The Desire Paradox: Why We Sometimes Avoid the Very Thing We Want

A guide on how to untangle our desire and fear, in pursuit of a fulfilled and authentic life.

Are you caught in a cycle where your deepest desires lead to frustration rather than fulfillment? Our 4-week Mastering Desire course starting March 11th offers transformative frameworks and practical, embodied techniques to not only recognize but embrace your core desires — so that you can create a life filled with love, joy, and personal achievement.

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A friend recently reached out for support in his struggle with sexual desire.

Whenever he felt sexual attraction for his partner, it wasn’t just desire he experienced. He also felt an overwhelming sense of neediness that would push his partner away.

This cycle of desire, clinginess, and subsequent disconnection would happen again and again. The more that he needed sex from his partner, the less he seemed to get it, and the more restless and helpless he would feel.

In a bold move to break free of the suffering and pain, he’d chosen celibacy for six months. But now that his celibate period was over, the fear of reconnecting with his desire was palpable.

My friend was trapped in the paradox of desire, where his desire was simultaneously the thing he was wanting and the thing he was avoiding.

This story isn’t just his; it’s one that echoes in many corners of our lives, where desire intertwines with pain, leading us into a maze of emotional turmoil.

The paradox of desire was a situation I was intimately familiar with — where my desire, which should’ve been my source of joy, was instead causing me pain and suffering. I’ve felt it in both my work life and in my personal life.

Several years ago, the last startup I worked at got acquired by Salesforce, and it was a huge source of celebration. But after a year, I struggled, feeling trapped by the golden handcuffs. I no longer felt motivated to stay and wanted to be doing something meaningful with my work and my life — and yet I felt so guilty at the idea of leaving millions of dollars from unvested stock on the table. It was money my parents could only dream of — how could I possibly throw it all away?

I eventually decided to leave the money behind, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I could have ever made. It freed up so much life force energy and led to a series of domino effects — including investing in myself and readying me to meet the love of my life who would become my wife — that I could only appreciate in hindsight.

I’ve felt a version of my friend’s pain around sexual desire, too, especially when I felt trapped in my 17-year-long sexless relationship (and 8-year-long marriage). I’d convinced myself that everything else in the relationship seemed fine — and I felt guilty and ashamed for wanting more and wanting a sexually and emotionally thriving partnership. Looking back, I could see how I had subconsciously shut down my sexual desire so that the relationship could survive. I resonated with my friend’s celibacy journey — I had cut off my desire to feel more okay.

It’s taken me a long time to learn that it wasn’t desire that was causing the problem — it was that I didn’t have effective tools and models for navigating all the tough emotions that got blended with my desire.

It turns out that anytime that we’re stuck in indecision, it’s because we’ve blended together desire and fear.

And once I learned how the cycle of desire and blended emotions actually worked on a foundational, somatic level, things started clicking in a whole new way.

Unblending Desire from Fear

Desire often gets a bad rap.

I used to hear Buddhist teachings like “desire is the cause of suffering” and then feel confused. Was the only way to achieve peace in life to live like a monk and let go of worldly desires? Would I really need to let go of my desire for love, wealth, or sex to be free and happy? How do I not suffer and also live in the material world?

It’s taken me a while to learn that I’d been wrestling with a misinterpretation and mistranslation of the teaching. It’s not actually desire that creates suffering, but attachment. Attachment means needing the thing we desire to happen, in order for us to feel okay.

Pure desire, in of itself, without attachment, is the energy of love and of life force. Pure desire somatically is a feeling of love and aliveness in the body. For me, it shows up as an expansive sensation of warmth. For others, it shows up as electricity or buzzing or something else. The energy of pure desire is what creates the impetus for positive change in our lives.

Unfortunately, when we feel desire in our body, it often comes blended with a host of other emotions — shame, guilt, fear, anger, sadness, or more — that often don’t feel as good.

We feel the desire to live a financially abundant life — and the guilt that we might not deserve it.
Or the desire to have a thriving sex life — and the shame that we might be inadequate or not good enough.
Or the desire to be loved for being ourselves — and the fear of rejection that comes with being in our authenticity.

Attachment stems from the fear that we won’t be okay and that we can’t be with all the difficult emotions blended with the desire. And so a part of us subconsciously goes into panic or neediness or striving or craving — needing the desire to be met so that we can make the blended emotions go away or needing the desire to go away.

