Lesson 2: The Energy of Desire

In this lesson I want to help you realize that you always have the ability to experience unlimited abundance in any area of your life. The key to experiencing this abundance is to realize that physicality is a symbol of your true desire.

When you can open yourself to receiving the energy — the essence — of your desire in any form that it will come, without setting specific expectations to it, you open yourself to experiencing this energy in any form. Usually, you then experience it almost immediately.

In order to experience a desire, all you need to do is to be receptive to experiencing it in any physical form that the desire might take. It is only when you begin to create expectation and set specific rules about how the desire needs to come to you or the exact way that it needs to look, that you limit yourself from experiencing that desire.

Every desire that you hold, every goal or aim you have ever set for yourself, is a symbol of the energy you wish to experience. This is a really important point, because it means that desires are never about the thing that you think that you want. They’re about energy. You can experience the essence of your desire by opening yourself to energy.

Realizing this correlation, recognizing the fact that they are symbols, is the first step in beginning to see the expression of that energy in your life.

Means Goals vs. End Goals

When we focus too heavily on the physical, we tend to overcomplicate things. Oftentimes, we create a lot of desires that we don’t actually want, but are things that we think that we need in order to achieve some further aim.

One of the most important things you can do to begin to break down the symbolism in your desires and look at the energy behind them, is to start to ask yourself which of your desires are actually real desires. Which of your desires are things that you absolutely want to experience for the act of experiencing them, and which of them are things that you want only because you think that they’re things you have to do? Maybe that “have to do” comes from an expectation that society at large has set for you, or maybe it comes from a goal that you’ve set for yourself, but the “have to” comes from a limited logical path that your mind sees towards it.

One trick that you can use as you begin to explore this is to realize that desires you hold as means goals only for the purpose of achieving other aims, tend to have negative associations with them. They tend to come from an energy of needing to avoid, overcome, or alleviate a situation in your life.

True desires, on the other hand, tend to have a positive impulse. They tend to be the feeling of moving towards exhilaration, passion, or love, and they tend to encourage these emotions within you when you think about them.

Just by looking at the energy that you experience — the emotion that you feel — when you think about your desire, can help you to sort out the real motivation behind it.

Example: Buying a Car

To help distinguish between these two types of desires, let’s consider the example of buying a car. I think this is an example most people can relate to in one way or another — you’ve probably had this desire at some point in your life — but the question is where the desire came from.

Did you want the car because your old one was breaking down and you needed a new one to get to work and go about your daily errands, or did you want the car because you wanted the exhilaration of it? Generally, if you bought a normal sedan or SUV or another average, day-to-day car, you probably didn’t want the car for the sake of owning the car, but you wanted it to be able to continue on with your normal life. By contrast, if you wanted a Ferrari, or a Porsche, or a new Tesla — something that’s associated more with the rush of driving or the experience of luxury in your car — that might be an end goal in and of itself.

The difference is between something that you needed to function versus something that was fun and enjoyable, an experience that you really wanted to have.

Exercise: Revealing The Energy of Your Desires/h2>

In this exercise, we’re going to practice revealing the true energy of the desire that you hold.

The first thing to do is to think of a desire. It can be anything, whether it’s a small thing you want to do today or a larger aim you’ve set for your life. I want you to take a moment to clearly state and write down that aim in one or two sentences.

Then, ask yourself why you want this aim. Why do you hold this desire? Write this answer down in one or two sentences as well.

Often, this “why” will be another goal in your life. If that’s the case, keep repeating the process until you wind up at a trait, a characteristic, or a feeling. The goal is to look for a state of being that is behind the desire. Keep going through this process until you get to a feeling.

This feeling might be slightly hidden. For example, the feeling might be something you want to be, which is a state of being. “I want to be successful.” Then, you can restate this: “I want to feel successful.” “I want to have the feeling of respect, confidence, integrity, security…” or anything else that is associated with that state.

Example: Getting a Promotion

For example you might have a desire to get a promotion or a raise at work. If you’re like most people, you probable desire the promotion because you want to earn more money.

Then you can ask: why do you want to earn more money? Maybe you want to save for retirement, buy a house, or go on a vacation. Let’s say you want to buy a house: you want the promotion to earn more money and you want more money so you can buy a house.

Then you would ask: why do you want to buy a house? Maybe you want the feeling of security, the feeling of stability, or the feeling of knowing that everything in your life is “on track.” Whatever the reason, there is some association you hold with that goal. Dig into what that feeling is and you’ll be able to uncover the symbolism of the original desire of wanting the promotion at work.

Exercise: How Many of Your Goals Are True Desires?

In this exercise I want you to be brutally honest with yourself about how many of your desires are true desires and how many you hold only because you think they’re necessary in order to do or achieve something else.

If you really take a hard look at this, you might be surprised to find that almost all of your desires are desires you hold for the sole purpose of doing something else. How can we uncover these?

Firstly, you can start with the exercise we did in the last video, digging into why you want each desire until you come up with the feeling behind each.

The other way is to apply the technique we discussed earlier of noticing whether the energy, the intention, behind the desire, is positive or negative. Anything that comes from even a slight feeling of needing to avoid or escape or overcome, is generally a desire that is a means to another goal.

The more you can uncover this, the more you can begin to reflect on what your true desires are.

So, take a moment to write a list of at least 10 desires you hold in your life, and dig into how many of these really are your true desires — specific experiences you want to have — versus how many are things you think that you need.

Thought Exercise: If Everything Always Worked Out…

For the last exercise of today’s lesson, I want you to give yourself some space to truly let your imagination run wild.

I want you to take the time to think about what your life would be like if you KNEW, absolutely knew with 100% certainty, that everything that you would ever need or want would happen for you. How would that change how you move throughout your day? Would you still work? Or, confident that everything you wanted magically appeared, would you just move effortlessly from one incredible, exciting, idea or passion to the next?

What is it that you would do? Take the time to really focus on these passions and feel into them. These are your true desires. These are the essence of the energy that you want to feel whenever you take away all of your ideas about what you think you’d need to do in order to get them.

Feeling into this technique gives you a glimpse of how desire is supposed to feel, and how you are supposed to live your life. Begin to play with this idea.