The Deep Work of Love & Desire

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago. He and I were on a theatre stage, wrapped in a lovely soft nurturing web - the kind you want to stay inside forever. And then his wife appeared, backstage, and began to pull on it. Slowly at first. And then with gathering purpose. Until I was standing alone on stage, the web completely gone, disentangled, held by nothing.

I woke with the image still vivid in my body. Not with anguish, exactly. More like the recognition of something I already knew but had not yet found words for: that to love someone whose life is already woven with another is to accept that there are moments when you will simply be standing there, fully exposed onstage.

This is what I have been sitting with lately. The trickiness of loving at the edges of convention. The places it has taken me - inward, mostly - and what it has asked me to confront.

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I have become, over time, much more skilled at asking for what I want. This has not come easily. It has been the work of years - of sessions and journals and conversations held past the point of comfort. But I have learned to notice when desire rises in me, to name it without apology, and to move toward it.

And yet, recently, with one person, I noticed myself guarding. Contracting. Pulling back from a want before it had even properly formed. Old habit. I recognised it - the tightening around my breathing, at the back of the ribs and the top of my belly - but recognising it did not immediately dissolve it.

What dissolved it, or began to, was a dearmouring session with a fellow student. She was holding a single point on my chest and I felt, slowly building up, an enormous wave of pain rise up. The pain of love offered but not fully received or reciprocated in depth. The person who first rose to my consciousness along with this emotion is someone who has entered my life relatively recently. But the pain was ancient. The pain of a little girl whose love for her mother was met inconsistently.

And if I turn it around - it’s always interesting to challenge one’s first understanding of something - what I was feeling is also the love I yearn to receive. And the grief of not having been met in that way. And something else, something more tender and more frightening: the tentative, barely-formed hope that I might still learn to receive what I want. In this lifetime.

*

I have been thinking about desire. I often dwell on it, as my guiding light and life force energy. About what it actually is, beneath the noise of conditioning and the stories we inherit about what we are supposed to want and how we are supposed to want it.

One of my favourite people in the world taught me the three rules of desire. The first is that desire is always positive. It has a “moving forwards” energy. Which means that in order to feel it - to actually feel it, in the body, not just name it in the abstract - I have to be willing to hold in my heart and imagination what I am moving toward. Not the catalogue of what has not worked, not all the roads I took that left me stranded. What I am drawn toward.

This sounds simple. It is not. The pull toward the retrospective, the analytical, the self-protective is strong. It is much easier, in some ways, to understand why things have gone wrong than to stay open to what might go right. But desire does not live in the retrospective. It lives in the open, in the possibilities.

And so I practice. A sense of play, of depth and intimacy. A curiosity and a willingness to try and shift and try again. A discipline and commitment to practice and introspection and communication. I hold these not as ideals but as something I can feel as an orientation in my body, the direction I want to move in.

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The second rule of desire is one that I have been learning, amongst many other things, through my relationships in the last few years.

I have been loving someone who is married - ethically, consensually, and with as much transparency as any of us can manage - more deeply than I thought possible. And recently there has been a recalibration within his marriage. Nothing taken from me, exactly. But a refocusing of his attention. I felt the energy shift before he could even find the time or the words to tell me.

This is the structural reality of my position. Health scares, relational shifts, decisions made between two people whose life I am not inside - I receive these as information, from the sidelines. There is no cruelty in this. It is simply the geometry of it. But the geometry has a cost: I have no agency over the things that shape my experience of this connection. I cannot live through the shifts in real time. And sitting with that - noticing the impulse to react and contract, and actually sitting with it - has required a kind of attention I did not previously know I was capable of.

It has also required me to be very honest about what I want. Not in a grasping way. In a specific way. And, crucially, to own my desire. To embody it while knowing full well it might not be met, and surrendering to that possibility.

My journaling practice is critical in helping me dig deeper to uncover the unconscious beliefs I don’t always know are there, lurking in the shadows. Irrational beliefs such as loving more than one person makes me less desirable to the kind of person I want to build a life with. That I am somehow making myself less available, less legible, less possible to hold. Unsubstantiated beliefs. They do not need to be rational to operate in the background. They need only to be unexamined.

Excavating them is not heavy work, exactly. It is clarifying work. Because once I can see them, I can ask: is this true? And if it is not true - and it is not - then what do I actually want?

What I want is specific. And this is the second rule of desire: it comes alive in the detail. I want to build a life with someone who is committed to their own evolution. Someone with whom I share deeply held values and a willingness to cultivate both giving and receiving - the full range of relational energies, not just the comfortable ones. Someone who can hold me in my strong emotions and waves of creativity and bladed clarity - and not be threatened by any of it. Someone who can ground my more feminine energies and open to my more masculine ones. And who needs the same in return.

That is not a fantasy. That is a specific desire. And there is a difference.

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The thing nobody tells you about true desire - the thing that has taken me longest to understand, and the third rule - is that it is uncomfortable not because it is wrong, but because it requires you to evolve in order to meet it.

The connections I have had so far, including this one, have not been failures. They have been a kind of apprenticeship. Each one has gradually transformed what I understand myself to be capable of, and what I want to embody. Each one has given me a glimpse of what might be possible - and then demanded of me the work of becoming someone who could live it.

I do not always know if I am capable of this. That is the honest answer. I do not know if I can sustain the attention and the vulnerability and the discipline and the surrender that the relationship I am moving toward would require. Some mornings I feel entirely up to it. Other mornings the grief surfaces - the love I could not give, the love I have not received, the web dissolving on the stage - and I am not sure of anything.

But I have learned to recognise the signals in my body that tell me when I am contracting around something out of fear or habit rather than wisdom. The slight tightening. The dimming. And I have learned, slowly, to soften that knot. To open the heart again. To release the mind from its relentless narrating and return, however briefly, to the felt sense of being alive in this particular moment, in this particular body, wanting what I want.

Love is energy, and energy moves in cycles. It cannot, by definition, be a constant - and anyone who has tried to make it so will recognise the futility of that project. What it can be is a practice. A thing you cultivate and get better at as you grow. A way of staying awake.

The dream on the stage, the grief in the dearmouring session, the beliefs found in the journals: these are not problems to solve. They are the material. They are what it looks like, from the inside, to play at the edges. To experiment and learn and love and, yes, sometimes lose.

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For as long as I can remember, there has been a forward-moving energy in my body. A hum. A yearning toward something just beyond the horizon. I have always experienced life as a kind of quest - at first with a destination in mind, but that rainbow did not have a pot of gold waiting for me at the end. It is now more a felt sense that there is always more to understand, more to become, more to meet.

I recently discovered that this quality of being, this perpetual searching, had a name, ancient and precise. The dakini appears in Sanskrit and Tibetan tantric texts as an enlightened being in female form. She is always in flight. Always moving toward wisdom. She doesn’t land because flight is her nature. Constant motion is her practice. Expansion is her purpose.

I recognised something in her.

In the last two years, there have been seismic shifts in my life that compelled deep transformation in my identities. I have moved from violinist and wife to something less easy to define, and increasingly hard to pin down. The speed of my internal changes has accelerated. I have evolved more in the last two years than in the previous ten, and more in the last six months than in the last three years.

I am beginning to experience life as a deepening movement.

It feels entirely different from the journey that takes you in a clean line towards an end point (and then, what?). The movement of the dakini is about staying in flight, spreading wings, learning to dance with the winds rather than brace against them. From believing my purpose was to tick a series of unexamined boxes, I have come to understand something different: that my true purpose is to stay in motion. To follow that endless expansion. Like a flower opening and opening until it turns itself inside out.