Your Desires Are Maps, Not Pests: How to Meet Your Needs without Falling into Predictable Traps
Read the messages encoded in your feelings
From an early age, most people learn to distrust their feelings. Although we respect signals of being cold or hungry, we meet many of our desires with weariness, believing that our needs for play, fun, pleasure, adventure, and self-expression are part of a flawed system that we must tame through discipline and heroic feats of will.
However, this mindset forgets that all feelings are signaling mechanisms. They contain messages intended to guide behavior.
Yes, chasing your every emotion might indeed distract or mislead you. But chronically suppressing feelings, believing they’re meant to be managed, rather than reflected upon and met with curiosity and openness, creates a deeper, far-reaching dysfunction that leads to burnout at best and serious illness and mid-life crises at worst.
Your urges aren’t pests. They’re maps. When you invest attention into the messages encoded in your feelings, you live an increasingly satisfying life. You leave behind self-denial and self-punishment. You also avoid getting trapped in the opposite dynamic: caught in illusory, delusion-based pleasure seeking rooted in fear or denial.
Below, you’ll find context around why we fall into self-denying patterns. Then we’ll talk about shifts that will help you create a partnership with rather than a war on your urges.
Society Hijacks Innate Trust in the Self
“I never let school get in the way of my education.” Mark Twain
Self-denial begins early. In school, people are trained to believe that it’s normal to sit inside a building, detached from personal curiosities and subject to a district or state-wide program, for nearly six hours per day almost every day. We detach from our bodily needs, following the rhythms of lunch bells and raising our hands to pee. I remember multiple teachers insisting that holding pee was a matter of politeness or ability. They’d say things like, “If I’m in my 50s and can manage to avoid the bathroom for an hour and 45 minutes, surely you can too.”
This statement illustrates society’s war on nuance. Individual bodies have their own requirements for homeostasis, whether those needs are physical or emotional. When young people learn to ignore their needs in favor of external demands, they lose touch with their body’s messages. Connection with these messages makes possible the internal locus of control, or the belief in having authority over one’s life rather than being the powerless subject of external forces. When people internalize excessive reliance on the authority of others, it not only creates estrangement from the internal guidance system, but it corrodes a person’s ability to self-regulate.
We become complacent because we’re taught to ignore the desire to go outside, to enjoy day-to-day variability, or the preference toward experience over rote memorization. Believing that these inclinations should be repressed or disciplined away, it becomes easy to develop dysfunctional relationships with desire. For example, Catholic priest abuse scandals showed where the suppression of healthy desire can lead. While I’m not implying that repressed desires always lead to failure, there are better ways of approaching experience than suppression.
The habit of chronically ignoring desires manifests in subtler patterns, too. For some, chronic self-denial consists of sleeping only four hours per night, telling themselves that being burnt out is the cost of “hard work,” medicating lack-of-sleep headaches with multiple pots of coffee and bottles of over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications.
Taking the other side, chronic suppression of emotions can turn into a pursuit of temporary sensory pleasures. In this cycle, we live for the weekends and see regular dissatisfaction as an inevitability of life. Diverting genuine longings to change our circumstances, we’re seduced by the quick hits of distraction-based behaviors like refreshing news feeds, going on fried food binges, drinking massive amounts of alcohol, and watching pornography.
From this vantage point, desires are meant to be tucked away for weekends and holidays and so-called days off. Instead of being essentially satisfied most days, the sharp distinction between work and freedom creates the desire to numb oneself enough to stomach the same lack of alignment over and over again.
But You Are Nature’s Opportunity to Know Itself
“Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.” Terence McKenna
When you talk about learning to honor desire, the first criticism you’ll get is something like, “Oh no. Sounds like you’re advocating for hedonism.” People might also assume you’re looking for a justification for being weak-willed and self-absorbed.
Yet baked within these criticisms are the very forms of distrust and cynicism that ignite the dysfunction.Pleasure only becomes hedonism when needs get chronically thwarted. Yet humanity has an adversarial complex that manifests in many battles: from the war on germs to the war on cancer, this destructive mentality appears everywhere. We’ve long ascribed to a kind of manifest destiny, in which humanity and nature are separate and nature is something to be conquered with force. You can find this paradigm even in the dictionary definition of nature:
the material world, especially as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.
the natural world as it exists without human beings or civilization.
Dictionary.com is mistaken. Humanity is not distinct from evolution and its results. Humans, dogs, sheep, zebras, lions, and other animals experience sexual desire, hunger, and aversion to predators in order to ensure survival. Desires to take long walks, play music, or spend time with friends are not different from hunger, coldness, or sexual drives. These feelings urge us toward balance. When we overlook or ignore them, we trap ourselves in a disempowering dynamic that only needs to more confusion.
