“When we feel we are powerless, our ego most wants to change the things in our world.” ~Gregg Braden
Jafree Ozwald – The burning energy of desire is essential to life. Without it, we would have no forward movement. There wouldn’t be an urge to take action or create anything. We would all be sitting in the dark, just being very still, and barely breathing. We wouldn’t want to eat, dance, sing, or be fully self-expressed. The vital essence of desire is what keeps you alive. It’s the magical fuel that propels your life into tomorrow, allowing you to create and recreate yourself in a multitude of outrageous ways.
We are all born into this world with desires. We come out of the womb seeking a warm soft cozy place to snuggle, a breast full of milk to suck on, and a safe place to learn, grow, and be nurtured. At our deepest core, we all yearn to be touched, held and loved. If these needs are not attended to throughout our childhood, they end up fueling a plethora of adult addictions later in life. We smoke, overeat, and seek sex in a desperate attempt to return to that sweet cozy warm breast. Having these core needs met at a young age are essential components to an enlightened maturity, and having a healthy, happy, and fulfilled adult existence.
The major challenge here is that most of us didn’t get our natal needs met as children. We grew up physically, yet not emotionally as these basic core needs were continuously denied. They also morphed into a variety of very specific and sometimes complex “adult desires”. We may become hooked on watching our favorite TV show, or obsessed with making money in the stock market, or buying another pair of overly priced shoes at the mall. All these efforts to feel good inside only mask, numb and distract ourselves from truly going to the core and getting our natal needs finally met.
When it comes down to becoming the master of your life, one of the essential secrets is learning how to master desire. If you can master your desires, you will take back the steering wheel on your life and be able to pull your vehicle over at anytime. Otherwise, you will most likely spend the remainder of your existence driving along, following the traffic, tailgating your life from one desire to the next. Most people feel stuck or powerless in their lives because they cannot put on the brakes, stop the car and pull over at the rest stop. This is because they are slaves to their desires. The moment they wake up in the morning, they start moving from one desire to the next, not even knowing they have a choice. They spend their entire existence trying to fulfill the continuously extending list of adult desires, never feeling truly nurtured inside and blindly following the traffic into gridlock.
“Each desire brings misery. There is no fulfillment through desire. You never reach anywhere, and contentment is impossible. Seeing this truth, that running after desires takes you nowhere, you stop.” ~Osho
The good news is that there is nothing wrong with this scenario. Everyone has to go through the experience of being a slave to desire in order to master it. The slavery is simply our initiation into the desire mastery process. Without it, we would have no desire to be free! It’s important that we first understand the mechanics of desire before we can master it. The first thing is that your mind is addicted to desire and in this pattern it cannot ever reach total satisfaction. Even though you may get all the adult desires on your list accomplished, a new wish or want will be formed in the very near future. As long as your core need is not being met, the mind will continue to find something to fill the emptiness and chase after. This is the nature of the mind.
Again, I want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with the long list of adult desires we have. It is our destiny to go through this experience, living inside this constant pull of wanting things that we think will fulfill us and bring us real joy. The gripping energy of desire is what pulls at your ego like taffy, causing you to spiritually stretch yourself and evolve as a soul. Eventually you realize that nothing can fulfill you and you have to move deeper inside, meeting your deepest need and truth at your center. Ironically, desire for freedom becomes the missing fuel for a spiritual awakening.
The fiery desire for freedom is that force which will eventually burn through the ego, and liberate you from the repetitive cycle of daily suffering. When the desire for freedom is greater than everything on your adult desire list, then real changes happen. This raw real energy is soooo intensely powerful and unstoppable that you can directly face and meet every wound, challenge and insecurity inside you, and roar at it without resistance or fear. It’s the light from your burning fire of desire that gives you the insight you need to bring clarity into your confusion. You are able to see the beauty and creativity in your inner world, and love yourself exactly as you are. When this fire gets hot, it becomes sooooo freeing that it can liberate you from any pattern of fear, depression, apathy, insecurity. It makes this planet one of the most exciting and fascinating and places to live.
