Every time I see one of those posts saying “Women want…” or “Men need…” or “This is what turns women on…” I’m like:
Really? Which women?
How can we generalize like that? Haha. We are unique beings, folks. What turns someone people on, puts another people off, do you get that?
And I don’t mean only sexually. I mean what attracts us to people, what fascinates us and makes us want to get closer.
Desire is personal... and complicated.
Look at this drawing I’ve just made.
Excuse the artistic skills.
The symbol in the middle is based on one of the oldest ideas in Chinese philosophy: yin and yang. The idea goes back thousands of years, even though the familiar black-and-white symbol came much later.
And no, yin doesn’t literally mean “evil” and yang doesn’t mean “good.” Darkness isn’t bad and light isn’t good.
That’s actually the point. They are different forces that belong to the same whole.
And notice something else about the symbol: there is darkness inside the light and light inside the darkness, none of them exists in some perfectly pure state.
That got me thinking 🤔
We understand quite easily what happens when what we call the “dark” side of human nature takes over.
Look around 🙄
Violence. Cruelty. Greed. Hatred. Destruction. People completely consumed by their wounds, impulses, rage, fear or hunger for power.
You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize to recognize that as imbalance.
But what about the other direction?
What happens when someone tries to become all light?
What happens when we become so identified with being loving, conscious, spiritual, peaceful, compassionate, detached and “good” that there is no longer anywhere for jealousy, anger, ambition, lust, vanity, ego, aggression, money, status, power, selfishness or plain old human contradiction to go?
Where does all that stuff go? Because I don’t think it disappears and this is one of the things that fascinates me about spirituality.
I’ve met people who seem to have no shadow whatsoever. Everything is love, acceptance, consciousness, surrender…which is cool but:
Sorry, where’s your shadow?
And I am not saying you need to behave badly and you need your darkness should be acted out. And that’s not because I think “balance” means being Buddha on weekdays and a psychopath on the weekend.
I mean this: Where are the parts of you that don’t fit the person you think you’re supposed to be?
Where is your big ego? (yes, you have it), where’s your desire? your ambition? your sexuality? that part of you that wants to be seen? or wants money?
Where is the animal in you (yes, it is there)?
I am currently “integrating” my bits and pieces that I have had scattered for a long time while figuring myself out.
And by the way, you will soon find out what I am cooking and it is yummy.
What’s my point?
Ah, yes. the ugly parts of ourselves. What if we just look at them and accept them?
That’s my Conscious Desire project.
Desire does not need to be killed, neither has the ego, we are human! We will never get rid of those things regardless of how many spiritual retreats we attend or how much incense we consume.
Awareness.
That’s the word we need to start using more and more. What is there? What does it come from?
So anyways, if you see sentences like: “women want…” or “men want…” , scroll past.
Desire doesn’t belong to “women” or “men”, it belongs to people.
Individual, contradictory, complicated human beings with histories, bodies, fantasies, wounds, values, personalities, conditioning, shadows and souls.
So no. I can’t tell you what turns women on, I wouldn’t even try but I can tell you what turns me on.
And you are going to be really surprised…
