What Does Desire Want from Us?

All my life, I’ve felt confused and overwhelmed by my desires.

As a child, I remember wanting things—Barbies I saw on TV, candy bars at the store—with such force and ache in the pit of my stomach that it physically hurt. “When I grow up,” I wrote in my diary at age 7, “I will buy my kids whatever they want.” I became known in my family as a “whiner”—an unpleasable member of our five-kid brood, who always seemed to want something more and different from what I had.

Looking back, my desire for sweets and toys hid underlying desires that were much more intense: a desire for attention, to be seen, loved, and accepted just as I was. My parents urged me to be grateful and happy with what I had, but counting my blessings couldn’t touch that deeper longing and sense of inner lack. I felt like my factory settings were defective. Why couldn’t I just be grateful? Why did nothing feel like it would feed the bottomless hunger within?

I found my way to Buddhism in my 20s, exhausted from a life of unrelenting wanting and excited about the idea of uprooting it. By this point, my desires had jumped from Barbies to boyfriends. I wanted love so badly, and yet continually found myself drawn to unavailable men who couldn’t commit. Just like in childhood, I felt consumed with the ache of what was out of reach, uninterested in the perfectly nice guys who asked me out. When I learned about the Buddhist image of the hungry ghost—a being with a gigantic hungry belly and a throat so small it could never feel satisfied—I deeply related.

The Buddha had a lot to say about desire and its discontents. He used different words for different kinds of wanting, including tanha, usually translated as craving, which appears in the four noble truths as a central cause of suffering. He also spoke of raga—greed or sexual passion—as one of the three poisons, and described sense desire as one of the five hindrances. In one discourse, he says:

“There are forms perceptible by the eye, which are desirable, lovely, pleasing, agreeable, associated with desire, arousing lust. If the monk does not delight in them, is not attached to them, does not welcome them . . . there is no bondage.”
—Samyutta Nikaya 35:63

I was on board, as I understood it, with slicing the desire out of me with the scalpel of meditation. I imagined landing back in my simple, boyfriend-less life, walking around town like a nun with a permanent soft smile on my lips, feeling beatific and blessed.

So I tried to follow the Buddha’s advice. I learned that one antidote to desire was to picture, in gruesome detail, the person you were lusting after as a decomposing body—focusing on the gunky, slimy insides oozing out of their dead eye sockets. Many retreats were filled with picturing my crushes decomposing in this way. It was so much fun.

Just kidding. It was awful. It sort of worked in cooling my jets about a particular person, but what replaced desire felt deadened rather than freeing. I didn’t like being hooked by grasping, but I also didn’t want to live in a desire desert, stripped of the vitality and aliveness my wanting contained.

The turning point came not on the cushion but one day at the beach with my crush and his girlfriend. We were part of a group of friends headed to Coney Island. On the surface, I laughed and engaged normally, but inside I felt the familiar hollow ache of wanting a boyfriend like him and feeling hopeless about my own prospects. I couldn’t stop comparing my body, my looks, my success to his girlfriend’s, consumed with jealousy and self-criticism.

At some point, I wandered into the waves alone and decided to play a game. With each incoming wave, I would name something I wanted. It didn’t matter how shallow or impossible the desire was. After naming it, I let the wave crash over me and repeated the process.

“I want the watch I saw last week.”
Crash.
“I want a boyfriend who really loves me.”
Crash.
“I want to be beautiful.”
Crash.
“I want to be loved.”
Crash.

Saying these desires out loud helped lift them off my heart and offer them to the ocean. At first, it felt like unburdening. Then I noticed something else: By naming and allowing my desires, I began to feel a taste of what I was actually after. Saying I wanted to feel beautiful—and sensing what that would feel like—helped me feel beautiful. Imagining what it would feel like to be loved helped me touch that feeling directly. Nothing had changed in the outside world, but I had short-cutted the process of acquisition and felt some of the flavor of fulfillment anyway. And it felt amazing.

After this experience, I started to approach desire differently in my practice. If Buddhism encouraged fully welcoming all elements of experience, from pain, to anger, to grief, why not fully welcome our desire? Instead of antidoting it away, what if I let my desires wash through me like waves, leaving energy and joy in their wake? The tricky part was continuing to release the need to own or possess the objects of desire, while leaning into the feeling of wanting itself.

Mark Epstein writes that the arising of desire is an opportunity to ask not how we get what we want or what to do with our wants, but what does desire want from us? That pivot takes desire out of the realm of ego—me over here wanting that over there—and into the realm of energy. Desire becomes another word for life, like the way trees reach toward the sun: life seeking more life.

Whether or not it makes me a “good” Buddhist to say it, I delight in desire these days. I still have to practice releasing the craving and clinging of objects of desire that cause suffering, of course, but I feel grateful for the warmth and inner pull that arise when desire is alive in me. In naming what I want, sensing how it would feel, and letting those feelings fully expand, I light up. I feel alive. Whether or not I ever get what I want doesn’t really matter. The wanting is the having.