“For the rational, healthy person, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.” ~ Nathaniel Branden
I’ve been studying the nature of desire through the years, and perhaps one of the most enlightening aspects I’ve ever discovered about it is this. Sooner or later it always happens that the one thing you’re running from in life later becomes the thing you run towards (and vice versa). It is just a matter of time before the pendulum swings the other direction. For example, in your teens, you may have desired to have more space and less intimate interactions with your family. Through the years as you got this desire met and matured along with it (hopefully), one day the pendulum swung back and you realized all you wanted was to spend more time with those people who really knew you during your childhood.
The swinging pendulum of desire is always in motion. It may take a day, month, year or many lifetimes to complete its swing, yet it always swings. This is a very essential secret to know and understand if you want to master your life. The nature of desire is an eternal swing, and this pendulum will never ever stop swinging on its own, as long as you are unaware that it’s swinging.
Once you are aware that the thing you’re running away from will one day become the thing you’re running towards, then you have a chance at not being so emotionally attached to the list of desires you have now. Check it out for yourself and you will see. One day it will happen, in the very far or near future you will be running towards that which you were running away from, or running away from that which you’re running towards.
It can easily happen that in the morning you are deeply in love with your wife or husband, and by the afternoon you cannot wait to get away from them. If the emotional body gets overidentified with the pendulum swing, we can feel totally lost in life. We don’t know what we really want because we want two opposite things! With a tiny spark of awareness around this pendulum swing, we can transcend the entire process that arises and let whatever is most needed to manifest. The mind may still be a slave to desire, always following one thought after the other, yet you can sit back and watch without getting hooked into it. You can be free from incessant addiction to wanting, wanting, wanting… searching, seeking and reaching for a higher peak to climb.
Once you bring full awareness into the mind, everything changes. We can see the bigger picture as the clouds clear away, and understand why we were chasing after that dried up morsel of moldy cheese for years. With awareness we can start approaching our desires with more curiosity and have a deeper introspection into why we are the way we are. We can become openminded, and have a more playful, lighter approach to life. This soft sweet curious awareness is the golden key element in having true mastery over the mind.
With awareness you can step back from the addiction to following desire, and a doorway magically opens to a very spiritual experience of life. You don’t get hooked by another desire because you realize they are all going to manifest one day at the right time. You see the power inside you, that whatever you want in life wants you, and one day it is going to manifest whether it happens in this lifetime or the next one. Knowing this, you start to relax, breathe deeper, and feel this infinite being you truly are. You begin seeing your desires as a fun and enlightening escapade that is meant to awaken your soul to the vastness of your being. You start to enjoy your journey through life soooo much more, because your happiness is not dependent on what does or doesn’t manifest.
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, whole heartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.” ~ William H. Sheldon
Another secret to the mastery of desire comes from knowing how your level of suffering in life solely depends on how attached you are to a certain desire. If you have no attachment, there is no suffering. This wisdom is one of the greatest tools you can use on the path towards enlightenment. The next time you’re fuming over something or someone in your life, just notice how attached you are to the desire you have inside. The more you can become aware that your level of attachment is the one thing that’s creating all of your suffering, the greater the chance you have for mastery over your life. When you realize the truth of who you are is an all powerful infinite being who can manifest anything at pure will, you won’t be attached to anything anymore. Whatever desires arise in the mind will simply be fertilizer to grow deeper roots in, or perhaps superficial entertainment to laugh at and enjoy.
If you really think about it, nothing in this life is worth losing your cool over. What’s the point of letting yourself get overly entangled in anything? If you do freak out over something, it’s really The Moment for you to celebrate! For you are getting a glimpse into the level of attachment you have around a specific pattern of desire, and can see into an old natal need you never got met. If you can move even deeper inside yourself, you can understand the karmic lesson your soul has been trying to learn for lifetimes.
