What Is Your Heart's Deepest Desire?

Beyond goals and intentions, even beyond self-improvement, lie your heart's deepest desires. Driving every desire for more friends, more money, and greater health is the longing for the feeling state that you believe achieving or having these things will provide. 

While it's perfectly natural for you to follow your dreams and desires, after all you were created by a creator and will always tend to ask, "Next?," it might be worthwhile to explore what's driving them. Doing so is not meant to bring judgment to your desires, but to loosen any angst around them, to release any sense of, "When ___ happens, I'll feel better/be happier" etc., and to essentially open up to the feeling state you're trying to achieve and its presence as it might be available right here, right now.

Here's how:

Have a pen and paper handy. Take time to make yourself comfortable, get grounded, and breathe. Scan your body and see if you can get a sense of anything you might be holding, either in the form of body sensations or feelings, and allow yourself to simply be present with them as you breathe. Take time to do this until you feel that you're in a relatively quiet, relaxed state. Then feel into your chest, in the area around your heart, and ask yourself, "What is my heart's deepest desire?" See if you can wait and simply allow whatever comes to come.  Remember you're asking your heart, not your head. Whatever comes, whether it makes sense or not, jot it down briefly. If nothing comes, just breathe and ask again.

Ask as many times as you'd like, pausing to write down, sit with, be with, and breathe with each answer. You might notice that your answers change or they may stay the same. It really doesn't matter.

Select one of your most consistent answers or the one that feels strongest to you and ask yourself, "What feeling state will I have when I have this, that I don't have now?" Breathe and notice the first thing that pops in your mind. Then ask yourself, "If I could, would I be willing to let myself have that feeling now, in this moment, for just this moment?" Or, "Would I be open to the possibility of having that feeling now?" 

You don't have to know how. You don't have to get into a debate with yourself about how you can't possibly feel what you're wanting to feel until __ happens. Just see if you'd be willing or be open, just a little bit, to having the feeling now.

Just do your best. If you'd like help with this, please let me know. If you've worked with me before, we can do this over the phone.

If you get nothing else out of this exercise, you will at least have some insight into what deeper desire might be driving the more conscious desire. And sometimes when you can validate the deeper desires of your heart, some of the angst about when and where and how you'll get them, will relax.