Is this desire?

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

Eros is a force that doesn’t like to be constrained. When it settles into repetition, habit, or rules, it touches its death. It then is transformed into boredom and sometimes, more powerfully, into repulsion.

Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object.

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

So don’t seek to become free of desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind.

But you won’t exhaust desires by searching; you will exhaust them by experiencing that which underlies them.

few people have ever stopped to examine desire, to feel it directly, to discover a wise relationship to it.

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.