53 ~ Leaning Into Desire: Expanding Self-Trust and Infinite Possibilities

What if your true desires are the key to unlocking a more vibrant and fulfilling life? 
Imagine embracing your desires with openness and curiosity, even in the face of fear and resistance. 

Join us as we explore the transformative power of leaning into what you truly want, despite the natural inclination of our minds to protect us from potential disappointment and failure. We go through the complexities of identifying desires, managing resistance, and building emotional resilience and self-trust. Brenda shares how desire often appears as a subtle nudge from our soul, encouraging us to reach for something greater, and how consistent practice and self-love can empower us to back ourselves, even when the path is uncertain.

In this episode, we highlight the importance of viewing life as an infinite game, where success and failure are part of a continuous journey. Brenda opens up about her personal experiences of facing setbacks and feeling expanded from the act of pursuing her desires, emphasizing the significance of sharing your dreams with others and imagining their fulfillment. 

Through our heartfelt discussion, we underline the importance of self-trust, the support of friends, and the joy of saying yes to your desires. As we kick off Season 2, we invite you to lean into your desires with honesty and trust.

Chapters

• 0:08 Leaning Into Desire
• 13:36 Expanding Self-Trust Through Desire
• 18:51 Embracing Desire and Infinite Possibilities

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.

Speaker 2: 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life. Motherhood relationships and my business Desire has taken me on quite a ride and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within. I'm a middle school teacher turned coach and guide of the feminine.

Speaker 1: 0:36

And I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children, I've never been married. I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of tired and wired and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker and a forever student, even after decades of inner work.

Speaker 2: 1:00

We are humble beginners on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

Speaker 1: 1:12

On the Desires Medicine podcast. We talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked being responsible for our desire. Welcome back family. Hello listeners, so happy to have you. We are in season two. I am joined today by the lovely Brenda, my co-host of the Desire as Medicine podcast. Hey, brenda.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Hello, hello, welcome to season two, everybody.

Speaker 1: 1:44

So, if anybody's curious, season two to us just means this is our second year. That is what season?

Speaker 1: 1:50

two means there's all types of writings and write-ups as to what season two or what seasons mean and we decided you know what? We will complete our season one by just calling it. We Are a Year Old and now we're going into our second year, which is really really exciting. We had this big plan, brenda and I, that we were going to go into or go back to the desire, the basics, like rehashing kind of our first episode or our first one through eight, and as we were in that excavation, it was like wait a second. I would love, we would love to dive deeper into a piece of desire of when you start to lean into something that you want.

Speaker 1: 2:38

Sometimes leaning into the desire can be so scary, especially if it's something that you want, whether it's baby, home, car, job, relationship or anything that for you, is scary. There's some resistance, right, brenda, like there's like what happens if I don't have it, right? Like, what do you think about when you think of? Hmm, actually, I'm not going to go there just quite yet. I'm going to remind us and our listeners that we spent most of season one outside of the self-love series around really touching into what do you want?

Speaker 1: 3:19

Is that alone is big, like just deciding what you want is big enough, whether it is an ego desire, it's like in your mind, conditioned, subconscious, generational, whatever or it's in your soul like something that you're just yearning for and leaning and you don't even know the reason for it. Both of those can be very confronting. It can be and feel really big to get there. We hope that our previous episodes have really helped you come up with some of your desire lists and desire pulls. If not, you are welcome to go back and check out some of our toolbox editions. But after you know what you want, the next step is like going for it and leaning in right, and one of the first things that we hit is la resistance. Would you like to say more about resistance, brenda?

