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Making Monday
I've heard it said that how we feel on Mondays is one of the clearest indicators of life satisfaction. Here is a quick thought on how to make Monday—and every day—work better...
Desire
February 13, 2023
Desire gets a bad rap in our culture.
Denying desire has been a standard move in moralistic and fundamentalist world views since time immemorial, especially around denial of the body and sensual pleasure, and vilification of intuition, the feminine, and the Earth herself.
As my poetry teacher used to say, we have a Dionysian body in an Apollonian culture.
And yet we desire…
It is how we are made.
There is a story about a monk and his teacher walking on a path beside a river.
“I have conquered desire and attachment, Teacher,” said the monk. “I am completely free!”
The teacher nodded, then pushed the monk into the river, jumped in after him, and held his head underwater until the monk was thrashing.
The teacher finally let him up to catch his breath.
“How's that non-attachment of yours going?” the teacher asked. "You seemed like you wanted to breathe pretty badly."
Our word Desire comes from the Latin Desiderare and means “to long for, wish for, demand, or expect.”
But the more literal Latin definition is “to await what the stars will bring.”
I like that a lot—awaiting what the stars will bring.
Desire is normal, natural, and very human...
And an amazing source of life direction and energy when channeled consciously.
I call this Intentional Desire—the natural drive and energy of longing applied to conscious intent.
The alternative is to act from subconscious drives, which may or may not serve our best interests.
We mostly inherit these drives from our families and mass culture. And while they can be beneficial, they are often toxic and completely antithetical to our health, happiness, prosperity, fulfillment, and freedom.
As Carl Jung said, until we make subconscious drives conscious, they will direct our lives and we will call them fate.
Or as I've said before—less poetically—the backseat driver tends to steer us into the ditch.
So we can begin to get the stars to bring more of what we want by simply and clearly and unapologetically stating what we deeply long for.
I call this the Intentional Desire statement…
I want ______ without ______ , in order to ______ .
This is an extraordinarily powerful statement when we clearly articulate it.
Creative new options appear that we could not see before.
We see what we can do and be differently to align our actions with our heartfelt desire.
We also connect to a deep and primal energy for taking those actions.
And through the coherence of our action and desire, the stars themselves seem to align.
Together, let's end the fight to change…
Delmar
