Campfire burning in a dark open field representing desire

The Indisposable Problem of Desire in Yoga

Desire, Self-Consciousness, and the Reproduction of Suffering

Written By: Balraj Persaud

In yoga philosophy, desire is not simply one problem among others—it is the very structure that organizes experience before any particular problem comes into view. Although many Indian contemplative traditions identify desire as the source of suffering, desire rarely remains a/the focus in one’s practice. This essay examines the challenge of foregrounding desire in one’s practice and why the pursuit of invulnerability—including through yoga practice itself—can reproduce the very suffering it seeks to subvert.

Desire and Lack: How Striving Often Reinforces the Very Problem it Wants to Subvert

Many Eastern contemplative traditions feature desire prominently in their teachings, often identifying it as the source of the perpetuation of suffering. It is then set aside, often by desire itself—a single-minded focus on engaging in whatever techniques a particular tradition offers that promise to rid me of my personal suffering, or by a non-negotiable attachment to my specific desire—i.e., the specific thing(s) I know I need to have/do/become in order to be rid of my suffering: the money, the status, the healing, etc.. Regardless, despite the attention given to desire in talks and theory, it is quickly set aside by a network of desire—the aspirant to heal/solve their life, the tradition to offer (and receive money/praise for) their techniques, etc. We speak about desire, but rarely return to the desire that is active in the very attempt to practice, improve, heal, awaken, or become free. Desire is named, then quickly displaced by desire itself. (And interestingly enough, in the end, the striving is for the end of striving—to no feel longer compelled to strive for anything ever again.)

Of course, the more intensely we crave something to make us feel better, the less we feel we have it. Desire, in other words, doesn’t produce the feeling we want; rather, it amplifies the sense of lack we feel. The more desperately we want to be rich, the poorer we feel—the more things seem to remind us of how much money we don’t have; the more desperately we want to feel recognized, the less we feel we matter—the more things seem to remind us of how much status we don’t have; the more desperately we want to be healed or enlightened, the more incomplete we feel—the more things seem to remind us of the so-called defects that plague our inner lives, and the more intolerable our inner life becomes.

And we become hypersensitive to the things we fear, the things that signal our lack: the more we try to avoid shame, the more we (unknowingly) train ourselves to detect it—we become skilled at how to prevent it, manage it, or hide it—and, as such, become even further entrenched in the very structure that keeps us bound to it.

But this is not simply a story about misdirected attention, as if we have neutral perception and then misallocate attention on the wrong half of a dualism (say, wealth/poverty or recognition/obscurity) that is objectively “out there”, in the world. Desire does not compete with lack for our attention—desire is what opens the very possibility of lack or its absence in the first place; in other words, the desire is what generates, so to speak, the lack as something noticeable in the first place. Once the desire for, say, wealth takes hold, hitherto unnoticed phenomena become legible as wealth-signs, sorted/ranked without our explicitly choosing to sort/rank them, because the desire is now the very organizing principle of what counts as relevant. We can’t want richness without poorness becoming, structurally, the shadow that now colours everything—because “richness” is only meaningful against the background of not-yet-rich. The same is true of calm: this is not to say that one is simply “too focused on restlessness instead of calm”, but rather that urgently wanting calm is what turns an ordinary, previously unremarkable fluctuation of attention into “evidence” of failure. Before the desire for calm became so urgent, a passing thought was just a passing thought. Once calm/dis-ease organizes our experience, that same thought is now proof our efforts to be calmer continue to fail. Not only did desire fail to produce calm, it made us notice the noise more; the desire turned the noise into noise-that-counts. In other words, we do not first perceive the world neutrally and then, regrettably, dwell on what it’s missing; the world was never neutral to begin with—desire is what makes something show up (including as missing) at all.

