Desire as Divination 🔮

When your cravings are cartographers 🧭

I used to be afraid of my own desire.

Not just the big, taboo ones—the career pivots, the ‘what if I left it all behind’ moments—but even the small ones. Wanting more time off. Wanting rest before I’d earned it. Wanting sweetness without the shame that crept in afterward.

We’re told not to want too much. That it’s greedy. Entitled. That we should be grateful for what we already have. While gratitude is a powerful anchor, it’s not a muzzle. We weren’t born to survive—then stop. Don’t forget, we are here to thrive.

Desire, I’ve come to realise, isn’t a sin or a flaw. It’s a compass.

When held gently, without judgment, desire becomes one of the clearest signals of where your soul wants to go next. Not every desire is meant to be followed literally—but every desire is worth decoding.

The War on Wanting ⚔️

Tall poppy syndrome. The bucket of lobsters. The sermon about sin. The spiritual bypass disguised as detachment.

Every dominant system needs you to regulate your own desire. That’s how control works best—when we do it to ourselves.

Religion told us desire is sinful. Capitalism told us it’s never enough. Together, they taught us to crave and fear in the same breath.

In Australia, it’s the suspicion of ambition.

If someone dares to bloom, there’s an unspoken rule that says: “Don’t stand out. Don’t ask for too much.” You’ll be cut down. Pulled back. Taught humility through resentment.

So we learn to self-regulate. To dim. To disassociate from what we actually want—not because we’re noble, but because we’re scared.

Capitalism weaponises this too. It bombards us with shiny dreams, but punishes us for chasing them outside the system. Want a slow life? That’s lazy. Want to be rich and spiritual? That’s hypocritical. Want freedom? Better be productive while you’re at it.

No wonder so many of us don’t know what we want. We’ve been trained to want what’s allowed.

But here’s the thing: no one else can author your desires. You might have inherited them, sure—picked them up from movies, childhood wounds, religion, the internet—but underneath all that noise is something older. Quieter. Truer.

Your real desires don’t shout. They hum. They ache. They haunt you in the shower and whisper when you’re trying to sleep. They show up as jealousy (yep—envy is often just desire in disguise). They flare when you see someone living the life you say is “unrealistic.”

They don’t go away, either. You can stuff them down. You can numb them. But they’re patient. And if you ignore them long enough, they’ll show up in your body—as fatigue, bitterness, or a vague sense that something’s missing.

So what would happen if you stopped pushing them away?

What if you didn’t judge your wanting as a weakness?

What if you started listening?

When Desire Scares You 😨

Not all desires feel good.

You may have grown up thinking some thoughts were punishable—not just bad, but damnable. That’s no accident.

Shame is a powerful tool of social control.

Some are confusing. Others are dark. Sometimes they come dressed as fantasies we don’t even want to have—violent, inappropriate, or morally wrong by our own standards. Ones that shake us: “Why would I even think that?”

Here’s what I want to tell you: not every thought is yours.

You are not your brain’s search history.

Some thoughts arise because they oppose your values, not because they reflect them. In psychology—particularly in OCD and anxiety therapy—there’s a well-documented phenomenon where people fixate on their worst fears. The more you try not to think something, the more it pushes to the surface. That’s not desire. That’s fear wearing a mask.

We’re not just talking about stray thoughts here—we’re talking about indoctrination.

If you grew up around purity culture or strict religious teachings, you may have been taught that desire itself is dangerous. That even thinking a “wrong” thought is a sin. This is known as religious scrupulosity—a compulsive need to mentally monitor every thought and motive for purity.

The result? You end up hypervigilant, ashamed, and deeply confused. You start to believe that feeling something means you are something. That wanting is the same as wrongdoing.

But it’s not.

Thought ≠ truth.

Desire ≠ corruption.

Even in spiritual circles, this can resurface as spiritual ego—a subtle superiority that judges desire as “lower vibrational,” that shames craving as a sign you’re not evolved yet.

As if wanting things like love, money, sex, or recognition somehow proves you haven’t done enough shadow work.

This kind of teaching can become its own form of bypass. There’s a common belief in some spiritual spaces that we must detach from everything—from desire, from identity, from any earthly longing—as if full disconnection is the highest form of awakening.

Unless you’re trying to become a monk (and even then, we could talk), that’s not the path for most of us.

Because we’re not here to transcend the human experience. We’re here to embody it.

You came to Earth for a reason. You have a body for a reason. You feel desire because it’s part of the curriculum—not a glitch in the code. The goal isn’t to deny your humanity; it’s to live it well. To move through life with integrity, respect, and agency—not asceticism.

You’re allowed to want money. You’re allowed to have sex. You’re allowed to be seen.

Just try to be a good person anyway.

Respect other people’s sovereignty. Honour your own. That’s more sacred than pretending not to care.

Your mind throws out wild, extreme, sometimes ridiculous ideas not because you secretly believe them—but because it’s trying to resolve your anxiety about them.

It’s a distress flare, not a roadmap.

So let’s make a distinction here. There’s a huge difference between:

• a desire you feel in your body, rooted in your longing, and

• a thought you experience as a threat, driven by fear, shame, or guilt.

