Desire is such a sexy word to me right now.
In the past, desire tended to be a feeling I resisted and found challenging because I had spent a very long time in my life with unmet desires. I found that my desires were strong and powerful and I watched as friends and people around me had their desires fulfilled and I stood by the side of the road with empty hands. Desire can feel harmful to us when we look to others, to material objects and events to make us happy, but desire as an energy can be perfectly beautiful, like a fire raging through us that cleanses and transmutes all that lies within its path.
Desire For Love
“In its essential nature, desire is radiant heat. It is an upsurge of bodily excitement, of raw life force that wants to reach out, make contact, and connect with life around us. But as it radiates out, it usually glues itself to something or somebody – like a suction cup affixing itself to an object. This attachment of our life force onto an external object is what makes desire feverish and excrutiating.”
~ John Welwood – Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships
When you have spent a long time with unmet desires it can be challenging and scary to let desire flow again, to trust the nature of the universe and the nature of life. In its essence to trust love.
We are feeling creatures, we all want to experience love, to feel loved and to love. Loving brings us back to source energy, to who we really are. As I said in my post A is for ATTRACTION in the infatuation stages we can lose all sense of time, our eating habits change, we have more sleepless nights and our ups and downs are intense. Infatuation can feel like the suction cup attaching to the object of our desire, but eventually infatuation wanes and either something deeper comes from this or we part company. However, if our wounds are deeply set in ‘I’m not good enough’ we can become needy, dependant, jealous and attached. Our desire then becomes what John Welwood says as ‘feverish and excruciating‘.
In my past I was like the suction cup. No longer am I like a limpet grabbing on for dear life to my lover. But I don’t judge those who do grab on, because desire when coming from the grounds of low self worth can create a dynamic in relationships where being together instigates a big wound release for both parties. We can either learn from our wounds, begin to tend to them and acknowledge them or we can use them to blame and project onto the other person, this is when relationships can become toxic.
But desire when met with the present moment can be exciting, life enhancing, a fuel for creativity and laughter and play.
Love Without Attachment
To love another without attachment – is it possible? I say yes, but it’s not easy. You have to be very clear and present with what is taking place within you. Relationships expose where we lack love for self; they have a strong healing power when we are awake to their true purpose.
“Dying to your own attachments is a beautiful death. Because this death release you into real life. You have to die as a seed to live as a tree.” ~ Mooji
I would not say I am an expert in non-attachment. I am learning more to go within myself to nurture and tend to those places where there is hurt or pain from my past and bring them into the light of awareness. Sometimes I feel attached to my lover, but more and more I am allowing the relationship to be icing on the cake of my life, not the cake itself.
How is love to you?
If you enjoyed this post on desire you
may enjoy earlier posts on love below:
Photo credit: The first photo I took from the internet I would like to credit the artist but the image is so widely used I could not find the original creator. If you are the original artist, please contact me and I can either remove the first image on my blog or credit you properly and link back to your site, thank you.
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Kelly Martin, author of ‘When Everyone Shines But You’ is a dedicated writer and blogger who fearlessly explores life’s deepest questions. Faced with a decade of profound anxiety and grief following the loss of her father and her best friend Michael, Kelly embarked on a transformative journey guided by mindfulness, and she hasn’t looked back since. Through her insightful writing, engaging podcasts, and inspiring You Tube channel Kelly empowers others to unearth the hidden treasures within their pain, embracing the profound truth that they are ‘enough’ exactly as they are.
