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  I can fall into wishing I could write quickly and easily like my friend. Yet to be honest with myself, I also have to recognize that his books are not the kind that are mine to write. Letting myself be the being that I am means appreciating the particular journey I am on and the way my writing reflects that, instead of trying to write like someone else. After all, no one else can speak with my voice. As long as I can’t appreciate what is mine to offer, I set up roadblocks to what wants to come through me.

  Similarly, each of us has some gift that is uniquely ours. One person might be a special kind of mother, another might be a powerful communicator, another might be a sensitive listener. Someone else might be fiercely dedicated to truth, while another might have the capacity to inspire people to do their best. The beauty in these gifts can shine forth only when we appreciate what wants to come through us, without trying to live up to some preconceived standard in our mind.

  Moreover, even this description of people’s gifts falls short of the mark, for the most special gift that you have to offer is the living quality of your presence, the indescribable spark that makes you you. Each soul has its own multifaceted, jewellike character, its own “suchness.” Even though no one can exactly pin down this “special something,” it’s what people love when they love you. Suchness means just so. You are just so in your way; I am just so in mine. We are all just what we are, and cannot be other than what we are in the end. This is cause for celebration.

  Loving yourself as you are may sound like egoism to some. But in truth, it provides the most powerful basis of all for loving others. For, letting yourself be the being that you are helps you recognize the importance of letting others be who they are as well. One of the most loving things you can do is to let others be different from you and to free them from your demands and expectations. When you kindly understand that others have their own laws and must follow their own way, just as you do, the need to control them or make yourself more important than them starts to fall away.

  The elements of self-love explored in this chapter—loosening up your self-concepts, letting yourself have your experience, letting yourself be the being that you are, saying yes to yourself, understanding your weaknesses with kindness, and appreciating the unique gift your life has to offer—are all ways of opening your heart to yourself. And this is the indispensable key that will unlock the door through which absolute, perfect love can enter and take up residence within you.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Holy Longing

  You see, I want a lot.

  Perhaps I want everything.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  The intensity of the longing

  Does all the work.

  —KABIR

  SAYING YES TO OURSELVES, letting ourselves be as we are, opening our heart to ourselves—all of this serves to kindle the inner glow of self-love, bringing healing to our core wound. One more element still needs to fall into place, however, if we are to free ourselves from the mood of unlove: We must be able to let love all the way into us.

  Yet how is this possible if our capacity to open to love has been damaged by the devastations of hurt, distrust, and fear? Fortunately, there is a simple and obvious place to start—from our very desire and need for love itself.

  This can be challenging, since we may also have a troubled relationship with our wanting. We may have learned at an early age that our need for love subjected us to danger. Children of parents who are emotionally distant must often shut down or deny their longing for love because it is too painful to keep subjecting themselves to so much frustration and unfulfilled desire. And children of parents who are overly intrusive or controlling often have to cut off their need for connection so that they can more easily forge a separate life of their own.

  As a result of these early conflicts, most of us grow up judging or denying our need for love. We may become ashamed or afraid of our desire, which we associate with intense vulnerability, sorrow, or deprivation. A further obstacle for some is religious teaching they have absorbed that condemns desire as a sign of their crude, animal nature, dragging them down into the mud. So even though our wish for love is undeniable, it often feels too threatening to let ourselves fully acknowledge it. Even though we can’t help wanting, we don’t want to want.

  In this way, our relation to desire becomes troubled and we experience it as something that diminishes us. And since we are not on good terms with our wanting, we have a hard time expressing it cleanly and unapologetically. We often pretend to ourselves or others that we don’t really want what we want.

  We cannot receive love, however, if we are not open to the raw and tender experience of wanting it. Suppressing or denying desire shuts down our openness to receiving nourishment, and thus only intensifies our hunger.

  Perhaps if we could make friends with it, we might find that our wanting itself is holy. We want love, after all, because we intuitively know that it can free us from the prison of the isolated self, allowing us to feel connected and at one with all of life. What is so bad about wanting that?

  Making Desire Transparent

  In working with couples, I commonly find that one or both partners have trouble stating their desire clearly, or even recognizing what it is they want. When I invite them to express their wanting directly, what often comes out instead is complaint, demand, evasiveness, or speechmaking. They can easily say what their partner is doing wrong or failing to give them. But when it comes to expressing their actual desire, there is uncertainty or hesitation.

  Why is it so much easier to complain, collapse, make demands, or attack than to openly express what we want? The answer is simple: Complaint and demand provide a defensive shield to hide behind, while desire makes us feel exposed. Letting others see how much we want their love means letting down our defenses and baring our soul. This is even more difficult if our sentry is constantly on guard against the bad other who isn’t there for us. Thus it’s not surprising that exposing our desire for love is not something we want to do. It’s much easier to play it safe by focusing on how others don’t give us what we want.

