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“Our world runs on desire. We would not have been born without sexual desire. Without continuing desire we would die. There is desire for love, connection, understanding, growth. When people lose their desire to live, they jump off a bridge or swallow pills. We need desire. And yet desire is also a great challenge for us. Mistakenly, many people think that Buddhism condemns all desire. But there is no getting rid of desire. Instead, Buddhist psychology differentiates between healthy and unhealthy desire. Then it leads us to a freedom that is larger than the desire realm, where we can transform desire into true abundance.” —Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology
To rest our eyes on a work of art painted decades, even centuries ago.
To absorb the nourishment of the beauty of a bucolic setting.
To revel in the performance of talents on stage.
To note a boost of confidence while wearing bespoke clothing.
To experience an endorphin rush while being in the company of those we love, feel supported by and respect from.
Each of the experiences shared above happen outside of ourselves. Their materialization requires more than what is within us even though we have to be fully present to savor them and experience the gift they offer.
As we continue on through our month-long series of Who TSLL is Written For, today, in part three, we are exploring what we mean by savoring the everyday ‘sides’ of living well as shared in the axiom guiding the content chosen and explored here on The Simply Luxurious Life.
Found on TSLL’s Start Here: Introductions page, last week we talked about what it meant to be a ‘thinking person’ in the context of living simply luxuriously (read Part One here), and next week in podcast episode #410, we will talk about what it means to embody true compassion. But today, we’re diving into what we mean when we say “everyday ‘sides'”.
Often the concept of embracing Buddhist psychology, something that guides simply luxurious living (learn more here in episode #403), is, as the quote mentions above from Jack Kornfield, misunderstood to mean all desires are forbidden. Which is absolutely not the case. What needs to be undestood is how to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy desires, and this is where the ‘sides’ of everyday life come into play.
The key to knowing which desires to welcome and which to practice self-discipline to resist or decline when they arise comes down to “having a wise relationship with desire”. And this wisdom is found in understanding why we have the desires we have. What we reach out for – the ‘sides’ to enjoy, spend our money on, exchange our time and attention for.
At the core of living a simply luxurious life, a life grounded in true contentment, is not how well we dress, where or if we travel, how much money we make or how big our house is nor which neighborhood we live in. At the core, what holds us ‘upright’ and steady, is knowing where we find true contentment. We find it when we take the time to know ourselves, then heal ourselves, learn the skills (all of which are taught in the Contentment Masterclass), apply the skills to lead us to our song that only we can sing – our dharma, and then courageously sing it. A choice that both energizes and nourishes us in the act of doing it, while also positively contributing to the world.
So long as we look outside of ourselves – trying to build a better wardrobe, buy a fancier house, gain approval from others with the choices we make, the list goes on and on regarding all the things we can focus on that reside outside of us – we are frittering away time that would be more wisely invested learning the skills and gaining self-knowledge to cultivate contentment that will lead us to the same feeling we say we want to find – peace, fulfillment, enjoyment of living our everyday life.
The purpose of everyday ‘sides’ is to complement the life we are living. Let’s look at this list below of what a healthy desire/‘side’ might be:
- It nourishes us – gives us life:
- This nourishment allows us to care for ourselves which will be unique to each of us, but also includes the basics of sleep, food, clothing, shelter for ourselves and those we love, to strengthen our skills set for work which provides us with the financial means to live, to strengthen and elevate our community.
- Founded on wisdom and compassion
- Loving-kindness
- Integrity
Now some of these may sound vague, and they are vague for a reason, to act in integrity for you will be unique to you and your needs to feel and be nourished. Loving-kindness, something we have talked about in previous posts, is how we engage with others as well as ourselves – is it loving? Is it kind? Noting the difference between nice and kind as was explored in-depth in this post.
Letting Go comes into play in an important way
So much of living well, living a simply luxurious life, asks of each of us be able to let go. We set our intentions, understanding why we have them, but we don’t cling, we don’t demand, we don’t manipulate or even expect. We let go and live fully in the present moment knowing our life sail is pointed in the direction of our choice and the quality of travel will be determined by how we engage with the moment – our choices, our attitude, our choice to be loving, kind and do so with integrity.
How does healthy desire work with letting go? We understand why we want something, how it will nourish our life, but then instead of having a narrow focus of how that desire materializes, we keep our heart and mind open. Being ready to seize how our intention is presented should it do so, but only if we meet it in the present moment.
