The Trouble with Raging Desire
My house-moving trauma, transformed
In February I was visited by an overwhelming desire. After a decade of living in community I became desperate to live separately - a little house just for me, Kaspa and the dogs.
Since then I have been on a rollercoaster of a ride as we’ve navigated the various challenges involved in meeting this desire.
First: Kaspa wasn’t at all ready to move out of the Buddhist community we’d run for ten years1. Second: we were renting out the small house we needed to sell, and our tenant’s situation was complicated - how could we support them to be rehoused? Third: we fell in love with a few houses and lost them. Fourth: our house sale has been massively complicated. In early July our offer on our dream house was accepted, and we still don’t know whether or not it’s going to fall through2.
As you’ll know if you’re a Going Gently reader, or if you’re one of my dear friends who’ve been putting up with me going on and on about this, it has been one of the most challenging years of my life so far.
It turns out (shock horror) that I’m a teensy bit of a control freak. And it also turns out that buying and selling houses is not totally under my control - however much information I gather, however often I chase, however skilfully I manipulate. My huge desire to move (rrrraoooarrrr) has repeatedly met the brick wall of helplessness and frustration and despair, and it has threatened to consume me completely.
They say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Mine appeared via a trusted friend: she’s called Tosha Silver. Silver’s life is guided by a number of principles that have been the perfect antidote for my year of raging desire.
Silver says that we can trust something other than our small selves to know what is best for us. She tells us that this force or energy or whatever it is (I usually call it the Buddha but let’s call it Great Love for now3) knows what it’s doing, and that we can open ourselves to receive more if we go with the flow of life rather than against it. She teaches folks to make offerings of their desires, and then ask Great Love to show them what’s best for them instead.4
For months I had been putting her advice into practice, and I was noticing some great results, but the desire for a quicker house-move raged on.
I was waiting for two final pieces of the puzzle. The first was this favourite quote of Silver’s, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj:
The only thing required of you is to allow all your raging desires to relax into preferences. Then everything will be done through you and for you, not by you.
It struck me like a bell.
The second was a suggestion in an interview with Silver. She said that when we can’t budge our desperation to have things turn out a certain way, when we are confused and battered and lost, when things are utterly intractable, we can pray for a miracle. We can ask for Great Love to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.
Last week, after an especially tortuous sleepless night and hours of trying to work out what I could say to our buyer to get him to do things differently, I got up before the crack of dawn and read about this prayer. It broke me open - or maybe I was already broken. From the bottom of my despair, I called out to Great Love for a miracle.
Nothing changed.
Also, everything seemed to change. Calm lapped over me. When I thought about the move, and our dream home, it felt like cooling balm had been poured all over my unbearable itch. Would we get the house or lose it? I still very much wanted it, but if it didn’t work out, I knew that I would survive. I knew we would find somewhere else, different but equally beautiful.
Most importantly I knew deep in my bones that it wasn’t the house that would make me happy. My happiness depends on refuge in something much deeper. It depends on remembering that I could lean into Great Love’s capable arms, and that she would hold me.
My raging desire had been transmuted into a preference.
A final test. We are waiting for one final thing before exchange and this should only take a couple of weeks. Yesterday we unexpectedly heard from our solicitor that something new had come up - something that (when I looked hastily online) could take between 5 weeks and 4 months to resolve.
4 months!! And yet, I didn’t go crazy. My heart didn’t speed up. I didn’t gnash my teeth or wail or even whimper.
What I felt instead was an amused ‘here we go again’, a faint feeling of frustration, and a curiosity about what would happen next.
I haven’t been miraculously transformed into an enlightened being. This morning the parts of me that want to manipulate are tugging on my skirts again - try this! Contact the buyer again! Try that! I’m still on a rollercoaster, just a much gentler one. I will need to keep handing these things over and taking extra care of myself.
I do think that something important happened this week. I turned a corner, found my sea legs, surrendered. I know that, even though my human fallibilities will keep tripping me up, I have a new reserve of steadiness which will accompany me always.
I also felt, for the first time and to my great surprise, grateful for the delays in the house-moving process. If I hadn’t been pushed to my limits so many times this year, would I have reached a point of surrender? Would I have seen the depth of the desperation of my wanting so clearly? Would I have been so perfectly ready for Silver’s teachings, and for all the teachings still to come?
I don’t think so.
I do want to move into our new house, which is just the right size for us and is surrounded by green and which has a BATH.
I also know that the perfect house won’t fix all my problems. More money won’t do it, or more popularity, or even more expensive chocolate.
When I lean into Great Love, I know that I am okay.
I can do that anywhere.
Go gently,
Satya <3
Up next I’ll be starting a new series on the brilliance behind everything - known in Internal Family Systems as Self-energy. Read more about IFS (with puppies) here. If you’d like to join me on an exploration of the eight qualities of Self, starting with curiosity, look out for the first piece this Friday.
I’m happy to say that they are now very much on board, and I am very grateful to them for their support throughout this process.
The situation in the UK is that anyone can pull out at any point up until exchange, with no consequences.
Please use whatever word works best for you here - the Earth, God, Divine Source, the Buddha etc… the important bit is that this force is benign, that it’s unimaginably vast and unknowable, and that it isn’t your small self!
This is a vast oversimplification. If you’re at all interested I’d recommend her book of short anecdotes from her life which illustrate her guiding principles - Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead. Take what you like and leave the rest.
This is such a tender post Satya. And one I needed to read today.
After my 11 days of hospital limbo, many tests and hoops to jump thru and finally an embolization (scary procedure) of my most current venous fistula, I returned home.
It’s so good to be home, and so challenging to not have improved at all yet.
The newest words from my MD are “wait two weeks, and if you’re not better, we’ll have you return for more (invasive) tests, and surgery”. The surgery carries the risk of chronic pain down my arm, but I might have the relief of being upright again.
I’m calling in Great Love to do what I cannot do, surrender and wait, while walking the path of perpetual unknown,
Thank you
This line hit me hard: "It turns out (shock horror) that I’m a teensy bit of a control freak." Isn't it funny how life has a way of revealing our hidden control tendencies, especially when we're chasing after something we desperately want? It's like the universe's gentle (or not-so-gentle) nudge to remind us that we're not the puppet masters we think we are.
I write this as a control freak. Haha.