The Permission to Want: Why You Hide What You Really Desire

Preparing a client for a retreat last spring, I sat across from a woman who had spent twenty years on her path. Meditation every morning. Years of training in energy work. A depth of presence you could feel through the Zoom. I asked her a simple question: if nothing were in the way, what would you want your life to look like ten years from now?

She smiled and said, “I try not to think in those terms. I trust that whatever is meant for me will come.”

It was a beautiful answer. It was also a locked door.

Because when I sat with her longer, going past the polished response, into the quiet underneath it, what emerged was not trust. It was a woman who had wanted to open a healing center for over a decade and had never told a single person. Not her husband. Not her teacher. Not even her journal. When her and I explored why this was so, her eyes filled, and she said something I have heard in a hundred variations: “If I say it and it doesn’t happen, I don’t think I could bear it.”

That sentence is the whole teaching. Not the spiritual language on top. The fear underneath and the beginning of an exploration into the root of this belief. 

The Disguise: When Surrender Is Really Spiritual Bypassing

Somewhere along the way, many of us on a conscious path picked up the idea that a truly surrendered person doesn’t want anything. That preferences are for the unevolved. That the highest state is a kind of serene neutrality where life happens and we simply nod.

So we learn to translate our longings into safer dialects. “I’m open to whatever unfolds.” “I’m releasing my agenda.” “I’m letting the universe drive.”

Sometimes those words are true. But often they are a costume. And what this costume is showing is not enlightenment, it is a cover for a wound that decided long ago that hoping is how you get hurt.

I think about a musician I worked with, a man with a hard drive full of finished songs going back nine years, and I repeat, nine years. When I asked when the world would hear them, he said he was “waiting for divine timing.” But divine timing, it turned out, had a very specific shape: it was the day he could release his music with zero possibility of it being ignored. That day does not exist. So the songs stayed in the drive, and the waiting got renamed as patience, and the patience got renamed as faith, and underneath all the renaming was a man terrified that his offering might land in silence.

Or the practitioner who kept her rates at a fraction of what her work was worth, telling us that “abundance flows when it’s ready”. At the same time, it was uncovered that she was quietly resenting her clients, her calendar, and eventually her calling itself. She wasn’t in the flow. She was in hiding, and the hiding had a spiritual vocabulary.

This is what our spiritual ego does. My quick and dirty working definition of the ego has always been simple: it is whatever stands between you and your values. And the spiritual ego is the version of it fluent in your own tradition, it is the part that can quote “spiritual-type” scriptures and mantras while walking you steadily away from your life.

You’re Not Afraid of Wanting — You’re Afraid of the Answer

Here is what I want you to see, because once you see it you cannot unsee it: almost nobody is actually afraid of desire. They are afraid of what happens after.

Desire itself is warm. It rises easily in daydreams, in the shower, on long drives. The fear arrives at the moment of commitment, at the moment the daydream would have to become a stated intention, spoken where reality can respond to it. Because a spoken desire can be answered, and one of the possible answers is no.

An unspoken desire can never fail. It just quietly costs you your life.

Think of an archer who loves everything about the bow, ex. the draw, the tension, the stillness of aim, BUT never releases the arrow. As long as the string is drawn, every possibility is still alive. The arrow might be a perfect shot. Release it, and you find out. So some part of us learns to live permanently at full draw: aiming, refining, preparing, visualizing, and never letting go. From the outside it can look like discipline. From the inside it is a body that has decided the moment of truth is the enemy.

That refusal to release takes two main forms, and if you look honestly you will find yourself in one of them.

Some of us go still. This is the woman with the healing center that exists only inside her. The man with nine years of songs. The endless certification-collectors, the ones taking “one more year to get clear,” the ones whose vision boards are updated more often than their lives. Nothing is wrong with preparation until preparation becomes the place you live so that reality never gets your vote to take action.

Some of us go soft. We don’t bury the wanting; we sand it down. We ask for the smaller version, the version nobody could object to. The practitioner who charges half her worth is doing this. So is the partner who says “wherever you’d like to go” for the four-hundredth time, not out of generosity but because stating a preference would mean it could be dismissed.

The soft ones often look easygoing, even saintly. But ask them, late at night, whether the life they’re living was chosen or negotiated down, and watch what moves across their face. I ask these types of questions and I see, hear and feel their responses.  I also see the mechanism: shrink the target, and the miss can’t hurt you. Shrink it far enough, and there is nothing left to miss, and nothing left to hit.

Surrender Is a Conversation: Your Desires Are Information

There may come a season in your own lives when you begin to stop bargaining. Separately, and at a real cost, you may quit negotiating your values down to fit the rooms you are in. And we can tell you from the inside: that way of living is not available to anyone who won’t say what they want.  Because your desires are not obstacles on your path. They are information about who you are. You will never discover yourself by thinking about yourself; the self is not a concept to be located but a set of values to be lived. And long before those values have language, they announce themselves as longing. The pull you keep overriding is often your own soul, speaking in the only voice it has.

This is why refusing to want is not surrender. Real surrender is a conversation, and a conversation needs two voices. You bring the wanting; life brings the shape it takes. Withhold your half and you haven’t transcended anything, you’ve simply gone silent at your own table and called the silence holy.

The archer who finally releases the arrow does not control the wind. That is the whole art. Full commitment in the release, full openness in the flight. Control insists the arrow land exactly where imagined or the shot was worthless. Fear refuses to shoot at all. But there is a third way to approach life: let loose the arrow with everything you have, and stay curious about where life places it. Some of the best things in both of our lives arrived as arrows landing somewhere we never aimed, but they only arrived because we drew, and then released because we meant it. 

A 7-Day Practice: Say What You Want Out Loud

Not a concept. A practice. Find the desire you have never said out loud, and you know the one; it probably surfaced while you were reading this. Within the next seven days, speak it to one living person, at full size. Not the version with the escape hatch. Not “someday I’d love to” , but say it plainly: I want this.

Your heart may pound or you may get edgy. Let it. This is not danger, it is a decade of you holding on to this, and finally it is moving through your body. And then notice what you were protecting all those silent years. Not yourself. Just the fantasy that you never entered the arena, and therefore never lost. It is a cold thing to be protected by.

So we will ask you what we asked the woman at the retreat, and what we keep asking ourselves: What have you wanted for so long that the wanting has gone underground? And who taught you that saying it out loud was the dangerous part, when the danger was always the silence?

If this is moving in you, reach out in person. Some conversations need to be had, with eye contact, and the courage of company. I would love to be there when you finally say it.