A helpful example of this occurred in my own life when I was searching for a home in Bend to buy. I shared more of the details in The Road to Le Papillon (my third book), but essentially the search took place over five years. Throughout that entire time, knowing my intention was to be a home-owner in Bend, knowing what it would take to own a home, I held it in my mind, but kept on living fully – traveling, strengthening my business, and on a day I wasn’t even planning on finding my house, I was simply enjoying the Tour of Homes, pottering about in one of the neighborhoods and chose to ask if they had a smaller house that was for sale (not on the Tour, but in that neighborhood). And that is how I found Le Papillon.
The clarity never left me, but I didn’t force it, and my quality of life during those five years involved moments I will treasure forever, not having expected them, and being fully present to savor them. Eventually, when the time was right for my house to cross my path, we met, and then I had to find the courage to say yes. ☺️
Buying a house may seem to some to be a necessity, an absolute requirement for living a life of contentment, but that isn’t true. What I needed was shelter and I had that in my rental. The house I purchased enhances the quality of my life, and that is what healthy desires will do – enhance, not deteriorate
Jack Kornfield in The Wise Heart explains that an unhealthy desire creates suffering, is based on greed and ignorance, gives rise to possessiveness, fear, avarice and clinging. And so now we see the difference is found when we look at where the desire springs forth from.
Put simply, we “hold our desires lightly”.
How to Make Sure Our Desire is Healthy and Remains Healthy
How do you feel when you cannot have your desire?
Take a moment and assess your body in the moment when you want something but cannot have it or don’t have it at the moment you would like it. Is it tense? Does what you do not have, that feeling, cause stress and leave you locked into the future, unable to be in the present? If any and most definitely all of these are present, your desire is most likely unhealthy. The unique thing about desire is that at different moments in our life, we may have the same desire, but in one instance it is healthy and another it isn’t. Only we can know that, but the good news is, so long as our skill of self-awareness is toned and our Emotional Intelligence is sound, we will be able to discern unhealthy from healthy.
For example, any time jealousy, anxiety, or insecurity begin to rise up, or perhaps a stubbornness that we must have what we want spontaneously comes to the forefront, take a breath, take quite a few most likely, take a step back or leave the situation entirely. Most likely, this is an unhealthy desire that comes from a place of any one of the feelings shared above about unhealthy desires. Ask yourself why you feel you ‘must have it’, and if you have been strengthening your mind through meditation and can step back from your thoughts and be objective, you will see where the need is coming from.
We each hold the capability of being able to notice when a desire arises, then assess it and finally, choose wisely. But in order to utilize this capability, we must build our foundation of true contentment.
Examples of Everyday ‘Sides’
Literally anything that nourishes you is an everyday ‘side’. The variety of tea you prefer and bring back with you from England after visiting for the tenth time. So long as it is in your budget to do so, you know it nourishes you, and you savor it each time you pour a cuppa, and even if you incorporate it into your daily life and make it without a forethought, it makes the everydays all the more delightful regardless of what is unfolding.
The capsule wardrobe you build to present your best self to the world at work, the work that gives you the financial means to live and eventually becomes your calling, if that is part of your life journey. Similar to the tea example above, so long as it is in your budget, you invest knowing which brands suit your silhouette, what will last and what will be worn often and enjoyably.
The hobbies you throw yourself into with your whole heart, full attention and investment of time and money. This could literally be anything! For me, it is my gardening. Nourishing, enjoyable and a place I easily find myself wholly in the present moment. Our hobbies may be ‘sides’, but as is made easier to understand through the lens of enjoying our hobbies, when we have them, our days and life become a delight to live each time we engage in doing them. It is when any desire begins to deteriorate the quality of our life that it becomes unhealthy. Again, awareness is key.
Any one of the Petit Plaisirs you have incorporated into your life, the rituals that bring depth and anticipation and then delight, these are everyday ‘sides’ that elevate the quality of your life, bringing more happiness, enjoyment and calm your nervous system.
How A Strong Mindfulness Practice Helps
Yet again, it is through the skill of mindfulness that will help us better understand our own desires, be able to witness them, understanding that they will be intense initially, but just like any emotion, they will ebb. But first, we have to acknowledge that we all have desires. This is part of being human. If we suppress this truth, if we dismiss or ignore our desires, that is when problems arise and eventually explode if never addressed.
And on the flip side, if we have no impulse control to our desires, we can lead ourselves into a whole heap of trouble. As with so much of living well, balance is key, and balance is balancing in motion. Life is dynamic. If we are living in the present moment, fully engaged, we won’t know everything that will take place, but with the skills learned as to what constitutes a healthy desire versus an unhealthy desire, when something tantalizing arises, all we have to do is check in with ourselves.
