There are times in life when a desire becomes difficult to ignore.
It may arrive as restlessness. A sense that something is missing. A recurring thought about changing your work, your relationship, your health, your home, your way of living.
Sometimes the desire is clear. Sometimes it is vague but persistent.
And sometimes what we first name is only the outermost layer.
“I want a different job.”
“I want a relationship.”
“I want to feel healthier.”
“I want more confidence.”
“I want to move.”
“I want to create something.”
All of these desires may be genuine. But if we stay with them a little longer, another question begins to emerge:
What is the desire beneath the desire?
This question sits very close to the heart of Sankalpa.
A Sankalpa is not simply a goal we decide upon with the conscious mind. It is a deeper resolve, one that gathers desire, imagination, feeling, language, and action around something that has real meaning for us.
To find it, we sometimes need to listen beneath the first answer.
Desire Is Not the Enemy
In many spiritual traditions, desire is treated with suspicion.
And understandably so. Desire can become compulsive. It can keep us chasing one thing after another, imagining that the next achievement, relationship, purchase, experience, or identity will finally settle us.
But desire also carries information.
It can reveal where life has become too small.
It can show us where energy has gone dormant.
It can point toward a quality of being that has not yet been given enough room.
The problem is not necessarily that we desire.
The difficulty is that we do not always understand what the desire is asking for.
A surface desire may be perfectly real, yet still be carrying something deeper.
Someone who longs for a different job may indeed need a different job. But underneath that desire there may also be a need for creative expression, autonomy, meaning, contribution, or freedom.
Someone longing for a relationship may genuinely want partnership. Beneath that may also be a longing for intimacy, belonging, tenderness, or being deeply known.
Someone wanting better health may be seeking relief from pain or fatigue. Beneath that may also be a desire to feel more alive, to participate more fully in life, or to regain a sense of agency.
The deeper desire does not cancel the outer one.
It gives it context.
The First Answer Is Often Not the Whole Answer
The conscious mind likes clarity.
It prefers a sentence it can work with.
“I want this.”
“I don't want that.”
“This is the problem.”
“This is the solution.”
But the deeper psyche is rarely so tidy.
It speaks through mood, image, attraction, aversion, dream, memory, fantasy, repetition, and symbol.
Sometimes a desire appears again and again in different forms.
A person may believe they want a new career, then a new course, then a new business, then a move to another place.
From the outside, this can look like indecision.
But another possibility is that the same deeper desire is trying repeatedly to find a form.
Perhaps the real longing is for a different relationship with creativity.
Or freedom.
Or service.
Or identity.
Or belonging.
This is why I think it is useful not to rush too quickly into deciding what a desire means.
Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is remain with it.
Staying With the Desire
We are accustomed to responding to desire through action.
If something feels wrong, fix it.
If something feels missing, find it.
If an opportunity appears, decide.
There is a place for action, of course. Sankalpa is not passive. But before action, there is listening.
This may involve sitting quietly with the desire without trying to solve it.
What happens in the body when you think about it?
What images appear?
What emotion sits beneath it?
Does the desire feel expansive or anxious?
Does it carry relief, urgency, grief, excitement, fear, recognition?
Has it appeared before in another form?
What seems to become possible in the imagined future?
And perhaps most importantly:
What would having this allow me to experience or express?
That question can take us somewhere very different.
“I want a new job” becomes “I want work in which I can think creatively.”
Then perhaps:
“I want to trust my own ideas.”
And beneath that:
“I want to live less cautiously.”
The desire has not disappeared. It has deepened.
Desire and Samskara
We also need to recognize that not every desire arises from the same place.
The mind is shaped by accumulated impressions, or samskaras, formed through past experience. These impressions influence perception, emotion, expectation, and habitual behavior, often outside conscious awareness.
This matters because some desires arise partly from old conditioning.
We may want approval because, once, approval meant safety.
We may want control because uncertainty once felt dangerous.
We may want recognition because part of us learned to equate visibility with worth.
Again, this does not make the desire false.
It simply asks us to become more curious about it.
A mature Sankalpa does not require us to purify ourselves of every unconscious motive before we begin. That would be rather impractical.
It does ask for increasing honesty.
The more clearly we can see the forces moving within us, the more carefully we can choose what we want to strengthen.
The Desire That Keeps Returning
Some desires have a particular quality.
They survive disappointment.
They survive distraction.
They may disappear for months or years, then return.
The outer form may change, but the essential longing remains.
These recurring desires deserve attention.
This is not because every persistent desire must be fulfilled literally, but because persistence often tells us that something unresolved is still asking for a relationship with consciousness.
The desire may contain an unlived capacity.
