When Desires Clash

I like the perks of my stable job, but I keep dreaming of quitting and starting my own business.

I love my committed partner, but I miss the excitement of dating new people.

I really want to get fit and go to the gym every day, and yet my bed calls to me for more sleep each morning.

Have you been caught in the tug-of-war between two powerful, competing desires? Each side pleading with you to follow it for more comfort, excitement, safety or joy? How do you handle it? Most of us just ignore one of the desires or the other, shoo-ing it away.

Like the Indigo Girls sing in the song Prince of Darkness: "The dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve. I said I have no way of feeding you so leave."

But desires do not like to be shoo-ed for long. Freud called this, "the return of the repressed," whereby repressed desires explode back into our lives in anxious, neurotic, and destructive ways.

And yet, most of us are also acutely aware that chasing every desire we have also has the potential to blow up our lives, hurting ourselves and the people we love.

There is another path, however, between chasing our desires and repressing them. We can become intimate with both sides of our tug-a-war, learning more about what each side wants and what each is afraid of. We can interview them and appreciate them both as valued members of our inner team. We can find a way to balance these polarized parts, with care and compassion.

A while ago, I wrote about finding peace between my inner warring parts when I decided to leave my full-time job at NYU. You can read the full piece here.

Do you want support in working with the competing desires within you? Could you some support - meditations, talks, discussions and journaling prompts - to help you find some peace of mind? Only THREE DAYS LEFT to sign up for my new course, Aglow:A Five Week Journey From Restless Craving to Vibrant Aliveness. Because this is new material I am testing, the group will be kept intentionally small and the tuition is beta-pricing. Grab your spot before it's too late.

Love,

Yael

Yael Shy is the CEO and Founder of Sefira Wellness with over two decades of supporting others in uncovering their inherent worth and capacity for deep joy through mindfulness. She is the author of the award-winning book What Now? Meditation for Your Twenties and Beyond (Parallax, 2017) and teaches at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. You can find her on Instagram at @yaelshy1.

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