thoughts on desire

I am in the process of reading The Joy Diet by Martha Beck. On the joy diet, menu item #3 is desire. Here are a few thoughts on desire that I thought were important enough to highlight:

"I think we're all born with a set of preferred activities and talents, but more than that, with an inexplicable inner knowledge of the things we are meant to do and be, the changes we are meant to make in the world."

"The knowledge of your destiny is available to you, well before it actually happens as a message streaming continuously from your heart to your brain, written in the language of longing."

"If we dare voice a dream, we're liable to hear a litany of reasons we can't or shouldn't dream it. By the time we're adolescents many of us have replaced the awareness of our own desires with meditations on the topic 'Why I shouldn't want what I want.'"

"We repeat these claims to ourselves, over and over, because we think this will allow us to avoid pain--the pain of being rebuked by others, of failure, of humiliation, or loss. One of my friends calls this self-imposed pessimism 'inoculating yourself against disappointment.' This is a fabulous idea, except that it doesn't work. Injecting yourself with the fruits of failure from doing anything that might make your dreams come true, and if something good happens to you anyway, it will keep you from enjoying or appreciating your good fortune."

"I can tell you from extensive observation that refusing to feel desire is the only thing more painful than failing to get what you want, and that learning not to yearn, far from preventing disappointment, ultimately guarantees it."

Take the time to get still, and think about it: What do you really desire?

Namaste'
Leslie