A part of the personality that has not yet found expression.
A neglected value.
A necessary developmental movement.
A creative impulse.
A deeper spiritual orientation.
This is where Sankalpa becomes much more interesting than goal setting.
We are no longer simply asking:
What do I want to achieve?
We are asking:
What is trying to come into life through me?
Be Careful of Borrowed Desires
There is another difficulty.
We live in a world saturated with images of what a desirable life is meant to look like.
Successful work.
Ideal relationships.
Beautiful homes.
Healthy bodies.
Travel.
Recognition.
Purpose.
Calm.
Even spirituality is presented to us in images.
If we are repeatedly exposed to the same images, it becomes very easy to confuse familiarity with truth.
We begin to imagine ourselves inside lives that have already been imagined for us.
This is why imagination and discrimination are so important in Sankalpa practice.
The question is not only:
Can I imagine what I want?
It is also:
Where did this image come from?
Does it feel alive when external approval is removed?
Would I still want it if nobody saw it?
Does it belong to my life, or to an idea of what my life ought to be?
These are uncomfortable questions at times.
But they are clarifying.
The Deeper Desire Is Often Simpler
One of the interesting things I have noticed is that the deeper desire is often less elaborate than the surface desire.
The surface may be highly specific.
A particular role.
A particular person.
A particular outcome.
A particular version of success.
But underneath, the language often becomes simpler.
To create.
To belong.
To contribute.
To feel alive.
To speak honestly.
To love.
To become steadier.
To learn.
To serve.
To trust.
To be free from an old pattern.
These are not Sankalpas in themselves. They are still too broad. But they bring us closer to the source from which a meaningful Sankalpa can emerge.
From Desire to Sankalpa
Eventually, the deeper desire needs form.
This is where Sankalpa begins to move from an inner recognition toward conscious resolve.
The process may include imagination, reflection, meditation, symbolic work, and eventually language.
But the words come later.
First there needs to be enough contact with the desire itself.
Not merely the desire we can explain.
The desire we can feel.
The desire that carries energy.
The desire that seems to organize other desires around it.
The desire that, when we come close to it, produces a quiet sense of recognition.
This is what I mean by the desire beneath all desires.
Not one universal desire that explains every human longing.
But the deeper movement beneath the cluster of wants that occupy us at a particular stage of life.
When we find it, the outer desires often become easier to understand.
Some remain.
Some fall away.
Some reveal themselves as substitutes.
And some become much more important than we first realized.
Listening Is Part of the Practice
There is a tendency to think that Sankalpa begins when we have found the sentence.
I think it begins earlier.
It begins in the willingness to listen.
To remain with a longing long enough that it can reveal more of itself.
To resist immediately converting discomfort into action.
To notice the images that accompany desire.
To become curious about what has been inherited, what has been conditioned, and what seems to come from somewhere quieter and deeper within.
This does not always produce instant certainty.
In fact, sometimes it initially creates more questions.
That is not a problem.
Discernment takes time.
And a Sankalpa worth living deserves that time.
Because once we begin working consciously with a resolve, we are not merely trying to obtain something.
We are entering into relationship with the direction of our own life.
And that begins by listening carefully enough to hear what the desire is really saying.
Finding the Sankalpa Beneath the Desire
This deeper listening is at the heart of the Sankalpa: The Ancient Art of Creating Positive Change workshop series.
I created these workshops because Sankalpa is often introduced as a short sentence to repeat, but very little is taught about the process that comes before those words.
How do you know which desire is ready to become Sankalpa?
How do you distinguish a deeper longing from the many other wants competing for your attention?
How do you recognize the images, feelings, memories, and patterns influencing what you think you want?
And once you begin to recognize the deeper desire, how do you give it a form that can genuinely guide your life?
Across four workshops, we will explore Sankalpa through the yogic and tantric traditions, alongside Jungian psychology, imagination, symbolism, language, and reflective practice.
We will begin with the origins and deeper meaning of Sankalpa, then explore the creative process through which an inner desire gradually becomes lived reality. We will then work with the language of Sankalpa — finding words that carry feeling and meaning rather than simply sounding correct — before turning to doubt, resistance, and those inevitable periods when our resolve is tested.
The intention is not simply to leave with a polished sentence.
It is to develop a clearer relationship with what matters deeply to you, understand the forces that may support or interfere with it, and create a Sankalpa that you can continue to live and work with over time.
If you have been feeling that something in your life is asking for change, but you are not yet entirely sure what that change is asking of you, this may be a useful place to begin.
Sankalpa: The Ancient Art of Creating Positive Change is a four-part experiential workshop series. Find out more here.
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