“What desire REALLY means, and how you can use it”
bysheilakelley
Advertisements
When I was younger I noticed I had an itch. A gnawing disturbance inside my body. In my teens, this itch was all about dancing. And it caused me to take action. It caused me to sign up for gymnastics which led me to ballet classes at age 14, which then led me to NYU where I majored in dance.
While I was there, I suffered a catastrophic hip injury. I was in the deepest throes of my passion, and I had to quit dancing. In the wake, I stopped doing ballet and started waitressing in the East Village but, of course, the disturbance within me didn’t go away. In fact, it grew louder. Bolder. My days of pirouettes turned into days of “hi, what can I get for you?” So, I tried new ways to satiate myself.
I became a punk and dyed my hair with white skunk streaks. I was a creature of the night. Started going to late-night dance clubs and after-hours clubs. Always seeking to quell the itch I felt inside. It was around this time my self-destructive behavior got out of control because I didn’t know how to meet my desire in a healthy way. I didn’t have the foresight to ask myself the right questions at that time… particularly this one – “What is this gnawing disturbance actually asking for?” So I continued kamikaze-like, with no end to the ache.
At the brink of no return from my own self-inflicted pain, I knew I needed to turn things around. I started seeing a shrink. I got a job doing PR for the circus. I started taking acting classes in the city. I pursued an agent and got one. All of this activity was spurred on by the itch inside that I couldn’t name. As much as I felt it and knew it was there, I didn’t understand it.
Sometimes the itch lessened. Sometimes it grew worse. When it lessened I went further in the direction I was going. For example, when I started acting and got my first movie, the itch lessened so I followed the acting trajectory. When I got the PR job at the circus the itch grew so I began to pull my energy away from there.
What I was learning, somewhat haphazardly, was what my desire actually was. I was hearing and feeling my body. I was letting her direct me toward what she wanted most, and to direct me away from what she wanted the least. When I ask my 19-year-old daughter, Ruby “What does desire mean to you?” She said, “It’s the thing that you want more than anything without really knowing what it is. It’s what you associate with Bliss.”
She’s always been a poet, my girl. Her words hold such great wisdom. They harken back to the great romantic poets of the 19th century like Rimbaud and Baudelaire. She’s right, desire is what we want more than anything else! We all have or had desire, right? But have we ever taken the time and energy to really understand it? Viscerally? Physiologically? Emotionally? What is desire, really?
Here’s what I’ve learned from my years of working directly with desire!
Desire is want. Desire comes in all different shapes and sizes. It can be a slight yearn for something like an ice cream cone, to a desperate need for something like air or water. Desire lives in this spectrum and evolves as we evolve and mature. Desire ultimately comes from the body. When your body wants something, what arises in your body is an itch, a rumble, a distraction. These are tell-tale signs of the request for a desire.
Desire is the first thing we feel when we enter this world. Seeking the fulfillment of desire is how we spend the rest of our lives. When you were born, you took your first independent breath. Your body needed air. This satiated your body’s desire for oxygen. Then you probably cried out until a warm blanket was brought and you were wrapped up and held. You sought the nipple for food and comfort. You slept when you were tired and woke when you were hungry. You effortlessly followed your body’s desires and needs. And if you were blessed, you had a loving caretaker who provided everything you needed.
As you matured into a wee toddler you were taught self-control over your body’s needs, which is to say: you were taught self-control over your desires. This civilization demands self-control and self-control relies on a certain degree of shame and shut down. So as you become more and more civilized, you begin to part ways with your body and fulfilling your desires. We train ourselves not to hear our bodies’ urges. So our body quiets and our desires go to sleep.
There are many words for desire – need, want, crave, yearning, hunger, or thirst. These words all mean you and your body require something. All of the words for desire have their origin in survival. They come from what your body tells you… you need to live.
In your earliest years, you ran on “need” because what your body needed to sustain life was of primary importance. And, when used in the right place at the right time, “need” serves a purpose. In your earliest years, most of what you experience is “need.” “Need” is the word that we use when we are seeking to survive. And what you needed to sustain your life in the very beginning is all about survival. But as we get into the groove of our lives and are able to meet our more basic needs we mature into “desire.” Desire is the word that elevates your needs and takes you into a place of thriving.