  Julie and Rick were on the verge of divorce after staying together through twelve years of marriage and the birth of three children. Rick was already half-gone, having initiated a period of trial separation. His basic complaint was that Julie’s heart was not open to him, while her complaint was that he was not committed to the relationship.

  Julie acknowledged that she had problems opening her heart to anyone, out of fear of abandonment dating back to childhood. So it was much easier for her to complain about Rick’s lack of commitment than it was for her to show Rick how much she wanted him to accept her, especially now that he already had one foot out the door. When I asked her what she most wanted in the relationship, her first statement was:

  “I want to know that Rick is committed.”

  “Can you say what that means to you? What is the experience you’re wanting to have with him?”

  “I don’t trust that he is really there for me.”

  Here again she was complaining. I invited her to turn that into a statement of what she wanted: “So you want to know that he can really be there for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell him that directly?”

  Turning to Rick, Julie sat there for a while, hesitant and anxious. Finally she said, “I want you to be committed.” But this sounded like a command or demand, as though she were building a case, rather than transparently disclosing what was true for her.

  “Are you wanting that right now?” I asked her.

  “Uh, yes,” she said hesitantly.

  “Do you? Check it out inside, and see if that’s true right now in this moment.”

  “Yes, I’d like that.”

  “Can you let him see that?”

  She again turned to Rick and paused. Then she said, quickly and simply, “I really want to feel that you’re here with me.” This time as she said it, her words had more resonance. She was actually fe
eling her desire as she spoke, right on the spot. It was no longer a demand but a transparent wish that invited Rick in. He immediately sat up and took notice. He was obviously touched.

  I asked him how it was for him to have Julie express that. He said, “It’s great. I can really respond to that.” Turning to Julie, he said, “That makes me feel that I do want to be here with you.” Since being able to see into Julie’s heart was the very thing he wanted, her transparency invited and inspired him to show up more fully as well.

  Julie was a bit confused. She didn’t understand what had just happened, why he suddenly responded to her so warmly, when he hadn’t so many times before. I said to her, “It’s like this: When you said you wanted to feel him here with you, you were really here, you were showing up. And that’s what he most wants: to feel that your heart is open and transparent, not hidden behind your complaint.” In letting her partner see how much she wanted him to show up, she was showing up herself. In asking him to be there, with her heart exposed, she was there, nakedly. This allowed him to feel connected with her, which was what he most wanted.

  It often takes some work for two partners to acknowledge and reveal their deep wish to feel loved. But when either of them can do this, without blame or demand, there is an instant sense of relief—on both sides. It’s a tremendous relief to get down to the simple truth and express it openly: “I really want to feel your love.”

  The partner who receives this message can also relax, because he or she no longer has to ward off the other’s complaint or demand. But there is an even deeper relief for the listening partner: When others reveal their desire in a transparent, undefended way, they are letting you see them, which provides an entry point that allows contact to happen. Moments of naked truth-telling unveil your partner’s beauty, allowing you to suddenly reconnect with why you fell in love with this person in the first place.

  This kind of electric moment also happens frequently when I work with couples in front of a group. When one partner simply reveals what he or she most wants, all the people in the room find themselves instantly riveted to that person. Everyone feels natural empathy without even having to think about it.

  It’s vital to understand the principle at work here, for it is what will allow us to receive not just human love, but also absolute love from the source. The essential point is to become transparent—by letting our deep longing for love and connectedness be exposed. This makes us porous, opening up the channel through which love can enter.

  The Spectrum of Desire

  Of course, when we experience the full force of our desire for love, this can also make us feel unsettled, overwhelmed, swept away. But it’s important to realize that it’s not desire itself that is so overpowering. Desire becomes overwhelming only when it attaches or glues itself to an object that we imagine we must have in order to feel okay. It’s this fixation on an external object, this obsession, that becomes disempowering and enslaving.

  In its essential nature, desire is radiant heat. It is an upsurge of bodily excitement, of raw life force that wants to reach out, make contact, and connect with the life around us. But as it radiates out, it usually glues itself to something or somebody—like a suction cup affixing itself to an object. This attachment of our life force onto an external object is what makes desire feverish and excruciating.

  After all, we never really have that much control over any of the most important things in life—least of all other people. We simply cannot control how they respond to us or how much they will desire us in return. So when our wanting attaches itself to other people and what they do, this puts us at their mercy: Our emotional state becomes subject to their whims. We feel helpless, and the mind spins feverishly, trying to figure out how to get them to give us what we need.

