Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.

Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.

Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence