Facing the Truth of Your Desire

Why spiritual practice is about clarifying desire, not transcending it (Breaking Open: Part 3)

This series emerges from conversations with friends and Claude AI, drawing deeply from the wisdom of David J Temple's CosmoErotic Humanism, Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma, Steve March's Aletheia Unfolding, Daniel P Brown's attachment theory work, John Churchill's Planetary Dharma, and many insights from Jill Nephew. While their teachings light the path, any limitations in expressing their ideas are my own.

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
- St. Augustine

The Problem of Confused Desire

A problem well stated is a problem half solved. What problem is spirituality trying to solve?

One way of looking at it is that spirituality seeks to resolve the problem of our confused desire. It's not that we want too much or too little, but that we're confused about what we actually want. This confusion is the cause of our unnecessary suffering. No matter how much we get of what we don't actually want, we will never be satisfied.

Consider how this plays out: We think we want achievement but actually we want to feel worthy. We think we want control but actually we want to feel safe. We think we want enlightenment but actually we want to feel at home in our own existence. Our desires become tangled with compensation and confusion, obscuring what we most deeply long for.

Our entire economic system thrives on this confusion of desire. We chase satisfaction through endless consumption - believing perhaps this new phone, this next purchase will finally ease our deep unrest. Even those of us who've seen through materialism often transfer the same pattern to spiritual seeking, hoping the next practice or healing modality will finally make us whole. In each case, we're trying to purchase or achieve what can only arise from secure attachment to reality itself.

The Root of Our Confusion

This tangling of desire reflects our attachment patterns. When we don't feel securely attached to reality itself, we develop elaborate compensatory strategies. We might become compulsively self-reliant, perpetually seeking, or endlessly achieving - all ways of trying to earn what should come naturally. These patterns show up everywhere: in our relationships, our work, and our spiritual practice.

For many of us, what appears as the contours of our desire is in reality compensation for early failures of love. These failures shatter our sense of secure relationship with reality and lead to spiraling compensations and confused behaviors. We tragically attempt to satisfy through endless rearrangement of circumstances what can only be satisfied through intimate contact with reality itself.

The solution isn't to fulfill these compensatory desires or to transcend desire altogether. It's to clarify desire - to follow it back to its source. This is what spiritual practices are for. Not techniques for self-improvement but tools for understanding what we really, deeply, truly, helplessly long for.

The Process of Clarification

What does this clarification process actually feel like? Often it begins with noticing the exhaustion of our compensatory patterns. The endless striving, fixing, and achieving starts to feel hollow and pointless. We might notice how even our spiritual accomplishments don't touch the deep longing at our core. As these patterns begin to unwind, we often feel lost, unmoored from our familiar ways of orienting to the world.

This clarification process often looks like breakdown. When our compensatory strategies stop working, when we can no longer maintain the endless effort of trying to earn love through achievement or goodness, our whole motivational system can fall apart. But this falling apart, however frightening, creates space for something more authentic to emerge.

This is what happened in my own life, as I described in the first piece in this series. What appeared as a total collapse of functioning - the loss of speech, will, and basic capacity - was actually the breakdown of compensatory patterns that had structured my experience for 37 years. The emergence of overwhelming shame, fear, and confusion wasn't a sign of failure but of my system finally feeling safe enough to let these patterns unravel.

When authentic desire begins to emerge, it feels qualitatively different from compensatory wanting. It's not driven by lack or fear but drawn by love. It moves with a natural intelligence that doesn't need to be forced or managed. It feels less like wanting to get something and more like being moved by life itself.

In this light, we might understand what the poet Mary Oliver means when she writes:

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

This isn't spiritual bypass or hedonistic permissiveness - it's a recognition that our deepest desire, when undistorted by compensation, has a profoundly trustworthy natural intelligence.

A Cultural Revolution of Desire

Our culture, however, systematically confuses us about desire. We're taught to want things that can be bought and sold, measured and achieved. We're encouraged to stay in compensatory patterns rather than face the revolutionary implications of our authentic longing. Because a person in touch with their true desire threatens the entire machinery of consumption and control. This machinery depends on our confusion - on keeping us believing that satisfaction can be purchased, that love can be earned, that safety comes through control. The result is a kind of living death, where we go through the motions of life without ever touching its essence.

The way forward isn't through more sophisticated strategies of wanting or not-wanting, but through honest investigation of our desire itself. Not to fix it or transcend it, but to understand how it became tangled and let it gradually untangle itself. This untangling, though it may look like crisis, is actually the beginning of sanity.

Next in the Series

The Living Dead

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together