We each do our best to navigate desire to varying degrees of success. On the spectrum of “not at all fulfilling our desires,” to “totally overindulging in them,” there is a sweet spot of “whole and complete satiation.” But because we’ve shut down our bodies and our desires we tend to land, most often, in one of two extremes.
We might starve ourselves or overfill ourselves when we’re hungry. We might hermit and then overextend ourselves socially. We might avoid seeking out the job we want, or we’ll take on more than we can handle. It happens in every area of our lives & that’s not all! We also misinterpret desire. We might feed ourselves when we are actually thirsty, or we might seek new friends when what we really want is a deeper connection with our lover. As we do this, the ship of our body’s desire keels to the left and then the right until we end up simply sailing in circles. It gets us nowhere.
So how do we know we desire something or someone?
The key to understanding your desire is through knowing what it truly feels like in your body. For example, I might feel a desire start somewhere in my lower back. It begins as an inexplicable tickle. The tickle turns into an itch. The itch then turns into an uncomfortable sensation that can best be described as a dark void, an uncomfortable empty space inside. This dark void feels like a constant low-humming distraction from my day. I can’t thoroughly focus on anything at hand. I keep getting distracted by this gnawing energy from my body. So much so that until I figure out how to quell this itch I find it difficult to even function at my fullest capacity.
I watch my body carefully. Sometimes desire shows up when my body expands toward an object, thing, or person that it wants. For example, if I’m super hungry and my husband brings a fresh pizza with sausage and mushrooms into the kitchen my entire body expands. My mouth waters. My nostrils flare. My eyes seem to not be able to leave the premises of the pizza box. Even my hearing perks upon alert. I’m enlivened with desire. If I open the box and nothing is there well my entire body droops. Irritation kicks in. I feel my body sink as if I were a balloon deflating. My life force recedes. And the empty itchy void rises again.
This body reaction to desire happens no matter what the thing is that I desire. If it is a body scrub or massage, water, warmth, or more complex desires like a deep conversation, creative expression, a lover, or a friend the promise of pleasure and fulfillment is what desire is seeking.
Desire is the life force that brings us deeply into our living. Without desire, we would probably wither away and die. All animals desire to move away from pain and into pleasure.
Why don’t you try your desire out for yourself right now?
Take a moment to scan your body – is there something she wants right now? Is your mouth dry? Perhaps you want water or a warm cup of tea. Are your legs feeling stagnant from sitting all day? Perhaps your body wants to rise up and stretch out. Is there a burning empty spot in your chest? Maybe you are aching for a hug.
By beginning to tap into the desires within you right now (even the small ones) you begin to cultivate a relationship with your body in which you are listening to what she wants. Listening is the first step in understanding desire. This step is so important, in fact, I explore it annually with other women, who are on this journey with me in my online experience, Woman Ignited. In this online experience, we explore how to connect deeply with our bodies and how to listen to them. Then, we watch as this simple act begins to transform our lives.
The more you cultivate the relationship between your body and your desires, the more it serves you later as you seek to fulfill desires that are a little more complex. Like your desire for a better career, or a better car, or a home. Or your desire for a relationship, or your desire to alter and enliven your current relationship. Or your desire to travel or to write a book. Your desires become as complex as you are. And no matter how complex and seemingly cerebral your desires become when you come back into your body to fill them you will win.
The more you understand how desire presents itself in your body, you will learn how to fill these desires. By finding where in the body they come from, we begin to use the body like a heat-seeking missile to attain these desires. Your body is built to fulfill her desires. In fact, there is no power greater in your life than the power your body has to find what it is you need to thrive.
I will often tell the women who choose to work with me that if you can just get your cognitive mind out of the equation and let your body do what it was put here on earth to do (which is to live in bliss) then you will succeed at what your mind has failed to ‘figure out’ for you. Your body has brute animal instinct and desires to thrive because of what you lost track of way back when. And trust me, you can get it back. It’s never too late.
If you want to dive into your desire and learn how to use it to completely transform your life, this is my invitation for you to join me in the Woman Ignited Online experience. If you are reading this, and you know you want more and you can feel something in your body pulling at your curiosity – that, my friend, is desire. Listen to it.
This annual course is a staple for the women I work with…it promises to awaken you to your body, teach you how to be guided by her! Ultimately, it shows her how to live in the most pleasurable and bliss-filled way possible.
