Longing as Sacred Practice

In Western culture, children are often encouraged to distract themselves from grief: stay busy, focus on the positive, look forward. Mirabai's tradition honors longing differently—as a sacred, intentional state worthy of devotion. Her practice wasn't to move past the ache but to deepen into it, to sit with yearning as a form of intimacy with the divine. For grieving children, this permission to feel longing—to miss someone profoundly, to sit with the emptiness, to let sorrow have full duration—can be liberating. Mirabai teaches that longing itself is relational; in missing someone, we affirm how much they mattered. Rather than viewing grief-work as closure and moving on, longing-as-practice allows children to honor their connections indefinitely. This legitimizes the child's continued sadness without pathologizing it. Mirabai shows that the deepest relationships produce the deepest longing, and that longing can itself become a practice—a way of continuing to love. For young people, this reframes grief from something to overcome into something to fully inhabit.