Your Desires Are Not Your Desires

Tune into this exploration of the deeper nature of desire — not the fleeting and distracting cravings that we're bombarded with in our culture, but the soul-aligned, values-rooted desires that stir something deeper in us.

Drawing on the body’s wisdom, the poetry of Kahlil Gibran, Vedic philosophy, and nervous system resilience, Rohini re-frames desire as Nature’s evolutionary intelligence moving through us — a current to be stewarded, not owned or controlled. She invites us to start noticing the difference between compulsive wants and the authentic impulses that connect us to Life’s unfolding.

This episode touches on trauma, cultural conditioning, and the countercultural practice of stewarding our authentic desire as devotional work. Rohini also shares how these practices are at the heart of her Root + Rise membership community, which is now open for autumn enrollment.

If you’ve ever felt torn between longing for more and fearing your desires, this episode offers a grounded, Nature-aligned perspective — one that empowers you to become a steady, compassionate vessel for the desires that want to root and rise through you.

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Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

Welcome to Root and Rise the space where we explore the vaster, unseen nature aligned rhythms that govern life.

I'm Rohini Walker, and I'm so happy you're tuning in. Today, I want to talk about desire, not the surface kind of wanting and craving, but those deep soul, aligned values, aligned desires, the ones that stir something, something ancient in your body and call you towards a truer way of living.

These desires are at the heart of my own practice, and they're also a core part of the work that I do with my clients. And as always, I turn to the body first, the body's language of sensation, which is also the Earth's language, has become my most trustworthy compass. Through sensation, I can feel the difference between a fleeting craving and the current of an authentic desire that wants to move through me.

Desire, in this sense, isn't random or frivolous, it's nature's evolutionary intelligence, alive in our cells and our tissues, moving through us as us.

For a long time, I knew this intellectually. I had read it, studied, it nodded along to the teachings. But knowing it through the body, through the slow, sometimes uncomfortable integration of what actually felt true and what didn't feel true, that's a whole other dimension of knowing. It's the difference between reading about fire and sitting by a campfire, letting its warmth soak into our bones, that kind of knowing feels more like Gnosis, a revealed wisdom, a felt sense intimacy with the mysteries of life.

All to say that it's very likely that our meander off onto some relatively uncharted terrain here in this episode, which is one of my favorite things to do.

But first, I want to ground us in a poem.

You may be familiar with it. It's on children by the Lebanese American poet and artist Kahlin Gibran from his beloved book the Prophet.

I invite you to listen to this poem, not only as some great guidance for parenting if you happen to be a parent, but through the lens of desire. Imagine every time you hear the word children in hearing desires also just to note that the Prophet was published in 1923 so given its historical and cultural context, don't be put off by the generalized masculine reference to the divine in

so here's the poem on children by Kahlil Gibran, 

and a woman who held a babe against her bosom, said, speak to us of children.

And he said, your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

They come through you, but not from you.

And though they are with you, they belong not to you.

You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies, but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth.

The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite and he bends you with his might that his arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness, for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so he loves also the bow that is stable you

Isn't that powerful to me. It's some of the most profound guidance on how to steward not only our children but our authentic desires, because when we stop trying to own or control our soul's desires. When we stop subjecting them to comparison and to timelines and to our cultural checklists, they're free to bloom in their own rhythm and our job shifts from forcing to tending, we become the steady bow the soil, the vessel through which these sparks of evolution can root and rise. And this is where nervous system work comes in, because being steward of desire requires resilience. It asks us to bend sometimes against the weight of judgment or disapproval when we choose differently from our family of origin or our social circles or our culture, from whatever weight of external expectations are put on us, it asks us to hold the tension of not knowing, to stay with the discomfort of the in between, to keep listening without a flexible, attuned nervous system, we abandon these authentic desires before they have a chance to grow.

But with practice, our bodies and systems can become fertile ground for these desires to take root and rise up into form.

We cultivate the capacity, the internal spaciousness and resilience to allow them to grow and bloom and express in their own time, in their own way, recognizing that they belong to the rhythms of a much faster unfolding, a greater evolutionary process that we're also participating in, and our participation gets to be free from coercion and forcing and attachment and resistance, our practice is about becoming supportive stewards of our authentic desires, into becoming the stable foundations through which they can move from unmanifest reality into manifest reality, which is the process of spirit or energy alchemizing into form or matter, the process of creation.

We our psyches, our imaginations, our bodies, our hearts, become the bridge for that process. Stewardship, in this sense, is being a bridge between the internal or unmanifest dimensions to the external or manifest

let's take a quick pause here.

Take a breath with me.

Let yourself land back in the body.

Notice is there resonance or dissonance?

A remembering don't rush past it. These sensations, these subtle currents of yes and no, of your yes and your No, are your guides, especially in this age of endless noise and voices and information the body's innate wisdom is your most trustworthy Oracle and your most trustworthy guide.

