You Don’t Actually Choose What You Want

You have no choice about what you want.

When someone first suggested this to me, I balked and scrunched up my face in disapproval and disgust, with my knee-jerk response: Of course I have a choice in what I want. What a ridiculous idea.

Then I sat with it.
And realized.
Wait. No, I don’t.

I actually resist most of the things I really want.

When I am tired and need rest, I fight it and override my sleepiness to work harder.

When I am hungry and need to eat, I tell myself it’s the wrong time or place, and override my impulse to slow down and feed myself.

When I long to write, or draw, or play, I look the other way saying I don’t have time for frivolous luxuries like these because I have to be productive and useful.

How many things do we want each day, that we resist, override and dismiss?

I don’t choose to be tired in the middle of the day.
I don’t choose when my body wants to eat.
I don’t choose my longings to write, or play or draw.
I don’t choose who I fall in love with — it just happens. (And, often with people that my rational mind just would not choose).

These wants, these longings, these deep desires emerge within me — often at the most inconvenient times.

Like when I want to cry — and then suppress it quickly because we all know we don’t cry at work.

When I really think about it, we don’t choose what we want — what our hearts and souls most want.

We can, however, choose to live in alignment, flow and connection with what I want, or to dismiss, minimize, ignore or resist what I deeply desire.

We choose our relationships with the deep life force moving through me with its wisdom.

We choose our response to inner longings, but we have no control over the nature of the wisdom, the drives that emerge within us.

What would it be like to start living in alignment with what we deeply want, instead of in resistance to it?

Last week during a regular group Q&A session, we explored how we can work with universal human needs as intrinsic motivators, or life force energy moving through us.

I’m sharing a couple excerpts of our discussion here this week.

The first one covers the inner work of keeping your attention in your own lane, the empowering effect of getting to the heart first (before addressing differences in thinking) and on getting your behaviors to align with what is deeply important to you, instead of on trying to avoid judgments.

The second one is a short story about how my daughter’s dance teacher managed to extinguish her love of dance in just three weeks. Listen now to find out the #1 thing in schools that kills off our desire for learning, exploration and play.

What is deeply important to you from moment to moment?

Are you living your life from that place? Or, are you enslaved by cultural conditions?

What will it take to stop being so controlled by your fears of others’ judgments and to live your life from the deep desires in your heart and soul?