  At the same time, fixating on another person pulls us out of ourselves, disrupting our connection with our own ground and vital center. Since this creates intense feelings of helplessness and disempowerment, it’s not surprising that many people wind up shutting down their desire and need altogether.

  It is this addictive quality of desire—where the life force becomes locked onto an external object—that many religious teachings warn against. This unbearable tension is what the Buddha was referring to when he said, “The cause of suffering is desire.”

  For many years I had trouble with this statement of the Buddha’s. I could certainly see that clinging to objects of attachment caused painful states of obsession and addiction. But I found something missing in this formulation because it was clear to me that desire also contains real power and intelligence, that it can move mountains and is, finally, the energy that propels us to make intimate contact with life and move in the direction we are meant to go. I also did not want to forego letting myself fall passionately in love or feeling deep bonding with loved ones. I had found that the pure energy of desire, if experienced directly, without straining for fulfillment, had a luminous radiance and beauty of its own. It was the juice of life itself.

  It took me years to sort out this seeming contradiction and to understand how desire could be the source of both endless suffering and great bliss. The key was in recognizing that desire can come in a whole spectrum of different forms—from crude to subtle, from feverish to sublime—depending on how tightly it is attached to an external object or fixed outcome.

  At one end of the spectrum is desire at its most crude—what the Buddha called craving. This becomes especially destructive when it takes the form of a coercive demand or ultimatum: “Do what I want, or else . . . I’ll leave you . . . I’ll punish you . . . we’ll bomb you back to the Stone Age.” A more polite form of craving is the pressure-filled plea: “Please give me this, please, please, please.”

  Less extreme is ordinary, conventional desire—plainly wanting or needing something.25 Though less coercive than ultimatums, demands, and pleas, ordinary desire also creates stress and tension when it expects or requires a set, preconceived form of fulfillment, which is in fact beyond our control.

  At the subtler end of the spectrum, when desire is no longer a suction cup grasping onto a fixed outcome, it can be experienced as passionate aliveness or even pure bliss. This is one of the profound secrets that comes from the Tantric traditions of the East. The key to making friends with your wanting is to center your attention within the energy of the desire itself, rather than on trying to control the object of desire or extract fulfillment from it.

  When you find yourself in the grip of raw need, lust, craving, or obsession, you can learn to turn your attention away from the object of desire and toward the desire itself, as a feeling in your body. Then you can try to meet it with unconditional presence, as described in the previous two chapters. Notice how the intense energy of hunger or passion moves in your body, open yourself to that movement, and ride this energy by centering your awareness within it. Riding this energy is like a surfer learning to stand up on a roaring wave. You are at one with the power of the wave, and this feels blissful.

  If riding desire is like surfing a wave, being carried away by desire is like being tossed around by the currents. This is a subtle but crucial difference, similar to the distinction between conscious and unconscious suffering. You’re dealing with the same energy whether you relate to it consciously or not. But in conscious desire or conscious suffering, you enter into the experience with awareness, so that it doesn’t overwhelm you, knocking the ground out from under you and sweeping you away. You have a conscious, deliberate experience of the desire and how it moves through you.

  Through experiencing the pure energy of desire, you may then discover its subtler nature as radiant aliveness, which might feel passionate, powerful, and electric, or tender, delicate, and sweet. While desire fixated outwardly generates grasping and tension, desire inwardly felt attunes you to the pulsing power of the body’s vital center.

  Once you can ride the wave of desire, it runs its course and subsides. Then you may discover what is deeper than this pulsing energy. Just as
the clear, calm depths of the ocean lie still below the thrashing waves, so the heart’s pure longing to connect is what underlies our passion. This longing has its own intelligence, for it is a direct knowing that you grow and prosper only through being deeply in touch—with yourself, with others, and with life itself.

  Even the Buddha, in an advanced teaching, had to acknowledge that “desire is perfectly pure.” Desire is perfectly pure in the way that fire is: It is simply blazing energy, not something intrinsically harmful. It takes a destructive form only when we handle it wrongly. If we can uncover the deeper longing contained in this radiant heat, it can bring about an inner melting that opens up our capacity to let love enter fully into us.

  The Good Other and the Sacred Thou

  When craving carries us away and we imagine that another person is the one who can bring total fulfillment at last, we are projecting onto that person the image of the “good other.” If the bad other is the one we resent for not giving us what we need, the good other is the one we imagine will make everything okay by loving us in just the right way. While the bad-other image is colored by fear, fashioned out of past hurt and disappointment, the good-other image is colored by hope, fashioned out of the longing for perfect love. So when other people feel us projecting this inflated image onto them, they usually recoil, knowing they cannot possibly meet our need.

  Popular love songs are full of these godlike projections: “You are everything and everything is you.” “I can’t live if living is without you.” “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”