Embracing Desire and the 7 Deadly Sins

Desire and the 7 Deadly Sins

In order to generate unstoppable motivation in your business you have got to be able to move through massive amounts of resistance (fear, terror, indecision, confusion, blank brain, etc.).

Most entrepreneurs fail because they are unwilling to get into right relationship with their own resistance. Instead, they give their resistance attention and nurturing, or take it as a sign from the Universe that their business wasn’t meant to be.

I am calling bullshit on that.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have got to figure out how to manage your ego resistance and move through it.

Here’s my secret sauce to move through resistance: DESIRE.

The only force that is as powerful as our need for survival is DESIRE. Unfortunately, we’ve been taught by all kinds of “spiritual authorities” for thousands of years that desire is wrong.

We’re taught that we should be grateful for what we have. We shouldn’t want more, but be satisfied with our lives. This is especially true when our lives are pretty good.

There is nothing wrong with having a gratitude practice. Gratitude is beautiful!

If we practice gratitude in order to make ourselves feel better because we don't think we can attain greater abundance, or we don’t think we deserve an even more abundant life, then suddenly having a gratitude practice causes us to settle. It creates a limitation.

“It could be worse” is not a reason to stay where we are!

Desire has really not been okay for us. We have been taught that really wanting more for ourselves is not okay.

Wanting more - more money, more fun, more sex, more freedom - all of this has been deemed greedy, irresponsible, selfish and self-centered.

So we actually have a habit of squishing our own desires into submission because we have a lot of voices in our heads judging us for wanting more. We have a bad habit of keeping a very firm lid on the most powerful force for change in our lives - desire.

Here’s the dirty little secret of humanity - deep down we all want more! We just don’t let ourselves admit it.

So how do we fully tap into our desire to generate better results for ourselves and our businesses?

Our divine nature and the nature of the Divine is for more life, more creation - that is what we are here for and that is our nature.

It is part of our divine self-expression to want to create something new and different. Yet we have been told for centuries that wanting more for ourselves is not spiritual - how crazy is that! Desire is part of our human nature.

Desire is what moves us past resistance.

Isn’t it convenient that spiritual authorities have instilled in us that desire is wrong?

It’s not strictly those institutions' fault. After all, we were busy hacking at each other with swords for a large part of our history.

We have to remember where we came from - thousands of years ago life was not safe, we were killing one another, so a lot of religious institutions and teachings taught us how to put a lid on desire, and called it unspiritual, told us we should just be satisfied, why?

Because it allowed us to peacefully co-exists. This clamping down on desire was a necessary part of human evolution.

Today in modern society it’s okay to want something more. It’s okay to want it really, really badly. And it’s okay to have your motivations that are not entirely altruistic, or positive, because your shadow side is as full of desire as your light.

When we want something badly enough, we can overcome any resistance our survival instincts throw at us.

We have largely conditioned ourselves out of feeling desire - because we think we can’t have what we want, because we don’t want to be greedy or selfish, and because our shadow side scares us. With Ego there is light and dark - we have a shadow side because otherwise we wouldn't be able to integrate ourselves into the third dimension (the physical dimension) because what is important about 3D is that there is a front and back, light and dark.

New-age philosophy has been very much about “sanitizing” our thinking and feeling to be all-positive, all the time and it has seriously diminished our creative power.

Not allowing ourselves to feel “negative’ emotions that are perfectly normal and human, such as fear, anger, sadness, frustration really creates dysfunction.

Once upon a time negative emotions caused us to kill one another but we are more conscious now. So it is safe for us to take the negative emotions out now.

If we aren’t giving ourselves permission to feel negative emotions we actually dampen down all our emotions - all our emotions go together and you can’t selectively turn down some emotions but not others.

We’ve diminished our own passions and disallowed ourselves from feeling the level of DESIRE that would move us powerfully towards our goals. True desire doesn’t come from a purely positive place.

True desire also always involves what is stereotypically considered our shadow side.

Because True desire involves all of who we are.

Some of your shadow motivations can be channeled towards a beautiful outcome.

You must be 100% honest with yourself about what you truly want. You cannot make your ego want what society/your in-laws/your parents/your spouse/your industry things you “should” want.

Your most honest motivations often have a component that isn’t so pretty.

Sometimes the truth is that we want a boatload of attention, or we’re pissed off and want to prove someone else wrong, or we want to make more money than someone else just to show them - that’s just the truth of our humanity.

But if you think you should be all altruistic and stand in service to the world and that’s the motivation that’s going to get you past resistance you are wrong. I have never met anyone who has a solely positive, pristine motivation.

Most people just aren't willing to admit to their shadow motivations.

This is about healing and self-acceptance, and not vilifying any part of you, any more.

It’s only when you step into the wholeness of your desire that you become unstoppable.

Some of the most powerful motivations come from what we were taught are deadly sins. The whole concept of sin suggests that God created us imperfect.

I don’t believe there is any such thing as sin.

Consider that there is nothing “un-spiritual” under the sun. How we are created is sacred.

The Christian Desert Fathers and later the Catholic Church created the concept of the “7 Deadly Sins” within a context of NO available way to channel desire productively. But that is no longer true in modern day society. In short, these are considered capital vices or cardinal sins: Pride, Wrath (Anger), Greed, Lust, Envy, Sloth and Gluttony.

Our Desire is powerful, and we are often inherently afraid of our own power.

I want you to actually look at what has stereotypically been called the “shadow” side of your power - via the framework of the 7 Deadly Sins - as a way to motivate you towards a beautiful outcome in your business.

Because the Truth is that we all carry these supposed sins within us and we can actually utilize them to motivate us towards what we want - towards our desire. Desire is like a muscle. It can be developed and strengthened through both light and shadow sides to make us unstoppable.

And, on a larger scale, this is really about integration and wholeness and provides a path of self-healing. We have to get good with all the different parts of ourselves and learn to utilize all of them in our businesses.

As conscious entrepreneurs, regardless of our products and services, or our business model, that’s what we’re really doing - we are healing ourselves and becoming whole through the platform of our businesses.

Over the next eight weeks, I’m going to explore the framework of the 7 Deadly Sins and show you how to utilize them to propel your business forward. Yes, you read that correctly!

Stay tuned for more! Meanwhile, comment below and let me know how this perspective on Desire and the 7 Deadly sins is resonating with you.