What are your deeper desires? Not your wishes for making this week go by more easily, but your deeper desires for your life. Do you know what your desires are? Take a moment to consider it. What do you truly desire?
In our day to day busyness, we can get so swept up in what we are “supposed” to do that we totally neglect to check in with what we truly desire for our lives. And when we ignore our deeper desires, it can lead to our feeling trapped, overwhelmed, empty, and out of control of the direction our lives are taking. We can fall into believing that we are a victim to our lives and that we have no power or right to feel into our deeper desires.
In my work in counseling and coaching, I have seen many many people who are out of touch with their deeper desires and they come to me wondering why they feel a deep inner void like something is missing from their lives. Ignoring our desires can be a path that we take based on the expectations of others or believing that our dreams and desires are not important or worthy of our time and energy; that they are “just silly dreams“.
To tune in to what our deeper desires are, we must bypass the mind and check in with our heart and our gut. When we get out of our heads and down into our bodies, we can tune into our truth. If we feel that we have to sacrifice our dreams and our deeper desires to do the things we are “supposed” to do, we are setting ourselves up to miss out on meaning and joy.
We must give ourselves permission to feel into what we truly desire to experience in our lives- physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, financially, etc. By tuning into our desires, we can then begin to create the life we want to live and we can feel more fulfilled as we live it. Imagine a world full of people who experience joy and live lives full of meaning…
We must also become aware of the story we are buying into that by tuning in to our dreams and desires, we will waste our time, neglect our responsibilities, or ruin our lives. We are only here to move through this lifetime once, so isn’t the point to enjoy it? No one was born to live a life of misery, suffering, and sadness. In our roles as parents, partners, friends, bosses, coworkers, etc., we will excel when we tap into our desires and not only enjoy ourselves more, but also enpower others to do the same. We must recognize that helping ourselves to feel better and to find more joy will also help those that we are in contact with.
Yes, there will be people in our lives who are disappointed and who fight against our desires. There will be people who attempt to enforce the “shoulds” and the expectations that they have for our lives. Many times, this resistance to our living our desires comes from their own fear and neglect of their desires. And sometimes we must make difficult decisions around choosing ourselves over those people.
To begin tapping into our desires if we have been out of touch with them for a long time is to start asking ourselves what we get excited about and what we look forward to. Are we counting down the minutes every day to run out of our workplace? Are we living for the weekend so that we can do things that we truly enjoy? Do we have trips or projects planned that we look forward to? What are the things that we would do if time and money were no object?
Once we can identify what we enjoy doing and what helps to light us up (or even to help us tolerate the other parts of our lives), then we must schedule time in for those things on a regular basis. We don’t have to quit our jobs or neglect our responsibilities in order to give ourselves moments of joy and fulfillment. We can add in short increments of time throughout the week or daily to move toward our desires.
I invite you to tune in to your deeper desires and to begin planning moments throughout the week to get in touch with and to do what brings meaning and fulfillment. Notice what you are doing on a daily basis that is taking you away from your desires. Run an experiment and see how you feel as you turn your attention toward what lights you up, and observe how it impacts your interaction with others as well.
I will be tuning in right along with you.
Chat again soon,
k