Your Desires Are Not Your Desires
A couple of months ago, during my Morning Pages, some delicious downloads began to flow through about the energy of desire, specifically about soul-aligned, or authentic, desire. I’ve been integrating what I received through my never-lying body, allowing it to metabolize. Through sensation, she’s showing me subtle and significant nuances when it comes to the energy of (authentic) desire as an evolutionary current of Nature, sensations that are becoming part of a trustworthy guidance system.
Intellectually, I had known this through externally acquired information for a long time. But the subjective experience of knowing it through my body, leaning into what felt true for me and what didn’t, and the unrushed embodiment of it, was a whole different dimension of entheogenic gnosis.
During this time of metabolization, I was intuitively led to pick up the book The Prophet by the Lebanese-American poet and artist, Kahlil Gibran.
The Prophet lives on my altar, but I haven’t leafed through it for ages. My intuition was pretty specific, asking me to turn to the passage On Children.
(This book was first published in 1923 = the generalized masculine reference to the Divine, so don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater ;))
On Children goes like this:
“And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s
longing for itself.
They come through you but not from
you,
And though they are with you, they
belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies, but not
their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek
not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries
with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path
of the infinite, and He bends you with His
might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand
be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
Not only is this one of the best pieces of advice ever on parenting (in my opinion), if you switch out the word ‘children’ for ‘desires’, it’s also some of the best guidance on the art and practice of stewarding our authentic desires.
When we can see and feel our soul’s desires as expressions of Life’s longing for itself, the alchemy of getting out of our own way happens quite effortlessly. The ability to discern authentic desires from those misaligned infiltrations that are not for us also happens quite naturally, free from judgment. In our embodied sovereignty, we get to choose what to offer our energy and attention to.
We stop taking things so personally, stop subjecting the innocence of our soul’s desires to externally mandated standards of success and failure, to what’s 'normal', to the absurdity of comparing. Instead, we become more willing to allow them to grow, bloom and express in their own time, in their own way - recognizing that they belong to the rhythms of a much vaster unfolding, a greater cyclical process that we’re also participating in. And our participation gets to be free from the GMO of coercion and forcing.
Our practice evolves into becoming supportive stewards of our desires, the stable foundations through which they can manifest.
For me, this is about regenerating my inner soil through tending and alignment so that I’m providing the best nourishment for the strong rooting and authentic rising of the desires that have chosen my soul-body as a portal.
This tending and alignment means creating more space to lean into the discomfort of bending, of cultivating a nervous system that has the resilience and flexibility to take intuitively guided aligned action in the world - that can often elicit disapproval and judgment from others, especially if it involves making different choices and moving towards change. A willingness to feel and alchemize this, instead of abandoning our bodies, requires the cultivation of capacity in devotion to something much bigger than us: the sparks of our soul-aligned desire-children.