As human beings, we all have different desires. Maybe you want to eat some exotic food, be rich and respected by everyone, travel around the world?!! These are actually our desires... Desires are not the same to everyone. But now... you get to know about yours.
My True Desire
There are numerous explanations for ill health, most of them physiological. But one frequently-overlooked factor is the failure to pursue cherished goals, to follow your proverbial "heart's desire." The emotional distress of this failure to act can cause physical symptoms in some people.
I decided to listen to my parents, be a good wife, supportive of my husband, cook and bake for him, wash his clothes, iron his shirts, and continue working in my private practice in the suburb of Paris. But within a few weeks, I became very tired during the days and had nightmares every night. Three weeks after the wedding a high fever started that lasted a whole month. No physician could find the origin of my fever. Was it a true fever? We tried several new thermometers. All thermometers indicated 101 degrees Fahrenheit fever, day in and day out. I was exhausted but my blood tests and X-Rays were all normal.
8. You feel empty or inauthentic: If you are lying to yourself and think you can handle ignoring your true desires, you might feel empty because key aspects of yourself are not accessible or are suppressed. In this case, you may spend too much time worrying about what others think of you. You are being the person other people want you to be (your parents, your partner, your boss) but you forget to be the person you, yourself always wanted to be.
Awareness of what is happening inside you is an important first step. In fact, it is sometimes enough in itself. If you want to proceed further, you need to weigh the pros and cons of staying in a known stressful situation and ignoring your true desires or changing to a different unknown situation aligned with your cherished dreams (which could also be stressful at the beginning but more fulfilling at the end).
As for me, I have put a lot of personal work into finding who I really am. As a result, I have made drastic changes in my life. As I go through different phases of my life, I reevaluate what my mind and body need on a regular basis. My early understanding of the degree to which the body can "rebel," plus a lifetime of work as a physician, convince me that taking time to tune into one's most cherished desires, even in the absence of any physical ailment, is always worthwhile.
Rav Ashlag explains that the amount of Light we reveal in the world is directly dependent on the strength of our Desire to Receive the Light of the Creator - the greater our desire, the greater the Light we can reveal. Many of us believe we have this desire. We know, on some level, that we want the Light and a closer relationship with the Creator. However, as Rav Ashlag explains, if we had a true desire for the Light, we would have it! The reason why we lack the Light in any area of our lives is because we lack a true Desire for it, despite what we might feel.
The second reason is that, although we may want the Light of the Creator, we also have other desires. A famous kabbalist once said you cannot have two desires at the same time, just like you cannot be in love with two people at once. It cannot be that we have a Desire for the Light of the Creator and a desire for something else simultaneously. The desire for anything else will snuff out the flame of Desire for the Light of the Creator. If we are honest with ourselves and realize that we desire things other than the Light of the Creator, we must realize that we do not have a true Desire for the Light. Therefore, part of our spiritual work is to transform our desire for things of a physical nature into a Desire for the Light.
Rav Ashlag teaches us that this ultimate level of having the truest possible Desire to Receive the Light is one we must actively build for ourselves. This means that people can help and support us, but we must do the work. If we are being inspired by external sources rather than an internal commitment to the Light, it is not creating a lasting desire. If the reason we stay on our spiritual path is solely because of a certain teacher, a certain community, or a certain environment, for instance, it will never last. What happens if those factors are removed? If there were no Kabbalah Centre in the world and no spiritual community, would we still be doing the work? If literally everything in the world was against us, would we still be doing the work? If the answer is yes, this is an indication that we are owning our own Desire to Receive the Light of the Creator.
When we feel that we do not have the Light, it is important to remember that one of the reasons for our hardships and our struggles is to awaken our desire and appreciation for the Light. If the Light was always with us, we could never awaken that yearning for the Light of the Creator. The powerful lesson here is that the more work we do to awaken our Desire to Receive the Light of the Creator, the more Light we reveal in our lives and in the world.
