Your Very Own Pandora’s Box
Unearthing Your Desires
Re-kindling desire is basically the transition from numb to alive, ordinary to extraordinary, profane to sacred, productive to playful, separate to connected.
ESTHER PEREL
You want a compass? An inner guidance system by which to navigate your crazy, splendid life? You’ve got one, sister. It’s your Oracle.
What calls you out on the open road with your Oracle at the wheel, what directs you to the place where X marks the spot, what compels you to kneel down and start digging — are your desires. The Pandora’s box that you bring up from where it has been buried — contains your desires.
Your desires are what you want, what you strongly long for. Your desires, heroine, are the call to adventure. Your desires are your cool soul’s instructions mixed with your body’s lust for life, tugging at you, whispering to you, and pulling you along your path. Yet, what woman among us doesn’t have a fraught relationship with her desires?
Your desires, alas, are generally neither simple nor straightforward. Each desire is a unique fusion of the inner voices you just distinguished in the last chapter. It’s like this: find yourself a nice big treasure chest and into it pour some sensations and a few emotions; a big splash of intuition; a couple instincts, impulses, and urges; and a double dose of longing. Mix vigorously, and then garnish with a doubt and a delusion or two, and voilà! You’ve got yourself one delicious Pandora’s box of desires.
Pandora, if you don’t know her, is a much-maligned, mythical female, famous for lifting the lid of the very box she was told not to, led by her desire to understand the mystery of what lay within. She certainly isn’t the first (or only) woman to be condemned for her disobedience, shamed for her longings, and blamed for letting loose all manner of torments and troubles into the world.
But not everyone interprets Pandora’s myth as a cautionary tale of how evil came to the world — through a woman. One understanding of the name Pandora is “she who sends up gifts.” In an alternate interpretation of her story, Pandora embodies the sexy fertility of the earth and its capacity to “send up gifts” such as seeds and fruits and pearls and other treasures for the benefit of all humankind.
And yet, you may be wary about listening to your Oracle, lifting the lid of your desires, and letting your longing loose in the world. Aren’t your desires the very things that limit your awareness, dumb down your human potential, lead you astray, and propel you compulsively toward pleasure one moment and away from pain the next? Not necessarily. As my friend and author Jena la Flamme says, “Desire is not the same thing as compulsion, addiction, or unconscious consumption, though many people mistakenly confuse them.”
As a human and as a woman, your desires can be some of the most exalted parts of you, not some of the least. Your desires are the longings of the Universe, longing to be lived through you and as you. Your Oracle’s specialty is alerting you to your desires. As the thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet Rumi says, “Your longing for the Divine is divine.” Letting your Oracle alert you to your desires and steer you in their direction will keep you forever walking on the path of Feminine Genius.
Each desire is a complex amalgam of lead and gold, of delusion and vision, of the sensual and the spiritual, of trouble and treasure. A desire can be just as easily G-rated as X-rated. It can be mild, medium, or spicy. A desire can be simple or multidimensional, Technicolor, and elaborate. A desire can be a prescient nudge, a creative impulse, a simple truth, or an inspired vision. A desire can be a tangible, actionable, obtainable thing or experience, directing you to “visit the pyramids in Egypt,” “take a week off,” “get a massage every week,” or “learn how to have multiple, full-body orgasms.”
Nevertheless, desires need to be honed. Without opening the lid on your Pandora’s box and examining the contents, you just don’t really know what kinds of jewels — and what kinds of challenges — lie inside. And that’s part of the point. Sorting through your desire’s contradictions to find the jewels of truth inside is as much the point as is fulfilling any desire. Getting what you want is not nearly as important as what you must learn — and who you must become — as you try to get it.
HONING YOUR DESIRES
One hot August afternoon over a decade ago, I sat on the steps of a Manhattan brownstone with my friend and mentor Regena Thomashauer (aka Mama Gena) while she savored a cigarette. For some reason, she got me talking about my early twenties, a time I refer to as my “early midlife crisis” period. I had left my fancy college dance program to “find myself” by living on my own in a strange city far from home, newly of legal drinking age.
I told Regena about a habit I developed where I would stalk unsuspecting yet handsome young men in dive bars as a valiant attempt to meet my soul mate. At the time, I didn’t really see it as a problem because I was such an easygoing, charming, and well-intentioned stalker. However, each guy, without exception, sometime between date one and date two, would literally say out loud to my face, “I am not your soul mate.” But I would sleep with him again once or thrice just to be sure. “My desires were all messed up. I just didn’t have good inner wisdom at that time in my life,” I told Regena.
“Oh no, darling,” she told me. “Your desires were working just fine. You were developing your inner wisdom.”
Oh, I realized. I’m not deficient in inner wisdom. It can be developed. I felt a little less troubled and a little more wise. Too stunned to say much else, I said, “Huh. Wow. Well, thank you!”
“You’re welcome. But next time, try, ‘thank you, it’s true.’” Regena winked at me. “Might as well admit you’re pretty great, mess and all.”
