Desire for Good

This morning a priest came to see me for a session. Chronically overworked, fatigued and in a low mood, he told me he knew he wasn’t able to manifest what he wanted and just could not figure out what was in the way. He leads late night prayer vigils for peace, delivers food to the poor, and has taken several individuals with mental illness under his direct care by taking them to their doctor appointments.

We worked initially with body awareness, getting a sense of what he was aware of, the felt sense of his body, or of any internal sensation he may have of his body. He manages his life and work through his mind and has very little creative expression, or any expression for that matter except via talking to people under his care. We worked with breath, bringing him out of the mind and into the sensation of the body. The pelvis and viscera of the abdomen were congested and bogged down, sluggish and heavy. His abdominal cavity reflected his mind and his inability to move. As he started to sense more into that area he started to talk about desire, eating food that wasn’t good for him, sexual desire, desire to do what he wanted when he wanted.

What became obvious was the judgement that having desire was wrong, and that it was something to be contained, suppressed, and taken out. He wanted that desire healed and taken out of there. I asked him to name his beliefs about desire in the context of his tradition and the ways he has used to manage them. What came from his naming his values was the realization of the judgement and violence he was doing to himself because he had desire, the very violence he advocated against in his daily life. And that the fundamental drain on his system, and what kept him overworking was that internal violence that something was fundamentally wrong with him. There was of course nothing wrong with him.

Desire is a fundamental component of our humanity. Without desire, we would not act or change. Desire is energy, how we translate it in the mind, or express it through a chakra is actually a choice. We can choose to express it through our second chakra sexually, through our throat chakra through the voice, or to integrate throughout as a vehicle for integrated expression.

The goal here is to use the desire, a massive energy force within him as a vehicle of manifestation for his dream, namely: to build a homeless shelter for women and children in a 3rd world country. He could not come up with the energy to do it because he was so busy denying and judging that he had desire in the first place.

While this work is seemingly simple and obvious, the truth is we all walk around with some type of judgement about desire within ourselves. When we can realize that desire is a fundamental force that can be used in service of others, we can awaken to a vast healing potential within ourselves. With this awakening, we have access to greater energy for ourselves, and the power to manifest our dreams.