Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's awake show, where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey people, thanks for tuning in today. I've got something important to tell you about desire, yearning, longing, wanting,
Speaker 1 00:00:40 Meeting the fire in our bellies, the fire of the gods, our drive to satiety gratification, satisfaction addiction. But in reality, our drive toward enlightenment a lot to tackle or get a drink of something. If you need it, get comfortable. And let's jump in in episode 17, exercise six, how do you use what you yearn for in life to transform a problem? I showed you how to use your deepest, yearnings and desires as the guide to transforming a problem. I use the word yearning to mean a kind of deep visceral need that hides just at the fringes of your consciousness. It's fairly easy to access. You just have to stop the world for a moment, close your eyes and ask yourself what you really long for beyond all the superficial stuff you want in your outer life. What core inner experience of life do you yearn for?
Speaker 1 00:01:52 Have you already known this, but gave up pursuing it at some point or have you never actually identified and acknowledged it? The phrase living in quiet desperation, a pediment is this problem. It's a resignation to not fulfilling. One's deepest desires in life. It's really interesting how there are such contrasting views on the issue of desire. On the one hand, motivational gurus show you how to actualize, whatever you desire. It's like bootcamp for the American dream. One, a nice car and a big house. You can get it. What an awesome relationship. You can do that to want to look like a model. No problem. On the other hand, most religions and spiritual traditions take a dim view of desire, especially the rock and roll farm of really going for it. Like hedonistic worship, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Whether it's Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Shiva, Shakti, or just the, the idea of seeking truth and wisdom, focusing on your desires.
Speaker 1 00:03:11 Isn't usually a big part of it. In fact, most spiritual practices use methods that intentionally deny desire in order to stimulate higher consciousness. I mean, fasting hours of meditation or prayer and all that, isn't exactly what you'd call fun. It's awesome, but not in a let's party, our asses off tonight way. Although there are exceptions like some forms of yoga that incorporate ecstatic dance and music, but for the most part, desire is seen as a lower form of consciousness. And the goal is to transcend it. I don't think this is correct. It's based on a pre psychology understanding of the human condition and doesn't differentiate our yearnings into conscious and unconscious desires. It just lumps them all together into one undifferentiated mush and says they're universally bad. What psychology has taught us is that desire is simply a drive to experience something. And that this can be either conscious or unconscious.
Speaker 1 00:04:34 A conscious desire is the urge to express your true ideas, feelings, creativity, compassion, power, joy, and so on. An unconscious desire is an urge. For example, that makes you feel hungry all the time and overeat or a need for more, no matter how much you engage in something you like, like you never feel satisfied. This happens when you aren't conscious of what you actually yearn for. Unconscious desires, often express themselves in physical urges. We have little control over, but if you learn how to process them, they can reveal their true purpose for your consciousness. For example, I've had lots of clients with addictions where healing involved connecting with the real States of mind they were driven to in some folks, the urge to get totally fucked up was actually a drive for a spiritual experience. Other folks were actually yearning to feel loved or experienced peace and so on.
Speaker 1 00:05:47 So conscious desires lead to expansive growth. Whereas unconscious ones can lead to pain, addiction, depression, destructive behavior, et cetera. The idea in a lot of spirituality is that what you yearn for in prisons, you, and that you should work to free yourself from it. There's some truth to this in terms of the fact that the more you grow, the more economist you get and the less you feel in the grip of overwhelming desires, needs and disappointments. But it's also a false understanding of desire. In fact, it's an internally self-refuting concept because if you didn't desire anything, then why bother focusing on self-improvement at all? Why not just sit there and do nothing? Why help other people? Why do anything wide live? What you yearn for is in fact, meaningful, purposeful, and contains all the information. You need to understand yourself, what to focus on and what direction you need to move in, what you desire, contains your roadmap.
Speaker 1 00:07:02 This doesn't mean you should just act on every desire. It means that you should acknowledge your desires and differentiate them into conscious and unconscious ones. If your desires aren't consciously processed, you'll suffer from a lot of problems or at least you'll live with an essential unsaid yearning in the background, something fundamental, a core need that never really gets addressed. The exercise shows you how to identify this and process it. Desire is the fuel of your process. It's up to you, how you relate to it. It doesn't matter what the desire is. You can always process it to consciousness and integrated into your life. A great example of this is rock and roll. I've known tons of musicians over the years, and it's always fascinated me. How two different people can take the exact same desire in totally opposite directions, one unconscious and destructive, and the other conscious and uplifting.
Speaker 1 00:08:13 I'll tell you about two such rockers, both comrades of mine, who said, I could share a piece of their stories with you. One of them is of rock and roll guitar player in a really well-known band. He struggled with addiction for years. He told me it was an insatiable physical urge that nothing could stop. Not a, not rehab, not alternative drugs, not love, not sex, not prayer, nothing for a while. There, he lost everything. His wife, family, and his band. He eventually got it figured out, but it took a long time. The other friend is a singer songwriter who was also well into drugs and booze, but he had an interesting relationship with it. He looked at it as a method of mind, expansion, not the healthiest method could be dangerous walking the tight rope, but for him a method, nevertheless, he said he got high because it made him see things, feel, things realize things that he couldn't otherwise find for his music. He claimed it made him a better musician who knows it was sort of enlightenment through debauchery. But as soon as he stopped learning and growing from it, he stopped indulging pretty rare and thoughtful of him. He was able to ride the wave consciously enough to stay out of any serious trouble.
