Listen To Your Desires

Learning how to be in relationship with our desires is key to creating new ways of loving.

I’m now offering Desire Sessions— one on one opportunities to be in relationship with a desire. You bring in a desire, and together, we sit with it, listen to it, and give it space to express in healthy ways.

Many of these sessions end up being about the push-and-pull between the desire and the parts of us that are terrified of the desire. Desire is about change, and the rational, safety-seeking brain does not like change. In the sessions, we work on improving the relationship between desire and other parts, so that they can work in harmony.

These skills are key to creating new ways of loving. Stepping off the conventional path and using our internal authority to make decisions can be terrifying to our brains; in the brain’s logic, there’s a lot more safety in sticking to the established path. Deciding to use an internal authority means we need to learn how to get our brain on board enough that we stand a chance at hearing our own authority.

Desire can be this inner authority— the thing that moves us along the new path of our lives and loves. Desire for specific people, but also desire for different ways of connecting. Desire for spaciousness, desire for friends down the block. Desire is what helps orient us towards what uniquely works for us in the face of a lot of pressure to do things one specific way. Desire is our guide to differentiation.

We also have a deeply embedded cultural narrative around desires being dangerous and life-destroying. Following your desire will ruin your marriage. It will blow up the stable life you’ve built. Desire isn’t safe.

In my experiments with desire, I’ve built up trust that following my desires will actually keep me safer than using my rational, fear-based brain to make decisions.

I have a very safety-seeking brain. It tells me a lot of stories about how I need to always be scanning for threats, about how I’d best not offend anyone, and that I should only do things I know other people will approve of. When I was using my brain to run my life, I ended up burnt out, people-pleasing, triggered, and overwhelmed all the time. Turns out, this actually isn’t the best space to make good, moment-to-moment safety decisions from.

When I started living from my desires, I got a massive burst of energy that has not subsided since. When I’m moving from desire/joy, I have way more capacity to make better and quicker decisions if I actually feel unsafe, and I have more capacity to deal with hard or bad things that do happen. I also have a life that I’m excited to live every day; I have lots of proof now that living from my desires won’t ruin my life. It’ll improve it.

Desire keeps us safer. Desire helps us move towards ways of loving and ways of being that uniquely work for us. Desire is so key to the mission of Creative Encounters for me because it puts us in touch with our individuality.

I have so, so much to say about desire.

In the meantime, I would love to work with you in a desire session! You can find out more about how I work on my website, and book a session: