Let yourself want what you want.and why this is so edgy

Spirituality

Jul 26

*What if I just want a basket of kittens?*

Let yourself want what you want.

I first heard these words from one of my mentors, Tiffany Carole. They’re so simple — yet weirdly edgy, right?

Go ahead and check in with yourself here: What do you feel when you hear this advice? Just let yourself want what you want.

Last year, while teaching at the Gathering of the Shamans in Sedona, I met the amazing Whitney Freya. I was teaching on soul healing and nature (as I do) and she was teaching on art as a catalyst for transformation (as she does).

I went to Whitney’s workshop, of course. And during this experience, Whitney guided us through a powerful journey to meet the Goddess Kali.

Kali, the dark goddess who comes to us from Hindu traditions, she who destroys demons and anything that prevents us from remembering our true nature. Kali, who gave me a serious talking to.

Kali told me I needed to let myself want more.

It’s as if she unleashed a hunger that already existed within me — a gaping mouth that I’d been feeding crumbs when it really wanted the whole damn meal.

She asked me to confront all the ways I wanted more but stopped myself. The guilt, the tendency to over-compromise, the shame for still wanting more even though I have so much already.

I felt what it was like to want what I wanted — somatically, imaginally, and energetically.

I saw my self-imposed limitations morph into messages from my own soul.

It turns out that the energy it takes to suppress our soul-aligned desires is more harmful to our well-being than we realize.

Our energy becomes depleted, and it’s almost as if our souls slip away.

Not as with old shamanic models of the soul actually leaving the body — but more like parts of our divine blueprint for this lifetime starts to dim and retreat until we no longer remember they’re there.

Not letting ourselves truly want what we want is a form of self punishment, and this fiery Aries era is bringing us a cosmic opportunity to end that pattern.

If you still feel a little hesitant — I get it. Like really, really get it.

In large part because of how this idea has been warped in our capitalist, colonizer culture.

Wanting what you want can sound like an excuse to “manifest” a new wardrobe that is made by polluting our waters and in horrific labor conditions. Or going after what you want even if it means others suffer.

Our news feeds are full of people who let themselves want what they want and destroy the world along the way.

And it is actually really easy to get caught up in cultural conditioning and programming that obscures our true desires, replacing them with a consumerist, hierarchical frenzy of never-enoughness.

To be clear: this type of desire is not what Kali was encouraging. Desires born from the coherence of our soul and our hearts — our divine blueprint’s ability to fully express itself — this is what illuminates our true wants.

So part of our work is to decondition, deprogram, and rewild ;)

This is what the Wild Alchemy Apprenticeship is all about, and this is what our upcoming free workshop on soul coherence will introduce you to.

One of the stages for coming into soul coherence is releasing that which is not yours — all these stories and inherited beliefs.

Another stage is working with the material that is ours to process and transmute into something more helpful — the subtle and pervasive obstacles we face within our own psyches.

There are many that fall into this category, but I’ll name a few big ones here…because I have quite a bit of experience dealing with these.

Here are just a few of the obstacles that get in the way of wanting what we want:

Which ones do you resonate with?

First up — fairness.

This one is big for me. I’m a triple Libra (sun, moon, rising) and I have two more planets and an asteroid in that sign. Libra, you probably know, holds the scales — she wants fairness and harmony. That is the point of life.

You can imagine how hard this makes it to want what I want. I feel like I’m not allowed to want anything unless everyone else gets their fair share too. And I’m certainly not allowed to want more than others have.

I mean, wow. Maybe I was born with these placements so I wouldn’t turn into a greedy asshole, but this patterning requires a lot of deep soul work on my part.

Next up — compromise.

Highly related. In wanting everything to be fair, I of course compromise to make sure everyone’s needs are met equally.

This is overall an excellent and essential quality — and one more people need to cultivate, imho ;)

And…it can go wrong sooo easily. Too many compromises and we forget who we really are. We forget what we even want.

We talk ourselves into thinking that the thing we’re compromising for — a job, security, a home, relationship, opportunity, etc — is what we want, when in reality our more heartfelt callings are becoming malnourished.

Another big one — guilt.

Right? This one seems like it should be obvious to identify and work with, but in my experience our inner saboteurs are incredibly tricky.

I remember looking for a new house with my partner several years ago. We would find a house that seemed too good to be true but miraculously within our budget. And I felt so much shame around not being able to have children that I truly believed I didn’t deserve a nice house. Like it should go to a family, not a sad broken woman like me.

It’s hard to write these words. I wonder what my life would have looked like if I could have cultivated a bit more self love sooner. Instead, I subtly denied myself the home I knew I was called to because of weirdly twisted guilt.

For some, this can show up as already having so much. Everything you thought you wanted even — the whole “I’ll be happy when” thing. The self judgement slips in: How can I possibly want a new job, or new home, when this one is everything I’ve been asking for?

This is super tricky: Because sometimes, wanting more at this stage is a reflection of habit rather than a true heart calling.

If you’ve spent the past two years job hunting on LinkedIn and manifesting your dream job, the space left at the arrival can feel more uncomfortable than the search! Same if you’ve been obsessively treating Zillow like a social media site.

Once you’ve let yourself want what you want then actually get it — the wants need to shift. You will still want more because you are an expression of the universe in human form, and the nature of the universe is expansion and creation.

You just need to realize that the energy of the want needs to shift. Old habits take some intentionally unwinding. It’s normal ;)

Then — it just seems impossible.

Our brains like plans, categories, and organization. They are not such big fans of the unknown and taking leaps of faith. If we have a vision or dream, we immediately want to start figuring out how. How to build it, how to get there, and exactly what each step will require.