Speaker 2 00:09:54 Drugs
Speaker 1 00:09:54 Are always liked that it's either hide or seek folks, take them to hide from something that causes pain and blocks them from their true needs and desires, or they take them to seek something beyond what blocks them. Of course, it's often a combination of the two, but both are a slippery slope. Makes me think of how the 1960s drug revolution expanded consciousness in ways that our society benefits from to this day. It ushered in a more open and aware relationship to personal freedom, behavior, belief, spirituality, et cetera, and more consciousness of social oppression. But both then and now people either make it through the experience or they totally fuck up their lives. And it's the same with all desires. All yearnings, all needs. If they remain unconscious, they give you trouble because that's the only way they can express themselves to you. If they're made conscious, they not only solve your problems, they propel you down the path of your awakening and success in life. Now sometimes identifying what you consciously, Mead is easy. You know that what you really want is to be loved or acknowledged or feel free or whatever other times, it's hard to know. There can be lots of confusing layers. You have to fight through a really powerful way to figure it out is to work on a problem. Like say you eat too much because you're hungry all the time. The question is, what are you actually hungry for? And how can you figure this out and process
Speaker 2 00:11:46 It? Or
Speaker 1 00:11:48 Maybe you have an exacting checklist for who you want to find in a relationship, but it never seems to come to fruition, which items on your list are actual relationship processes and which ones are projections of unmet, inner needs that no outer person is ever going to fulfill complicated. Or perhaps you just want life's complications to go away. You want peace, but you don't know how to make it happen. In all of these situations. A powerful question to meditate on is if I couldn't get what I want in the way I want it food, a certain quality and a partner have life's complications go away or whatever, but had to get it in a completely different way. What would that be? Focus on your yearning, your desire, your urges, and feel into the question imagined solutions, visualize yourself fully satisfying your need, but in a completely different and more conscious way.
Speaker 1 00:12:59 This may help you connect with what you're actually hungry for or what you actually need in a relationship or what state of mind you need to access in yourself. Regardless of life's complications in my life, one of my most powerful desires is for music. It's not a problem per se. Maybe it's an addiction. I don't know. It can't be that bad though. It's better than beer or sugar. I feel music in my core, like a burning fire. It connects me to some other place way beyond myself. To be honest, it's kind of freaky at times. I'm not sure. Average music lover. I have strange experiences when I play guitar or write songs. I don't know what words to use to describe it. I guess it makes me feel connected to reality beyond me and my meager human personality and existence. I feel the cosmos infinity.
Speaker 1 00:14:09 And if I'm away from music for more than a day, I start yearning for it. Big time. Of course, it's not actually music that pulls me. It's where music takes me. That's what I yearn for processing my problems and life experiences also takes me there. And where's there besides the great, beyond the big picture, beyond my blink in the eye existence. For me, it's the underworld, the background behind the curtain, behind the word, the motivation behind the motivation, not to freak you out or anything, but it's really the spirit of death eternity, where we come from and where we're going. After this little tangent, we call life. It's that whole realm of things we prefer to avoid. Ignore repress. Look the other way from it's the elephant in the room of life. And it contains all the really juicy truths behind the flimsy appearances of our everyday daily existences. Whoa. Hm. This makes me feel like playing guitar. I'll be back in a minute.
Speaker 1 00:16:51 All right. I am back. You know, the original stated goal of yoga is to be a dead man in life. It means to be dead to the mundane and the obvious and awake to the background processes that drive life in Eastern traditions, they call it enlightenment Christians, call it Christ consciousness, Jews, and Muslims simply call it God. An ancient alchemical traditions. They had lots of mystifying names for it, like the philosopher's stone, the black diamond, the elixir of immortality and the Magnum Opus. Every spiritual tradition has its own way of expressing it, but they all share the sense that behind everyday and problems is an unseen process that can be tapped into and experienced the processing methods. I teach aim at identifying this unrecognized reality as a part of our own psyches and making it conscious through direct experience. They help you uncover the meaning and purpose of your problems and show you how to use this awareness to transform them.
Speaker 1 00:18:19 This gets you more on track with what's really trying to happen in your life and doing this leads to health. Well-being personal power, creativity, joy, and wholeness, no matter what's happening in my life. As soon as I pick up the guitar or sit down at the piano, everything shifts, it takes a minute, maybe two. And I start to feel and see in a different way. It's like meditation, but more fun. And in my experience, more colorful and immediate, but Hey, maybe my meditation hasn't reached the golden zone of rock and roll yet either way. My consciousness shifts from everyday life to a deeper sense of things that feels pure and correct. It's closer to mathematics than to, I don't know, buying groceries or arguing over who washes the dishes. It's closer to where your mind will go on your death bed to the deeper dimensions of life than to, I don't know, doing your taxes.
Speaker 1 00:19:36 You get the point. I tune into what I hear, see, and feel and follow where it goes. Sometimes words pour out of me too, but they're not words I'd normally be able to think up. They come from my subconscious and they illuminate something for me. It's like having a therapist, the session, but it's free after playing, singing, writing, and especially performing. I feel like I've been on a journey from point a to point B. My whole awareness has shifted. I've learned something. I've become a different person in some way. And this is the same process that our problems aim at producing. If you just get rid of what's bothering you without getting its message, like if you just suppress it and try to keep the status quo, you've missed the point. You might feel better in the moment, but you've thrown away a golden opportunity to change and grow in a fantastic way, just because something's painful, difficult doesn't mean it's wrong or meaningless in my own experience. And that of working with thousands of clients, I found that problems are actually the golden elixir of life. They're trying to bring forth this deeper experience I'm describing. They aren't just meaningless crap, their signs and symptoms of your deepest desires, your liberation, your personal freedom, trying to get your attention. They manifest as pain, disturbance and impossible conflicts in your life. To try to force you to break through to a new level of awareness, happy holiday, see you next time and stay aware.
Speaker 0 00:21:39 You can follow me on social media at doctors awake, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctor's wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips and lots more be well.
