The Alchemical Relationship Between Desire & Fear

There is a conversation that wants to be had about desire and fear, and the indelible relationship that exists between the two. But to have this conversation in its true potency, we must clarify the true nature of desire.

Desire, in its true and essential nature, is nothing short of our soul’s expression guiding us towards our destiny. Our destiny, said another away, is the peak evolution one can experience in human form, before the only left to do is leave the body and ascend back into our pure spiritual form of no-thing oneness with all that is.

Ascension, however, is not what I’m interested in talking about here. 

That does not mean to say I’m opposed to ascending in this lifetime--I’m just not attached to it--nor am I gunning for it.What I am significantly more excited and aroused to experience in this lifetime is DESCENSION. Descension into the body. To become an aligned, open, embodied, receptive, and engaged vessel for being fully inhabited and penetrated by the divine, so that I am nothing short of a walking embodiment of god.

That may seem a bit extreme to some, but I’ve found that most freedom comes in life when we’re just willing to call a spade a spade and stop acting like we don’t actually know exactly what we want and who we are.

So, back to our topic of the moment--Desire.

There is an important distinction to make between what I’ll call “authentic desire” and “compensatory desire”. Authentic Desire is what I described above--the soul’s longing to guide our temporarily amnesiatic human Self back into remembrance of our divine nature, so that we may fully embody and release the illusion of separateness, unworthiness, and anything else that has us dig our feet in the dirt in resistance of our own ecstatic awakening.

Compensatory Desire, on the other hand, is what has confused, maimed, and shamed what desire actually is. Compensatory desires, unlike authentic desires, are impulsive longings for things/people/experience that serves as a means of escaping from or avoiding our authentic Self.

Compensatory desires on the extreme end can take the form of addiction to drugs, alcohol, technology, sugar, and abusive or co-dependent relationships. 

Compensatory Desires lead us farther away from the truth; the deep, core, essential truths that free us from self (or societally) imposed limitations about who we are and what we are capable of being or becoming in this lifetime.

There is so much to say on compensatory desires, but that’s not where we’re going today. Today we are focusing on authentic desires, and how they are irrevocably related to fear.

When we connect with an authentic desire--a desire that exists deep down within us, there is something inherently confronting about it to our Ego. One of the most common things I experience with people through my private coaching work, is that many of us do not know what we want. Or at least, that is the story we tell ourselves. 

Often, it’s not that we “don’t know”, it’s much deeper than that. The deeper thing is that to actually know what we truly desire, would mean liberating ourselves from the shackles of conformity and compliance, which is so directly threatening to the Ego, that can become easier to bury the voice of the authentic self beneath other people’s expectations, externally-conditioned morality, or feelings of ineffable unworthiness.

The Ego abhors the prospect of our authentic self connecting to our authentic desire, because when we do, we threaten the Ego’s survival, the crumbling of false concepts of control, and a surrender into the great dark void of the unknown.

Authentic Desire threatens our entire existence. It threatens the idea and deeply held belief of everything we’ve believed ourselves to be up until this point. Which means, on some level, to embrace our true desires means that we must allow ourselves to die.

This is why what we truly desire is also what we most deeply fear.

I’ll offer a personal example, as I’ve found that leadership without vulnerability is a recipe for disempowerment and tyranny that I prefer not to perpetuate in this lifetime.

Much of the intimacy energetics and spiritual embodiment work I facilitate with private clients and groups has been a by-product of my own fervent devotion to dismantling patterns and belief systems about romance, relationship, and sexuality rooted in disempowerment and victimhood.

Long story short, I spent a lot of my 20s getting into diabolical at worst, co-dependent at best, romantic relationships with men where the consistent unconscious desire driving my engagement in the relationship was my desire to escape the feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty I felt in my own life, and how that related to the stories I’d ingested about what it means to be a woman.

This very twisted (yet in simultaneously circumstances deeply erotic) unconscious desire revealed itself to me during a solo acid trip I decided to imbibe one New Years eve many years ago when I found myself with seeminly no other offers that felt more exciting.