This need to know keeps us small. Our biggest dreams will seem impossible because we don’t know how to get there. If our wants truly reflect the fullness of our souls, it will be impossible for us to see all the steps along the way. So in our attempts to make a plan, we decide the dream itself is impossible.

But some things are impossible! You might say.

Totally.

I remember telling a friend about my search for a home several years ago. She seemed to think I should be able to manifest my dream home if I got over my “money stuff” 🤮

I thought — um, I make $30k a year working full time as a lecturer at a university. I live in affordable housing. The average cost of a home in my ideal neighborhood is $1.5 million (this was 10+ years ago in Boulder…that same house is probably $5 million today). Living near the trails in South Boulder didn’t just feel impossible; it was impossible at the time. And still is for goodness sake.

So how do we deal with wanting what we really can’t have?

Wanting what you want isn’t necessarily about getting what you want.

But listening to our desires, treating them with respect, and listening to their wisdom without immediately suppressing everything shifts our energy in ways that create a fuller life, even if it doesn’t quite look like the life we expected.

One more for now — fear.

Yup. Often, we’re afraid of wanting what we want. Because of course we are.

If we really let ourselves fully hunger for the bigness of what might happen in this life, we’d have to grow into our capacity to metabolize that bigness.

This requires us to change, sometimes in ways we just don’t want (ironically…humans are so complicated).

We see warnings in all our cultural narratives — Icarus and the sun, the tallest poppy syndrome, getting too big for your britches…

We are a communal species. We don’t want to be kicked out of the tribe, lose our loved ones, or leave our friends behind. We don’t want to be judged, cast out and unsafe on our own.

We fear who we might become if we let our desires have that much power.

Paradoxically, all of our resistance to wanting what we want is wise.

Take fear, for example: Like most things, fear is a messenger. It’s important to listen to the very real wisdom and truth in our fears. To understand if our wants actually do need some tweaks because of the ways they conflict with what we most definitely don’t want.

And, we can know that our fears aren’t the whole story either. What are they obscuring? What are they trying to protect us from — that we are actually strong enough to face?

Once we see how we stop ourselves from wanting what we want, and then we start glimpsing more of what we truly do want, our task is to unwind all these self-sabotaging loops.

In a way, this is shadow work — but I don’t want to make it seem like we just need to dig up all our buried shit. That stanks, y’all. Sometimes, our shit can stay buried and get composted into nutrients on our behalf without contaminating our fresh air with bacteria and stench.

How’s that for a metaphor? 💩

We don’t need to peel off our scabs and poke at our wounds. We don’t have to go into every corner of our psyches and get sucked into a downward spiral. And we don’t need to revisit every word in our old, repetitive stories in order to write new ones.

Hallelujah.

No to healing loops. Yes to a spring cleaning. ;)

Because we will need to sort through and clean up at least some gunk.

But I really like thinking of our resistance as just that — gunk. Accumulation from being human; not all the places we’ve done life “wrong”.

Just like you dust, sweep, and take out the recycling from your own home, you can tidy up the old beliefs in your psyche and the density in your energy field.

This often looks like breaking down the boxes we put ourselves in. The internalized stories from family and early childhood, cultural and educational impacts, and even our soul experiences across ancestry and lifetimes.

It might involve greater self honesty — what constrictions are real, and which desires need some readjusting? There is skill to discerning between desires that are fantasy and distraction and those that are truly aligned with our soul’s blueprint.

The how of this happens on multiple levels of our being simultaneously.

The first step is always to create space for our wants and desires to emerge. Space to listen to our inner wisdom and remember what is actually authentic and true for our hearts, no matter how unlikely it might seem to the world around us.

From here, we work energetically.

So often we try to “think” our way through our challenges. Thinking is helpful, of course — but it has a lot of traps, too. Especially if it’s our primary approach to “figuring things out”.

This is largely why the field of psychotherapy has shifted from a top-town to a bottom-up approach to wellness. Rather than talking incessantly about the same thing again and again, somatic offerings help us access our bodies and nervous systems, effecting change on more holistic levels. As with the mind, the body is important in this journey.

And it’s also not quite enough on its own.

Staying in the body and our physical sensations doesn’t address the deeper vows and entanglements at play — it doesn’t address the energetic programming that holds how we resist our own desires.

And even just energy work isn’t quite enough on its own either — without somatic embodiment and a mental understanding what’s shifting and why, it’s just moving energy around…and those new patters are less likely to stick.

But when the mind and body come together through somatic sensations and imaginal focus — lasting energetic changes take place.The foundational blueprint of how we show up in the world shifts at the roots.

Add in energetic allies — oils, stones, plants, elements, even spirit guides — and we have a powerful, integrated practice for coming into what I call soul coherence — all parts of ourselves are present, in harmony, and able to carry us more clearly and fully toward what we WANT.

The process I described might look a lot like healing…because it is a healing process on every level.

But it’s also different from the old healing loops and “doing the work”: because this healing arc is guided by what you want.

When you let yourself want what you want, you start receiving little “ missions” to move towards it. Creative actions, experiments, risks — you are asked to cultivate the capacity to do more, become more, and hold more.

The universe is always expanding. And so are you. Because you are a universal being.

I find this both inspiring and grounding. We will always want more because that is the nature of who we are — to deny this nature is to cause suffering.

And there is no place of final arrival. There are ages and stages of greater rest, integration, and quiet, to be sure. Times when our wants are deeply internal — the want of peace and spiritual connection.

Even the want of less. ;)