How to Honor Your Urges
To reduce something, one must deliberately expand it; to weaken something, one must deliberately strengthen it; to eliminate something, one must let it flourish.” Verse 36, Tao Te Ching, as quoted in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
In The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, Charles Eisenstein insists that the more freedom he gave himself, the more his life took on an ascetic character. This dynamic isn’t the product of hedonism but permission. By giving himself the freedom to follow his inclinations, even if they initially felt trivial, he could discern between what really met his needs and what didn’t.
Instead of seeing pleasure- and joy-based experiences as enemies, Charles recommends seeing them as two sides of a spectrum. This is about developing the sensitivity needed to recognize what’s really a gift to yourself, as Charles put it, and what’s merely perpetuating old and limiting patterns. If you never satisfy your desires, you won’t have the sensitivity to tell the difference.
It’s counter intuitive, but developing this attunement might mean allowing yourself to refresh your email inbox when you’re supposed to be working. It might mean drinking coffee or eating a brownie even at the risk of a toothache. Just as it often takes a major accident or illness to inspire behavior change, you initially have to integrate the pain something causes to really align with the urge to act differently.
When you satisfy your urges, really pay careful attention to how they make you feel. I find, for instance, that when I carefully attend to what it’s like to eat a really rich and creamy dessert, it isn’t uniformly pleasant. Sure, there’s enjoyment, but there’s also the urge to rush through the experience. With increased awareness, there’s a part of me that wants to hurry up and finish so that I can move beyond the savoring and do something less overwhelming to my reward system.
The reason we distrust pleasure is that we’re in the habit of not fully experiencing it. This isn’t to say that if we really paid attention to pleasure we’d never want it. But when you give something your careful attention, you experience it, enjoy it, and then you’re automatically driven toward equilibrium. By allowing and paying attention to the results of that allowing, you can integrate on multiple levels what does and does not connect you to a deep form of satisfaction.
The Way Out Is Through
“Society tries to confine or divert the urge to break free, channeling it toward something inconsequential like drunkenness, video games, or bungee jumping, but what are these pleasures next to the exuberant expansiveness of real freedom?” Charles Eisenstein
While many people enjoy drinking or watching television, these are the levels of pleasure that are a vibratory match for the rest of their life. If you’re regularly experiencing expanded forms of consciousness or deep registers of gratitude and fulfillment, are you going to sit in front of a TV with a beer? I’m not sure.
However, the point isn’t to suppress that urge to watch TV or drink beer if that’s where you are or if it’s what you like to do. I’m also not suggesting that these things are “bad.” In fact, the best option is to meet those needs while investing thorough attention into how they make you feel. Either you’ll drink the beer and enjoy the subtleties, or you’ll notice the feelings operating beneath the urge and realize there are more satisfying alternatives. That increased attention alone, regardless of where it leads, is enough to move you in the direction of joy. But when you ignore or fight your urges, you’re more likely to perpetuate the same old patterns. Or you’ll persist in your renunciation without real consciousness and pick up another destructive (though perhaps initially more benign) habit.
When you satisfy your urges, even if they seem trivial, you’re gathering a sensitivity that invites balance. In that state of equilibrium, you’ll naturally move in the direction of activities that evoke real fulfillment. But you’ll never get there without at first allowing yourself the freedom to non-judgmentally satisfy your urges.
Although most of us have learned to suppress or transmute our desires, this is a cure worse than the disease.
Chronic denial of healthy desires, which are intended to drive personal satisfaction and balance, get channeled into destructive activities. We’ve been trained to adopt generalized ideas about what’s productive and healthy, not realizing that we have unique needs. It’s our moment-to-moment feelings that keep us in touch with them. What looks like productivity in one moment might be counterproductive in another. The truth is that leaving work to attend a workshop on reclaiming play is sometimes the most productive thing you can do.
While human exceptionalism bleeds into this war on pleasure, we’re not above evolution and its principle of order. The sensible choice is to honor our inclinations because we can never truly avoid them. We might be able to postpone our needs, but they’ll make themselves known in stress headaches, crises of meaning, and the like.
When you learn to see your inclinations as maps rather than urges that must be tamed, your life begins to work. You trust yourself. You participate in meaningful rhythms you don’t need to organize or contain. Instead you trust that they’re leading you toward a destination larger and more grand than you can see from your current vantage point.
No longer are you navigating resistance or relying on force to complete your work. Actions arise naturally and desires are seen as friends, not enemies. And when you see your own desires as important messengers, your relationships improve. As you become more in touch with your own real needs, you become better equipped to help others do the same.