Hello everyone, and welcome back to Awakening the Divine Within.
Over these first few episodes, we’ve been talking about what I call The Great Forgetting—the loss of our awareness of who we really are as spiritual beings.
We’ve talked about the emptiness so many people feel inside. We’ve looked at the spiritual crisis behind many of the problems we see in society. We’ve talked about humanity forgetting its divine nature. And in our last episode, we explored why we so often search outside ourselves for something that ultimately has to be discovered within.
Today I want to bring all of those ideas together by talking about something I believe exists in every human being. I call it the hidden hunger of the soul.
Have you ever had the experience of knowing that something was missing from your life—but you couldn’t quite identify what it was? Maybe everything was going reasonably well. You had people who loved you. You had a home. You had work to do.
Maybe you had achieved some of the things you once believed would make you happy. And yet, somewhere beneath the surface, there was still this feeling: There has to be more.
I think most of us experience that feeling at some point in our lives. And our first reaction is usually to assume that something in our outer life needs to change.
Maybe I need a different job. Maybe I need more money. Maybe I need a relationship. Maybe I need to travel. Maybe I need a new project. Maybe I just need something exciting to happen. And sometimes we really do need to make changes in our lives.
But there is another possibility that we don’t consider nearly often enough.
What if the hunger isn’t coming from your personality at all? What if it is coming from your soul? The soul has needs just as the body has needs.
The body becomes hungry for food. It becomes thirsty for water. It becomes tired and needs rest. And I believe the soul has its own kind of hunger. The soul hungers for God. It hungers for truth. It hungers for meaning. It hungers for beauty. It hungers for love that is deeper than human approval. And perhaps most of all, it hungers to remember who it is.
That hunger can be very difficult to recognize because we live in a culture that offers us endless ways to distract ourselves from it.
If we’re uncomfortable, we can turn on the television. We can pick up our phones. We can shop. We can eat. We can work. We can scroll through social media. We can keep ourselves busy from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep.
And none of those things is necessarily wrong. The problem comes when we begin using outer activity to satisfy an inner need that outer activity can never satisfy.
You can entertain the mind and still starve the soul. You can surround yourself with people and still feel profoundly alone. You can accumulate possessions and still feel that something is missing. You can even achieve great success and suddenly discover that the success you worked so hard to attain did not give you the fulfillment you expected. Why? Because there are some things the world simply cannot give us.
Jesus expressed this beautifully when he said, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” I’ve always thought that was such a profound statement.
Obviously, we need bread. We have physical needs. We have responsibilities. We live in a material world, and we have to function in it. But Jesus was saying that there is another part of us that also has to be fed.
Our spiritual nature needs nourishment. And when that part of us is neglected long enough, eventually we begin to feel it. Sometimes it appears as restlessness. Sometimes dissatisfaction. Sometimes a feeling of disconnection.
Sometimes we begin asking questions we haven’t asked in years: Why am I here? What is my life really about? Who am I beyond all these roles I play? What happens when this life is over? Is God real? Can I actually know God? Is there something within me that is eternal?
Those questions are not signs that something has gone wrong. They may be signs that something is beginning to go right.
The soul is waking up. And I think this is an important distinction. We often try to get rid of discomfort as quickly as possible. But sometimes discomfort is carrying a message. Sometimes that inner dissatisfaction is telling us: “You have outgrown the way you have been living.” “There is more for you to discover.” “It is time to go deeper.”
There is a divine reality within every one of us and that the soul’s ultimate destiny is reunion with God. If that is true, then it makes perfect sense that something within us would always be longing for that reunion.
We may not consciously recognize it. We may call it something else. But beneath many of our outer desires may be a much deeper desire: the desire to come home spiritually. And coming home doesn’t mean leaving the world.
It means beginning to live in this world with an awareness of who you really are. It means beginning to develop a conscious relationship with God. It means learning to recognize your higher self. It means becoming more aware of the quality of your thoughts, your emotions, your words and your choices. And eventually, it means asking a very different question about your life.
Instead of only asking: “What do I want from life?” we begin asking: “What does my soul want to become?” That’s a very different question.
Maybe your soul wants to become more loving. Maybe it wants to learn courage. Maybe forgiveness. Maybe discipline. Maybe compassion. Maybe wisdom. Maybe you are here to overcome something that has limited you for a very long time. Maybe you are here to develop gifts that can bless other people. Maybe you are here to remember your relationship with God at a much deeper level.
The outer circumstances will be different for every person. But the spiritual journey has something in common for all of us. We are learning to express more of the divine nature that God placed within us. And that is why the hunger never completely goes away until we begin addressing it at the level where it originates.
You cannot feed spiritual hunger with material things. You have to feed the soul. So how do we do that?
We begin simply. Prayer. Silence. Spiritual study. Meditation. Gratitude. Service to others. Listening to that quiet voice within. Spending time with people who strengthen the highest part of us rather than constantly pulling us downward. And making room in our lives for God.
Not just when we’re in trouble. Not just on Sunday. But as part of our everyday lives. Because the spiritual path isn’t separate from life. It is life lived with greater consciousness.
So I want to leave you today with a question. Not a question you have to answer immediately. Just carry it with you for a while. What is my soul hungry for?
Not what do I want to buy? Not what do I want to achieve? Not what do I want other people to give me? What is my soul hungry for?
Sit with that question. You may be surprised by the answer. Because that feeling that something is missing may not be an emptiness you need to fear. It may be an invitation. An invitation to awaken. An invitation to go deeper. An invitation to remember the divine reality that has been within you all along.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Awakening the Divine Within. This brings us to the end of our first section, The Great Forgetting. And in our next episode, we’re going to begin exploring a beautiful but often misunderstood spiritual concept—the Divine Mother.
Who is the Divine Mother? Is the Divine Mother a being? A consciousness? An aspect of God? And why does understanding the feminine aspect of God matter so much to our spiritual development?
We’ll begin exploring those questions next time. Until then, remember: That longing for something more may be your soul calling you home.
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