Does Desire Make You Feel Bad?

Exploring Discontentment, Desire, and Manifestation

There’s a fine line between desire and discontentment.

For someone who has seen the results of persistent dissatisfaction with one’s life from an early age, I’ve struggled with embracing my own desires. Too often my wants and hopes were tethered to feelings of disappointment, sometimes even guilt, that my goals were not quickly obtained in the “here and now”, the material plane. Growing up in a family that was continually trying to become more financially stable and raise us all to a higher class, I witnessed (and maybe internalized) a lot of struggle. I learned that it was really difficult to make money and really scary to try to achieve goals outside of the resources you had at the moment. My parents held onto their desires to make themselves a better life, but what I saw was a lot of discontentment with where they were. Of course, I also had my own experiences and narratives around those experiences to teach me about the risks of desire.

When I was a kid, I auditioned for competitive dance teams and didn’t make the cut (due to discernable lack of confidence), I studied hard for my SAT and didn’t even improve my initial scores, and I punted someone in the face with a soccer ball accidentally the first time I played with a group of friends. In the last instance, the desire there was just to NOT be the person who did that. I think that was the last time I played soccer. On the other hand, the things I didn’t seem to want that much came easily. Being asked to sing in performances, receiving (almost entirely pointless) academic awards, and requests to be a mentor for younger students and a TA in college.

So why want anything at all?

I concluded that the key to not being unhappy all the time was to put aside big goals and desires; just be content with what you have and what you are given. Avoid the stress, avoid the feelings of lack, avoid the whole thing altogether. My Christian faith at the time and social circles in college reinforced this semi-stoic ideal: detachment from personal wants and life’s pitfalls. There was no “desire is sacred”. There was cultivating the virtues of self-sacrifice, self-control, temperance, and chastity. There was following the path of God and discerning God’s wishes above all. There was being “responsible” with your choices. Props to my past self, I even prayed that my Will would be united with God the Father’s instead of praying for my own hopes and wants.

When I converted to Catholicism, I chose St. Elizabeth Ann Seton as my patron saint, who — in a lengthy biography — had a moment of realization in her youth that she was too interested in nature and had to re-focus her devotion to God on high. Please note here that this small reflection doesn’t characterize her life entirely or diminish her good work (respect). This just happened to stick out to me significantly, as I also had a great love of nature which perhaps was indeed leaning a bit too pagan. We can’t have that. I put this desire aside too.

I practiced this mentality religiously and well. I prided myself on being pragmatic and diligent from future planning, to academic work, to my several part-time jobs and volunteer work, to my exercise regime, and strict (and very sad and beany) vegan diet on an unforgiving budget. When I graduated, I celebrated by eating a single orange by myself … which I stole from my college’s cafeteria. (Great job!) It wasn’t a very abundant lifestyle, and surprise, surprise — it didn’t make me very happy. Plus, it made for some weird hang-ups in my early relationship with Dan. (We were both working through a lot of stuff.) The ultimate result of all this was that I practiced shoving aside my wants, and when I indulged, I felt guilty and disappointed in myself. I kept reinforcing this relationship with desire and discontentment, wanting more and — instead of feeling joy in that — feeling only lack.

Jump forward several years through a lot of growing and changing, I’m re-learning how to be with my desires. I’m practicing something entirely new — and seeing a lot of benefits from it. I have much more connection to my body and awareness of my mental state, which has led to some very surprising results of being able to do mediumship and heal myself (partially) energetically. But I’m definitely still working on it. It can be really challenging to really enjoy desiring those big, (potentially) long-term goals, when you’ve spent much of your life and so-called formative years trying to stifle wanting at all.

And I think that’s a big part of the key: beyond just repressing true desires and not listening to what you really want, many of us struggle with taking pleasure in having desires itself.

Many people working on manifesting a new life or way of being for themselves have difficulty feeling their desires without also feeling a persistent and strong sense of unhappiness in their current situation. And here, there is one common solution: most manifestation teachers and motivational speakers remind aspirants to cultivate a sense of gratitude, which — among many other benefits — helps combat overwhelming feelings of dissatisfaction. But I’ve heard from several people that this technique doesn’t work completely for them. They feel that they must be “doing gratitude wrong” or else thinking too much about what they want to manifest — even though many techniques include thinking about this very often if not constantly. And so manifestation is struggle, and desire is discontentment again.

Listen: desire is not the source of our unhappiness.

I might argue it’s not necessarily the source of our happiness either — but I do believe that having desires is part of leading a fulfilled life and being a mostly happy individual. Desires are sacred and exist for a reason, and we should feel safe and good pursuing them. Why aren’t our desires, the feelings of wanting something united with pleasure? Desire and pleasure and good feelings are meant to go together right? How can we feel and pursue desire in the most pleasurable way (this doesn’t mean the absence of pain)? This is something for each of us to discern — but in many cases we should attempt this by drawing close to our wants in the material and imaginal realms. “What we seek is seeking us”, wrote Rumi.

Paulo Coelho wrote in The Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. Each thing has to transform itself into something better, and to acquire a new Personal Legend, until, someday, the Soul of the World becomes one thing only.”

I probably don’t need to tell you that this is a beautiful truth.

We are magicians and alchemists. We seek to transmute the matter from its initial state, we want to manipulate probabilities towards minute outcomes, we want to gain greater control over our lives, we draw towards our own flourishing and highest selves. We WANT. We desire and make that manifest in our worlds. For us, this is our natural state, our sacred path.

So let’s enjoy the process of reuniting desire, pleasure, and Beauty in our own lives and the lives of the Other.

❤