Life is an endless journey, and the main purpose of it is freeing ourselves from our karma and our drama. The suffering we incur is a clue to understanding our patterns, and what our next step is to truly becoming free. It’s good to know that there already is an inherent wise master inside you that sees the pain caused by attachment to desire, and responds accordingly with lessening the grip on life. It’s only this divine witness inside who can liberate you, and keep a vigilant watch over the scavenging mind. Practice today noticing the very moment you suffer about what desire you are attached to. Choose consciously to either get lost in the drama, or stay beyond it. Whatever you do, just remain conscious, and you’ll be able to free yourself from the pain.
Take time this week to explore this vigilant master inside you. Notice this part that is at peace with everything, because it knows it is intimately connected to everyone and everything. It doesn’t see your thoughts or feelings as separate forms which are cut off from the Universe in any way. The master inside you feels the oneness of creation. It is merged with life and thus has no hidden personal motives to need, control, resist or rid of desire. It simply honors whatever desire is showing up and consciously dives into the core of it, merging with it totally, exploring what it truly wants and needs.
The master in you knows it’s not necessary to act on every desire. The master knows there is a magical manifesting power within, and it will easily bring any desire into manifestation effortlessly. The master is the magician in you who can simply IMAGINE and FEEL that the desire is already manifested, that it already happened, and knows the Universe also accepts that this is the truth and thus brings it into absolute reality. This level of surrendered confidence and total conscious conviction woven inside the mind’s imagination is the secret element distinguishing the master from the servant. When you can live your life fully from this conscious place, you can make any wish you want manifest in your life. Life hears your every desire as a command and simply manifests it for you at the perfect time and place.
“The mind craves for formulations and definitions, always eager to squeeze reality into a verbal shape. A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet.” ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
To find the master in you, first get very very quiet. You need silence in order to hear its subtle voice who is always in the background dancing YES to each experience of life. The master is always embracing the totality of your existence, loving the energy of desire, knowing it’s the central fire that will eventually burn away all suffering. The master does not fear any desire, it welcomes desire without getting lost in it. The master knows all desires fade away when the divine truth is seen within. When the master in you awakens, you feel this connection with the God Source, feel deeply at peace with life, are intensely happy with yourself, and love your life just the way it is.
If you want to master desires in this lifetime, start with making the firm decision that this is the most important thing that you are doing with your time. Hold tight onto this decision and conviction that you are going to master desire. Breathe this intention into your spine and let it sink deep into your bones. To truly master the energy of desire is absolutely radical and huge. It may perhaps be the greatest accomplishment one can ever make on their spiritual journey. So please be gentle with yourself during this process, nobody ever climbed Mount Everest without any training.
Practice imagining what your life will be like to be free from attachment to all your desires. Explore that part of you who is already free, and can feel more freedom than ever before. As a true master of desire, how will your life be different than what it was last week? Thoughts are very powerful things, and when you open yourself continuously to any one thought, you start believing that it’s true and then this magical Universe responds accordingly! The Universe truly has no other choice than to follow your beliefs. They act like commands to the creation. The more you are convinced that this one thing is true, without a smidgeon of doubt inside you, the more quickly the Universe supports you in making it manifest. The world loves showing up in the way that you deep down think, feel and believe it really is.
SF Source Enlightened Beings
About Jafree ~ Jafree noticed his intuitive abilities at a young age, living in Colorado. He always had a deep curiosity of the mystical world, with a strong need to know the Truth. This driving need ultimately took him to India. There, at the age of 25, he experienced a profound change that directed him to his current spiritual path. From a small Mennonite college, to Costa Rica, Norway, and finally his Samadhi experience in India, Jafree now devotes his life to sharing the deepest truth of what he has learned, to assist the world in their awakening.
Jafree has created an online experience called The Super Manifesting Program where you’ll learn all the exact steps to take to manifest your dream life with effortless joy and ease.
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