Yuck Feelings

When raising the possibility of finding wisdom in desire, the conversation is easily derailed in two directions. Either people protest that there can be no such wisdom—for our desire for sex is wayward, fickle, and fleeting, conflicted and plural; or they begin to discuss good and bad desires, aiming for some normative statement about what kinds of persons, places, and acts we should want.

On either of these sidetracks, desire is treated as a thing to master rather than as a movement that is making us. “It” is something “I” must control, sometimes in the name of love. These attitudes to desire represent the mind over body patterns of sensation and response we have perfected in so many areas of our lives.

Yet, as we have seen, desire is us. It is who we are in a given moment. It is an impulse to move that is expressing to us in this moment what we have created, and who and what we have the potential to be. And when we perceive desire in this way, we realize too that it is because desire is fickle, plural, and conflicted that it is ultimately so useful and important and wise.

For our desires are sensitive. They are intimately keyed to what is going on around us and inside of us. They register shifts in the wind before our minds have a chance to remember or reflect upon those shifts. They root themselves in our awareness until we pay attention. In these ways, our desires are like barometers of the soul, sensing changes in pressure, registering important information about the health and well being of our relational selves.

In this capacity, desire for sex is and must be constantly shifting and changing in order to represent the multiple plies of our capacity for touch. For every surface of sensation—whether emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or physical—can and wants and needs to register the pleasure of touch. It is how we live.
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I think you are getting the point by now. A desire for sex is not just for “sex.” There is no such “thing.” A desire for sex is a desire for a relationship within which a certain kind of pleasure is possible. Such pleasure, in turn, is a matter of (what I am calling) a life-enabling touch. Yet again, the pleasure-inducing power of that touch is as much a matter of what we are willing and able to feel as it is how we are touched, as much a matter of what we are willing and able to give, as it is about what we receive.

To say it another way, as with so many things in our lives, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. The more surfaces of our sensory selves we are willing to admit into our experience of desire, the more we are able to open in ourselves with another, the more pleasure we are able to give and receive, the more we grow in love.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. More than anything else, it is our yuck feelings that harbor the wisdom that guides us to live in love.

Yuck feelings?

Well, how do we know what we desire? We feel the lack of something we don’t have. Sometimes we can perceive that lack as a delighted anticipation of what is to come, but many other times, especially within relationships, we feel our desire to be with another person as a sense of disappointment or frustration, irritation or intolerance. We want more—more than we are feeling, more than we are getting, more than we are giving—and it doesn’t feel good to want more. It feels like we are not getting enough. We may think that what we want—or don’t want—is “sex.” We pull away from the pain, turn in on ourselves, look for satisfaction elsewhere than in our primary relationship, and wonder why our desire wanders and wanes.

It is the same mind over body dynamic we saw in relation to our desire for food. When we learn to think and feel and act as if we were minds over bodies, we learn to respond more readily to stimuli that circulate outside of us than to the ongoing sensations registered in our own sensory selves. We traffic in images of desire and satisfaction mediated to us through the many media to which we are willingly exposed. Our sense of the “sex” we desire telescopes to a single orifice. With food, we lose the capacity to follow the arc of our own pleasure to a sense of enough; with sex, we lose the capacity to ask for what we need to be able to give and receive a life enabling touch.

We can’t ask—because we don’t know what we want, because we don’t want to want, because we don’t want our partners to say no, because we don’t want to risk not getting the pleasure we want. And so we don’t.
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The challenge involved then in finding the wisdom in our desire is different than one might think. It is no more about acting out our desires than it is about controlling them. It is rather about acknowledging that we are them, they are us, and then creating a space inside of ourselves where we can feel their pull—in all their conflicted, contested, convoluted mess—as calling us to be present to ourselves and each other. It is about learning to sense and respond to our own desires, in whatever form they appear, as guiding us deeper into relationship with our partners.

Next Week: The bulldozer and the butterfly. Or, why desire always wants more.

Reflection: Think about the yuck feelings that arise in your primary relationship. What do you do when they arise? How do you interpret them? Respond to them? What do you do with them? How do your strategies of responding affect your desire? Are you creating places of silence in your relationship? What if you realized that feelings of disappointment and frustration are actually signs that your relationship is working—signs of your faith in the potential of the relationship to grow?