#23 - Understand your deepest desires
Truth and authenticity have to be the foundation of our growth
When we decide to embark on the journey of spiritual awakening, the first step has to be complete honesty. It may hurt or feel shameful at times, but the truth must be the foundation of our spiritual growth, and we need to face it!
We all have unfulfilled desires—conscious or unconscious—that hinder our development as they keep us stuck. They can create unpleasant feelings of which we don’t even know where they come from.
One way to uncover them and ultimately heal is to take an honest look at our life—almost like an inventory.
Exercise: Take a life inventory
Take the time to put together a table and note down the answers to the following questions:
What am I spending my time on, what are my projects?
What is the content and the goal of each project?
What do I want to achieve with the project? What are the (hidden) desires?
What would happen to me and others if I stopped the project immediately?
Are some of these projects in conflict with each other?
Which feeling does each answer trigger in me?
I have tried this and it made me realize which “projects” are really important, which ones are nothing more than old habits that can be stopped in order to make time for new ones, or where there are conflicts between certain goals and projects.
What to do with it?
The life inventory helps us to understand what we really want, which old habits can be discontinued, what is missing and where we want to spend more time and energy going forward.
As a result, we can start to re-arrange our lives step by step, and we will see our happiness increase tremendeously over time.
But what shall we do, when we discover dark desires and feelings that would harm ourselves and others if we were to act on them? It is important to acknowledge them without judging. We need to bring them lo light, look at them and ask ourselves what they want to tell us. They can be the result of feelings that we have pushed away a long time ago and that have grown in the “shadow”. Shadow work as I described it in an earlier post, can be method to heal: #11 - Love your dark side!
The greatest desire
Now that we have looked at our desires and spent time with our shadow, it becomes important to ask ourselves: How important is awakening to me?
It has to become our biggest desire in life for it to happen!
That doesn’t mean we have to abandon our familes or our projects. To the contrary, our relationships will become more free and our projects more fulfilling if we constantly ask ourselves “am I acting in harmony with my goal of spiritual awakening?”
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