[Replay & Highlights] How to Want What You Want Workshop

Enjoy the video, read the highlights, claim your desires

What a powerful rich conversation exploring desire. Thank you to everyone who attended live and I’m sorry if you tried to get on the Zoom call and there wasn’t room.

Here’s the replay.

No time to watch? Grab the highlights:

Ask yourself: what have you desired today? Whether you could have it or not.

Toast? A particular flavor of tea? Time to write? Here is what some of the people on the call wanted:

• I wanted raspberries, and I did have them!

• I wanted to sleep

• I wanted to stretch my muscles in yoga.

• I wanted chicken noodle soup

• Rest. To be left alone. To cry.

• I wanted a sweater when I was on my morning call.

• To wake up for this and be one of the 100 … I’m here!

Notice how the glimmers of desire are always shining.

What does it feel like to simply want? Not because you need a particular outcome or to be productive or useful but simply because a desire arises.

We talked about how sometimes around desire, we feel resistance or fogginess. The wise people attending noted:

• I feel like I don’t have the time to desire or it’s not the right time to want what I want

• It's sometimes too easy to set them aside, planning to come back to them, but....

• My desires get overridden by past failures, an illness that took out years. So I have them but this annoying “halting” comes up.

• I limit the awareness of what I want when it feels big and then I know myself as a person who goes after what I want, so really getting "that's what I want" can feel like I need to actually achieve it to be congruent with my own identity.

• I judge what I want so hard I make myself forget what I want. (My head exploded on this one, so true!)

Notice what came up for you when you noticed your glimmers of desire. Maybe jot down what you noticed as our minds get very slippery around knowing what we want.

Why is paying attention to what you desire important?

Because we live in a patriarchy and we aren’t meant to a fully enfranchised human beings if we aren’t a white guy. We are taught, in endless ways, that owning our desires and breaking the rules that require, is dangerous, ugly, needy, demanding, ball-busting, sinful, covetous, high maintenance, too much, a nuisance, threatening, and SELFISH. Denying our desires, funnily enough, disenfranchises us even more. Which means claiming them does the opposite!

Because we stray off our life paths without desire. I don’t believe we have one life path or one purpose but for sure some paths and purposes bring us alive and others drag us into why bother.

Because desire is one of the ways we get free and help others to get free. That’s because our deepest desires are often the same: to love and be loved. When we know this, it’s harder to oppress others and see others being oppressed.

Because desire has gotten a bad rap as unspiritual when in fact desire as a practice is the fast track to being more human and more alive. Even enlightened!

Because desire gets left behind when we are traumatized or trying to survive or living through a long hard time and it’s part of what can help us recover our life force.

And consider these ideas from participants:

• Because desire helps us feel whole and alive and it’s fun too.

• We need desire so we act purposefully.

• Desire gives us juicy energy.

• Desire is a life force.

• To guide my choices.

• Desire feels like it draws us towards something.

• Desire is a powerful fuel, especially when we feel it in our bodies and let it flow like lava.

Pretty good menu of why to allow more desire into your life.

Consider this: It’s not that you don’t know how to want, it’s that you judge wanting itself.

Try this journaling exercises from Get Your Bother On:

• I sometimes judge myself for wanting ______ but not for wanting________.

• I get foggy or confused around desiring _______ but not around _________.

• I internalize the culture’s story about desire when I say to myself _______ or when I stop myself from___________.

Breaking the rules of wanting to be wanted

Perhaps the biggest obstacle many of us face around letting ourselves want what we want is that we’ve been enculturated to find our worth and power in pleasing others rather than discovering what we want and need.

We learn from an early age not to fulfill our own desires but rather the desires of others. This can look like wanting to be liked, wanting to be desirable, wanting to not rock the boat.

People noted in the chat:

• I judge what I want and think about if other people will allow me to want it.

• I know how to desire. Everyone else's life/needs/wants interfere. Now, it's hard to face the desire--the disappointment. The energy necessary to overcome.

• My true wanting is overridden by my wanting to keep people happy and to do the “right” thing.

• And the grief from allowing myself to want hurts so much that I just stop trying to want altogether.

• I know how to want, but I have trouble accepting that I should be wanting anything more.

How do you make it easier to desire?

• Attend to the glimmers of desire many times a day. For one breath. Oh, this is desire. It’s safe to feel it. Breathe. Relax the jaw. Feel the glimmer without attaching to what you are going to get or not get. Ignore any thoughts of self-improvement or making big plans. Simply feel.

• Practicing relaxing your body and allowing the energy of desire to flow rather than running from it or cutting it off. In the workshop, I talk about how I’m doing this as part of letting myself fulfill my childhood dream of writing a novel and how I get so full of energy writing, I find myself pinging away to do silly stuff — shopping! making the bed! — and how I’m working on breathing and letting the energy big as it wants. Staying with it without running away or into a fantasy.

• Develop an open loving compassionate relationship with desire. Like any relationship, it’s in the connection itself that the beauty happens.

• Find a person or two you can share your desires with especially the ones that feel subversive and unlikeable or that break the rules. Take back your power by acknowledging these desires to someone who is safe.

• Give yourself Desire Retreats where you simply ask, over and over again, what do I want and follow it. Even an hour can be transformative.

Desire is fundamental to your humanity. May it lead you to greater life and aliveness.

Thanks for being here,

Jen

P.S. Loved this post from poet Andrea Gibson especially this, “To know exactly what parts of me are comforted by other people’s approval and comfort those parts myself instead.” What a beautiful way to be free of wanting to be wanted more than you want yourself.