Throwing Caution To The Wind: Uncovering What You Really Want

By Wayne Vriend

You may want a better job, or a more reliable car, or a car that says you are really cool, or the latest smart phone, or some new clothes, or a new friend, or your spouse or mate to change in some way. But if you were to take a look at whatever it is that you want and to ask yourself if there is a deeper need underneath the surface want or need, what do you think you might discover?

As you ask this question, try not to judge the the surface want or need as either vainly superficial or justifiably necessary. This way of judging your needs, both approving or disapproving of them, is all part of hiding from the desires and needs that are at the root of them.

Maybe the deeper want or desire is something like hunger for approval from others, or being noticed. Maybe it is a sense of self importance that you are craving. Maybe it goes deeper still to a need to feel Divine approval or love. These are all real human needs. I like being noticed and feeling that my life is important, and being approved by others I respect feels really good too.

What you and I really want is our lifeline in a sea of drowning humanity. Your deeper desires are keys to who you are at a deep level.

I’d rather feel genuinely important than rely on a physical object like a smartphone or a car, or an emotional object like my role or status in society, that does such a poor job of affording me any consistent feelings of self love.

Genuine human need is what underlies vanity and even hideous barbarism. All of us would behave the same way if our needs were being unmet in the same way, and if our present life and past life experiences were similiar.

So, what is that YOU really want?

It’s hard to know isn’t it? If you knew what you really wanted, you wouldn’t stumble along pursuing lesser wants whose fulfillments seem so short lived, and oftentimes cause deep hurt? Would you?

Most people do what they have been enculturated to do with this “problem” of desire. That is to kill it, or control it, or to manage it, so it doesn’t cause problems and pain.

We’ve made desire itself to be the bad guy. But the truth is that the very essence of being human and being alive is to have wants, is to desire, and being the most alive is to have the strongest wants and desires. What condition is your ‘wanter’ in? Dead people are people who no longer need or want anything.  Dead people don’t look longingly in storefront windows and they can’t be sold sex, or ice cream, or a career.

I sincerely believe that the root problems of our aches and pains in life, physically, emotionally and spiritually can be traced back to having a wanter that has been neglected and is in poor shape. Just as it requires a healthy metabolism to shed the weight your body no longer needs, so it requires strong healthy desire to let go of the things that you need to, and are ready to, in order to make room for the new things you really need and desire.

Maybe the definitive expression of vulnerability itself, is to feel the need for something that you don’t yet have access to, or control.

You have to in fact work to get it. You have to do the work of drawing it to yourself. This isn’t actually as hard as it sounds though. Doing work that is fun is what you did as a child without realizing it. You called it ‘play’ in fact. You gave all that you had in terms of time and effort and resources to get what you wanted, and you did it for the fun of it. Your parents may have questioned the appropriateness of your passion, or feared you ending up in a pile of disappointment, but not you. You went all out. You couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t. Any hurts you encountered along the way, you were sure to recover from. You threw caution to the wind.

So what happened since then? You were told a host of things, in language and tone that was foreign to you, such as: ‘that isn’t really a responsible way to live; money doesn’t grow on trees; you need to care not just for yourself; work should come before play; responsibility is being grown up.’ You were told a whole bunch of things designed by nearly dead people with nearly dead wanters who needed to dim the light of your wanter; who in fact needed to sacrifice your alive reality on the altar of their dark deadness. They needed you to tone down in order to not feel the pain of their chosen deadness. They needed you to live as a medication to their deadness. Hence the gospel of putting others needs before your own.

What happened is that you just had the permission to be childlike in this way robbed from your adult reality. I’d like to see it given back to you. I’d like to be around more people like you who ache to return back to this authentic way of being human. Humanity is depending on people like you to take back what you had, what is in fact native to you, but that you lost.

This is the harder work, but it too can be done with all the seriousness of a child at play, with Divine help and guidance, and with deep and lasting rewards that no man can ever take from you.

If my words resonate with you, and you know that getting help with this kind of a life change is part of what you really want, I’d be honored to help you. I’d get to have a lot of fun helping you and uncovering the parts of you that hold your deepest desires. But only if that is what you really want! The deepest cost isn’t the time, or the money, or the effort. The deepest cost is enduring the process as well as finding the willingness to let go of what you in fact don’t really want, but are only presently attached to.

