Time to wake up your desire

Desire has taken a body blow over the past 18 months

‘Your appetite is your power’ is an aphorism that was repeated a lot when I was learning how to coach.

The idea is that what you want; your desire, your drive, your hunger, is your power.

And power in the sense of life force; energy, willingness to live; claiming your right to be here fully, as yourself, and being willing to experiment with what the truest expression of that might be.

Desire gives you direction

Listen for what you want, perhaps more metaphorically than this

What you want is powerful. It’s a primal drive that can show you where to angle your feet, heart, head. It helps you land where you are, know what you are about and take a position. Direction gives you a sense of purpose and self worth.

The ability to tap into what you desire, from basic wants to soul calls, gives you energy, self knowledge, the possibility of new experiences.

Desire connects you with life

And while the goal might be the siren call forward that is stronger than fear, I’m not talking about ‘getting things done’ - this idea that life doesn’t start until you get somewhere, that you’re not enough or your life isn’t enough until you’ve completed something. That you need to hold your breath until something is completed.

That’s when we stumble into fear of failure and needing things to be perfect and analysis paralysis and all those other frisky little goblins.

You are worthy of desire

Desire is such a visceral word it’s usually reserved for romance or other bodily pleasures - but really it’s in everything we do, should we choose to engage with it consciously and with intention

Allowing yourself to want what you want, without being boiled alive by soiled realism or contorted expectation, by those past messages of ‘can’t’ or ‘greedy’ or ‘too much’ or ‘going to be let down’ is a deep fucking kindness to yourself. You are allowed to want whatever your heart desires, without getting hijacked out the gates by ‘how’

To be able to stay with the desire itself and enjoy that you can want, and be with that feeling, that part of life is a talent.

To allow desire itself to be glorious and make nothing wrong of it, to allow yourself to be uplifted by it, and to imagine what it might feel like in your body to have; to enjoy both waking up as well as being awake - that’s magical.

Trust that life wants to give to you

And then if you do want to make your desire real in the world, trusting that it will happen, allowing for life to be on your side, even when it doesn’t look like it.

Know that what you are looking for is also looking for you. The job, the lifestyle, the project, the feeling.

And enjoy getting to know yourself as you feel into specifically what lights you up. Know that it is a process, and that your power is here now - this actual moment is where it resides. If you’re still reading this, your desire wants and needs you.

What talents within yourself might you have to awaken to, to have what you want?

What people might you meet? What beliefs or behaviours might you have to shed? What might you have to get good at?

People get triggered as fuck when you move towards what you want - because we are all told we can’t have it. And to the uninitiated it seems a lot easier to knock someone down than unshame your own desire.

Really however, you having what you want serves everyone around you too. Happy, joyful, purpose-filled people, who feel in harmony with what they are doing, are contagious,

Can you trusti the appetite, desire, power that exists within you, as part of life on this planet? Desire is life force. It’s fired by imagination. It’s bigger than fear. This doesn’t mean it can’t get knocked sometimes though.

Our desire has taken a body blow

But what’s happened to desire in the last 18 months? What’s happened to that life force? What’s happened to imagination? There’s been so much restriction, so many cancellations, dashed hopes and delays, that it might have felt safer not to desire than risk the pain of lonely frustration and disappointment, impotent rage and not really being allowed to vent about that for fear of having your head bitten off. There’s been a climate of not even being allowed to want to want.

Without desire and imagination things feel flat and a bit meaningless. There’s no possibility but you don’t even know what you’d want to make possible. It’s hard to find the energy or creativity to actually engage with what you are doing, and without engagement, there’s no connection, relationship or meaning. There’s lots of ways back to yourself here.

The good news

I just like this picture, and mountains always symbolise hope to me

The good news though is that there are some things bigger than us. Bigger than rules and bigger than anything anyone says. Desire is one of these things. So it never goes away, it just gets quieter and sleepier, waiting for you to decide that you can have it, that sometimes our perspective gets stuck and it’s not real. And that even if you can’t remember when you got lost, we humans have been finding new ways to come back home ever since we learnt to wander.

You can claim your imagination back, and your desire back. Things remain possible whether you believe they are or not. Start with one thing you want right now. Even if it is that you want to want something. That’s your desire right there.

Interested in coaching and getting more in touch with your desire? Pop me a dm on twitter, instagram or facebook (@felicitymorse) or email at felicitymorsecoaching@gmail.com and I can talk you through how it works and see if it’s a fit. It’s revealing, fun, restorative, buoyant and it works.