Speaker 2: 4:24

Ooh, I will say that resistance is real and our mind will come in and tell us all the reasons why we can't have this desire. And as we practice leaning into desire because it is a practice it's not something that we're automatically good at practice, it's not something that we're automatically good at we practice this over time you start realizing oh, my mind wants to keep me safe, my being wants to keep me safe. And what if I go for this desire and it flops? What if I go for this desire and I don't get it? That could be embarrassing. I might get sad or disappointed. That could be embarrassing, I might get sad or disappointed. And so part of the practice of going for desire is like, as we learn to regulate our emotions and we've talked a lot about this, about going down and going into the. You know the sad feelings and feeling your emotions. The more you're able to do that and trust yourself, the more I think you're willing to take a risk. You know and back yourself because you learn to trust yourself. You learn to trust yourself because you can handle some disappointment, you can handle some sadness and you know it depends where you are on your journey. It might take you a while to get there. So you might start small, with smaller desires leaning in and then, over time, you could build your capacity to go for some of those big desires. And yeah, the resistance is is real and it's. It's great to notice that it's resistance. We can't always believe what our mind is telling us. If we believe our mind, we will think that we can't have it. And something that we talk about on this podcast and something that I believe about desire is that it's kind of like it comes to you as a glimmer, it just drops in sometimes and it doesn't always make a lot of sense and you might say where did this come from? Why do I want this thing? Well, there could be many reasons, but it's your soul calling you to something bigger, something bigger for you in your life. And so if that desire comes to you, then it is for you and part of you know building the self-love with yourself is having the trust in yourself and using the self-love as fuel to back yourself to say I'm going to lean into this, even though my hands are shaken. I don't know what I'm going to say, I don't know how I'm going to have it. I don't know what I'm going to say I don't know how I'm going to have it, I don't know where I'm going to get the money, whatever your resistance is, and those things can seem really real. But what I want to say is don't listen to those things.

Speaker 2: 7:36

Going for your desire is a process and a practice and we don't go from A to Z right. There's all the letters in between, and the beautiful thing about desire is you could just follow the breadcrumbs. What if your first breadcrumb was just admitting to yourself that you want this thing? And that is actually huge. I don't want to say that that's something small. It's huge to admit to yourself that you want something Huge. And then we build that over time as a practice. And then, once you admit it to yourself, what's next? I don't know. For me it was sharing it with some friends recently a big desire and sharing it with people who I know, love me and know me and who back me and who reflect back to me oh, you want this thing, you can have this Just go for it.

Speaker 1: 8:48

That part, that part, that part is so good. Which part I want to piggyback on that? Brenda's talking about resistance. She's talking about you know how we don't want to automatically believe our minds. It's hard enough to decide what we want and then we want to lean into it. All the resistance pops up and she's saying your mind is going to have some thoughts. There will be some resistance and some of that resistance will come in the form of thoughts. There's other resistance. Sometimes we have Wi-Fi resistance, we have tech resistance. Sometimes we have airplanes or flights that don't show up. The car won't start. There's all resistance.

Speaker 1: 9:27

Believe it or not, we're energetic beings. We can really influence other things than just our minds. We can influence matter, but without going out too far in the conversation. Resistance will just be there, in whatever form that it is. And Brenda's saying you don't have to believe it and the mind will come up with all of the obstacles. The mind is like objection one, objection two, objection three, objection 599. Like all of the objections will step up and be in the forefront, letting you know all the reasons why this is not feasible, possible, rational, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 10:10

And Brenda's like the first thing she did recently, when she was wanting something, was she let people know and they were like, oh yeah, you can have it. And they were like, oh yeah, you can have it. And sometimes that is best backup, sometimes just that little phrase to another sister or your partner or a loved one, someone who comes to you and says I want to be an astronaut, and you're like, yeah, you can have it. I want to be married yes, you can have it. I want to buy a home yes, you can have it. When people come to declare their desires to us, they're not asking us how. They're like I want this, and we get to reflect back to them and say I believe in you by using the words you can have it. And just that in itself can allow, sometimes can be just enough fuel to get to the next stage of actually going for it being able to play.

Speaker 1: 11:15

Being able to play with life and lean into what you want with life and lean into what you want. Invite God, source, divine order, whoever you see as your higher power. But as we play and we invite all miracles to present themselves, as we invite the thing we desire to meet us in this life, we are also inviting the potential for disappointment. That just is. 50% of life is great, 50% sucks. And so sometimes we get what we want, sometimes we do not, and there is something to be said for just playing, as you heard Brenda talk earlier about. She was sharing. Oh, I have had this desire for something big and it took some time to lean into it. Then I went and I shared it with other people and they were like you can have it.

