When we care deeply about relationships, impactful work, Our communities and the world, how do we stay connected to what we long for without being consumed by the pain of its absence?
Longing can be a powerful source of erotic aliveness, connection and empowerment. It can also pull us into loops of rumination, chasing, striving, despair, or trying to force an outcome that’s out of our control.
What if longing isn't just an ache to chase away or overcome, but something to learn to be in relationship with?
Longing Lab is a small, intimate circle for creatives and tender-hearted activists who want to explore their longing as both a personal and collective force.
It’s an intimate, six-week circle:
Weekly Monday sessions for 90 minutes
With around six participants
In an intimate office space in Berkeley
Gift economy exchange
We'll slow down, listen inward, and make space For the desires, griefs, dreams, and uncertainties that shape our lives.
Through guided somatic practices, art and literary inspiration, reflective writing, creative exploration, ritual, and compassionate witnessing, we'll explore the difference between longing and chasing, surrender and resignation, hope and attachment to outcomes.
This is about cultivating a more spacious, embodied relationship with what we long for in our intimate lives and in the world we are working to create, without succumbing to the compulsive chase that’s reinforced by cultures of comsuption and extraction. Perhaps along the way, we’ll discover how our longing could be an abundant source itself of creativity, connection, vitality, and sustainable action.
(Or email chetna@mosaiceyeunfolding.com sharing why do you want to join this circle, if there are any sessions you'd have to miss, and what you can contribute as a gift exchange?)
LONGING LAB
An embodied circle for artists and activists to explore the wellspring of our longing
mondays, November 16th to December 21st @ 5:30 to 7pm
2955 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley
a six-week exploration
SESSION 1:
Monday, 11/16
meeting the ache
What am I longing for that I haven't fully let myself feel?
We'll begin by turning toward the longings we carry; the tender, inconvenient, exhilarating, and sometimes overwhelming ones. What happens when we give the ache room to breathe rather than rushing to soothe, solve, or satisfy it?
SESSION 2:
Monday, 11/23
the chase
When does wanting become urgency, compulsion, or striving?
We'll explore the moments when longing pulls us into repetitive loops of pursuit, fantasy, control, despair or burn-out. How might we recognize these patterns with curiosity rather than shame, and create more space between an urge and our response?
SESSION 3:
Monday, 11/30
fantasies of fulfillment
What do I imagine will become possible when my longing is fulfilled?
What do we hope a person, achievement, movement, or future will finally give us? We'll explore the deeper needs, meanings, and possibilities living beneath our desires, without dismissing the real-world things we want or need.
SESSION 4:
Monday, 12/7
grief and unlived lives
What am I mourning, and what remains possible?
Longing often carries grief for what has been lost, what never happened, and what may never be. We'll make space for these sorrows, including the grief and heartbreak of witnessing injustice, while tending to our capacity to remain in relationship with life.
SESSION 5:
Monday, 12/14
surrender and uncertainty
Can I want something deeply without controlling how it unfolds?
We'll practice distinguishing surrender from giving up, and acceptance from complacency. How do we release our grip on outcomes while remaining devoted to what matters? How do we keep acting, creating, and organizing without requiring certainty or immediate success?
SESSION 6:
Monday, 12/21
longing as life force
What might my longing become when I stop trying to force its fulfillment?
We'll gather the threads of our journey and explore how longing can move through us as creative expression, relational courage, collective imagination, and purposeful action. What do we want to carry forward? What are we ready to tend, create, or make possible together?
Facilitated by
Chetna Mehta (she/they)
For most of my life, I met my longing with more chasing, achieving, proving, hyper-thinking, story-making, over-planning, numbing, controlling. I’ve been tediously on the gerbil wheel of trying-to-make-the-ache-go-away.
Though over these last few years, I’ve been learning to meet the ache with compassion and discover what Sufi mystics, Bhakti Yogis and contemporary philosophers have been expressing through their art and poetry for ages: longing is a portal back to ourselves, to belonging and to the divine.
Longing Lab is a place for us to be in our longings without chasing, and to soften ourselves enough in it to discover what the ache is yearning for from us.
Exchange via gift economy
Longing Lab is something I feel really inspired to offer. I want these spaces to be accessible while also honoring the time, energy, creativity, and care that go into organizing and holding them.
The direct cost of this six-week series is $130 per person, which covers expenses like office rent and minimum wage for my preparation and facilitation. I invite a contribution of $95 to $350+, guided by your circumstances and what feels like meaningful reciprocity. Contributions within this range or outside of it could be made anytime between confirming your place and the day after our final gathering.
May you approach this exchange with generosity and discernment. Reserving a spot is a commitment to participate and follow through on your chosen contribution, or letting me know if circumstances change.
I’m experimenting with trusting the wider web of community care. Thank you for joining me in imagining more relational, liberatory ways of giving and receiving. Thank you to those I’m in community with who inspire this practice: trees, insects, sky, East Bay Meditation Center, Angela Kim, Sonya Shah, and many more.
(Or email chetna@mosaiceyeunfolding.com sharing why do you want to join this circle, if there are any sessions you'd have to miss, and what you can contribute as a gift exchange?)