The more we need the world to relieve us of our discomfort, the more our lives become organized by that discomfort—and the pursuit of invulnerability is guaranteed to reproduce our suffering. Some of us primarily run toward whatever we think will fill up our sense of self, add “weight” to our individual existence, make us matter more in the eyes of others, secure our identity, or command recognition. Some of us primarily run from whatever threatens to expose our insufficiency, shame, dependence, uncertainty—the disgust/fear drives us to want to shed the weight of the burdens of our inner life.

Progress, Security, and the Quest for Invulnerability

The problem isn’t wanting progress—the problem is wanting a final solution to our suffering; the problem is striving for a permanent sense of material/social/emotional security. Wanting a final conclusion to our suffering is what amplifies our desperation. Perhaps most importantly, a final conclusion is simply impossible: we are forever “inside” of an ongoing stream of appearing or experiencing that is not subject to our will. Whether we like it or not, we cannot retreat to some place outside of experience to author(ize) whatever shows up; there is always more appearing, always more that shows up that we didn’t produce and cannot have pre-decided how we will feel about. We cannot stand outside of our experience and decide in advance what will be allowed to arise. While we can train how we might respond to what appears, we cannot control the appearing itself.

But this is only part of the story of our vulnerability. We are, whether we like it or not, our existence as individuals depends on the very thing that we seek to transcend—our dependence. We are irrevocably relational, contingent, and shaped by forces beyond our control (e.g., embodiment, memory, culture/language/history, relationships, aging/death, etc.). We are not—and could never be—fully in possession of ourselves. Our desire for invulnerability is to be rid of the very conditions that make us the kind of thing that can read and understand this very article—the kind of thing wants to end their suffering.

For this kind of being, its security is always in question. It did not produce itself. It requires— continuously—other people’s recognition, its body’s cooperation, circumstances outside of its control. A self that depends on conditions it does not govern is structurally exposed. Not just occasionally, not just when things go wrong—but always, as a baseline feature, as the background context of what it is to exist this way. Security is always in question because the things that constitute its security—health, reputation, relationships, inner stability—are never fully in its command. And so for this reason, the pursuit of security is the (impossible) pursuit of eliminating its dependence.

To be sure, on this path, progress is, indeed, possible. But when charged with the impossible task of making us invulnerable, no success will ever feel like it’s enough.

Crowd of reaching hands expressing desire and longing

Desire, in other words, doesn’t produce the feeling we want; rather, it amplifies the sense of lack we feel. The more desperately we want to be rich, the poorer we feel... the more desperately we want to feel recognized, the less we feel we matter... the more desperately we want to be enlightened, the more incomplete we feel—the more things seem to remind us of the so-called defects that plague our inner lives, and the more intolerable our inner life becomes.

Deeper Than Any Individual Desire: Desire and Self-Consciousness

If yoga practice is to keep desire in view, it cannot concern itself only with explicit, self-conscious desires. It must also concern itself with the more primitive structure of desire that is already operative before any particular object of desire comes into view.

Things always already are showing up to me as relevant, as mattering, as worth reaching for or avoiding. There is no neutral world of objects that I first perceive and only later decide to want things from. A meaningful world only ever shows up because there is desire: a pre-organizing or self-organizing of what counts, what draws attention, what matters. Desire isn’t a response to a world of objects that shows up on its own; rather, desire is how my “world” shows up in the first place.

Our everyday experience of the world is a kind of desire-based experience, one that defines things, people, places, and situations in terms of their relevance or irrelevance for our own projects—including (especially) our most primary project of permanent self-security. In desire, I am defining reality in terms of my own needs and not on its own terms. The self’s anxiety about its dependence—its gnawing sense of dis-ease—is not caused by the dependence itself, but rather by the self’s refusal to tolerate its dependence—its permanent and non-optional lack of self-existence. And this anxiety is reproduced precisely by its craving for self-existence. Most basically, we are only ever really paying attention to what is relevant to or for ourselves.

