TND- The ebb and flow of desire
Or, having shit all figured out is great until you don't
2024 was a year of profound shifts for me, dramatically altering my inner and outer landscapes. This time last year, I was frantically looking for an easy out from my 9-5 job after encountering a situation that forced me to act out of alignment with my values. Aware that I was responding impulsively (and in retrospect, from a scarcity mindset), I took a job that was familiar to me but that I had previously burnt out on. Through the summer and fall, I worked at one of the busiest national parks in the US with the park’s nonprofit partner. This job allowed me to meet and work alongside some of the greatest park staff, learning more about the park than I had in my previous employment there.
In the mornings, I would arrive at the park early and have the privilege of sitting alone before “the outstanding skyline in all the world”. It was here that I developed my personal pathway into the Akashic Records, co-creating a unique prayer within the Records and with the spirit of the canyon I spent my days in. Although the summer was not without its incredibly difficult moments, I can say in retrospect that being back at the park was exactly where I needed to be as my path unfolded before me.
The Temples and Towers of the Virgin
As the season came to a close, my position was furloughed, and I got to spend the winter months at home. While unemployed, I began to dig deep into themes of desire and resonance within the Akashic Records. It was a very confronting experience. Here are some notes I made from December of last year:
“Since embarking on my journey with the Akashic Records, it has become apparent that I am out of touch with what resonance and desire mean to me. This is no surprise. One of the most crushing falsehoods that I learned and internalized as a child was that my heart is inherently deceitful and wicked; therefore, nothing emanating from it is to be trusted. I was told explicitly what to desire– God and his plans for my life. Anything that fell outside of this prescriptive formula for life was prohibited. Desiring wealth, personal freedom, sexual intimacy, and my own path; these were all deviant desires. If I followed God with all my heart, everything else would fall into place.
Not only did I learn to dissociate from my desires in the context of religious indoctrination, I also learned more subtle messaging from the society I am enmeshed in. Capitalism taught me that material desires are first and foremost, and to obtain the materials needed for happiness, my only option was to participate in wage slavery. My life was to be devoted to obtaining income, and that income was to be used to buy the things that promised happiness. Patriarchy taught me that my desire was insignificant. I was to be an object of desire, and my life would revolve around heteronormative relationships and obtaining a male partner who I would defer to.
At the age of 35, nearly 36, I am confronted with the truth that personal desire is elusive to me. Desire is deviance, but this deviance is from toxic narratives that seek to make me small and enthralled to systems of oppression. Now it is my wish to radicalize myself and my life with desire. The Records teach that desire is a soul-level design. When I embrace my desires, when I live life guided by them, I will become more expansive and more myself. I do not approach this work (for indeed, it is work) with reckless abandon. There is fear in admitting to desire, and fear in embracing desire. A life in alignment with my desires is nearly unrecognizable to me. Even though living in desire is appealing, it is also terrifying. Cultural and social conditioning has taught me that my desires are not compatible with freedom and happiness; they are surely not in touch with reality. To embrace my desires, then, is to reject reality as it has been sold to me, and shift my reality into one where my desires bring me deep joy and alignment.
Feeling into resonance and desire is more than just being able to say “I want this, this is resonant to my being.” It requires divorcing myself from the narratives that say my desires are shameful, selfish, and delusional. It requires peering deeply into myself and identifying both the things that bring me life and the narratives that would subject me to death. I am putting faith in myself that I can bring bravery and honesty into this work, and I am putting faith in the universe that it will co-create a new reality with me.”
Those notes were my prelude to the Ritual for Shifting Reality, a ritual I tended to in the weeks leading up to and following the solstice. This ritual helped guide the creation of The Oracle of Ibis and the launch of my business this past January. Unfortunately, I got bogged down in the narrative that doing this work had to be a frustrating and labor-intensive process, and ended up pouring so much time and energy into my website that by the time it had launched, I had very little energy left for tending my business. At the end of February, I returned to the park and found myself right back in the place of burnout. My scarcity mindset was back in full force; there was no time or energy to devote to tending my dreams. The reality that I had so carefully designed for myself seemed to evaporate.
When we spend a significant amount of time inhabiting and embodying limiting beliefs, they feel comfortable and familiar. It is too easy to put them back on rather than taking the time to measure, cut, and weave new patterns. Those limiting beliefs are insidious; our neural pathways have fired through those circuits so persistently that we don’t even notice that they are the default. It is easy to believe that all of the time and energy that I put into dreaming something different for myself, and not just dreaming, tending through meditation, journaling, and creating a new business, has been wasted. Especially as I sit here, all of these months later, feeling thwarted in bringing the dreams to fruition.
It is tempting to leave it there. To say I tried something new and it didn’t work for me. That was written into the design of my dream: to be able to change my mind at any time. And while things feel so uncertain, money is scarce, the American empire is (finally) crashing and burning around me, I know that I didn’t give my desires a fair shot. While moving through life in the ways I have become so accustomed to would be easier, it isn’t that difficult to make one conscious choice at a time to step into the waters of my desires. Today, I opened my Records for the first time in months, a simple movement to help me reconnect to the seeds I planted last year. They encouraged me to revisit, in detail, the shape of my dreams and the words of wisdom and support the Records offered me as they were being shaped. In doing so, I have the opportunity to redefine and reshape anything that no longer fits.
Some may not understand what it means to fear the depth of desire, to confront the personal dishonesty of refusing to admit to longing. My experience in this work has been one of ebb and flow, of painful excavation. Yet, since I dared to name my desires and lean into my resonance, I have found myself deeply dissatisfied and hopelessly lost when I relapse into an unexamined existence. As painful as it is, it is validation that the only reality I belong in is the one that honors and upholds my dreams and longings. Every day, I will endeavor to make at least one choice, large or small, that keeps me connected to my desires and resonance.
