The Art of Intimacy

“Love is a better teacher than duty.”

– Albert Einstein

Intro

To escape the clamp of obligation we can do two things: 1) We can look at how desire generates activity, and thus how we have never fully left desire in the first place. Our deeper desires are always pulling us in some way. And at least, we can see that we even desire activity itself, and thus desire generates itself in our activity. 2) More importantly, we can tune into and focus on our deeper desires. 

These desires tend to lay in who we are, not on what we have or do. Duty and obligation is a different kind of energy, often negative, that gets us stuck with a heaviness of “should” and “must do” instead of “want” and “desire to do.” Yes we have things in life we may not necessarily want to do (like go to work or drive carpool every other day), but we can learn to look at them from a perspective of how they allow us to fulfill a desire instead (get paid and not have to drive kids to school every single day) of a heavy, weighted obligation we feel like we are dragging ourselves through thick molasses to get done. Finding the desires of our activities begins to bring us back to ourselves free of obligation and burden. It also reminds us to carefully consider what we tell others we will do to make sure it aligns with our desires.

Reading – No Obligation

A key way to access peace of mind, power and resilience, is to stop and make a choice or to take a vow. “I will never again do anything that I don’t want to do.” At the very least, this stops us from habituated patterns and responses of extraneous and unnecessary behaviors. At best, it has us own our lives. There is simply no way to fall into the victim consciousness, including entitlement, if we’ve agreed to not do anything that we don’t want to do. 

What we are then faced with is a secondary issue. Most people have already overtaxed nervous systems so there are few things that they want to do. There’s very little space in the impacted system for organic and dynamic desire to arise. We are reduced to pleasure-based and biological activities such as eating, sex, napping or high reward activities that include intoxication of some form. 

If we continue on this path we discover that those forms are not something we actually want. They’re the lowest priced relief we can get. And because we’re so taxed, we can’t afford more valuable desires. What we discover then, is that what we actually want requires a great deal of us. But more interestingly, that what we want is not the result, but the process of being used in pursuit of something great. It’s often here, that we’ll have to stop, because the tumescent mind is a robbing mind. And it will attempt to rob us of any energy we’ve created by making the things we enjoy into an obligation. We will be reduced and feel prisoner to the things that we need to do in order to survive: production-based activities. 

To escape the clamp of obligation we can do two things: 1) We can look at how desire generates activity, and thus how we have never fully left desire in the first place. Our deeper desires are always pulling us in some way. And at least, we can see that we even desire activity itself, and thus desire generates itself in our activity. 2) More importantly, we can tune into and focus on our deeper desires. These desires tend to lay in who we are, not on what we have or do. Finding the desires of our activities begins to bring us back to ourselves free of obligation.

Most of us, for example, want to be talented, creative or brilliant. The more real desire underneath that though, is to live in a mindset of growth. This we can have anywhere and everywhere. We can have every moment, everything we do, be an opportunity to craft excellence in this life. From how we greet people to how well we negotiate walking in the street. We can be a living practice in growing our relationship with life. 

When we take this approach, we discover that we, in fact, want whatever activity does come. But until we get to this point, we simply make the agreement that we will not do anything that we don’t want to do. We take the pressure off the people in our lives and off our friends. We agree even to not do nothing when we don’t want to do nothing.

The only reason we would choose to not want to do whatever arises is because it would put us in a position of living in continuous consciousness, rather than the immediately rewarding but self perpetuating cycle of climax consciousness, where we construct through obligation, have a burst of behavior and then come down and reject. Continuous consciousness gives us the opportunity to be alive for the whole of our lives.

Meditation 

Set your timer for 20 minutes. Close your eyes and become aware of your breath and the sensations in your body. 

Notice the obligations circulating in your mind.  Your thoughts about your to do list.  Your unresolved problems of the day.  Appointments/outings/events that you have scheduled with others.  Give the obligations some space to float around in your mind like small slips of paper.  Let them detach from your mental calendar and hang in the air.  Visualize blowing your exhalation towards them and watch them move in the air.  Notice what is attached to them.  Do you notice any desires underneath? Ask your inner being, is this something I truly want to do, or something I said I would do out of duty or obligation? See if the slip of paper moves toward you or away from you. Don’t judge or feel guilty if the paper moves away. Notice the feeling in your body.

At the end of the meditation, slowly bring yourself back into the room. Feel the seat beneath you and the sounds around you. Slowly open your eyes when you are ready. Journal about how you felt when you looked in this way at the things you oblige yourself to do, often without thinking of the later consequences. Note how your body felt as you saw the slips of paper move toward or away from you. Did those feelings help you make a decision about how you will better spend your time and energy?

Exercise 

Make a list of some obligations that you’ve been feeling stuck around. Then next to each one write down what were the original or deeper desires that you had around them. Get in touch with those deeper desires again. How does this change your feelings towards it? Note if it doesn’t change the feeling of duty or “shouldness.” Write about how you might detach from this obligation in a way that does not hurt yourself or the person you obliged yourself to, if possible. If not, can you find a way to offer something in return that is more aligned with both of your desires?

Here are a few prompts to get you started:

I told __________________ that I would _____________________ and I do not want to fulfill this obligation because _____________________________________________________.

I often promise things I later do not want to do to these specific people: _____________________________________________________________________________.

I feel ___________________ when I beg off or cancel something I said I would do because ______________________________________________________________________.

I want to protect my time and energy more by doing what turns me on instead of always agreeing to ___________________________________________________________________.

Example

In my early forties, I was burnt out. Every single thing in my life felt like a burden. My marriage, my kids, my job, my friendships. The people in my life were meant to be a joy, my relationships with them meant to be supportive and something that added to each other’s lives, and it just wasn’t that way anymore. My job was something I had once been excited about, a place to stretch my skill set and grow in my chosen field. I had lost the connection I’d had with all of it, and even more core than that, with myself. How I recovered was removing all the “burdens” until I could find my desire for them again. I took a leave of absence from work. I took more space from my kids and husband in general and rearranged household expectations so that I could have that space (luckily they were teenagers who had social lives of their own at that point!). I stopped saying yes to events and lunches with friends unless I really wanted to. It was a bold move, I’m not going to lie; some of the people in my life were shocked. And judgmental. But it worked really well, and they all got over it. I took the time I needed to get back in touch with myself, and then I slowly added things back in. I got to remember my desire for my husband, how beautiful it is to see my kids grow up, and how special my friendships are. I actually ended up leaving that job and starting a business of my own, which was a big surprise for me too. I really think more people should try this when they are burnt out; it’s either something drastic and out of the box like this, or we are just giving a shadow of ourselves to all the people in our lives anyway. 

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” – Henry David Thoreau

Summary

Yes there are things we must do like take care of our children, go to work, pay bills, but you often overload your calendar with things you feel obliged to do. Desires to help others can easily become duties you then have to force yourself to carry out. Now you realize how important it is that you honor your desires first, as well as your time and energy. When you can turn a duty into a turn-on desire, it becomes a whole different experience, and when you can’t, you now have the power to just say no.