The first might scare you because it asks something of you—risk, change, growth.

The second scares you because it feels alien, like a possession you didn’t ask for.

This is why discernment matters. And embodiment helps.

Before you act, pause. Feel the thought land in your body. Is there heat in your chest? An ache in your belly? A sense of soft opening or clenching dread?

If it’s a true desire, you’ll often feel drawn to it—nervous, maybe, but curious. If it’s just a stray intrusive thought, it will feel static, dissonant, like white noise on the wrong frequency.

Try this:

“Is this coming from my heart space—or somewhere else entirely?”

You don’t need to claim every thought that crosses your mind.

You don’t need to act on every feeling.

You just need to recognise the ones that keep returning with quiet, soulful persistence.

True desire never forces you.

It invites you.

Notes on Desire from Spirit / Source / The Universe:

Inspiration for this post partly came through a recent tarot reading I recorded for the Fires of Alchemy Youtube channel. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into themes of desire, I have embedded the video below timestamped to the section on desire.

Reframing Desire as Guidance 🙏

What if we stopped asking “Is this desire good or bad?”

And started asking, “What is this desire trying to show me?”

Desire isn’t always literal. Wanting to move to a remote island doesn’t necessarily mean you need to quit your job and flee society—it might just mean you’re craving something different in your life. Silence. Solitude. Sovereignty.

Wanting to kiss someone might not mean you’re meant to be with them forever. It might mean you’re starving for intimacy, play, or to be seen again.

So often we leap to the conclusion—act on it, deny it, moralise it—before we even take time to decode it.

Desires are layered.

Desire says: “Look here.”

Not always: “Do this.”

It takes practice to hold a desire in your hands without rushing to label it. To turn it over like a smooth stone and study what’s hidden beneath the surface.

Try asking:

• What part of this desire excites me?

• What do I imagine it would give me?

• Is there another way I could honour that deeper need?

Sometimes the desire is the path. Sometimes it’s a decoy.

But it’s never meaningless.

Even your weirdest, most surprising cravings are teachers. Jealousy, for example, is one of the most honest emotions we have—because it doesn’t lie about what you want. It stings, sure, but it also points directly to something important.

The people you envy most? They might just be showing you your next step.

The longing that won’t go away? It might be a buried part of you trying to come back to life.

The itch you keep scratching in unsatisfying ways? It might be asking for a different kind of nourishment altogether.

So here’s the reframe:

Desire is data.

Your job is to listen, interpret, and choose what to do with it.

You can say no to a desire. You can let it pass.

But what you shouldn’t do is ignore it out of fear that it makes you selfish, broken, or unspiritual.

Wanting is not weakness.

It’s awareness.

Desire as Rebellion

Every time you choose what you want over what you were trained to accept, something cracks. A layer of conditioning peels off. You move closer to freedom.

Wanting what the system doesn’t reward—ease, slowness, joy, pleasure, presence—isn’t laziness. It’s defiance.

Desire is a spell. It’s time to recognise, you are in charge of casting your own spells now.

Living As If 👩‍🚀

Once you’ve recognised a desire—not judged it, not acted on it, just seen it—what happens next?

That’s where embodiment comes in.

You don’t have to quit your job or move to Bali or publish a book next week.

But you can ask: What would the version of me who followed this desire do today?

Maybe they wear that necklace.

Maybe they walk slower.

Maybe they say no with more ease.

Maybe they finally hit “publish” instead of leaving it in drafts.

This isn’t about faking it. It’s about familiarising yourself with the frequency of the life you want. About building muscle memory for joy.

Embodiment is a form of divination too.

When you act “as if,” you send a signal—through time, through space, through your nervous system.

You begin to warp reality—not through wishful thinking, but through alignment.

That’s what quantum leaping actually is. It’s not instant results. It’s instant readiness.

Desire becomes the map. Action becomes the spell.

You won’t always know what the outcome will be. But that’s not your job.

Your job is to keep saying yes to what lights you up—even if it’s faint. Even if it’s strange. Even if it scares you.

Because the version of you who followed their desires?

They’re not a fantasy.

They’re a memory—waiting to be remembered forward through time. Grounded into your reality.

Closing Reflection 📚

There’s a version of you—alive in some nearby thread of time—who trusted their longing enough to follow it. They didn’t wait for the perfect sign. They didn’t silence themselves to stay safe. They listened. They took one brave step. Then another. As a marathon, not a race.

Desire isn’t the problem. Denial is.

So let it guide you. Let it whisper, nudge, ache. Let it call you home—not to what’s easy, but to what’s true.

You don’t have to chase every craving.

But you do have to stop apologising for caring.

That’s how systems keep us small—by making longing look dangerous.

🪞 Journal Prompts

• What is one desire you’ve been pushing down, and why?
• What do you imagine this desire would give you?
• Can you trace a moment when you judged yourself for wanting something? Whose voice was behind that judgment?
• Have you ever pursued a desire that scared you—and been glad you did? What did it teach you?
• If you stopped waiting for permission, what would you let yourself want more of?