Force Majuere
Noun. Greater, superior, or irresistible force.
I’ve been a coach and a therapist for almost 25 years now. And I’ve seen, over the years, that there is always an embodied desire afoot, for everyone, in every moment. The Body/the Being wants something, is moving toward something. Always. That movement can be toward rest/sleep/nothing much at all, or it can be highly active—the body wanting creative expression, or to run and jump. And everything in between.
There is a wanting, a natural next thing for this unique body—it is the Force Majuere behind everything under God, everything in Nature (same-same). The birds naturally fly south to where there is just the right food for their bodies. They return north for the same reason. My dog joyfully chases deer from the backyard—the desire to protect his home and person alive and well. The baby eats the food she wants, spits out the food she doesn’t.
But we humans are conditioned to fight the natural, desiring movements of life; we are conditioned with many levels of fear-based resistance patterns—ideas of what safety, goodness, justice, spirituality etc are. Believing these ideas results in suffering, because the ideas simply aren’t true. The baby learns she should want to share her food, but the real desire (to eat it all herself, for instance) goes underground.
We call these ideas of how we, how life should be ‘painbodies’ (Eckhart Tolle’s term).
Working for an idea of success, for instance, can be driven by a deep belief in unworthiness, originating in pain in the body—the belief of unworthiness works to be successful, and therefore worthy. And itt’s tricky because success sure seems like a real desire.
But who is talking? Who is it that wants to be successful? Because I’ve never met a body who wants to be successful. I’ve met bodies who want a certain kind of home, car, friends, collaborative work, creative expression, clothes, food, etc. Our bodies want tangible, specific, real things. It’s the painbodies, including my own, that want abstract things—like success, approval, etc.
Body desires are real. Painbody ‘desires’ are not. But only recently have I been able to grasp what the tangible, embodied desire is when a painbody is active. For instance, if my ‘doer’ (based in unworthiness) is active, and I’m ‘achieving’ a lot in a day, out of effort, I can see that all that doing isn’t what my body actually wants. I get depleted, frustrated, things get glitchy—all signs I’m out of what is true/delicious.
At this point in my healing, I’m usually able to stop the madness of the painbody’s wants; I stop, bring awareness to the situation.. just be. I wait for something effortless to emerge. It breaks the pattern of the painbody and leaves room for something real. But where is my desire in this process? I don’t often know..
If delicious yes/desire is the default movement of all things under God—if it’s always operating, in some capacity—then there must be a desire present, even when a painbody is active. But this has felt elusive to me, finding what my body wants in those moments of being triggered, of painbody being active.
What I realized is what the body wants in those moments of active painbody is physical touch, physical attention. The body itself wants to be held in loving arms. The painbody is the wounded kid who believes he’s unworthy or unloveable, and is looking for worth or loveabilty in success or approval—something disembodied. But what his body wants in that moment is to be physically seen, to be felt/touched.
When we are ‘in a pain body’ (eg. we are efforting toward worthy, we are approval-seeking to get to loveable, we are triple checking everything to get to safety) the underlying desire is to be touched/seen. Simple as that. It’s a very simple desire (as all desires are, in truth).
In the healing process both myself and the majority of my clients and friends at some point see healing as this hard thing that we have to ‘do,’ versus something our body desires. But in fact the healing process is enjoyable; it is absolutely a movement of desire. (My essay The Strangest Pleasure explores this in more detail)
What I want to convey in this writing is how helpful it is to be lost in your painbody voice. You know what the desire is, then! I can promise you there is an area of the body that is looking for a big hug—that desire is what is actually happening in the body in that moment. It is the true movement underneath all the fuss—all the mess of trying to earn it, to be worthy of it. And eventually, the body’s desire to be hugged, to be seen, will be met, because desire is the most powerful force of Life.
Desire, and its fulfillment, will win out because it is the very thing Life is doing. The movement of Life is always with desire, with delicious. It is what every creature, every plant, everything under the sun is up to, in every moment. It’s the main thing goin on! A wolf, when their paw is hurt, will go to the cave and lick his wound until it is better. All attention goes to the physical pain until it alleviates. It’s the same simple movement in us—attention, until the energy of the pain is dissipated, the body is satiated by the touch.
In deep pain and suffering, a simple desire is there—to be seen, touched, loved. And the greatest news is You are the Awareness for the job. It’s not from outside of you, that touch. You can give yourself everything your body wants—you can keep your attention on that painful place, right now.
Desire is more powerful than anything, more true about Life/Nature/Us than anything else. Your pain is just an opportunity for more fulfilled desire, in the way that hunger is an opportunity to eat something delicious, to feel full and deeply satisfied.
Desire, fulfillment. Desire, fulfillment. The way of Life. The Force Majuere.