Why We Resist Wanting and How Awareness Can Transform Desire

People are often willing to endure discomfort, provided they can choose the nature of that discomfort. This phenomenon is evident in individuals who readily embrace physically demanding challenges, such as ultra-runners who might complete a 50k warm-up for a race, yet shy away from difficult conversations with their spouse. This suggests that people are selective about the "hard things" they are willing to do, often choosing challenges in specific domains while avoiding others that are more immediately present. Therefore, "the work" is not always what it seems.

The Danger of Suppressing Desire

One of the most dangerous psychological traps is when individuals stop allowing themselves to want things they fear they cannot achieve. This often manifests as a self-deception where one convinces themselves they don't desire something to avoid the potential disappointment of not attaining it. For example, someone who struggles to gain their parents' love might, instead of confronting that desire directly, focus on making them proud as a substitute.

This resistance to wanting stems from the fact that wanting is one of the most difficult emotions for people to confront. To truly sit with the feeling of wanting, even without a specific object of desire, can be incredibly uncomfortable. This contrasts with the common modern concern about excessive or misdirected desire.

Consider the example of nicotine. If one immediately consumes nicotine when desired, the feeling of wanting is quickly extinguished. However, if one holds the nicotine, observes it, and allows the feeling of wanting to persist, that is the true experience of desire. The challenge isn't necessarily about immediately gratifying or denying a want, but rather about sitting with the raw feeling of wanting itself.

Why We Resist Wanting

The primary reason people resist the feeling of wanting is that it forces an acknowledgment of a lack of control. Wanting, like gratitude, is an emotional experience where one must concede that they are not entirely in command of their needs or desires. This clashes with the human tendency to maintain an identity centered on self-reliance and control, where self-referential thoughts can lead to depression and narcissism. Allowing oneself to feel wanting can, in a sense, begin to erode this self-centered identity, which is why many find it so unsettling.

Understanding the Nature of Wants and Needs

Instead of questioning which desires to trust or distrust, the focus should be on simply feeling them. The key is not about taking action or refraining from it, but about being willing to fully experience the want.

To understand a want, one can ask: "What is the need behind that want?" For instance:

• Want: Porn
• Need behind that want: To feel calm
  • Need behind calmness: To feel some sort of connection
  • Need behind connection: (This process continues until a core, fundamental need is identified)

This process reveals that many superficial wants are merely strategies to fulfill deeper, core needs. However, because people often avoid the discomfort or "pain" associated with these core needs, they settle for the more immediate, superficial gratification.

Wanting as the Foundation of Suffering

Wanting is fundamentally linked to suffering. Peace and contentment are often described as the absence of want. Biologically, wanting is a crucial mechanism for survival and evolution. Even a simple organism like an amoeba "wants" to move away from a toxic environment.

Many emotions can be reframed as forms of wanting:

• Fear: A want for safety
• Anger: A want for territory or safety
• Lust: A form of wanting

This perspective aligns with the teachings of the Buddha, which are often misunderstood or not directly taught today because of their radical nature. The Buddha taught that while pain is an unavoidable part of life, suffering arises from our reaction to that pain. We cannot control the occurrence of pain, but we can control our reaction to it.

However, the Buddha also highlighted a more insidious truth: pleasure, the opposite of pain, is also beyond our control. We cannot dictate when or how positive feelings arise. When we attach ourselves to pleasure, often using it as an antidote to pain, it leads to obsession.

Therefore:

• Pain leads to suffering if not reacted to correctly.
• Pleasure leads to obsession if not reacted to correctly.

Striving for pleasure, holding onto it, and constantly seeking to satisfy wants can lead to a loss of control in one's life.

Conquering Desire Through Awareness

A meditation teacher once shared an anecdote about conquering desire, specifically an addiction to potato chips. The teacher, a yogi, initially tried to resist the craving for potato chips, believing it was a barrier to enlightenment. Despite his efforts, he would eventually succumb to the temptation, especially when encountering fresh potato chips being fried on the street in India.

Upon confessing his "problem" to his teacher, he expected to be told to redouble his efforts at resistance. Instead, his teacher advised him to stop resisting the potato chips. The instruction was: "Anytime you want a potato chip, just be aware of it. You can gratify it or not gratify it; I don't really care about that. Just notice what happens within you when you want the potato chip. Notice what happens. What is the nature of satisfaction that you receive from a potato chip?"

This exercise highlights a fundamental methodology: sometimes, the "work" is not about action or resistance, but about awareness. This approach, focusing on observing internal states without judgment, can be profoundly transformative and, for some, even unsettling as it challenges conventional notions of self-improvement and control.