Your Heart's Desire

To grow spiritually, you don't need to give up your BMW, become celibate, or banish all your aspirations.

By Rod Stryker

Many people in the yoga world these days seem to be confused about desire and its relationship to spirituality. A lot of yogis are under the impression that the more you desire, the less spiritual you are, and the more you grow spiritually, the less you'll desire. According to this logic, sincere yogis should strive to detach themselves from all desires and one day get to the point where they want nothing at all. But do the teachings of yoga really suggest that all desire comes from our "lower nature" or that all our urges must be written off as nonspiritual? Is desire, in the context of spirituality, at best the equivalent of a dog chasing its tail, and at worst, a pathway to spiritual bankruptcy?

To get some clarity on this issue, it may help to ask yourself why you began yoga in the first place. The answer, of course, is desire: You wanted something. Maybe you wanted to get rid of a nagging pain in your lower back or loosen your chronically tight shoulders; maybe a health care professional suggested you do yoga to help you slow down and de-stress.

Perhaps you were seeking to ease some emotional pain or heartache; perhaps you hoped to find more equanimity so you'd be less likely to snap at your children or an annoying coworker. Maybe you even longed for more internal silence so you could hear the quiet voice of intuition and conscience.

More than 2000 years ago the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most beloved and elegant Indian sacred texts, recognized that there were four major reasons that people sought out yoga. From lowest to highest, the Gita ranked these into four categories: the desire to reduce pain, the desire to feel better, the desire to gain power (internal and external) over our lives, and finally, the desire to achieve spiritual discrimination.

Clearly, the Gita implies that desire and the spiritual life are not mutually exclusive. In fact, aspiration is always a necessary step before you can realize a better pose, a better breath, a better you.

Consider the legacies left by Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, none of whom could be called unimpassioned. Each demonstrated how an individual can better the world simply through the power of aspiration and will. All noble acts—and all works of art, both great and not so great—arise out of a deep and sometimes powerful urge. Throughout history, many highly spiritually realized men and women have left keen evidence that a close relationship to God makes one anything but passive and unproductive.

In nature desire is all-pervasive. Note the zeal of salmon swimming upstream to spawn, the growth of giant redwoods reaching for sunlight, the drive of birds migrating thousands of miles.

Below the level of our perception, the material plane is entirely based on molecular and subatomic attraction and repulsion. Desire is the motivating force that endows all beings with the gift of life. After all, neither you nor I would be here if it weren't for the desire of our parents and the attraction between one egg and one sperm.

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