Unfortunately, when we’re gripping to desire with attachment, it makes it much less likely to happen. That’s true whether the desire is about initiating sex or asking someone out on a date or getting a promotion.

We mistakenly then believe that desire makes us feel bad or causes us suffering, when it’s actually the emotions blended with the desire that create the tension.

We start doubting what we want because of the discomfort that exists around it. We loop on decisions, unsure of what to do. We collapse.

I’ve devoted the past few years studying with amazing teachers and coaches on how to work with emotions and our belief systems because this is so critical.

When we learn how to untangle our desires from the things that get in the way, something magical happens.

We make powerful choices with clarity.
We move through life and the world with ease.
We no longer experience the stutter of the start-stop motion that happens when we second guess and loop in indecision.

And when we learn to come into right relationship with it, desire becomes a compass directing us toward the most aligned and alive life.

So how do we go about doing this?

How to Break Through the Suffering

One of the most powerful and direct ways to break out of the suffering loop — without suppressing our aliveness and our desire — is to develop the body-level awareness to unblend desire from fear.

That means building and mastering the ability to distinguish between the two sets of sensations for desire and fear in the body.

We feel emotions through sensations in the body — whether that’s the sensations of desire, fear, shame, guilt, sadness, anger, or something else.

At the root of any blended emotion associated with attachment is usually some sort of fear.

Emotions get stuck when we’re unable to let the sensations fully move through our body. What happens when we feel stuck is that the sensations from our desire get blended with the sensations from our fear — and we’re unable to feel either all the way through.

What follows then is that we end up pogosticking. We feel drawn to the desire, until we hit a limit and collapse into the fear, then we get tired of feeling the fear and go back into the desire, and we bounce back and forth without making any progress.

The key to breaking through is developing the somatic awareness to unblend and distinguish between the two, so that we can feel them to completion.

There are two powerful doorways for doing this.

One, we connect with the sensations of the desire ever more deeply and use our awareness to acknowledge the fear when it comes up without collapsing into it.

The desire is like a reservoir of potential energy. When we’re able to feel the desire completely, we liberate enough of the energy and can kinetically transform it into action in our lives, moving through the fear.

That’s ultimately what happened for me in leaving my sexless marriage and my golden handcuffs — I kept connecting deeper and deeper to the joy and freedom on the other side until it became strong enough to break through the constriction of fear.

The second way is to go straight into the sensations of the blended emotion and use our awareness to feel the sensations all the way through so that they resolve.

We can use a tool like emotional resolution for this. Once we’re no longer afraid of the blended emotion, we no longer resist or avoid it, and the pattern of attachment dissolves. We’re okay and feel whole whether the desire gets met or not, which ironically is the most important internal maneuver to make the desire to happen.

Connecting with the fear and pain of sex scarcity is what empowered me to boldly ask for a 30-day sex container with my wife — so that we could work out the kinks in our sexual intimacy. And that’s been one of the most powerful experiences we’ve been through as a couple.

The ability to unblend desire and fear and then move forward with confidence and clarity becomes a powerful abstraction and tool that we can use everywhere in life — from big decisions to day-to-day moments.

Ultimately, what stands between us and our most fulfilled, vibrant lives is not desire itself but our reaction to it.

When we learn to separate our desires from the fears and attachments that cloud them, we unleash a powerful force within ourselves.

This force is not just about navigating sexual desires or career decisions. It's about living fully, with a heart open to every possibility.

This shift in perspective isn't just life-changing. It's the essence of liberation itself and a path to a fulfilling life that resonates with the deepest truths of our being.

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If this resonates with you, I’ll be teaching a 4-week course on Mastering Desire in March that goes deep into these tools and more.

You’ll develop the foundational tool of unblending desire from all the emotions that get in the way — so that you can turn your deepest aspirations from sources of suffering to sources of joy and transformation.

You’ll build a much stronger connection to and trust of desire as your inner compass — with the confidence that you can move through any emotion or limiting belief that gets in way.

You’ll learn now to dissolve attachment in the areas that feel most alive in your life right now — so that you can feel at home and empowered with your desires.

Watch as your life unfolds in ways more beautiful and profound than you ever imagined.