Desire is experienced/created through the senses and through past impressions – pleasure or pain – that we want to avoid or experience more of. So essentially, desire is an experience of being out of the here and now and so limits and disempowers us -cuts us off from present, engaged consciousness.
We work and effort towards our desires -thinking the fulfillment of them will complete us – however once we have achieved the intended desire we find we arrive back at the original starting point, with another unfulfilled desire arising. The merry-go-round of desire keeps us in longing and separate self. The more we identify ourselves with our desires, the more we desire and the more create misery!
It is like we step into a kitchen as an apprentice to cook flapjacks and you have 2 teachers. One – Billy – is also a hypnotist that has been teaching you to make these flapjacks since you were a baby and has a lot of control and influence in your social circle, finances and other areas of your life. The other – Sanda – has just walked in from the street, but is carrying a delicious tray of flapjacks.
You have never thought of it, but you and Billy have actually never successfully made a batch of edible flapjacks. Something always happens -the ingredients make no sense, the recipe is utterly flawed and Billy often tells you how to operate the oven in such a way that you have already blown up 20 – thank fully you have insurance 😉 Whilst Billy insists his way is the right way, and WILL work eventually, Sandra shows you a simple recipe that works. She shows you the results and you see that when you try it her way, it seems peaceful, easy and you get the actual flapjacks you were trying to create.
In the West we have been taught the recipe for happiness, peace, joy, fulfillment : identify what/who etc will give that to you : marriage/unlimited singleness!, a fancy car, a good meal, wealth, beauty, power, status, success, etc and get it. We invest and buy into a ‘happiness=desire+obtaining’ system that can never actually yield gain as it keeps us beggars. The pattern of ‘wanting’ that makes us suffer and generates desire – does not get erased through getting what we want. It actually just gets enforced through engagement and practice and we get more and more bound and identified with ‘desiring’ and the objects of our desire and therefore feel increasingly empty and ill at ease.
Wanting and the misery that attends it – gets erased not by engaging in the pattern of wanting, but rather reconnecting with your true, blissful nature. From this place we are naturally treating everything that is not here as non existent and everything that is here as good and wanted.
“The type of heartbreak that people have is because you identified yourself with the desire too much…maybe you wanted some herbal tea, so you go but you don’t get your choice of the herbal tea …never mind… you just walk out…
..You had the desire, you tried for it, it didn’t get fulfilled, it didn’t throw you off the balance…
You don’t sit and cry that ‘ I didn’t get my herbal tea’….
Identification of the individual self with desires keeps them bound and away from their true nature which is blissful self….and yet even the desires are from shiva…so you can not stand there and say ‘I want to chase the desires out’….
Sri Sri RaviShankar
We can see in life where we blow desire and it’s fulfillment out of proportion, or turn it into a demand or a cause or justification of us thinking, feeling and acting ways that are unmanageable and often quite mad!
Somehow it would seem unreasonable to cry, to shout, to insist we get our way, to rail against heaven and earth that the coffee shop didn’t have mint green tea. To then sit in a room sobbing for days, to talk about it non stop with everyone we know and don’t know. To pray every day that that coffee she had had the ‘right’ tea on that day. To blame the lack of green tea for the next ten months of misery and poor comportment, and perhaps even justify it as a reason to slander the coffee shop or smash one of their cups or windows. But when we don’t get the holiday, promotion or relationship we had hoped for we can often degenerate into such type of thinking, feeling and behaving.
Sometimes the roads of philosophy, spirituality and therapy seem incredibly collaborative and congruent, and sometimes initially they seem at odds and I have to sit for a while in order to find a unified approach that both honors who I am and where I find myself at this point in my life, that honors trauma and its impact on the NS and mind and also honors the truth of our being, and an intelligent and compassionate way of living.
Sometimes spiritual principles or principles of ‘right living’ can be transformed into a force to punish, judge, suppress, deny my lived experience. Instead of this information being handled by an inner caring and loving authority – a remembrance of my true nature and heart natural wisdom, it can land with a punitive, judgmental, perfectionist or critical part of me.
Given the world and conditioning that we are born into, given the lack of skillfulness we are exposed to culturally to navigate, care for and take responsibility for our minds; given our own unique personal histories and potential trauma still held in the nervous system that can lead to increased impulsivity, reactivity, and returning to trauma states with impaired cognitive processing and functioning… how to integrate this truth in a way that feels kind, useful and enlightening rather than another brick for the coffin that our mind makes for us!
We do not need to jump immediately to mastery – immediately to perfect equilibrium, inner peace and detachment.
If your relationship to desire is causing you suffering, simply noticing that with acceptance brings some detachment.
We can accept what arises in us as a response to unfulfilled desires. We can accept the constantly arising desires…the instance on pleasure and avoidance of pain…we can see how the intensity and fixedness of some of those desires are generated from a place itself which needs unwinding and realizing and that actually in the unwinding and releasing of that past stored hurt, fear or even pleasure, we open up to our true nature rather than clinging to an experience where we are curled in and shorten around a separate self. We don’t need to get into ‘shouding’ on ourselves or others for how spiritually evolved, unattached and well behaved and healthy in mind, body and action we or they should be.
Yet we can use this understanding as a kind support around and within us, that can soothe, that can redirect, that can stabilize, that can heal, that can transform.
It can be there as a benevolent friend, or as a presence that we are inviting into our lives, but sometimes forget to open the door. This friend never holds a grudge. it is simply there, and when we invite it in, it brings delicious dishes to eat and calm to our home. It is not mad, or upset with us when we slam the door, when we throw plates or cry in our bedroom for weeks at a time. When we are ready, we wash our face and open the door, and it will help redirect our thinking, feelings and actions to align with what truly nourishes us and others around us.
And it’s okay to be learning. It’s okay to be practicing, to not be a master. If you sat down at a piano you would not be immediately discouraged if you couldn’t rattle off by heart every single masterpiece ever composed. So be loving, patient and reasonable with yourself. Go gentle when you sit down with the landscape and architecture of the mind…of everything that has been stuffed down into it, of every belief and all the conditioning it has been fed. None of it is bad, none of it is dangerous, and none of it is ultimate reality. You can sit there with compassion and with support of community, professional’s, practices, teachings and help detangle, declutter and unfog so that you can live in the blissful spaciousness of self, rather than a cloudy, cluttered, demanding confusion that is not who you truly are.
