Is this desire?
The role of wanting
Is this desire?
In a rare 1988 interview, mythologist Joseph Campbell was asked "How would you advise somebody to tap into joy?"
In response, he gave the most mystical, mind-blowing and beautiful answer I could have ever imagined: https://t.co/pmJk3qzmVu
There’s a tendency in psychology to treat shadow as unsavory desires
With a little more attention it almost always reveals itself to want something beautiful but have poor frame for achieving it
Validation? You mean a desire to be seen in your gifts? Domination? You mean a desire to put your will into the world or feel safe? Cowardice? You mean a... See more
Your deepest desires contain great wisdom and you get to spend your life unpacking that. Fun!
I love this sentence by the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing: “It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.”
John Lambert • Yoga
But you won’t exhaust desires by searching; you will exhaust them by experiencing that which underlies them.
Charlotte J. Beck • Everyday Zen: Love and Work (Plus)
So don’t seek to become free of desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind.
Eckhart Tolle • The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
We must learn to be big in a way we’ve never been big—we must claim our right to take up space, to say our words, to claim our desires. We must also learn to be small in a way we’ve never been small—to be in service, led not by our egos or by our desire for material goods or by our fears and aversions, but by our desire to be liberated from these t
... See moreHolly Whitaker • Quit Like a Woman
Understanding, freedom, and joy are the treasures that naming the demon of desire brings us. We discover that underneath unskillful desire is a deep spiritual longing for beauty, for abundance and completeness. Naming desire can lead us to discover this truest desire.
Jack Kornfield • A Path With Heart
When we study Buddhist psychology, we discover that desire is divided into many categories. Most fundamentally these desires are then separated into painful desire and skillful desire, both aspects stemming from a neutral energy called the Will to Do. Painful desire involves greed, grasping, inadequacy, and longing. Skillful desire is born of this
... See moreJack Kornfield • A Path With Heart
Because desire is to own the wanting. That’s one way of looking at it. And in order to own something, there needs to be a sovereign self that is free to choose and, of course, feels worthy of wanting and feels worthy of receiving. That’s why desire is so intimately connected with a sense of self-worth.