Maranda Pleasant: By now, you must have had hundreds of conversations with people about desire, lack of desire, “right” desire, “wrong” desire . . . desire. What’s the theme that keeps coming up whether you’re on stage or with readers? Danielle LaPorte: Permission. It’s universal. It’s this simple question, “Is it OK to want what I want?” And every time I hear this in one form or another, I want to throw myself at someone, like leap over chairs in my heels and grab them and say, “Sister . . . mister . . . yes! It’s OK to want what you want. In fact, if you don’t start there, with actually owning your desire, you are doomed. Own the wanting. Without apology. And all good things will start to flow from claiming the desire.” We can’t hedge with desire. MP: So you’re like a walking permission slip, then? DL: Kind of. I’m part cheerleader, part philosopher. Mostly, I’m interested in the truth and loving-kindness. And the loving thing for me to do is to grab the mic and tell that woman in the front row who wants to quit her soul-sucking corporate bullshit job so she can start an organic floral business because she is aching to feel free and surrounded by beauty—well, it’s my honor to say, “Chase the feeling, baby. It’s always about how you want to feel.” MP: And I quote, from The Desire Map, “Knowing how you want to feel is the most potent form of clarity you can have. And doing what it takes to feel that way is the most power-
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fully creative thing you can do with your life.” Keep going.
soldiering on to be successful. “Pay your dues,” “be logical” kind of paradigm.
DL: Yep, that’s it. Here’s how it goes: you want it, and you want it bad. Aspiring, hoping, plotting, recurring, reaching—it’s bubbling beneath your surface. You crave it, and it craves you. So you make a plan to get it, a to-do list, a bucket list, quarterly objectives, strategy, accountability, the goal. Except you’re not chasing the goal itself; you’re actually chasing a feeling. I think that we have the procedures of achievement upside down and inside out. We go after the stuff we want to have and get and accomplish and those things that we want to experience outside of ourselves. And then we hope and we yearn. We pray that we’ll be fulfilled when we get there.
DL: Exactly. We have to pursue our desires in a way that is life-affirming rather than soul-depleting. Rigid goal-chasing is numbing us out to our intuition and [our] noticing the signals that life is always putting in front of us. Most life-planning tools focus on external attainment and results. And this is incredibly valuable. This is great. Getting results is what moves your life forward. Except that most goal-setting systems don’t harness the most powerful driver behind any aspiration, which is your preferred feelings. And most goalsetting and time management systems foster almost an uptight kind of determination, and that actually keeps us from the vitality that we’re craving.
But it’s backwards and it’s running us in circles—and burning us out. So what if, first, we got clear on how we actually wanted to feel in our life, and then we laid out our intentions? What if your most desired feelings—what I call your “core desired feelings”—consciously informed how you plan your day or your year, your career, your holidays, your life? You know what will happen when you have that kind of inner clarity attached to some outer action? You will feel the way you want to feel more often. Decisions will be easier to make. You’ll know what to say “No” to and what to say “Hell, yes” to. And I bet you’ll probably complain less. A lot less. MP: This is not how most of us have been taught to get ahead in the “American dream” system. There’s a lot of sucking it up and
MP: So are there positive cravings and negative cravings? Right desires and wrong desires? DL: I hear things like this: “I want to be incredibly wealthy—is that greedy?” “I want to feel loved—is that needy?” Well, the answer is “Maybe.” Maybe you’re being ruled by what the Buddhists would call “your hungry ghost.” The hungry ghost is this overly needful, almost ravenous part of your psyche, and it’s always demanding to be fed. It wants attention and gratification. It wants comfort. It really wants whatever that hot-spot emotion is for us. It’s usually scared, it’s chronically empty, and it’s never going to be pleased. So some desired feelings are coming from a hungryghost place.
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