Jill posted yesterday in London Calling about dissatisfaction, suggesting that the way to shift satisfaction to dissatisfaction must somehow be related to letting go of expectations. I love the question, the openness of the inquiry, the quotes, and the way the whole thing springs from what she read in newspaper story i say lying on the kitchen table yesterday morning.
And… i think expectations are very different from desires and needs. expectations are made in brains. desires and needs and appetites spring from our ground, the ground, as we come into these bodies we have now.
i think it’s not possible to let go of desires and needs, but it is possible to move more deeply into them… to not be swayed by their surfaces but to get into them more and more so that we can see and satisfy them more directly.
on the surface i desire chocolate or cookies, but when i look into what i really want in the moment i’m dipping into the goodies jar, i often want rest. when i don’t think i can have what i want, i choose other options.
the key it seems is not letting go of the desires and needs but letting go of confusion about them. i think we need to work to get really clear about what we want. to dare then to ask for it, to see if satisfaction is possible. to inquire into others’ requests, to go further into figuring out what it is that they really want and need, beyond what they’re asking for. and we need to practice noticing when we already actually have what we really need and want.
this is letting go of the expectation or assumption that we can’t get what we want, which is different from expecting that we’ll get the promotion or that dinner will be on the table for us when we get home. one way to make this easier is to keep looking for the things we do have that we do want. i’ve heard from various sources that finding and naming at least four goodies for each one baddy is the ratio necessary to affect neurochemistry enough so that we actually *feel* a difference.
in this way, there need not be any loss or sadness, only an adding on, increasing our attention and capacity to notice what’s good and desirable and working. satisfaction guaranteed, though not necessarily immediately!