And to want something that makes you less of you through buffering, those false desires, will cause suffering. But true desire, desire that we find in the F-line that is generated from conscious thinking and conscious awareness towards a life that evolves us, towards a life that makes us bigger, towards a life that creates the potential that is us and manifest it, that is one of the most important things we can focus on.
And I know that many of you can relate to this in terms of food and alcohol and porn and social media. Any of those desires that feel compulsive, any of those desires that, when you satisfy them, make your life worse, those are false desires.
So, if you are someone with false desires, I want to encourage you to utilize the experience of those false desires to make yourself stronger and more connected. There is nothing wrong with you if you have false desires. It simply means that your brain is wired correctly for survival. And you can understand that and you can overcome that.
And in order to tolerate it, many of us give into false desires to tolerate our undesirable life. We replace our true desire with our false desires. But when we learn how to allow for those false desires, and therefore let them go, what we are left with is back to our undesirable life.
And as I removed those desires, what I found was dormant desires; desires that had been there, that were there, aching to be heard that were no longer dormant. They woke up. When I allowed space for there to be a vacuum, when I allowed space for there to be space, that genuine desire became known to me.
But once I was able to release that false desire, the new desires, the true desires, the dormant desires woke up and fueled me with a power, with an energy, with a motivation that I had never experienced before. The same motivation and energy that I was putting into going to the bar and getting a glass of wine, that powerful pull, was now put into something much more important, much more useful, much more expansive for me.
And with all that energy and all that motivation, I was able to create at a level and a pace that I had never been able to do before. I spent time acknowledging and finding and honing and listening to my true desire. What did I really want?
The desire for money was a desire for expression. How can we play this game of life and show how extraordinary it can be when you manage your mind? Never at the expense of myself and what I really wanted.
So, what are your dormant desires? When you get rid of all your false desires and you stop giving in to those and you really start to listen to yourself, what is it that you most want? When no one else is looking, when no one else has an opinion, what is it that you want for you in your life and are you willing to generate and allow for the desire that is there to fuel you into taking action?
Desire is so strong that it keeps me up at night. It keeps me thinking about it. It keeps me working through the problem and overcoming the resistance and overcoming all the obstacles to create and manifest that true desire.
And instead, what I do is I manufacture desire. I create desire with my mind because that is the fuel that I want to use to create the positive results in my life. And the way that we do that is by living into and from our future. What would our mind be thinking? What would we be believing if we already had accomplished this, if we already were the fulfilment of the desire that we want?
Reading literary fiction increases our ability to empathize with others in real life, so one good source of self-reflection is digging into a good novel. The fictional characters we meet and walk with in a story help us recognize our own tendencies to misidentify desires, or even hide them out of fear, pride, or a lack of self-knowledge.
The Countess of Bellefonte stormed out of the bedroom at the top of the stairs. She was a tall brunette with a pretty smile and an unfashionably affectionate regard for her earl, but at present, she was apparently in the grip of a pressing desire to quit the premises.
We are in the daily race for higher objectives and strive to over-achieve. Ambition is good, but is sometimes overshadows what we truly aspire to. Aspiration is related to our deeper desire. The closer we get to our aspired state the more fulfillment we experience. We should be careful not to miss this in the rush. That article might help to connect to what we truly aspire to.
In both cases there is action and energy that is associated to this desire. There is a motivation to take the necessary actions to achieve that future state. Be it to reach a certain physical performance in sports, to reach certain material goals, a business performance or career objectives. As such, both ambition and aspiration are positive.
But I believe that there is a fundamental difference between these two drivers. It is the source of the energy. Aspiration is based on our deep desire. It is like an inner force that pulls us to aim for higher goals. It is more deeply connected to who we are. Connecting to our deep desire will help us understand even better what we truly aspire to (see my video on How to connect to my deep desire) Reaching these goals will provide us with fulfillment, meaning and true satisfaction. 2ff7e9595c
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