Having a desire or wanting something sounds easy, but the truth is, wanting can be…complicated.
Some say they have everything they want; they want nothing. If so, that implies they are 100% satisfied with every aspect of their life including where they live, their neighbors, all their interactions, the love or lack of it in their life, what’s available in their local grocery store, etc. By definition, if there is anything that one does not want, there is something that one does want: it’s opposite.
One of the ways we discover what we want is by “contrast,” by noticing what we do not want. For example, in not wanting a boyfriend who is “controlling, a poor listener, not affectionate,” a woman is able to identify what she does want: an equal partner who has good listening skills and is affectionate.
Simply going through each day noticing what brings joy and what does not is one way of discovering what one wants, and creating what one wants is why we’re here according to Abraham who asks,
Do you know what you want? Do you know that you are the creator of your own experience? Are you enjoying the evolution of your desire? Do you feel the freshness of a new desire pulsing within you?
If you are among the rare humans who answered, “Yes, I’m enjoying the evolution of my desire. I feel wonderful as I stand in this place where many things that I desire have not yet come to me,” then you understand who you are and what this physical life experience is really all about (Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks, p.7).
“Sacrifice” is another reason people offer for not wanting. Perhaps they’ve had all desire and wanting squashed by society’s notion of “selfishness” or even the old “hair-shirt perspective” of seeking a spiritual path. If so, what does that say about wealthy TV evangelists or gurus? Perhaps “the one without wants” believes that there just isn’t enough to go around–that if they give up their dreams then someone else can have one. Perhaps they’ve failed, have given up.
The good news is that when they decide it’s okay to “want to make it better,” help is available. “Tapping,” or Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can change bummer feelings and deep-seated beliefs in mere minutes. If one prefers a more mental approach, there’s Rational Emotive Therapy, or “talking back” to those negative feelings, similar to the work found in Michael Losier’s book, The Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting more of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t. Or, they could find a local NLP practitioner or Alchemical Hypnotherapist. Help is available if and when one wants it.
We all need dreams, wants, desires; it’s what keeps us moving forward:
“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” ~Langston Hughes
“One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love and to long life.” ~Alexander Bogomoletz
This image on Mark Shaden’s twitter profile pretty much says it all:
There’s a different situation, of not knowing what one’s purpose is–as if we each had a specific purpose to fulfill. Frankly, Scarlet, I no longer subscribe to that theory having spent the greater part of twenty years trying to find mine. My search included career counselors, astrology, numerology, psychics–you name it. At some point, I realized, it all comes back to answering the question, “What do you want?”
If you’re not sure what you want to be or do, Mike Dooley, sharing from his own experience in Leveraging the Universe, says, “If you don’t know where you want to go, start going somewhere–anywhere!” While you’re “out there” doing whatever it is you enjoy doing, having fun, feeling good, the Universe is bringing you more and more similar situations, people, circumstances, so you can keep on having those good feelings. The point is that you have to be “out there” doing something for serendipity to happen. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Do what you can with what you have, with where you are.”
Finally, if nothing else has worked, we can always have the goal, “I want to know what I want.”
As you begin saying, “I want to know what I want,” you will begin to attract, by Law, all sorts of examples. And as you are collecting the data that comes to you, let your dominant intent, in each day, be to look for things that you want. Then you can look around you and see in others those traits or characteristics that you would like to have in your own mate or companion or work (The Law of Attraction by Esther and Jerry Hicks, p. 99).
What I’ve learned from all this is that I do, in fact, have an inner guidance system that is available to me when I’m paying attention. All I have to do is notice what feels good to discover if I’m on my highest path.
“Yesterday,” I thought I had finally discovered what I wanted to do, which was the reason for starting this blog last November, but Saturday night a friend called and asked if I wanted to move to Belize to join them as they pursue a dream I’ve had for many years…
Till next time when we look at different ways to focus our attention on what we want, I’ll be skating thru my days, “trying on” my latest “want” to see how it feels. What about you? Know what you want? ~Pam
[FYI: This series was posted in 2011, the year I began this blog. If you read articles in my series called “The Irony of Life”, you know that I was able to manifest everything I wanted. But now I’m looking at three giant things to manifest so I thought it appropriate to review what I had learned about manifesting.]
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