Here you are. You are on the path of awareness. Being on this path, you have learned that so much of what makes up who you are today, including what you want in your life, is trauma. If you become aware of and resolve that trauma, you have experienced that you change. What you want also changes. And it is here that you can make a crucial mistake.
You are smart enough to see that if you heal trauma, your desires can change. And so you try to play the game in reverse. You see a desire and believe that the achieving of this desire is going to lead to pain. And therefore, you try to heal yourself specifically so that the desire will change. Essentially, you try to process or heal yourself out of a desire. What you do not understand is that this is not how the universe works. And this approach often does nothing but make the desire stronger.
I’ll give you an example of this dynamic so that it will make more sense. Imagine a woman who was raised by her family to be a wife and mother. Deep down, she always had a deep yearning to become a success for her own achievements, not to have her success be all about what she does as a caretaker for other people so that they can succeed. She gets married and has a baby. She loves them both very much. But this desire for her own personal success will not go away. Being a relatively conscious person she sees that a big factor (and potentially the whole reason) behind why she wants personal success is because it was a trauma for her to never be able to have personal success. After all, in her family and culture, that is not something girls do. No one ever saw her for her; they saw her as someone who was born to serve so others could succeed.
She thinks or feels that if she went for her desire, her husband would be upset and maybe it would lead to a divorce. Her child would feel abandoned and maybe hate her as a mother. She sees this as a selfish move on her part. She may be wrong or she may actually be right that this is the reaction they would have to her desire. That isn’t what matters in this conversation. What matters is that her fear of losing that ‘feel good connection’ with her husband and baby, makes her try to resolve the trauma in her childhood (and do all the shadow work and processing and positive focusing she can do) with the hope and even belief that by doing so, she will no longer desire her own personal success. Instead, she will eventually feel amazing being a wife and mother. The thing is, it doesn’t work. In fact, the more she tries to do all this healing work to try to get rid of this desire, the desire gets more suppressed and stronger and she becomes more unhappy and more unhappy in the situation that she is in.
The times we tend to do this most is when we are afraid that a desire of ours threatens our social connections. Essentially, any time one of our desires threatens that we will lose our closeness to someone that matters to us. And especially when we have been led to believe by our specific social group, culture, society etc. that the thing we desire is wrong.
People have this idea that certain desires are bad and wrong and that if you desire them, it means something bad about you. This is obvious to see when two people are facing the issue of incompatibility. When an incompatibility is present in a relationship we care about, we try to make the other person compatible with us by making them wrong or bad for what they want. This creates shame in them. And they most likely will do the same to us. They will make us feel bad and wrong for our desire. After a while, the emotional condition of the relationship itself is shame and resentment towards each other because of it. When we make the other person wrong for their desire (when it differs from our own) we come up with a reason why they are wrong for it and try to then heal them out of that difference or try to change it so that it doesn’t exist. This never works because if you try, the message conveyed by approaching them in this manner will be “you need to be fixed because something is wrong with you.” They will feel totally unloved by you and unaccepted and unwanted as they are. It also doesn’t work because you can’t un-want something that you want. To understand incompatibility in depth, watch my video titled: Incompatibility (A Harsh Reality In Relationships).
Something that people have got to accept is that this is a time space reality of contrast, where both personal expansion and the expansion of this universe is occurring as the result of desire. This means that you have to accept that desire ALWAYS comes from the unwanted experience. At this point in our evolution, desire comes from trauma. There isn’t such a thing as a good desire and a bad desire. Any time we judge a desire as bad or wrong, we really need to question this judgment and consciously look deeper into understanding the desire itself as well as our resistance to it.
Where people are accurately feeling a discrepancy relative to desire is where people think their desire is one thing, when it is in fact another thing. For example, one man could want to be a multi millionaire because he wants that feeling of being financially free and that specific feeling of abundance that comes with knowing that he is the one creating that stream of income. For this man, being wealthy in this way is his true desire. For another man, if he asks himself why he wants to be a multi millionaire, it is so that he can have women be interested in him because he wants a relationship so badly. Why does he want a relationship so badly? Because he is lonely and therefore wants connection and wants to be wanted. It is obvious then, that he is not taking a direct route to getting what he really wants. He is finding a back road to get it in a round about way. Trying to make money will not feel good to him because it is a means to an end. If he accepted his true desire, he would probably go about getting it in a different way. His thoughts, words and actions would change to be more in alignment with his actual desires. As a result of being more in alignment in this way, he will feel happier and achieve his desires faster.
Keep in mind that a person may want something for mixed reasons. Using the previous analogy, a man may want that feeling of being financially free and that specific feeling of abundance that comes with knowing that he is the one creating that stream of income and also really want a close, connected relationship. When this is the case, it will not feel bad to focus on making money. He will also take action to prioritize having a relationship. The problem arises when we are trying to convince ourselves that we want something, when we don’t… Because it is just a means to an end or a strategy for getting what we really want instead. To understand this in depth, watch my video titled: If You Want To Be Happy, Don’t Do This.
