Honoring Your True Desires

June 23, 2009

Sunset stirs inside many of us thoughts of our true desires.

Taking the time to recognize and honor your desires is an essential step on the journey to finding your true self. In truth, you may have many kinds of desires: but they can be grouped under two major headings, one we can call and think of as the soul’s desire, and the other as the mind’s desire.

Another way to think of this is as our lifelong quest for inner and outer success. You probably know by now, but it always bears repeating, that the soul’s desires can be thought of as inner success and the mind’s desires can be viewed as outer success.

In the western world we most often lead with our mind’s desires. Our thirst for financial success, our striving for competitive success, our attention and concern over our investments, our social and professional advancements, these are all evidence of this focus on outer success. Even our spiritual lives are often influenced by this drive for outer success as we seek, for example, to use our place of worship as a place to make contacts and advance our competitive position.

Often, but not always by any any means, these desires are reversed in the eastern world where inner peace and happiness are placed above the mind’s unquenchable thirst for material gain.

The good news is that there does not have to be a battle between the soul and the mind. Learning to honor our desires does not mean sacrificing one aspect of our highest wishes for another. When we are in touch with all of our true desires, we have the unique opportunity to honor all of them.

In a quiet and meditative state, the vast majority of us have a general awareness of our desires, both mind and soul. Our minds want freedom from financial fears, we want recognition and success for the contributions that we make in our workplace. We want to be in the best health we can hope to have, we want to fulfill our intellectual curiosity whether that’s through travel, reading, or other forms of personal growth. Our soul’s hunger for inner peace and happiness. We seek lasting attachments and almost always mourn the loss of them.

There are twelve ways we interfere with the process of listening to our desires and getting better in touch with those things we truly want. By being aware of these tendencies we can begin to better sense what we may know, think, feel, or sense we want, and what we truly want.

Generally, the twelve ways we disconnect from our true wants are revenge, attachment, doubt, rationalization, defiance, submission, avoidance, justification, rejection, withholding, reaction, and sacrifice. Next Tuesday we will continue this topic with a further examination of the first four of these twelve blocks to realizing and honoring our true desires.

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This article is the first of a four part series that will appear every Tuesday about understanding and recognizing our desires and the twelve ways we disconnect from our true desires. Today, in part one of this series we will focus on the process of acknowledging our desires and those blocks that we place in the way between ourselves and what we truly want.

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Want to accomplish your goals?

Read the book that inspired Oprah and her fans:

John Gray’s

How to Get What You Want, and Want What You Have

Posted in Inspiration, Wellness