Our Desires are Intelligent
“He who had never desired a woman
is similar to an ass
and even lower than that.
Because from the tangible desires
one should learn to pay attention to the divine work”
(~ Kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak of Acre, 13th century)
While most mainstream spiritual traditions, as well as most “normal” parents and teachers, tell you that your desires are a disturbance, and might even be dangerous or EVIL — 😈 — we are here to tell you that your desires are intelligent and you better listen to them if you want to be aLIVE.
Our desires are our compass for aliveness.
They point us in the direction that brings us into closer intimacy with ourselves and therefore with all of life. They point us to our most aligned life. The life we came here to live.
They are the whispers of our soul guiding us, calling us to our fate. But we need to know how to listen carefully and learn not to take desires at face value. We rather need to excavate desires until we get to the clear message that they carry – as we will explain later.
All of creation is born from desire.
Without desire, there is no creation, there is no life. We can think of desire itself as the creator of life.
The Hebrew language beautifully captures this: The terms for ‘desire’ and ‘creator’ are very similar: “Yetzer” is desire and “Yotzer” is creator. The term “Yotzer” can also be interpreted as God, the ultimate creator. And “Yetzira” is creation.
Desire is core to creation, and yet desire so often gets a bad rap. Desires are painted as distractions, unhealthy indulgences, and untrustworthy impulses. We are taught to suppress our desires. To dismiss them. To distrust. But this, in our opinion, is a tragedy for us as individuals, as well as for our collective. Because when we disconnect from our desires, we disconnect from our inner creator. The creator within us, who came to this life to create love, to create life, to create the gifts that the world is yearning to experience through our unique incarnation.
When we connect to our inner creator we connect to the Ultimate Creator that continues creating this world and designing it through our unique souls. When we disconnect from our desires, we also disconnect from the Ultimate Creator, the divine forces of the universe. We disown our divine nature and the sacredness of our desires.
Each of us came to this existence for a purpose. To be the creators of our lives. To be the gifts of creation that we are. To express the gifts of our creation. Our desires are our navigation system for living in the fullest expression of our gifts. The gifts that the world is yearning to experience through our existence.
So let us listen deeply to our desires, and honor them as powerful forces of creation.
However, listening to our desires does not mean reactively following them, or impulsively acting on them.
Desire Excavation
The tricky thing is that, oftentimes, the intelligence of our desires isn’t immediately apparent. It takes some digging, some excavation, to harvest what our desires are truly inspiring us to create for ourselves.
Listening to your desires does not mean acting on them. It just means to listen carefully, because your desires carry deep messages within them, messages that can bring you healing of body and mind, and often put you on the path toward your soul mission.
Whatever you desire is formed first as an image in your psyche. This process of desiring is trying to answer a deeper need that lies inside you. The image of the object of your desires is often not exactly what you really need. This image is merely a symbol that is carrying a message from your body, your psyche, or your soul.
When your body needs specific nutrients, for instance, it will try to communicate it with you by sending images to your brain of food that contains those nutrients, so you will desire it and get the nutrients you need. It is just like a pregnant woman who desires to eat strange things that she normally doesn’t like eating but the embryo needs them for its development.
Your desires might carry a message from your psyche. When you feel a desire for chocolate it might signify that your heart needs comfort and warmth. It is not the chocolate that you need, but the serotonin and all the feelings that are associated with chocolate in your mind and subconsciousness. The piece of chocolate is the strategy that your brain found to meet the need that your psyche needs for its health and balance.
Even desires that on the surface are destructive and harmful — such as the destructive desire of a drug addict can carry a deep message. Underneath drug addictions, as we know it nowadays, lies a desperate yearning for deep surrender, for a devotional life full of meaning, and a traumatic wound that is crying for attention and healing.
Desires, even destructive ones, even those that are under the umbrella of social taboo and are forbidden, might also carry a message from your soul. Your soul might need you to shift and move on in life. It might want you to change your career, your relationships, or your approach to life in general. To move you closer to fulfilling your life’s purpose your soul will often use images that have enough magnetism to pull you out of your comfort zone. Those images might later turn out to be a mirage, but the soul uses them as bait to get you moving in a specific direction.