Speaking of mixed reasons for wanting something, most strong desires are wanted for mixed reasons. Some of these reasons you may judge as “shadowy”. For example, a healer may want to be in the healing profession because one part of them really loves the feeling of watching other people feel better. Another part of them may have been so hurt by unconscious people growing up, that making people conscious, feels like the only way to stay safe themselves. Notice your tendency to make this wrong because of where it comes from. The desire isn’t wrong. It simply suggests that where the focus needs to be is on what can be done to feel safe in social situations. Potentially that is doing something totally un-related to making people conscious. But potentially, consciously making people aware of what they are doing so as to see that he or she can have more power relative to their own safety is actually that healing they need to experience.
At this point, it is probably important to correct some vernacular that is getting in the way of your understanding relative to this topic. People in the awareness community use the word “shadow” to mean two different things. 1. Something that a person is unaware of and is therefore unconscious of and 2. Something about them that is either bad, wrong or out of alignment. If I had my way, we would stop using the word shadow for both things. A shadow is something that a person is unconscious of. When they become conscious of it, it is no longer a shadow. Some of the things that we become aware of about ourselves, we and/or others judge to be bad and wrong. Any time we have this judgment, we need to question it. That being said, sometimes we can accurately feel the “offness” of certain patterns within ourselves or others. Meaning that something a person is thinking, saying or doing something that is not in alignment with their desires, wellbeing and perhaps the wellbeing of others. This pattern of being out of alignment in some way is often what people call someone’s “shadow”. I would rather this be called someone’s misalignment.
I do have to warn you that there is a potential that you might be projecting that something is “off” about someone when it is you that is off. It is quite common for us to perceive someone as misaligned any time something they are thinking, saying or doing is out of alignment with our desires for them. And our desires for them are usually because of what we want for ourselves. A better way of putting this is that we run the risk of thinking someone is out of alignment with their desires, wellbeing and the wellbeing of others when what they are out of alignment with is our overlay. To understand this in depth, watch my video titled: Overlay, What Prevents You From Having a Real Relationship.
The better you get at honing your desires, the easier it is to know what direction to actually go and where the focusing of your energy will feel the best and yield the best results. To do this, spend most of your time and focus asking why. Whenever you become conscious of a desire, ask yourself why you want that thing. For example, let’s say you are conscious that you want a good job. Ask yourself why. The answer may be so you can make lots of money and be successful. Ask yourself why you want to make lots of money and be successful. The answer may be so other people start taking you seriously. So ask yourself why you want other people start taking you seriously. The answer may be so they see you as worthy of connecting with. This exercise may prove to you that what you really want is to feel like people want to connect with you and value you. Obviously if you know that, you may go about getting to that desire in a different way. You may even see that the way you would try to get that experience would give you the opposite feeling, because in trying to get a good job so that people will value you, it proves they don’t value you as a person. Maybe if you do enough healing on that feeling that you can’t be valued for who you are, separate of what you do, you will choose not to take a job which is held in high societal esteem. But there is also a big potential that you might take a job that is held in high societal esteem, but no longer because you are doing it to get people to value you and want to connect with you.
Authenticity is the crucial thing to live in alignment with, including relative to your desires. You can never know in the process of healing, what the outcome will be. One person, who sees the trauma that gave birth to their desires, may resolve the trauma and no longer desire that thing. Another person may resolve the trauma and their desire for that thing remains and even becomes stronger. They may simply come at that desire from a different energy or place inside them. For this reason, watch my video titled: How To Be Authentic.
Also never forget that the experiencing of the thing you want may be the very thing it actually takes to heal that trauma. To understand healing in depth as well as this concept that perhaps the experiencing of what you want (no matter if the desire comes from trauma or not) is the only thing that will actually heal the trauma, watch my video titled: What is Healing?
Desires are always being amended. Any time you achieve what you desire, more desires will emerge within you. You will want different things. There is no end to desire. There is no ‘end of the game’. The sooner you accept this, the more comfortable you will be in life. You will not find this sweet spot in life where you have achieved everything you ever wanted and therefore, you feel awesome all the time and desire nothing else. The reason you want that “end state” is because you associate pain with wanting. What if the way to not be in pain relative to wanting is to accept that wanting never ends and that your discomfort is really about the resistance to the desire, not the desiring in and of itself?
It may be the case that when we discover a trauma and work to resolve that trauma, that our desires change. But we have no idea if they are going to change or what they are going to change into. All that will happen as a result of healing is that we will become more authentic to who we really are and what we really want. For this reason, and even though it is terrifying to accept, you cannot process and heal yourself out of a desire. You cannot heal yourself so that you don’t desire something. You cannot heal someone so that they don’t desire something. This is not actually healing at all. Instead, it is resisting a desire.
