you rather know? Brain. Okay. Now everything I'm talking about is not in the Greek world. Everything I'm talking about is in the Hebrew world. Alright? Now I tell you that because in the Hebrew world, they had a definition for truth. And in the Hebrew world, truth is, not was, truth is, God is. And implied in that God is, I am, I am, who I say I am, is God is faithful. So in the Hebrew world, when a child was born, they they were born into the truth and simply lived in that truth and struggled out of it. K? Now, they live in that truth. And in the Greek world, truth is something that is continuously speculated about, and it's always behind the next veil. It's something you go in search of and kinda resolve yourself to realize you'll never actually find it. So of course, in the Greek world, if you come at this life with from the Greek context, you wanna find out the answer to it so you can have the illusion of being able to fix it because you could have the answers to it. As if, you know, diagnosing and coming up with a name of depression, somehow you tell a person you're depressed. In fact, I was talking to the guy on the way up here and he was talking to me. He's like, he can't leave his house and it's like, well, you got anxiety. And he's been to the ER and his heart was racing and I said, man, your life's caught up with you, blah blah blah. You've got tons of fear, you you know, control anxiety and sorry, your hero child stuff. And he said, okay. That's all great, great, great. But can you get me out of my house? Okay. I said, not at the moment. Now, you know, now what I meant by that was, you know, he he wanted a Greek. I mean, he wanted he wanted a Hebrew experience, but I was giving him Greek. Like, here's the name of it, here's what it's like, and here's what it does. And so that's all great and it kinda helps you calm down, but doesn't get you out of house. So you can learn all the brain chemistry and know all the moves and makes of whatever happened in this and that, but you're not gonna know how to live an unpredictable life. And that's the only kind of life you're gonna have. And I don't like that either. Something else I don't like. Now, so the the Hebrews said, God is faithful. And then because they weren't robots and they weren't fakers completely, they looked around at life and they saw how much it hurt. And they experienced despair, death, destruction, disorder, being overrun, like, I thought you liked me. If you liked me, then how come this is happening? What did I do to make you do this? They got into conflict with reality. They got into conflict with the truth and how much it had to do with reality. So they went, you know what? Okay. Yeah. We got god is faithful. You know what? Life is tragic. And so they got a conflict between the truth and reality. I'm asking you to consider that is the truth about you. I feel therefore I am. I'm I I feel therefore I am and cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am is a subset of how you're created. The truth is here. In reality, you can think about yourself if that's not who you are. There's a lot more going on beyond what you can think, what you can reason, what you can find out. There's a whole lot more to you. But see, what Einstein said, we we make a pan cognitive bad decision. We assume that because we can think and everything we can think, therefore, that thinking is everything there is when there's so much more. And it turns out that the Hebrews knew, they weren't they didn't talk about this, but they knew that as a person thinks in their heart, so is the person. That's Proverbs twenty three seven, the old King James. But see, they knew that that the the brain was in us to express the internal experience of the human experience and to bring it out. It's amazing. They got catharsis long before, others in the twentieth century. Twentieth century. So this conflict is made to be resolved because that is the conflict of life. And where God is faithful, we go like, I'm looking for a life that's full of what it's made to have. Is that correct? Where we see God is faithful, like, hey, you're faithful. You're gonna give me the life that I'm made to have. And you're born looking for the life that's in you to find. And so, God is faithful, then there my longings, life is tragic, well then there's my grief, and my distrust, and my despair, and my disappointment, and my disgust, and my disregard, and my I think I'll handle this on my own. I think I'll take over from here because of what's happening around me is b s. I'm not doing it. Now, what's amazing is that there's a famous story in the old testament, which I won't get into, but it's basically the resolution for this conflict. They called it Israel and the translation, English translation for Israel is to struggle with God and live. To find your life in the struggle. The resolution of the conflict between the truth you're born with and the truth that is and the reality you experience and the experiences you have is struggle. The reconciliation is in your capacity to struggle. Boom. Makes sense. You and I are created as emotional and spiritual creatures. Created to do one thing in life, live fully. But you can't live fully unless you're struggling completely and utterly and even vulnerably and competently and confidently with trust in relationship with yourselves, facing yourself. And you know, you can't face yourself unless somebody's really there to help you hear what you're having to say about you. Because a lot of conclusions we come up about ourselves are way off. They're a lot worse than what the truth is. You're a lot prettier, a lot smarter, a lot more competent, a lot more adequate, a lot more loved, a lot more careful, a lot more caring, a lot more cared about than you know. You see? Y'all probably laugh about something else, weren't you? Oh, you thought the conclusions you would come up with would be grandiose. Like, I look in five today. You know, that kind of thing. It takes it, well, you are. And, and it's probably okay to say it. Even though you will get stoned using a biblical reference or insulted using a good American reference. Like, look, how many of you would be more comfortable telling someone that might or might not care about you that you've been sick? I've been sick and I've been struggling. Or telling them, like, I got a big fat screaming crazy $55,000 bonus today. Would you tell them you're sick, or would you tell them about your bonus more?

Sick. I I'm with you. It's I think it's so true. We will hide that which we most appreciate ourselves or most wish or most think could be true. Like when I said that loving, loved, cared for, handsome, adequate, competent, confident, trusting, and nice. It's like and if I said that to you and you believed it, you're putting yourself at a pretty heavy duty risk. But if I said, look, you got these things to work on. Here's the sheet. I know it's long, it'll take you all night. Come back tomorrow, we'll talk about it. You're like, oh, good. I mean, you'll be like, alright, alright, no tricks here, no tricks at all. So we are amazingly fearful of telling the truth about what we're looking for and what we wish. Amazingly distrustful. Amazingly scared. We would rather things be bad than good. We can't tolerate the good. It's scary. It's so scary.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. If you're interested in learning more about the power of our core eight emotions, I encourage you to check out Chip's book, The Voice of the Heart, A Call to Full Living.