All my life I felt confused and overwhelmed by my desires.
As a child, I remember wanting things with such force and pain – seeing Barbies on TV, candy in the store – with such force and pain in my stomach that it physically hurt. “When I grow up,” I wrote in my diary at the age of 7, “I will buy my children what they want.” I became known in my family as the “whiner” – the obnoxious member of our brood of five who always seemed to want something more and different than what I had.
Looking back, behind my desire for sweets and toys were much stronger desires: the desire for attention, to be seen, loved and accepted for who I was. My parents encouraged me to be grateful and happy for what I had, but counting my blessings couldn’t touch that deeper longing and inner sense of lack. I felt that my factory settings were wrong. Why couldn’t I be grateful? Why didn’t he feel like it would feed the bottomless hunger?
I found my way to Buddhism in my 20s, exhausted from a life of incessant longing and excited by the thought of being uprooted. At this point, my desires jumped from Barbies to boys. I wanted love so badly, but I kept finding myself attracted to unattainable men who couldn’t commit. Just like when I was a child, I felt consumed by the pain of being unattainable, uninterested in the perfectly nice guys who asked me out. When I learned about the Buddhist image of the hungry ghost—a creature with a huge hungry belly and a throat so small it can never feel satisfied—I was deeply moved.
Buddha had a lot to say about desire and its dissatisfaction. He used different words for different longings, including tanhait is usually translated as longing, which appears in the four noble truths as the central cause of suffering. He talked about that too stick to it– greed or sexual passion – is one of the three poisons, and he described sensual desire as one of the five hindrances. In one speech he says:
“There are forms perceptible to the eye which are desirable, lovely, pleasing, pleasing, attached to desire, creating desire. If the monk does not delight in them, does not cling to them, does not welcome them…there is no bondage.”
—Samyutta Nikaya 35:63
As I understood it, I was trying to carve the desire out of me with the scalpel of meditation. I imagined going back to my simple, friendless life, walking around the city as a nun, with a constant soft smile on my lips, feeling happy and blessed.
So I tried to follow Buddha’s advice. I learned that one of the antidotes to lust is to visualize the desired person as a body decomposing in gruesome detail—focusing on the slimy, gooey innards oozing from their dead eye sockets. Many a retreat was filled with me depicting my brokenness disintegrating in this way. It was a lot of fun.
I was just kidding. It was terrible. It kind of worked to cool my nozzle off a particular person, but what replaced the desire felt more suffocating than liberating. I didn’t like being caught, but I also didn’t want to live in a desert of desire, deprived of the vitality and aliveness inherent in my desires.
The turning point didn’t come on the pillow, but a day at the beach with my love and his girlfriend. We were part of a group of friends heading to Coney Island. On the surface I was laughing normally and engaged, but inside I felt that familiar hollow ache of wanting a guy like him and feeling hopeless about my own prospects. I couldn’t stop comparing my body, my looks, my success to his girlfriend’s, consuming me with jealousy and self-criticism.
At some point, I wandered into the waves alone and decided to play. For each incoming wave, I would name something I wanted. It didn’t matter how shallow or impossible the desire was. After naming it, I let the wave crash over me and repeated the process.
“I want the watch I saw last week.”
Collapse.
“I want a guy who really loves me.”
Collapse.
“I want to be beautiful.”
Collapse.
“I want them to love me.”
Collapse.
Speaking these desires out loud helped lift them from my heart and offer them to the ocean. At first it seemed like a relief. Then I noticed something else: by naming and allowing my desires, I began to feel the taste of what I was really looking for. Saying I wanted to feel beautiful—and sensing what it would feel like—helped me feel beautiful. Imagining what it would feel like to be loved helped me tap into that feeling directly. Nothing had changed in the outside world, but I had shortened the acquisition process and felt a sense of fulfillment anyway. And it felt amazing.
After this experience, I began to approach desire differently in my practice. If Buddhism encourages total inclusion all elements of experience, from pain to anger to grief, why don’t we fully embrace our desire? Instead of canceling, what if I let my desires wash over me like a wave, leaving energy and joy in their wake? The tricky part was continuing to let go of the need to own or possess the objects of desire while leaning into the feeling of wanting.
Mark Epstein writes that the awakening of desire is an opportunity to ask not how to get what we want or what to do with our desires, but what does desire want from us? This turn takes desire out of the realm of the ego—me they want to come here that beyond – and into the realm of energy. Desire is another word for life, as trees reach for the sun: life seeks more life.
Whether or not it makes me a “good” Buddhist to say the least, I’ve been reveling in lust lately. Of course, I still have to practice letting go of the longing and attachment to the objects of desire that cause suffering, but I am grateful for the warmth and inner attraction that arises when desire lives within me. By naming what I want, sensing how it will feel, and allowing those feelings to fully expand, I flash. I feel alive. It doesn’t matter if I ever get what I want or not. Desire is possession.
