This is a consolidated transcript from a past lecture that had accompanying slides. My hope is that the core ideas continue to resonate, despite their somewhat clumsy presentation in this format. Enjoy! -Dalton
A friend recently asked me some version of, “How do I overcome my desires?” In his case, it was about wanting to stop eating cake all the time. He wanted to find a balance between his desire for vitality and his cravings for junk food. We all have our own versions of this—something we’d like to do a little more or less of that we’re having a hard time actualizing.
So how do we overcome these desires? Well, you don’t. But that’s not to say that they won’t ever fall away.
The question itself—“How do I overcome my desires?”—has two assumptions built into it:
- That your desires are something that must be overcome.
- That you even know what you truly desire.
The Trap of Resistance
Let’s start with the first assumption. The idea that desires are something to be overcome is the cause of a lot of suffering. I’m not suggesting that we just act like animals and do whatever we want. What I mean is that by trying to overcome your desires, you are resisting the lessons that they carry. You’re fighting yourself, feeding your shadow, and causing even more disharmony inside of you.
By trying to overcome your desires, you’re essentially desiring not to desire. It’s just a backward way of playing the same game. When you’re playing this game, you’re always looking for the newest habits, tactics, and books to help you cope.
The Buddhists would say it’s like trying to clear up muddy water by splashing it around; the more you splash, the muddier it gets. Or you could think of it like a Chinese finger trap: the more you pull, the tighter it squeezes.
So if desiring causes pain, and desiring not to desire causes pain, what do we do?
First, we recognize that we can’t fulfill them by external means. No matter how much food you eat, sex you have, or money you earn, those desires won’t go away forever just by getting more of it.
We also must recognize that we can’t overcome them in the traditional way. All we really do when we fight our desires is replace one coping mechanism with another. You replace your desire to eat cake with the desire to be skinny, and you get addicted to the gym rather than to food. It looks a little better on the outside, but internally you’re still in a state of stress, fighting yourself.
What Do You Really Desire?
This brings us to the second assumption: that you even know what you desire. We can break through this layer by deeply investigating what it is that we really desire.
- You want to eat sweets, but what you’re really chasing is a feeling of fulfillment.
- You want bigger arms, but what you really want is to feel accepted and loved.
- You say you want to make more money, but what you really want is to feel seen and free.
Way beneath our surface-level desires are these deep feelings of separation, inadequacy, fear, and scarcity that are really at the root of all of our addictions and desires.
By recognizing and accepting that part of us that wants to be seen and held and loved, we become our own source of fulfillment, our own healer. We generate our own feeling of success, of love, of connection that we’ve been searching for outside of ourselves. And, miraculously, once we really connect with our own source like that, these external desires start to disappear.
This is the key insight: You cannot overcome your desires by force. At best, you’ll replace one coping mechanism with another. What you can do is evolve your idea of self, expand your awareness, investigate your own consciousness, and watch as your new understanding brings to life a whole new relationship to life and to the things around you.
For example, if you want to be a vegetarian but you really like eating meat, I would ask: would you be happy to kill and eat your family dog or cat? Don’t try to stop eating meat just to stop eating meat. If and when you become the kind of person who looks at all animals with the same level of love and compassion that you have for your dog, you’ll naturally stop eating meat.
I’m not saying whether you should or shouldn’t do this or that; I’m just asking you to investigate yourself and what you really desire. Try the “5 Whys” method. Think of something you want and ask yourself why. Then, with that answer, ask yourself why again, and again, until you get to a part of yourself that you aren’t familiar with.