The desire to escape (or “transcend”) the insubstantiality of our ego—to literally become something, become a(n independent) thing—is deeper than any individual desire. This most primitive desiring precedes our explicit self-conscious desires (such as, I want a new car/house/partner/job/body, and/or more money/fame/status, etc.). In this most basic sense, desire is life: an organizing activity that relates to itself only implicitly, through its relation to what it pursues. This implicit self-consciousness—absorbed in objects and driven by need—becomes self-consciousness proper only when desire encounters another desire. Self-consciousness proper erupts when we realize that another is looking back at us—judging us, evaluating our claims, and defining our worth. In that encounter, we are suddenly exposed to an outside perspective we cannot control, making explicit the structural lack and non-authorship that was operative all along.

Self-consciousness proper, then, is this same structure held explicitly: desire for [something for] itself, rather than merely desire in itself [pure desiring with no sense of self/orientation]. It is desire—which at its origin is the most primitive form of our self-consciousness—that confirms my existence to myself (even if I’m “unsuccessful” in becoming something). Desire is the very activity by which selfhood “happens” at all. There is no self sitting behind desire that desire then reports on; there is only the lived, non-reflective conviction—call it self-certainty—that my claim on reality is the one that counts. Strip away the desiring, and there is no remainder self left over to check.

Desire confirms my existence as a real, active thing with determining power: it is the experience of being compelled beyond myself, to transcend myself, to consume. And desire is not something I learn to do/have but is rather always already “there”, even before I am explicitly self-conscious. Desire also confirms my existence as a real, passive thing that can be compelled/impelled: desire strikes me (as something that is not me) but does so from within—it appears to me as my desire. In desire—this most basic relationship to appearing—I find myself, I find a self, so to speak.

This is also why no finite acquisition will ever “terminate” desire. Desire, by its nature, never simply coincides with what it takes hold of—it reaches toward (relates to) its object as something that might satisfy it, secure it, relieve it, confirm it, etc., and so it always “exceeds” the particular thing in which it seeks satisfaction, security, relief, confirmation, etc. This is a feature of desire as such, prior to any question of what specific thing is desired: the lack that desire seeks to close is not a specific-sized hole that a specific-sized object could fill, but is something closer to an open-ended excess that no content, however large, could ever complete, because it seeks from objects a settled relation to itself that no object can supply.

In seeking satisfaction, security, or confirmation through what we desire, we are also—if only implicitly—relating to ourselves through it: in desiring an object, I am not only oriented toward it, I am implicitly relating to myself through it—seeking my own satisfaction, security, or confirmation in what I pursue. We are taken up with particular things, yet not simply identical with them.

And we find that we are able to notice this—to turn our explicit attention toward a self-relation that desire was already implicitly enacting. There is no prior state of pure absorption to which reflection gets added later. The self-relation is constitutive of desire’s activity from the start: desire is never simply identical with what it takes hold of, but always relates to itself through its object. This noticing is a capacity we find ourselves already able to exercise. Desire’s attempts to secure itself regularly encounter resistance, frustration, or contradiction because desire by its nature never simply coincides with what it takes hold of, always already reaching past whatever it secures: what I seek does not satisfy me; the security I pursue intensifies the insecurity organizing the pursuit. Such failures make the operative terms of a pursuit more available to notice because what reflection makes explicit was already there, in the non-identity of desire with its object. (Noticing this does not require a separate faculty that steps outside desire to inspect it.)

Reflection, in other words, is the becoming-explicit of a relation in which desire was already at work. This means that attending to desire is not a matter of locating some neutral event beneath interpretation and then deciding how to feel about it. Rather, it is attending to how a situation was already given as mattering in a particular way—as threatening, desirable, burdensome, hopeful (and to the conditions that shaped one’s capacity to receive it that way).

For this reason, the yogin isn’t primarily concerned with explicit, self-conscious desire. Any analysis of desire that begins with explicit, self-conscious desire is already too late. Desire, in other words, is not an imaginary thing that one may or may not have, but is rather constitutive of having a self. If I find myself impelled to rid myself of desire—if “I want to get rid of my desires”—this wanting only confirms the very thing I am trying to subvert.

