“I want. I want… I want…. It’s one of the most dangerous phrases you will ever speak.”~Jan

How can five letters hold such power?

I WANT has the immense and immediate ability to rip you away from the grace and power of the present moment while disconnecting you from the joy, passion, and peace that is your birthright.

In short, these two tiny words equal suffering. Let me show you how.

Two Tiny Words, An Immense Amount of Suffering

I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be smart. I wanted to be successful. I wanted financial independence. I wanted to have kids. Lots of them. And I wanted to be loved (for a while I thought by George Clooney!?!) Oh, and I also wanted to have long, thin, beautiful legs. Seriously, Gisele Bundchen legs!

I wanted it all, with all of passion and conviction I could muster.

But my wants remained loftily stubborn. Out of reach. In fact, for the majority of my life, the absence of checkmarks on my ‘want list’ (and my bitchier days, my ‘deserve list’) made me firmly believe that life was against me.

I was a classic victim, sure that I had an oversized bullseye on my back. My life, I felt, was downright unfair, so I took every opportunity to remind the universe of this fact.

All because my wants weren’t showing up.

Most people get depressed at times, and many suffer greatly from bouts of major depression. At the heart of the suffering is the experience of severed belonging—of being imprisoned in the pain of separation, unworthiness, unlovability and hopelessness. These two talks explore several meditation practices that reconnect us with our natural aliveness, open heartedness and awareness. They empower us to develop our inner resources, energize us to awaken, free us from rumination and remind us that we are not our depressive thoughts and feelings. The growing realization of the loving awareness that is our home heals the very roots of depression.

As a psychologist and a psychotherapist, I could see that each of us would get our minds into a certain place, our thought processing into a certain place where we would tend to see life, day by day, in a very repetitive fashion, and with a set of habits and thought that we were incapable of breaking through.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the inevitable “aging and decaying process.”

I witness my own body and mind as I struggle with various aches, pains and wrinkles, as well as that of my friends and family.