Desire.  Wanting.  Longing. 

What do you want?  Truly madly deeply want....  More joy?  Deeper connection with others?  Meaningful work?  To live your most authentic life?  Better coping with life's challenges?  An ease inside your own skin?  

Down deep inside can you feel it - the feeling of your longing?  It is the uncomfortable feeling of reaching, of stretching - an unfurled hand extending away from the body, opening you to possibility,  

The feeling of wanting aches.  It echoes with the hollowness of not yet having. 

This wanting is not a passive stance.  We are not children.  It is not a hopeless victim sort of wanting that is bitter and resentful, waiting for the world or another to do it all for us. 

Wanting is a powerful commitment to ourselves.  It speaks of mattering.  To want is to say you are there for you and prepared to know what you want, to ask for it, and to draw forth from yourself all that you are in service of the outcome.  With your whole heart and mind and body.  Yet at the same time knowing that we are not singlehandedly able to guarantee the outcome.  It is a high stakes game.

And that is what takes the courage.  Because it is so very vulnerable to want with all our hearts, to speak our truth (if even only to ourselves) and to reach with all our might - given that forces other than ourselves, other than our will, other than our efforts contribute to the outcome.

And so many of us therefore back away from our hunger for a big life.  The vulnerability of wanting's reach sends quivers of dissonance through our bodies and we back away from our healthy drive.  Our hands drop to our sides and we deny our longing.  "Never mind".  "No big deal".  "Doesn't matter."

I want...  Can you even say the words?

The New Age literature has it half right - they say that in order to have a more powerful life we need to ask the universe for what we want.  And that is indeed true.  We need to visualize and articulate with precision what we want in our lives.  What that literature omits to tell you though is that what it feels like to ask like that is vulnerable. 

The biological experience of vulnerability is what I call "dissonance": sensations of muscle tension and physiological arousal that feel like threat.  The feeling of dissonance is the message from your deep self that you are on the cusp of an experience that will grow you.  It is a phonecall from your body letting you know that right here and right now you have a choice.  You have a choice to approach these sensations and become more You, or you can avoid them and stay stuck. 

The problem is that we are wired to move away from the discomfort of dissonance.  The choice to approach is simple.  Doing it is not easy...

Our job is to stay with dissonance in the body.  We need to feel dissonance In the specific sensations of muscle tension and arousal.  We focus in, slow and precise and without judgement.  That is how the body comes to know that although there is uncertainty we are safe, even so.  We answer the body's phonecall and assure it that this place of not yet knowing and not yet having is not immediate physical danger.

What do you want?  Can you let yourself know that?  Say that to yourself? Speak it aloud?  Feel that?  Can you stay with yourself in the vulnerability of that? 

I want that you can open yourself to all your brilliant possibility.  I want that you are able to want, with all that you are.  I want that for you with all my heart.

You are so worth it.  We are so brave.

Photo Credit: Sparker