3 Ways You Unconsciously Block Your Deepest Desire
My clients are generally shocked to realize how much they have unconsciously blocked the things they want the most in their lives.
They want things like deep, present relationships. To be successful and taken care of through their life purpose. Self worth and to know their true power.
They would have never guessed that their deepest desire is something they would actually sabotage if it showed up… and that perhaps they already have, over and over and over again.
It’s not a popular thought to consider that you might avoid or destroy the things you say you want. People find this highly confronting, and to those committed to being victimized by their circumstances, even offensive. This level of radical responsibility for you life is uncommon and an advanced pose to hold.
It is easier and far less vulnerable to decide that your desire just hasn’t shown up yet, or that maybe it isn’t even possible for you in the natural world. That the problem is based externally.
Most of the time this couldn’t be further from the truth.
We live in an infinite reality where everything we could want is available at all times. I’m always asking my clients to take a deep responsibility for the circumstances around them, and to look internally at where they’re out of alignment with what they’re moving toward in their lives.
The question is: Am I available for what I want?
Physically, emotionally, and energetically.
It’s outside of most of our fields of vision to believe that we would conspire unconsciously to stop ourselves from having love, happiness, wealth, or success. Of course we want to believe that we would accept those things, if they were to come. But there are so many clever reasons why us humans block what we want, consistently and ferociously.
Becoming familiar with these patterns and learning how to gently unravel them is the key to unhooking from self sabotage and beginning true reception and availability for your desire.
So, what are some reasons you would unconsciously block the thing you want?
1. It’s outside of your preferences.
When many people have a powerful desire arise inside of them, they quickly begin running a fantasy where they attach a huge amount of details and qualities to that desire. What it looks like. How it will arrive. What it will feel like to have it.
It’s fun to do. And it’s okay to have preferences, specifics, and ideas. But people don’t realize how easy it is to let preferences block you from being with the pure desire you have.
Because at the end of the day, they’re just that: Preferences. Ideals and hopes, not dealbreakers or requirements.
Pure desire often has very little details attached to it. This is unfortunate for our mental ideas about what things “should” be like, what would make us comfortable, or look good. When a desire drops in, it’s pure and expansive.
When you begin conflating your true desire with the preferences you have attached to it, you shove your desire into a very tight and narrow box and give it highly specific, often unrealistic and untrue standards for that desire to manifest in the physical world.
You begin to not be able to tell the difference between the desire, which was open and void of preferences, with the preferences themselves.
And if your desire needs to be ran through a highly preferential filtration process to land into your life, it won’t make it through most of the time. Your desire could slap you in the face and you wouldn’t even recognize it.
Ask yourself if you are truly open to the deepest form of your desire, or if you’re attached to it looking a certain way.
If you’re attached to it looking a certain way and unwilling to be outside of your preferences, you’re going to reliably block that desire from manifesting in your life.
Let’s look at the example of romantic relationships. You feel the desire arise to be in a loving partnership. It’s exciting. And you begin ideating about what your lover will look like, where you might meet, the butterflies you hope to feel upon seeing this person for the first time. You fabricate an identity, a story, an embodied experience based off of the desire you feel for partnership.
He will be tall, chiseled, funny, a doctorate candidate, wealthy. You will meet on vacation, in a beautiful destination.
You are so attached to your preferential story about the fantasy for your future partner that when a lovely, kind-eyed, your height, slightly older, imperfect and secretly sexy man shows up next to you on line at the discount store, the one who would love you and meet your deepest desire inside of partnership, you don’t even notice him.
Getting stuck in your preferences is one of the best ways to block and bog down desire.
You will have resistance letting go of your preferences, especially if you’ve treated them like dealbreakers. Follow the thread of the resistance, name the preferences for what they are, and sit in that discomfort. Then, feel into the essence of the pure desire, and ask yourself: Underneath my ideas about what I want, what is the true desire?
Oftentimes, desire will ask you to surrender your ego to have it.
2. The desire outside of your havingness.
Contrary to most people’s beliefs, you can’t just have anything you want. And it’s not because what you want isn’t possible.
It’s because having what you want isn’t just about the thing that you want. It’s also about your ability to accept it.
See, every single person has a unique “glass ceiling” of goodness they will allow into their life. This is called your havingness. Your havingness is a savvy defense mechanism of the ego that exists to keep you safe, in control, and comfortable in your reality.
Your havingness’ job is to make sure that the circumstances in your life stay consistent with your beliefs about yourself and the world. And because we live in a world with a variety of belief systems and human experiences, everyone’s haingness level is different.
Some people have particularly high havingness. These are people that seem right at home with gifts, promotions, and delightful surprises in their lives. They believe they deserve the beauty that life gives them, and can accept the goodness as a natural part of their life. However many people, especially women and marginalized groups, have chronically low havingness.
A low havingness means that you will only allow yourself to receive goodness up to your level of belief about your worthiness and what’s possible for you. These are the people in your life (or maybe you) who might struggle to receive things even as small as compliments, would rather do something on their own then receive someone’s offer to help, or insist on paying for things regardless of a colleague’s offer for a coffee on them.
If you don’t believe you deserve goodness or an opportunity shows up that doesn’t blend with your beliefs about the world (beliefs like I am on my own, I am not good enough, I have to work hard for anything good in life), the thing you actually want may set off alarm bells in your system.