The peak of that trip was me finding myself curled up in the fetal position on my couch, bawling my eyes out realizing that all of my romantic relationships with men up until that point had been subconsciously driven by the covert desire to be saved by a man. To be saved by him financially, emotionally, ceremoniously--similar to how I’d seen in many Disney movies in my early adolescent years. However, my idea of being saved was less about white horses and shining armor, and more dollar bills and an obviously superior perspective of how to survive in life inherently because he was a man and I was a woman. Those belief systems ran so deep in me I didn’t even realize there could be any other truth.

Yep. On the outside I had all the lingo down of wanting a man who could really meet me, who could handle all of my intensity, my emotions, my sexuality, my power--and yet deep down, what I really wanted was for a man to possess me, own me, dominate me, in such a way that I would not have to take responsibility for my own fears of not being able to create financial security and personal emotional and physical stability in my life.

It was some deep dark twisted material, very artfully nuanced amidst my sexually liberated post-modernist Femininst personal. And don’t you know, I wound up attracting in relationships with men who DID want to own me, possess me, control me. 

Hell, one of them got very close to convincing me it made total sense for me to become a prostitute and he my pimp. (And by the way, it feels important to mention here I actually have nothing against sex work and sex workers. I simply hope that in choosing to be a sex worker, that they’re doing it from a place of desire and choice--as opposed to a perpetuation of victimhood and self-sacrifice). 

Long winded way of saying, I learned a lot about myself in the process.

The past 10 years have been about deconditions myself from models of relating rooted victimhood, manipulation, and disempowerment. I realized that if I wanted a truly powerful relationship with a man in my life, where I could fully receive his power and penetrative energy without sacrificing or losing myself in the process, that I was going to need to do some deep internal work around the subtle energetics of sexuality, sovereignty and the art of giving and receiving. 

I’ve gotten a place in my life, in my own personal spiritual evolution, where I am beginning to attract men into my life who are available for deep emotional intimacy. They are powerful, driven, embodied, attuned, receptive, grounded in finance and purpose. Clear on their desires and their connection to their own spirituality. 

And you know what? It’s DEEPLY confronting.

That which I’ve desired, longed for, done the work to become an energetically and emotionally available for, is now beginning to enter into my vortex of reality, because I’ve become an energetic match for it, and it TERRIFIES me.

That which I desire, is also that which I deeply fear, because to surrender to this desire, to become available to receive it, to allow this desire to fully penetrate my emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual plane of existence being, means to die to who I once was. 

Desire embodiment work is not for the faint of heart, and it is important to realize this if this is the spiritual path you are inclined towards.

There is a common misconception in different spiritual communities that if we’re actually ready to receive a authentic desire that we’ve never had before, that we won’t be afraid. I think that’s bull shit. I believe that fear is a necessary part of the activation process that heats up our spiritual-emotional-energetic system enough to allow that which is no longer resonant with our current identity to burn away.

Here lies the inherent sameness of desire and fear in the context of personal transformation. 

Desire and fear both activate arousal in the body. They charge up our life force energy in such a way that we become more present, more receptive, more penetrably available the Divine to enter through us in service to the fulfillment of our desire and simultaneous destiny.

Both desire and fear catalyze energy within our body that can be utilized in service to our own embodied awakening. 

Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy once said, “fear is excitement without the breath”. This is the very thing we observe in the relationship between desire and fear.

In those moments in life when the energy and sensation feels so high in our bodies that everything in us is screaming to shut down, contract, cave in on ourselves because the signals in our body tells us we should be afraid--that we are not safe.

What if, instead, we learn how to stay present to the higher and higher levels of sensation and energy that were moving through our bodies? 

What if, in the moments where we our reactionary body wants to clamp down and contract around on the energy stirring within us, we instead chose to breathe, stay grounded and embodied, and open expansively to what is possible in the present moment?

What if the story of fear, of “not safe”, “helplessness”, and “not enoughness”,were all gauntlets of initiation and rights of passage created by our Higher Self to test our ready willingness to walk across the threshold of our own liberation from suffering and the illusion of separateness?

I invite you to consider these questions, and notice the sensations, emotions, and feelings that evoke within you. These are powerful times to be questioning the nature of our reality, and who we believe ourselves to be.

I’ll leave you with a final question for today: 

Are you ready to Remember Who You Are?