Speaker 1: 12:17

It's like putting ourselves in the field of life to play. Sometimes we win and sometimes there's an ouch or an ouchie. Sometimes we fall. Sometimes we win and sometimes there's an ouch or an ouchie. Sometimes we fall, sometimes we don't get what you want. And this is the place where we have a choice. We can self-regulate. We can say, oof, that hurt. Okay, I'm going to tend to myself, tend to my heart.

Speaker 1: 12:46

That does require some awareness. Some of us just like it up buttercup. Some of us close off, shut down and get numb or frozen. We would love today to invite you to soften and self-regulate, because there's something to be said about playing the game. There's a game that we want to point to again G-A-I-N. There's a game that we want to point to today and put on a pedestal. That gets to happen.

Speaker 1: 13:21

That doesn't happen if you don't play, and that is that leaning into our desires may lead us to having a feeling, a sensation of inner expansion.

Speaker 1: 13:36

Something can actually happen in that space where there's a possibility that you have more belief that you can have it as you share it with other people and you begin to daydream about what it's like to have it. There's an expansion that happens for you. You start to think about all the ways that you can participate in going after for what you want. You start thinking about how else can I have this, how else can I have this? And with that experience of playing, have this, how else can I have this? And with that experience of playing right, there's a somatic thing that happens, like you somatically start to create space inside of your energetic field, inside of your body, for potential reception of something. There is an actual physical sensation in wanting and being in the yearning of something that, even when the no comes, you could just say hmm, this is a no right now. It's not a no forever. What comes up for you, brenda?

Speaker 2: 14:44

Thank you for all of that. It feels really soothing to my system to hear all of that, and you know that one of my favorite things to talk about is playing the game. It's so important to play the game and it's so important to lean in, and I'm having this experience today desire kind of falling flat, like something that I wanted, that right now isn't looking like it's panning out, but it might. I don't know. But I've been leaning into the desire and playing the game and, my goodness, that is everything. It's everything. To play the game and let the universe know that you're willing to say yes to yourself and the universe will meet you and, like what you're willing to lean into the universe will give you and you build your capacity for that over time. And as far as playing the game honestly, it just makes life more fun If you look at life like an infinite game, instead of failure or success or good or bad, if we look at life like nonlinear, like something we just keep playing and keep playing. Life is so much richer that way because it allows us to take chances and lean in and not get so caught up in the trap of I have to have this thing, I have to have it this way.

Speaker 2: 16:31

I think that when we get stuck in that we there's like maybe, some internal belief that you're not going to be okay if you don't have this thing or you're not going to be able to handle it if it falls flat. And I will say that I had some sadness and disappointment today and that's okay. I feel this inner sense of expansion that I went for it and the game is not over. It gets still going, but for now, for today, it's on pause and I feel such an inner sense of expansion for having said yes, because this particular desire that I've been leaning into is something that I haven't known how to have.

Speaker 2: 17:21

I haven't known how to have it or if it's even possible, but it is true, it's something that I want and actually the how or the if is none of my business, but what is my business is opening up, like you said so beautifully, softening like just softening my body and saying yes and leaning in and seeing where it takes me. And it really does build a sense of deeper self-trust within myself to be going for something that I want. And I have to also say that it's been really great to have really good friends around me who support and back my desires. That's really everything. And in a time where I didn't think I could have it, people reflecting back to me oh, you can have it, just go for it. And I'm like, okay, let's do it. And honestly, that feels exciting.

Speaker 1: 18:42

It feels vibrant, it feels like life worth living, going for it. That's so good Life worth living, going for it. I love how you said that, brenda going in and leaning in towards something you really wanted, having it feel so expansive for you now. And yes, life is an infinite game and there may be a pause or even an end to this potential version of that goal, but we don't put everything down right, like you continue to go after what you want and the form could change and the way you want it could change and the way that it shows up could change.

Speaker 1: 19:14

That's what this game is about staying in the game, the game of desire, the game of going and leaning in, feeling the resistance, looking at okay, where do I believe that I can't have it? What would be one step closer? What would be a step I could take that would bring me one step closer to having what I want? And this is the invitation season two people, let's start leaning in to what we want, allowing for our source, god, higher self, to be waiting for us on the other side with a huge sign that says it's yours. Thank you so much, everyone for listening. And with that, season two has begun.

Speaker 2: 20:07

Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.

Speaker 1: 20:11

Desire invites us to be honest, loving and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.