This is the meaning in the ancient kabbalistic text we brought at the top, from the 13th century: “He who had never desired a woman is similar to an ass, and even lower than that. Because from the tangible desires, one should learn to pay attention to the divine work”. The text encourages the reader to have sexual desires, saying that those who try not to have desires and think they are enlightened are “similar to a donkey and lower than that”. The reason is that through excavating our carnal desires we can purify the golden core that is in them, and realize the way to connect to the divine through the path of desires, not by repressing or avoiding them.
Therefore — listen! Listen carefully to your desires. Do not dismiss them, and do not repress them. On the other hand, do not believe them either. Do not think that the object of your desire IS the thing you need. It is merely a symbol that is used to get your attention. Therefore — be present with your desires and listen with curiosity to what they want to tell you. Excavate underneath them like an archeologist who digs deep below the surface to find the hidden treasure.
Here is an illustrative example from Katara’s life’s experience:
There was a time in my early 20s when I desperately needed a radical change from the life I was living. It expressed itself as a death wish. I was debilitatingly depressed, and suicide showed up as a recurring desire. Now, conventional thought might consider such a desire taboo, and morally unacceptable. But if we look beyond face value, and dig into the deeper desire underlying my want for death, we discover that it was pointing to my longing for peace and freedom. I felt like I was a prisoner trapped in the suffering of my life. I wanted relief. Therein lies the deeper intelligence of my desire.
Thankfully, I did not take the desire at face value and end my life. But what I did do was end my life as I’d known it by inadvertently creating a traumatic brain injury that forced me to abandon everything that wasn’t serving me. I left my university, I left my home, I left my relationship, and I left my limiting identity as a high-achieving high-performing star student whose entire sense of self was wrapped up in her intellect.
This was an unconscious act, as I did not intend to create a brain injury. But since I had not found ways to see, feel, and honor the deeper desire beneath my desire for death, the desire was fulfilled in a shadowy way. We are creators whether we create consciously or not. We manifest our desires whether we do so consciously or not. And I did give myself peace and freedom to some degree through this brain injury, but it was not at all in a skillful way.
Nowadays, when I’m slipping into suffering, feeling trapped in my life, yearning for an escape from it all (the despair that leads to a death wish), I consciously connect with the desire for freedom and peace beneath it and recognize that something in me needs to die. So I consciously create shamanic death experiences, I consciously destroy what is standing in the way of my freedom and peace. I do this through embracing heartbreak as a death experience, I do this through working with medicines that take me to ego death, I do this through consciously letting stale identities, attachments, and beliefs die. Through this, I have freed myself from jobs that no longer served me, relationships that no longer served me, and ways of living that no longer served me. And have initiated myself into a life of greater and greater aliveness.
The hidden treasure that lies within our desires is our Life Force — the ecstatic current of life force that does not want us to be stiff and stagnated, but alive and evolving.
And yes, to be clear, like in Katara’s personal example, sometimes the flow of our Life Force itself causes death and destruction. This IS how it is in nature. The old needs to die and compost for the new to be born and blossom. If we listen to the rhythms of the seasons we can dance with it. But many of us resist change, fight it, want to stay in the known, and refuse to move into the unknown. The more we resist it, the more pain and suffering will be involved in the destruction of old states and the creation of new ones that the intelligence of our desires points us towards.
If you’d like to explore the intelligence of your own personal desires and harvest their wisdom, consider joining Katara’s 4 week online course.
March 11th - April 5th, 2024
From Katara:
I'll be guiding an intimate group of courageous souls in walking the path of transformation together. We will inspire, reflect, and lovingly challenge one another into our greatness. Through mastering our relationship with desire, through living from our life force, through hatching ourselves through struggles, we will expand and emerge equipped to better live the lives that we came here to live.
I’m partnering with my dear friend, master coach, and bestselling author Edmond Lau to co-create and co-lead this program. We both transitioned out of tech and engineering careers into this work and bring a high level of rigor and systems-based thinking into what oftentimes can feel like a confusing black box of soft skills. You’ll learn practical tools and frameworks that will be easily woven into your day-to-day life throughout the course.
Learn more at https://masteringdesire.co/