So back to the topic of these authentic desires, I want to call in the ancient Indian Vedic perspective. Here, the Vedas are a body of knowledge that has guided seekers for 1000s of years. The Vedic perspective on desire runs counter to a lot of pathologized conditioning that still lives in so many of us around the nature of desire from the Vedic perspective, these authentic desires are not something to fear or suppress in the Vedas desire, meaning our authentic soul desires as distinct from our addictions and compulsions, which are usually trauma responses of some sort and feel completely different in the body. In the Vedas, our authentic desires are recognized as nature's evolutionary impulse arising from the unified field of consciousness, the same field that births galaxies and trees and the beating of the heart, anything that is known and noble, no matter how subtle or how dense, arises from and returns To, the one indivisible, unified field of consciousness, quantum mechanics has in recent decades affirmed this, which is also why a fair few quantum physicists are also students of the Veda, these authentic soul desires which originate in the unified field. Like all phenomena, from the subtlest to the densest are nature's evolutionary flow moving through us and moving as US

nature is the larger organizing intelligence that governs evolution, including the multiplicity of death and rebirth cycles, including the ones that go on in our cellular and atomic processes. When unimpeded, everything is constantly regenerating, and when we get out of nature's way, which is also getting out of our own way. Evolution is all that's ever really happening, according to the Vedas and desire is the initial impulse that sets this whole creative process in motion.

So when we connect with the sensational impulse of our authentic soul and values aligned desires bubbling up in us that's our individuality being engaged as an instrument of evolutionary change.

The mistake that we often make is grasping onto the desire as if it belongs to us, as if it originates from our small self, much like when parents make their child's perceived successes and failures about themselves, about the parents, rather than about the larger journey that the child is on.

This is when we move from stewardship of our desires to ownership of them. We claim ownership of our desires, and this leads to attachment and suffering.

Many people bring up the Buddhist view when they're offered this Vedic perspective on desire, namely, that the Buddha said that desire is the cause of all suffering.

In fact, there's a subtle but important misinterpretation here, as the Vedic meditation teacher and scholar Tom Knowles has pointed out, what the Buddha actually said about desire is that it's the authorship of desire that causes suffering, meaning that it's the belief that we are the authors of our desires that cause suffering. It's the belief that the small self, the persona identified self, the one who takes things personally is the author, the originator of the desire which causes suffering.

This belief is what leads to attachment and craving and control and inevitably suffering.

When we do this from the Vedic perspective, we're committing theft. We're appropriating the desire as ours, and in the process, layering all sorts of meanings onto it. If I get this, it means I'm successful. If I don't get this, it means I'm a failure, etc, etc.

Somatically in the body, there's constriction and contraction from the attachment and the appropriation, contracting around the authentic desire that wants to move through us again, leading to an experience of suffering in the body, not to mention stifling and impeding nature's creative impulse and flow.

We weigh it down with all of our shoulds, our timing, our urgency, and we cut off life force from ourselves and the desire that's here to be birthed through us. Again, from the Vedic perspective, whenever we violate the laws of nature and block her evolutionary movement, we create suffering for ourselves and inevitably, for the world around us when we appropriate nature's desires that bubble up in us as our authentic soul aligned desires, we create suffering for ourselves and the world, but when we relate to them as movements of a vast intelligence flowing through us, everything shifts.

And yes, I know all of this is easier said than lived, especially when trauma loops or old conditioning keep telling us that we're not worthy and that we'll be judged and that it's safer to do what's expected of us, to conform, etc, especially when the culture rewards conforming and submitting. This is why the practice of stewarding these soul and nature aligned desires is radically counter cultural and deeply necessary.

I understand that it's all well and good to say all this but difficult to implement when we're still identified with the wounds of being inherently unworthy and bad and sinful and all that rubbish that we're indoctrinated with from when we're children and we have no psychological filters to protect us. I understand that it's difficult when the harmful cultural and intergenerational conditioning that we have to prove ourselves to be worthy and deserving is still looping in our nervous systems, causing us to appropriate these bubbles of soul and nature, align desires and attach our worth and our value to them and get in the way of the evolutionary process.

This is why I speak of stewardship as devotional practice.

Each time you say yes to an authentic desire of recognizing it as the sacred guidance that it is, we simultaneously enter into the process of meeting the parts of ourselves that are still stuck and looping on the traumatizing constructs of the dominant culture.

It's through this that we realize that it was never really about the desire. After all, it was never about us getting whatever it is that we mistakenly project our innate worth and value onto.

We realize that it was about our own evolution, our own embodied becoming of who and what we truly are through compassionately tending and resolving and releasing the parts of us that are looping in unworthiness and shame and pain and scarcity and all the other unnatural and damaging imprints of this dying dominant culture we compost the imprints of shame and scarcity and unworthiness, and in that alchemy, we become more fully who we are and flow with the current of evolution, not against it. This is the work we do together in my online membership community, also called root and rise inside, we intentionally elicit and attune to our core values, a direct portal to the soul so that we can feel and recognize the desires that are truly ours to steward.

And we cultivate the inner soil the nervous system capacity and resilience that allows those desires to take root and flourish without coercion and without force.

This work is about feeling the safety and eventually the freedom from being guided by embodied Gnosis, not from external constructs and teachings or should infused conditioning. It's about discovering that it is possible to thrive when we align with our soul bodies which are inseparable from nature. Root and rise is now open for autumn enrollment until September the 30th.

If your body is humming with a curiosity or a resonance, you'll find the link to join in the show notes. And if you have any questions or reflections or disagreements from this episode, I'd love to hear from you. I want to deepen into this topic in future episodes, and responding to you is the perfect way to do that.

So let's close with another breath.

Let your inhale deepen what landed for you today, and let your exhale release anything that isn't aligned for you.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for your sacred attention, until next time say yes to nature's evolutionary current moving through you as your soul's desires you.