Today let’s look at how to fill the void of unhappiness. Today’s question is this: Are you empty? Are you yearning for anything? Do you feel fulfilled, or is there something missing?

All humans feel something missing when they arrive on Earth, and that something is their Divine sustenance, their Spiritual home and family. I will get back to this in a moment.

This feeling of Spiritual Orphaning is compounded by the way most people are raised in this modern world, with less than conscious childbirth and parenting and socialization, into a culture of duality and separation. Many of us are not held or breast fed. I myself did not hear the words “I love you” from my parents until I was age 30 or so from my mother. My father died without me ever hearing those words from him.

So, if we can agree that most of us are operating and carrying on in life with some sense of lack, something missing–call it love to keep it simple. So we often look in all the wrong places, trying desperately and often unconsciously to fill that ancient void. We may go from mate to mate, wife to wife or husband to husband trying to fill that bottomless pit which to me often feels so hopeless to fill. Maybe take some time today to meditate on ways you try to fill that yearning and how effective it is.

Here are four ways to fill that void in a healthy way:

First, fill your own needs. nobody else is ultimately responsible for filling our needs. We need to eat right, exercise, get help, face and feel our old wounds, get some therapy, get out in nature–whatever we each need to take responsibility for our own happiness.

Second–especially for those who try to fill that void with a mate–seek the company of the same sex, if you are heterosexual anyway. For me, that means finding men to relate to, men who are emotionally available and vulnerable to fill some of my needs with the company of good men.

Third, begin to cultivate healthy romantic relationships with your mate or date. In other words, now that we have filled some of our own needs ourselves and with good friends, we are not placing an unfair burden on our mate to fill our tank. We come into relationship from a position of at least partial wholeness and health, so the relationship has a real chance of success, not carrying all our old childhood woundings.

Lastly, back to where we started. We do not have to go through life as spiritual orphans, estranged from our Spiritual Sustenance. Spirit is right here, now within us, always awaiting our invitation and willingness to connect with and listen to the quiet whispers of love and guidance.

So to repeat, we get our sustenance from four main sources: ourselves, our friends, our mate, and our Divine Source. With this support, all other vices, addictions, false gods and sources of unhappiness fade away and our true yearnings are filled.