As it turns out — and what I took from my conversation with my mentor — although your desires are natural and wise, they aren’t necessarily good to go right out of the mouth of your Oracle. Although your desires are transmissions from Feminine Genius herself, they also come through your unique, wounded, wonderful psyche and body. The woman who can hear the voice of her soul speak to her through her Oracle is the same woman who learned early on that she should not speak until spoken to, that a lady closes her legs when she sits, that she is not as smart as her brother, that she should look pretty so she doesn’t end up a poor spinster, that boys are only after one thing, that everything that feels good is bad, and that it is all up to her so she has to do it all herself.
As it turns out, you aren’t meant to simply fulfill an unexamined desire, but instead to chip away at each surface-level desire to reveal the deep desire inside. However much a desire might be a holy messenger, it still needs to be honed. This honing process — opening the lid of the box, peering inside, sorting rock from gem, burning away lead to lay bare veins of gold — requires ever-expanding self-awareness and discernment.
You know you are in the honing process when you make a mess, fall on your face, and then ask yourself, “What would I do better next time? If I look back with what I know now, what wisdom was at play that I couldn’t see then? From that experience, what do I want to toss and what do I want to keep?”
My desire as a twenty-something to find a soul mate wasn’t inherently flawed. I had to try a few (or twenty) one-night stands to hone my desires and to turn up the volume on my inner wisdom. I would love to save you a few unwanted one-night stands and a few unnecessary empty tequila bottles; however, learning to trust your Oracle and hone your desires through the process of trial and error is as it is designed to be.
Surface Desire versus Deep Desire
In a moment, I’ll lead you through an exercise that is designed to help you excavate the deep desire inside a surface desire. A surface desire is still a desire, and it can feel urgent, such as wanting to eat an entire chocolate cake, quit your job, or hop in the sack with the UPS guy. But ultimately, your surface desire might not be fulfilling. And it might leave you with a bellyache, a headache, or a long spell of regret.
To use the UPS guy as an example, the surface aspect of your desire might be for sex with that hot guy toting your packages, but your deeper desire might be for something like: life-force running through your body; spontaneity; being able to say yes to an opportunity that literally comes knocking on your door; spiritual union; feeling desirable and attractive; or changing the sexual agreements in your marriage to include having intimacy and sex with others.
If you just go with the surface desire and hop in bed with the UPS guy, you could miss the deeper wisdom and reasons embedded within your desire, and you could do something that violates your personal ethics. However, once you learn to distinguish your surface from deep desires, you can start to figure out ways to get your deep desires met without necessarily trampling on your boundaries and values.
DESIRE PRACTICE SORTING SURFACE FROM DEEP DESIRES
Don’t be scared by the length of this practice. The more you do it, the more natural and effortless it will become, so what used to be a series of in-depth contemplations will eventually be just a few moments of self-inquiry.
1 Pick one of your desires. A desire is an experience, understanding, or thing that you want, that you long for, that enlivens you, that calls to you. If you are having trouble accessing what you want, you can check in with the yes feelings in your body. Or, you can ask your Oracle, “What do I desire?” If it is helpful, you can remind yourself it is safe to know your desires, and you can thank yourself for the courage to share your desires.
2 With curiosity rather than judgment, ask yourself (or your Oracle) some or all of the following questions and write (or record) the answers you receive:
• When this desire is met, what will I feel (emotions, impulses, and sensations)?
• When this desire is met, what will I know about myself (beliefs, abilities, capabilities, sense of self, frames of mind)?
• What feels most important about meeting this desire?
• Assuming there is a rebellious, disgruntled teenager in me, what might that part of me be acting out against, moving away from, proving or disproving, reclaiming or avoiding by having this desire?
• Assuming there is a vulnerable, unsafe-feeling, small child in me, what might that part of me be defending, protecting, numbing to, attempting to fix, trying to save, or simply hoping for by having this desire?
• How might this desire positively impact me/my partner/my family/my community (in ways perhaps not easily seen at first glance)?
• How might this desire negatively impact me/my partner/my family/my community (in ways perhaps not easily seen at first glance)?
3 Find a “baby step” — a small chunk of this desire — to experiment with. Ask yourself (or your Oracle) the following questions as a guide. You can also enlist help from a friend or partner, if you want.
• Are there easier, simpler, more effective ways that will have less impact on me/my partner/my family/my community to get some or all of this desire met?
• What is the smallest chunk of this desire that I could experiment with and use as research to get more information?
4 After you experiment with your “baby step,” make sure to self-reflect on these questions:
• What worked?
• What didn’t work?
• What would I like to repeat, and what would I like to not repeat?
• What about the experiment am I most grateful for?
• What do I want my next step to be?
FOLLOWING YOUR DESIRES
Following your desires is one of the keys to living a Feminine Genius life and becoming the woman you long to be. But it’s also no joke. When she calls, or you call her in, there is just as likely to be a joy storm as a shit storm.
I experienced this firsthand with my friend Sera, an author and recovering Harvard-trained comparative religions scholar. One evening, Sera was taking a break from writing to let other humans visit, and I was the lucky human. Generally, Sera preferred to hang out with the Divine Feminine (who can blame her?), her trash-talking parrot, Anaya, and her tiny Chihuahua, Lalla, who is named after the often-naked Sufi mystic poetess and who has a compulsive and mostly endearing licking habit. The dog licked, I mean. About the naked poetess, I couldn’t say.
