Nature illuminates the path to our highest expression through the language of desire. Our desires move us in the direction of greater expansion, connection and evolution.  

I've spoken previously about the liberating effect the Vedic tradition of knowledge has had on my life. There is perhaps no area where this is more true than on the subject of desire. Before finding my way home to this knowledge, I would drive myself (and probably the people in my life) around the bend trying to make decisions about what I wanted to do with my life. Actual written pros and cons lists were a regular feature. Though difficulty making decisions is a symptom of stress, for me it ran deeper than this. Since I was a little girl I had an inner knowingness that there was more to my identity than I was aware of, and I was desperately searching for it wherever I could think of. It's what lead me to dive head first into a degree in Psychology and post-grad diploma in Psychotherapy before veering down a different path. 

What does this have to do with desire, I hear you ask? Before I came to this tradition, I didn't fully trust my desires or my intuition. I wasn't aware that our desires are nature's way of communicating with us the most evolutionary thing for us to be doing, moment by moment. There's one big caveat to this, which is that when we're not in touch with our deep inner self and when we're operating from a place of stress (these two go hand in hand), the desires communicated with us by nature get distorted. It's not that the desires aren't delivered, they always are, but with a physiology filled with stress we don't tend to get a good read on them. Desires can range from a sudden urge to change the way we drive to work, to a spontaneous desire to go for frozen yoghurt or a bigger desire like leaving your job or moving city. Whatever the magnitude of the desire, we're being asked to move in that direction. We may not end up eating the frozen yoghurt, but we bump into someone on the way that we really need to meet. We may not end up leaving the job, but having a conversation with our boss that sparks real and meaningful change in the organisation. 

The more we make contact with our inner self through a practice like Vedic Meditation, the more we can rely on the desires that spontaneously bubble up from inside us. For me, complete surrender to my desires was not an on-off switch. Like most people, I've had to work through some deeply rooted social conditioning in order to arrive in a place of knowing that nothing my individuality can conjure up will ever come close to the life nature is guiding me towards - if I can let go of control.

One of the biggest barriers to complete surrender to my desires was unwinding my conditioning around the typical path women in their 20s and 30s should follow. The more in touch I became with my true nature, the more I realised I didn't actually desire the things that family and society had conditioned me to think I wanted - property ownership, marriage, babies. It's not that I don't ever want these things - let's wait and see - but nature isn't causing me to desire them right now. Getting comfortable communicating my truth appropriately when asked why I'm not doing these things (which in my experience happens frequently in subtle and overt ways) has been one of my biggest learning curves in recent times and one it feels good to have transcended. At the end of the day, we always want to be sweet and kind; knowing that all anyone is ever doing is giving us a report of their state of consciousness. If someone assumes we can't be happy or fulfilled if we're not having a particular set of experiences, what they're really sharing is that it wouldn't be possible for them if they were in our shoes. Rather than frustration, this is worthy of our compassion and of remembering that attempting to derive fulfilment externally was also our experience once, too.