A few weeks back I wrote an article about desires and introduced the notion of ownership – are they your desires or are they coming from a deeper, more expansive aspect of life? If you want to check out that article, click here.
In response to that post, a student asked the following question:
What if we follow desires but things aren’t aligning to support that process? When do you keep trying, when do you let go?
Let’s go back to some fundamental points:
• Desires (like all thoughts) are coming from a field of pure consciousness
• Desires are to be honoured because they are nature’s way of getting you to the right place at the right time
• Ultimately you are not the author of them
• Your job is simply to follow the desires and to pay attention when they seem to change
However what if I’m following desires and yet they don’t seem to happen. What if they don’t seem to be getting much support from nature?
The first place to start investigating is to see whether some control and attachment to the desire has crept in. Am I trying to author the desire?
If I am trying to make something happen my way then I have fallen into control mode. This means I have assumed ownership and authorship of the desire. It is MINE and it needs to happen MY WAY according to MY TIMEFRAME! This means I have out myself in the driving seat and thus run the risk of going against nature. This is a very rough place to be because if you try and resist nature you will always suffer.
There is a very straightforward test to determine if authorship has crept in.
Simply ask the following question:
If this desire did NOT happen, how would I feel?
If the answer is along the lines of “I would be devastated”, “I’d be so disappointed”, “I’d be miserable”, “I would feel like a failure”… then these feelings point to authorship. They indicate that your identity and your sense of fulfilment has become bound into the desire. You are attached to things playing out a certain way and that attachment limits you. It limits you because you are then not paying attention to the new direction that things are moving in. You are still hanging on to an old version of reality and you are failing to move on. This leads to resentment and the creation of a victim mentality – “poor me”, “why me” and so on.
If instead you ask the question and you find that you are neither upset, disappointed nor devastated by it not playing out in the way that you thought it might then there is no authorship. When you had the desire you were fully engaged and yet it is not turning out that way. Something has shifted and so now you find yourself curious, open and excited about what is coming next. In this way you are making yourself available for whatever is most evolutionary in the moment.
This is how we move from a life based on should to is. Rather than this should happen we move to this is happening.
As a result we stay relevant. We stay available to whatever is most life supporting – for ourselves and for those around us.