The alarm bells prevent you from receiving something above your glass ceiling of having, because if you did, it will destabilize your understanding of reality. All those beliefs in your system are contradicted. Your ego will sneakily block it from entering to maintain the idea of the reality you are comfortable in. Because as it turns out, your beliefs aren’t necessarily true just because you believe them. The ego hates this fact.
In other words, when the outside world is in dissonance with internal ability to accept a wonderful reality, our nervous systems will do anything to get back to a place of comfort and safety, where the world makes sense again.
This manifests on the outside in a variety of ways.
It might look like you deciding you can’t trust something that seems amazing, or unconsciously finding problems with it to look for excuses to reject it. This is the newlywed bride who had the wedding of her dreams and picks a fight with her new husband at the airport on the way to their honeymoon. Or, the young executive who gets super cranky and irritable after rocking the big presentation.
For a long time, I had a pattern where every time I got a new job, I would get sick. This was a manifestation at the time of me hitting my havingness. I wanted the job, but unconsciously didn’t believe I could have it. I would find myself in thought patterns believing that I must have tricked them somehow, or maybe they gave it to me by mistake, or I will certainly disappoint them. And at the last opportunity, on the first day of work, my body would come through with illness to level me back to my comfort zone. Of course, I would recover and integrate the expansion. But it was rocky.
Expanding Your Havingness
If something contradicts some of your deepest beliefs about the world and who you are, allowing that desire to permeate your life will require a massive, multilevel ego death. Having, for example a six-figure income, will require you to question long-held beliefs about your worth and capability. Sometimes, these beliefs are generational and would require you to amputate long-held values of your parents, grandparents, and ancestors.
If you’re not aware of the transformation that will need to take place, or you haven’t done any inner work to begin to align your deepest beliefs with what you truly want in the world, it will be very challenging to outsmart your ego.
However, consciously expanding your havingness is possible. You can do it at any time. To become an energetic match to your desire, to help you grow to fill the gap between who you think you are and who you know you really are, and to feel more comfortable in the discomfort of expansion and goodness.
First, acknowledge the beliefs and tight spots you have about reality, your deservingness, and this desire. See if you can put some space between these beliefs and you.
Then introduce a gratitude practice. Gratitude is the ultimate slayer of self sabotage. Write frequent lists and lists and lists of everything you appreciate in your life. Every person, opportunity, every moment, every item, every flower, clean water, fresh air. Gratitude will help you soften into the expansion, and humble yourself into beautiful reception.
This sounds like a small, anticlimactic tool. But I assure you, do not underestimate it.
3. It’s boring to have what you want when you identify with the struggle.
Finally, the one people really don’t like to hear. Most people don’t realize how much they secretly love and identify with the struggle of wishing, craving, and fighting for what they want.
Contrary to what your inner hustler might think he believes, there are actually so many benefits to working hard and still not having what you want. Working toward a “someday” is a huge cultural identity. Not having what you want can be interesting and inspiring, entertaining and invigorating, motivating and admirable. It will give you righteousness, purpose, and lots of positive attention from others.
You had me until this one, Hailey. I don’t love this! This is a means to an end!
I hear you. So imagine there was no more struggle bus, no more hustle. You had everything you want. Money. Love. Health. Success. Once you got used to it (like you got used to what you have now), where would your sense of fulfillment, motivation, and inspiration come from next?
Most people never get to experience what happens after you have the thing you think will fix your unhappiness. When you finally have the money, or the perfect relationship, or the job title, the experience of inner turmoil, discomfort, and discontentment might go away temporarily… just to quickly return in your new baseline of life.
It turns out that the working hard or feeling unhappy wasn’t a means to an end, but a whole identity feeding itself through constant hard work, fantasy, and subtle victimization.
Identities and patterns don’t go away just because the circumstances change. They find ways to prevail regardless of the circumstances.
Making this an inside job.
If fulfillment isn’t external (based on circumstances, things, possessions, or conditions) it would have to be sourced internally. And if you realize that you secretly love and identify with the struggle, you would have to undergo a massive shift to begin to resource your fulfillment, happiness, and peace from within.
It would be an ironic scenario of you being willing to let go of your external desire, surrendering to the truth that you don’t need it for your happiness. Sitting in the spaciousness of not needing to struggle, and finding more present ways to entertain yourself, know yourself, and be with your feelings. Therefore becoming available to truly receive it because your identity and entertainment no longer depends on you opposing it.
You wouldn’t derive interest, inspiration, or happiness from the struggle. You would find it on your own. And it would be quieter, less interesting, less dramatic than your system is used to.
Ask yourself: Where is not having what I want attached to my life story, personality, or idea of myself? Who would I have to be if I was satisfied?
All in all, DESIRE is a spiritual practice.
These are just some of the reasons why you might block the thing you want the most in your life.
They are deep, often unconscious, and sneaky manifestations of the ego. In this way, the journey to becoming available for what you truly desire in this world will relentlessly ask you to be more true to yourself, more honest, and less concerned with looks, noise, and falsities.
I teach the path of desire for the journey of it.
Because everything we touch along the way to what we want the most is deeply connected to our ability to be our truest selves in the world.
Desire will bring you to your knees, and show you who you truly are.
And I recommend you let it.
