Desire Requires Awareness and Acceptance

What do I mean by desire must include awareness and acceptance?

Seriously – it is hard to explain!!! However, I will do my best 🙂

Before I get to that though, I will discuss –

  • What is Desire?
  • 9 Quotes on Desire
  • Do You Have Any Desires?
  • How Desire Requires Awareness and Acceptance!

 

What is Desire?

I did some research and found the following on desire –

The word desire is Latin from the word desiderata. Desiderata means –

  • “feel a keen desire for (something lacking or absent).” ~ Google

 

9 Quotes on Desire

There are many quotes linked to desire, including –

  1. “Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.” ~ Tara Brach
  2. “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.” ~ Nelson Mandela
  3. “What you seek is seeking you.” ~ Rumi
  4. “Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
  5. “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” ~ Plato
  6. “Be suspicious of what you want.” ~ Rumi
  7. “When resistance is gone, the demons are gone.” ~ Pema Chödrön
  8. “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.” ~ Aristotle
  9. “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be, you can’t see how it is.” ~ Ram Dass

Are there any of your favourites quotes on desire that I have missed? If so, feel free to share them below!

 

Do You Have Any Desires?

What are your desires?

Yes truly – what do you REALLY want?

If you don’t know, maybe it is time to sit down and identify what you really want in your life? Yes – REALLY, TRULY want – YOUR hearts deepest calling!

You would think it is easy to sit down and identify what our authentic self really wants since we live in a world that encourages us to want so many things all of the time. But are those things really what we want or what we think we want?

It’s interesting because many of us spend time at work and chasing this thing called success only to find out that when we get there it isn’t what we thought it would be or we weren’t even sure about what we were chasing in the first place!

This is why desire requires awareness and acceptance of where you are.

 

Desire Requires Awareness and Acceptance

Once you have decided on what you truly desire, you can start to develop greater awareness around your desires. For example, you can start to identify if the desire is a need or a want.

What is the difference? Glad you asked –

  • a need, when filled nourishes you and helps you survive, and
  • a want, when filled entertains you.

If you confuse or substitute a want for a need, it can drain or deplete you of money, time and energy.

What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring. - C.S.Lewis

Once you identify if your desire is a want or a need, you can sit with the experience and accept where you currently are. Yes, there may be resistance, however when you truly sit with the resistance and have a deep acceptance of where you are, your next step is often presented if you didn’t know it beforehand (which is why awareness is so important).

Another reason why awareness is important is so you don’t keep making the same mistake over and over again as Rita Mae Brown said – “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Over the years, what I have learnt working with clients and from my own experiences is that your deepest needs cannot be met by spending money, eating extra amounts of food or winning awards. Meeting your essential needs is also an individual thing, something you need to find out for yourself. Kahlil Gibran puts it this way “Your friend is your needs answered.”

 

 

 

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