Refusing to react and instead choosing not to rush, but thoughtfully consider what is present and appears as a desire, and if we discover the desire would be nourishing and complement our lives, then we respond in our own time. In approaching desires this way, we discover that the intensity of any desire, the discomfort that we want to squash by seizing it reactively, gradually subsides. We make far better decisions in this state of waiting for the desire to lessen because we are not tense, but instead, relaxed. This relaxed state is where we feel peace, and when we make decisions from a place of inner calm and peace, our decisions support the life we are living rather than deteriorate it.
Where Freedom is Found
Because we are not attached to our sides, but rather appreciate that we have them in our life and don’t take them for granted, we savor them. As we savor, we know the experience is evanescent, and so we don’t ask for more, nor do we expect it. Instead, we look to ourselves. Being secure in ourselves, recognizing where healing may be helpful and doing what we need to do to provide that healing, we don’t cling to others but instead engage with loving-kindness when we do have the opportunity to be with them. Once we have healed, we have befriended ourselves and begin to realize great company has always been with us, and that too is how we begin to build healthy relationships that nourish us.
To the topic of our conversation today, when we learn the skill of discerning healthy from unhealthy desire, when we become honest about which everyday ‘sides’ will nourish us, we then begin to invest in those with confidence. Investing in our sides plays a powerful and necessary role in both helping to lead us to discovering our dharma, and then when we do, being able to step fully into it with bravery. Being brave, choosing to invest, and letting ourselves be energized by this new outlet of fun, creativity, enjoyment, pleasure.
The freedom arises because once we have fully embodied our dharma, we see with clarity why the sides could never have been at the core of our contentment, but most definitely do complement it. We feel free because we chose this life, but most importantly, because we finally realized “we already contain all that we desire” – it resided within us, we just needed to know how to unearth it. All of the ‘unearthing’ is taught in TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass. We just need to be brave enough to live where and how our inner compass is pointing us, and then the sides will complement our journey. We may, and most likely have had to, make some difficult decisions to lead us to this point, but the strength we have gained gives us peace knowing that we have the skills to navigate well any unknown and unwanted event, including death.
The feeling of abundance begins to emerge when we know this to be true – we have all that we need, we just need to tap into that knowledge, nurture it into being through strengthening of the skills and bravely embracing our dharma. The ‘sides’ then become a delicious extra dessert that we didn’t expect, but consciously chose because we knew, with our newfound knowledge, that they would enhance our life. We now savor and appreciate these ‘sides’ even more because they strengthen our symphony of living well, elevate the delight and increasing the happiness in our daily experience.
Now that we know the sides that we love can and need to be part of our journey, so long as they are nourishing us, not hindering us, we let go of shame or guilt or anything the outer world and often we place upon our shoulders that is preventing us from expressing our true self. We give ourselves this freedom and then the possibilities become exciting and vast in their potentiality.
Concrete Exploration to Deepen Your Self-Knowledge and Strengthen Your Self-Trust
A helpful assessment to do from time to time: It can be at particular times of the year (the week between the years, your birthday, your half-birthday, etc.) or just anytime you feel yourself either feeling unmoored or conversely, deeply grounded and at peace (so, in other words, anytime you would like), is to make a list of the daily, weekly and monthly ‘sides’ you have in your life. As well, those occasional sides can go on this list as well – goals you are working toward, trips you are saving up for, etc. – add them all to a list, and then go back through what you have written, one by one and honestly answer these question for each: Why do I desire this? What do I feel it will bring into my life?
Eliminate desires/’sides’ that are determined to be pursued/wanted as a result of:
- overwhelming ambition (to prove yourself to someone else, the world, to be famous, etc.)
- to simply have more – greed
- to objectify or put your needs above another sentient being’s life and needs
- to feel that you are enough
- because you cannot say no
- you want to control something beyond yourself
Conversely, continue to relish, delight and welcome into your life any desires/’sides’ that are determined to be pursued/wanted as a result of:
- caring for something (garden, animals, Mother Nature, history, etc.) or someone (this includes yourself)
- cares for your livelihood
- nourishes your well-being
- cares for your mind, body, spirit
- an act of generosity, stewardship, steadiness
- leads to a feeling of happiness
I hope you found this segment of our series helpful and most importantly liberating so that you can feel encouraged to honor what piques your curiosity and where and in doing what brings you to life as well as nourishes you in the most wonderful of ways. From the simple book that rests in your snug that you cannot wait to return home to and read to the long-anticipated trip to see a favorite far-away destination, trust that your inner compass knows how to best take care of you. So long as you have a ‘wise relationship with desire’, you can let yourself revel in experiencing each and all of your chosen ‘sides’.
The series continues next Monday with Part Four when we will explore how we Anchor our Life in Everyday Contentment. We will explore the nervous system and discover how knowledge of how it works will set us free even more so to relish this amazing life we are living.
Catch Up On the Series – Who is TSLL Written For
