Dear reader,
The previous article about joy led me easily to the path of desire. We want good health, love, money, relationships, good jobs, material goods, etc. Desire can be both general and special e.g. I desire a dessert now. It may be lasting or temporary, we do not want the same things for our lives now and ten years ago. Desire is essentially one of the ways to express who we are and what is important to us. Some people want to do something more manual for work, others something more theoretical, some people want to live in the heart of a city and others are living in a village. Having desires is intertwined with being alive, through which we give our lives meaning, we expand and we grow. But one thing is to have a desire for something or for someone and another thing is to follow it. The way to desire is not always linear. The pursuit of desire presupposes first and foremost its recognition, contact with and awareness of what is important to us and this may require work, especially if for example we have learned to focus on the desires of others. Since we recognise our desires at every given moment, then we can do something to satisfy them. We may want something and not feel that we deserve it or that it is not accessible to us, so we do not pursue it. We may want something and think that we do not have the means to obtain it, so we do nothing. We might generate and pursue constantly desire without sitting with not having any and still be ok with it. We always have the choice either to take care of our desire or fight it. If we have not learned to take care of it, we should learn step by step how to embrace it, endeavour it, redefine it and listen to the signs of guidance that lead to it. It is very common to feel that we want something e.g. love and actually to take steps on the opposite direction. The road to satisfaction is not always smooth. For example, in order to fulfill it, we may have to ask for something from another which in itself can put us in a vulnerable position in which we may find it difficult to be. We may need to get in touch with our deepest issues like what it means to have this particular desire and want it to be accomplished in a specific way by rejecting perhaps other ways in which it can be fulfilled. Like all things, this is seen through the lens of spirituality always referring to something bigger. Whether we recognise it or not, we are in constant relationship with everything that exists and we constantly interact in ways that may be difficult yet to comprehend. We do something and it has a direct effect on someone else or something else (the same to a degree applies to our thoughts). We cut a fruit and we change its form, we talk to a person and we influence it (in small or large extent). Through this lens, then, the ultimate human desire is to be of service to others and the humanity. Creating and fulfilling a personal desire is primarily an internal quest for wholeness, e.g. we may want to eat but our deepest desire may be that we want to fill the void or the loneliness that we feel. This becomes particularly evident in close relationships where the desire of one we expect it to be fulfilled by the other e.g. for honesty and truth but this does not imply that the other has got the same desire or is capable of fulfilling it for us at any given time for whatever reason. In our relationships with others our light can illuminate the darkness of another and the light of the other can illuminate our darkness calling for the redefinition, hierarchy, responsibility and honesty about our desires and the desires of the other. Some of them have to be taken care of by ourselves, and for some others we might ask the other person to do something in order for us to fulfill them. From an adult position we can negotiate our desires, ask and listen, take and give, agree and deny, if we truly want to, with possible obstacles our selfishness, insecurity, the sense of lacking etc. With Love, Panos
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Panos GoumalatsosCounsellor/Psychotherapist, Archives
March 2023
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