Yet this does not mean that desire only locks us into perpetual repetition. The phenomenon is ordinary: desire is not only directed at some already-specified object. It is also a felt disturbance of any settled fit between oneself and one’s world. To desire is to find oneself drawn beyond the adequacy of what is presently given—to seek, imagine, inquire, compare, return, change course, or revise a way of living. No achievement, identity, relationship, or way of life fully settles the question of how to live. This is part of what makes desire painful (i.e., it never “works” in any complete/permanent way, it never lets experience settle), but it is also what both keeps experience open to change.

This dynamic sharpens considerably whenever what I am chasing is not just any object but specifically the sense that I am secure, adequate, or admired in the eyes of others. Money, status, and reputation acquire their power to (seemingly) end my lack largely because their meaning is never mine alone to fix—it is already saturated with other people’s regard. But another person’s regard cannot be finally secured: a self, like desire itself, is never simply identical with any fixed state it’s in—it is always already exceeding whatever determinate form it currently takes. To seek security in another person’s regard is thus to seek to fix something whose very nature is to never be fixed, to fix an excess of exactly the same kind that makes my own desire unsatisfiable. This is why the pursuit of this kind of security tends to escalate rather than settle: each gain has to be watched, defended, renewed—not because people are fickle, but because what I was chasing was never the kind of thing that stays caught.

Dark stormy ocean waves under a heavy clouded sky representing the anxiety of desire

The self’s anxiety about its dependence—its gnawing sense of dis-ease—is not caused by the dependence itself, but rather by the self’s refusal to tolerate its dependence—its permanent and non-optional lack of self-existence. And this anxiety is reproduced precisely by its craving for self-existence.

Desire in Yoga Practice

This is why yoga practice cannot simply be another strategy for becoming finally secure, complete, or permanently beyond discomfort. Any practice—postures, breath control, meditation, mantra, devotion, inquiry—can be taken up as part of the attempt to secure oneself against dependence, to become complete, pure, in control—invulnerable.

The purpose of yoga practice is, strictly speaking, not to produce anything—such as more relaxation, “more” consciousness, etc.—nor is it to destroy anything—such as painful emotions, unwanted thoughts, even suffering—and even desire. The experience of desire is not optional. And, again, if I find myself compelled to get rid of my desire, this desire to get rid of desire only confirms the very thing I am trying to subvert. Furthermore, if I try to get rid of my desire or my shame or my lack of status, I remain ensnared in the dualism of desire/desirelessness and, as a result, I become hypersensitive to my desires or shame or lack of status and hypercritical of myself for having them.

Yoga is not the destruction of vulnerability; yoga is what remains once we abandon the quest to destroy our vulnerabilities once and for all. This means that our primary question about our practice is less about what practices we perform, and more about whether our practice is still serving the very fantasy it is meant to expose. For this reason, the central discipline is not merely performing a practice, but keeping in view the desire that may already be organizing it. Regardless of the specific form of practice—posture, prayer, meditation, devotion, inquiry—the question remains whether or not this practice motivated by or exposing a desire for some version of exemption, perfection, or invulnerability. The moment desire escapes our view, practice is again enlisted in the pursuit of self-security.

It remains true that certain practices are more conducive to the cultivation of awareness; in this way, meditation and breathwork were central components of nearly all traditions of yoga. But searching for the “right” method may be a symptom of an underlying desire for some version of invulnerability—bulletproof mental health, financial freedom, self-mastery, union with God, etc.. The desire for the method, the desire for progress, the desire for the right experience, the desire for the result, the desire for certainty that the practice is working—these are all ways the very thing practice is meant to illuminate may already be organizing the practice itself. If we allow our practice to lose sight of desire—if it is no longer oriented toward noticing whatever version of perfection, invulnerability, or exemption we are pursuing—we are, in a meaningful sense, no longer doing yoga.

