Desires of the Heart ~via @SugarJones
Follow Sugar Jones, her writing is not only insightful, it’s from the heart. I met Sugar many years ago via the early blossoming blogger community, and have valued her words and friendship ever since. /Ted
Some desires of the heart are buried deep enough to ignore…
for a while…
until you can’t ignore them any longer.
Because one day, you’ll be walking down a hallway in some random building and you see these people up ahead that have that thing that you’ve been pretending you don’t want. And you stop dead in your tracks.
You want this.
And you can’t pretend you don’t.
Because it felt like a punch to the gut to witness.
At least, that’s what happened to me.
Keeping our desires buried allows us to walk around and smugly complain about how life did us dirty. There’s no need to take any ownership of the situation. It was all chance… maybe even destiny. The stars aligned to ruin your life. Mercury Retrograde and all that.
Acknowledging your desires means you have a personal decision to make. You can choose to pursue them or you can walk away from them. Either way, it’s your decision. It’s a choice you have to own. It’s the decision you’ll make that you can point to as the one that changed everything… or the time you just decided to keep living at the minimum acceptable levels of satisfaction.
Maybe not even that much.
But the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Sometimes, mild discomfort is comfortable compared to venturing out to the unknown. Digging up those desires… those possibilities… that’s the hard part.
Sometimes, you say you want to get at the core of your pain, but your deeper survival mode creates a barrier to guard your heart. Maybe you’ve been hurt so much that you just want to stay safe. Or maybe you’ve lived with good enough so long you don’t see what could be wrong with staying there forever.
But our better selves know that to truly live, we have to get past that fear.
Eventually, you may decide to step into the unknown and, as I’ve quoted before, you find that everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear. But how bad do you actually want it? Are you willing to give up what’s in your hands right now for something that may not even exist? That depends.
Are you willing to risk safe for amazing?
I talk a good game, but a lot of times, I choose safety. Not as often as others, so I guess I get to still point to my crazy decisions and say, “See??? I’m not living at status quo!” But then I’ll be walking down a hallway and I get slapped in the face with the truth.
That was the situation I took to my intuitive counselor, Shawna Allard. I showed up in tears that I just couldn’t hold back. I had seen the thing I knew I wanted and I was having a hard time acknowledging it. Because I knew once I did, I had to make some significant changes. And as much as I’ve lived through, I haven’t been here before.
And I gotta be honest… I’m scared.
When I first made my appointment with Shawna, I was just feeling like something was just… off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. By the time I was driving to her, I had a clear understanding of what that discomfort was.
Just before turning up the street to Shawna’s neighborhood, I passed the same grocery store I always pass to her house. But this time, a random thought floated through my mind. I have been shopping at a grocery store looking for power tools. The grocery store has a lot of great stuff, but it doesn’t have power tools.
You can’t build a house with pie crusts and spatulas.
Shawna greeted me at the door with her compassionate and knowing smile. She saw the story on my face and reached out to give me a hug, then we turned and walked up the stairs to her tranquil little office. Sitting across the table from her, I just couldn’t hold back. She handed me the tissue and I just let it all pour out, blubbering something about “I know what I want and I’m scared.”
She began her reading and helped me uncover more.
In the midst of it, we had one of those moments that always confirms the conversation for me. “You’ve been shopping at this one store for this one thing, but while there’s a whole lot of good stuff at this store, there is NOT the thing you’re looking for.”
I wanted to say, “I was just thinking that!” But we both knew it, so there was no need.
She had some advice for how to proceed and gave me an assignment that would “save me” from staying in safe mode. I’m having a hard time breaking from the first store, so it’s with some reluctance that I’ve taken a peek into the other store. The results aren’t what I’ve expected, but then again, I’ve never been here before, so I don’t quite have a good frame of reference for what should happen.
I’m gradually releasing my grasp of the comfortable status-quo safety blanket, but I still need some nudging, which is why I scheduled a follow-up. I need to keep seeing the things I want to unsee and keep doing the work to get to an optimal result. It’s too late to pretend I don’t want that thing I’ve been ignoring. It’s all on me to decide. And it’s all on me to accept the outcome.
That’s scary.
That’s also the kind of clarity that gets us to our best lives.
It’s not easy to attain, I hear. But I know that nothing worth having is.
If you’re waiting for some clear sign to fall from the sky to tell you what to do, this is it. Find someone to help clear the path of resistance… to pull out the inner wisdom you’re too afraid to acknowledge. Call Shawna. She’ll tell you what you need to hear.
And she’ll do it with that compassionate and knowing smile.