I know of no greater bravery, and I see its’ potential in you!

​Visit soulfullheart.com for more articles and information about the SoulFullHeart healing process.

The End of Emotional ‘Extend and Pretend’

By Wayne

We are in the middle of huge change.

Just what is going on? And at what pace is that happening? And, more so, how will it affect me and my family? What’s a sane amount of preparation? To what degree are we going to have to ‘just wing it’?

Many of us are managing our lives and facing these new challenges in such a way as to remain buoyant, to look on the bright side, and not to succumb to an anxiety that we feel around us and in us. We’re afraid of going into our anxiety, for fear it will swallow us. If not swallow us, it certainly would slow us down, affect our performance on our jobs, affect our relationships, etc. Our success is dependent on our positive bearings, we feel. While that strategy feels like it has worked in times past, it is actually setting you up for a much harder landing, given the pace of change we are facing. This is essentially the ‘Extend and Pretend’ approach of our political, economical, and spiritual leaders, as reflected in our mainstream media, that has held so much of our allegiance.

This ‘extend and pretend’ approach also applies to how you relate to your internal reality. The challenge comes with getting in touch with your emotional reactions and conversant with what you really feel, especially what we call the, ‘negative’ emotions of shame, anxiety, and depression. In my opinion, allowing yourself to feel these feelings is the single most important thing you can do to prepare yourself to be in a place of fitness to face these unfolding changes. Nothing it seems  in our current society supports this kind of awakening. But, your depression and your anxiety and your attempts at control are not what’s wrong with you. They are the path to being the most real you and the most alive you and the most contributing-to-the-world you that can be. If you can embrace them.

I feel a voice, the voice of my own heart calling out to me, and you:

If you sign on to your most alive path, then you are about to enter the most interesting and intense journey, the most well written plot and sub plotted story, the story of you. But you can’t know and experience it any other way than by living your way into it, on this planet, at this interesting and transitional time. You already have it. You don’t need to attain something, or overcome something, or escape you in order to enter this very true story.

Your only requirement is yielding to this story of you.

If you sign on, Life will soon bring your first choice embarking into this story. You won’t know where it is going to end up, you will only know clearly in this one choice what YOU really want. Oh, you will have a wrestling of what you ‘should’ do and anxiety about the possible outcome, but in your heart, you will know what is the path of your true and real story, the internal script or scrip-ture of your life, for this one choice at hand. It will take huge courage, no doubt, but not more than you currently have available to you.

Living in this story will become your new mode of living. It offers you no guarantee of what is coming financially, or what is coming regarding your career, or even your relationships. Chances are strong that most people are not resonant with or ready to join you in your new way of navigating life. It’s funny this new way is all about navigating, but nothing about controlling. You value the people in your life and the money and advantages you have, but you no longer live from the dead ground of basing life’s choices on protecting and preserving them, at the cost of your true story.

Life’s choices still come at you whether you sign on to this most authentic and magical journey of you or not; it’s just that the choice you make is often very different from what is considered safe or even sane.

As I write these words, my heart aches at the pain I’ve felt and the time and relationships it has taken for me to transition from an external scripture to an internal one. From an ‘extend and pretend’ mode of life to a real and authentic one. Arriving at adulthood, I attached myself so deeply to learning and living by the Christian Bible as the truth of all life, the meaning of all life, the guarantee that my living and breathing on this earth would come to the most meaningful outcome and the most reward, both in this life and the next if I lived out of and in allegiance to that truth. I see now that the challenge of following my own heart in the way and degree I describe above I was working towards, but not yet ready for. It was the most authentic journey of my life then. There was no possible other outcome it seemed. Until there was.

Actually, the story of you (as it was for me) is so difficult to let in, in fact, that most of our lives (and lifetimes) are spent in earlier domains while we gather the courage for the next step, the next true and authentic and totally natural step. And, none of this is wasted time or unnecessary pain as it all leads to growth.

There is such a deeper ground of living arising now, in the midst of global collapse, where the ‘extend and pretend’ modes of life are finally wrapping up. And we are all being invited to live an internal and external reality that is more in alignment with our authentic selves.

​Visit soulfullheart.com for more articles and information about the SoulFullHeart healing process.