Detachment is also central—so as to be able to see our pre-reflective patterns of desire without our seeing being a symptom of our desire. Detachment is not indifference or the forced elimination of desire, but is rather the practice of becoming aware of how awareness is absorbed, preoccupied, or determined—particularly by mood, which isn’t optional—and in this noticing, no longer being fully consumed by it.

Awareness and Self-Awareness

The practices of yoga are simple. You always already have the only thing you ever need: your attention. Everything else is nonessential.

In yoga, we cultivate awareness so that we may become aware of—before becoming consumed by—the pre-reflective (automatic, unthinking) habits of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving—the very habits that prevent us from seeing how our efforts to acquire peace might be reinforcing the very suffering we are trying to escape. What we most want to secure is also what keeps us from seeing the truth of our situation, including the unrelenting pursuit of self-security that structures it. When you notice a pattern, you are no longer inside it; just as when you notice that you are daydreaming, you are no longer daydreaming. To be sure, noticing this momentum does not make the desire disappear, but this noticing breaks our automatic identification with the reflex, allowing us to feel it without unthinkingly obeying it as an absolute command.

Becoming aware of our reactions before becoming consumed by them does not entail a detached “witness” or “observer” stationed outside the mind to watch it; consciousness is not best understood as opaque, blind mechanism that requires a flashlight shone from the exterior in order to be seen. To be sure, we can never step outside of experience to inspect it from a neutral vantage point. Rather, experiencing always already contains an implicit awareness of itself, prior to any explicit reflection—lived experience is never an anonymous event that happens in the abstract (that we must inspect to identify as our own), but is always immediately lived from a first-person perspective; it is already given as mine from the start—I am always already implicitly aware that it is my experience. When we are swept up in a reaction, consciousness has not been extinguished or replaced by an automatic reflex; our attention is simply absorbed in what feels threatening. If a reaction could completely consume consciousness—if panic, anger, or shame were genuinely total and opaque—we would be reduced to a purely automatic biological reflex and no one could ever “wake up” from a reaction in the middle of having it; we would have to wait for an outside force to break in and rescue us. Our ability to catch ourselves in the act of reacting means that the reaction was never as sealed as it felt; the ability to catch ourselves in the middle of a reaction—and loosen its grip, slow its momentum—is not an intervention imported from the outside by anything like a higher spiritual self. It is simply the reaction’s own implicit self-awareness becoming explicit.

Instead of focusing on explicit, self-conscious desires, the yogin relies on practices that foster direct awareness of self-consciousness itself as always already produced by desire. The yogin is interested in making its way to the original impulse to be (a) something, to self-exist, to secure itself as an independent entity, to the pre-personal appropriative impulse or habit/activity of ahaṃkāra: I-making. But the yogin is not interested in making contact with this primitive impulse in order to eliminate it, but rather just to notice it (and become comfortable with the sense of inner lack that it produces and reifies) so that its awareness is freed of this appropriative quality that does not permit contact with Reality, that does not permit contact with oneself. In this sense, yoga practice does not require the elimination of desire, but an ongoing vigilance regarding the ways desire recruits the practice itself into the pursuit of whatever version of invulnerability/exemption.

In yoga, the cultivation of inner stability is simultaneously the cultivation of a kind of selflessness. Less consumed by our “default” modes of being, we are better able to see not only our personal, habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving (particularly our automatic habits of avoiding uncomfortable thoughts/feelings and clinging to whatever we think will destroy them) but also the non-optional dimensions of experience (the true dimensions of “transcendence”) on which we are irrevocably dependent (and in which we are irrevocably embedded): including embodiment, memory, time, mood, other people. In yoga, this self-awareness is self-transcendence. It is in bearing witness to the ways in which we are determined that we realize the part of ourselves that is essentially undefined.

Small Buddha statue in meditation pose on a table representing self-awareness of desire

This means that our primary question about our practice is less about what practices we perform, and more about whether our practice is still serving the very fantasy it is meant to expose.

balraj.yoga | the yoga of self-awareness