While we ate take-out Burmese food, Sera showed me a newspaper article from the New York Times in which she was featured, along with two of her friends, as three women to watch as rising stars in the world of fresh voices for young women’s spirituality. She had a dazzling list of opportunities knocking at her door and promising projects she was in the middle of — even Oprah was expressing interest. But her inner guidance had said no, to all of them. So, she had shakily said no, as well. She explained to me that the guidance she was listening to was the voice of her soul — or as I call it, Feminine Genius, which, as you know by now, often has other plans for you than what you have planned.
At the time, with a plate of spicy noodles on my lap and a tiny dog licking my arm, I thought that Sera should hang up on her soul and get back on the line with Oprah. But over the years, I started to feel the power, the essence, the energy, the truth, and the intelligence of what it was that Sera was listening to and acting on. I started to glimpse what is more precious than the gold stars of achievement, and I started to understand why any of us might pick tuning in to our Feminine Genius over tuning in to Oprah.
(As an aside, I freakin’ love Oprah Winfrey. A woman who embodies self-esteem and who has created an empire while modeling how to responsibly wield wealth and power? Who has dedicated her life to empowering others to live truer and more meaningful lives? More, please. However, neither she nor whatever she endorses is a substitute for your own inner guidance.)
Steering your life by your desires is not about guaranteeing one particular outcome or another. It’s about the quiet fulfillment that comes from a path well walked and the radical sovereignty that comes from coming home to yourself.
Oh, the places you and your desires will go! The world you will remake as you walk! The life you will reclaim as you go! Dear One, listen.
through your desires
Feminine Genius whispers to you
LIFE IN THE FIELD
Remember how Feminine Genius likes to make her home more in quantum reality than in Newtonian reality (back in chapter 4)? Let me introduce to you the quantum phenomenon of a “field,” an invisible, nonmaterial, organizing, intelligent energy. You might also be familiar with it from the work of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst who brought us the idea of archetypes and the collective unconscious. The quantum field is the shared mind, the collective memory, or the collective soul.
Scientific experimentation with quantum fields begins to explain things such as dream sharing, telepathy, premonition, precognition, telekinesis, limb regeneration, remote viewing, garden-variety intuition, and the phenomenon wherein groups of the same species of animals who are separated by great geographical distances learn to do the same new skill at generally the same time, or learn a skill that previous generations knew how to do, but was forgotten for long spans of time. The idea of the quantum field helps to explain how specific habits and beliefs are passed down through the “emotional DNA” of human family systems, and then expressed by family members who, often, have never met.
Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and researcher of quantum fields, says;
Magnetic fields extend beyond the surfaces of magnets; the Earth’s gravitational field extends far beyond the surface of the Earth, keeping the moon in its orbit; and the fields of a cell phone stretch out far beyond the phone itself. Likewise the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains [and bodies]. Fields . . . do most of the things that souls were believed to do.1
The tugs and pulls of the Universe that quantum researchers refer to as a field, I call your soul. Your soul, our soul — same thing. As writer Lynn McTaggart puts it, a field is like a phone network and all parts are always on the line. Your desires are the voice of the collective soul calling out to be lived through you and as you. And your Oracle picks up the call.
As women tapping into our desires and tapping into Feminine Genius, we are using the same forces that are at work in a quantum field. As we feel and intuit and hone our desires, we are in conversation with a larger, soul-based field that extends beyond our human bodies into the collective, shared consciousness. Our desires are an interface between an extrasensory field and our sensory-based world, between our soul and our workaday existence, between our Feminine Genius and our female bodies, between the other world and this one.
Our desires are also the blueprints for futures yet to be. In a quantum reality, where time and space are simply suggestions, it is as Rupert Sheldrake suggests: “Each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.”2 Our desires will change who we, individually and collectively, will become. Our desires will change who we, individually and collectively, remember ourselves to be.
Desires are memories of the future.
NISHA MOODLEY
When you excavate a deep desire and then let that truth loose into the world, you not only affect yourself and your own destiny, but you also affect humankind backward and forward in time, now and in the future. You create waves that will be felt by women and men you have never seen or met, on the opposite side of the world or in an inaccessible culture. Your desires come from the other world — the world of soul, spirit, mystery, creative energy, and divine intelligence. When you follow your desires, and hone them as you go, they will lead you and me right into a new world-to-be that is richer, brighter, more aligned with truth and beauty than the one you and I are in right now. What you feel, what you know, and what you desire, will change the world.
Feminine Genius — the feminine flavor of God, the intelligent energy of our collective soul — loves to get your attention through your desires. A woman in this kind of intimate, ongoing conversation with the collective soul is a living embodiment of Feminine Genius. Your desires have something brilliant to tell you, if you would only unearth the treasure box and listen in. And your Oracle makes a lovely gateway for your desires to make their way into this world.
You suppose you are the trouble, but you are the cure.
RUMI