Obsession

The more you want something, the more you push it away from yourself. So you may as well just be content with the fact that you will never get what you really want. At least not the things you want in a greedy, obsessive and clingy way. You’ll never be successful in getting the things you would sell your soul for. And even if you do get them, you will never really have them because of the fear of loss that comes from such tight clinging.

We suffer from desire when we become hyper-focused on getting what we want. When we suffer from tunnel vision. When all we can see is the object of our desire. When all we do is spin stories about it in the mind and believe those stories to be total reality. These are the stories that my meditation teacher refers to as “self-centered dramas”. The self-centered dramas our minds create feel real, they feel like Me, we take them personally, they make us feel like we exist in a solid way.

But there is hope. There may not be any getting rid of desire, but desire can happen without clinging. When desire occurs in a spacious field that doesn’t require a particular outcome, there is no suffering from desire. When there are no stories about desire, there is no suffering. When there are stories but we don’t believe in them, there is no suffering. When there are stories and we believe them, but we see how believing in them is an error, we only suffer a little.