I once read a story about a young seeker who spent his life pursuing enlightenment. Caves, mountains, austerities, disciplines — the whole catalog. At the moment he believed he had crossed the final threshold, the first word that escaped his lips was the name of the girl he had secretly loved decades earlier. He had never spoken to her, never confronted the longing, never allowed that desire to run its course.
This wasn’t a testament to love’s triumph. It was a quiet indictment of what happens when someone mistakes avoidance for transcendence. He had not risen above anything. He had simply sealed a living part of himself in the basement of his psyche, and there it waited — patient, undigested, unresolved — until the door cracked open.
I relate to him more than I’d like to admit. I can explain Kriya mechanics, I’ve sat hundreds of hours in Vipassana silence, I’ve taught meditation to rooms full of people. And yet I still experience anger, pettiness, resentment. There are domains of my life that have genuinely loosened their grip on me — alcohol, nightlife, certain forms of validation — and there are other domains, like wealth, where I can feel the old contraction still alive and active.
Not because I’m failing at spiritual practice.
Because I haven’t resolved that pattern yet — not through repression, not through indulgence, but through genuine, embodied understanding.
This distinction is the heart of what I’m exploring here.
Suppression is a Disguised Form of Attachment
Suppressed desire does not disappear. It simply relocates. It moves from conscious awareness into a part of the nervous system that doesn’t use language, and from there it shapes behavior, emotion, and fantasy. It becomes a background vibration influencing everything — the tone of a conversation, the way you interpret a message, the decisions you make without quite knowing why.
Buddhist phenomenology, modern psychology, and Jungian shadow work all circle around this same observation: whatever you refuse to face directly ends up steering you indirectly.
We see the consequences everywhere.
In religious scandals.
In spiritual communities where people claim purity while their unresolved urges leak out in twisted forms.
In “ascetic” people whose entire identity depends on convincing themselves — and the world — that they are above desire.
These are not failures of morality.
They are failures of contact with reality.
And after teaching, practicing, and observing for long enough, I’ve come to recognize three broad ways people respond when a domain of life pulls on them: money, sex, status, pleasure, power, comfort, ambition, beauty — whatever their particular magnet happens to be.
The Three Modes of Relating to Desire
There are many sub-variations, but the essential structure is surprisingly simple:
1. Supression
You declare yourself “beyond” something, not because you’ve resolved it, but because you don’t want to feel its pull. You cut yourself off prematurely. You climb the metaphorical mountain. You pretend the longing isn’t there, even though your body knows better.
2. Unconscious Indulgence
You give in to the desire without paying attention. You repeat the cycle automatically, learning nothing. You wake up years later in the same place, slightly more tired, slightly more bruised, still confused about why the satisfaction doesn’t hold.
3. Lives Resolution
You turn toward the desire rather than away from it.
You observe it without collapsing into it.
You allow the full arc to reveal itself: the anticipation, the high, the crash, the subtle aftertaste that remains once the thrill evaporates.
And eventually — not through rejection but through understanding — the charge weakens. The grip loosens. The desire flattens into something uninteresting, not forbidden.
This third mode is messy. It doesn’t offer the aesthetic appeal of renunciation or the dopamine of indulgence. But it is the only approach that reliably dissolves the underlying attachment.
Ancient Initiations and the Modern Equivalent
Ancient cultures understood this challenge long before we had psychological language for it.
Some confronted fear and craving through controlled ordeals:
Egyptian initiates spent days in darkness, sealed inside a sarcophagus.
Tibetan practitioners practiced solitary retreat in caves, exposed to the raw material of their own minds.
Native American rites involved fasting, isolation, and vision quests.
Tantric traditions used carefully structured encounters with pleasure and discomfort.
The purpose was not punishment.
It was contact with what the individual avoided, compressed into an accelerated environment.
Did every ritual work? Probably not. Many were simply attempts at forced transcendence — suppression dressed up as spirituality. But the underlying principle is worth keeping: human beings require direct experience to understand themselves. Not theory. Not moral framing. Not spiritual performance.
Today we don’t get a cave or a ritual burial.
We get inboxes, bank statements, relationship tensions, aging bodies, career disappointments, unexpected losses, subtle humiliations, fragile egos, persistent cravings, and the uncomfortable reminders of our own limits.
These are the initiations now.
Not elevated or symbolic — painfully ordinary.
But no less transformative if approached with the same seriousness.
The Seven Ordinary Initiations
Over the next letters, I will explore seven domains that consistently shape the inner architecture of a person’s life. These are not arbitrary. They are the terrains where human attachment tends to root itself most deeply:
1. Family
The earliest blueprint — the emotional loyalties, unmet expectations, patterns of guilt and belonging that shape us long before we choose anything consciously.
2. Wealth
Money functions as a mirror, reflecting whatever meaning we project onto it. Safety, freedom, worth, revenge, recognition — rarely the number itself.
3. Social Status
Recognition feels like nourishment until you realize it binds you to external evaluation in ways that quietly suffocate inner autonomy.
4. Health, Sickness, and Death
Aging is an unsparing teacher. The body becomes the curriculum nobody can skip.
5. Romantic Relationships and Sex
Most longing in this domain is projection; we chase aspects of ourselves we haven’t met, packaged in the form of another person.
6. Spiritual Life
Meditation, when misused, becomes escapism wearing sacred clothing. Avoidance disguised as depth.
7. Indulgence: Food, Pleasure, Stimulation
These behaviors reveal patterns of emotional regulation. When observed without numbing or shame, they burn themselves out through simple clarity.
My Own Case Study: What Has Resolved, What Hasn’t
Some domains have truly completed their arc for me.
I no longer drink — not because alcohol became morally unappealing, but because I finally saw the entire cycle so clearly that the appeal evaporated. The anticipation, the short-lived lift, the flattening afterward, the way it pulled me away from myself. I repeated this pattern enough times with awareness that the desire simply thinned out.
It was the same with nightlife, with casual sex, with status games inside academia. Observing the mechanisms long enough stripped them of their glamour. They lost their spell.
But wealth is different.
It still activates something.
I still project meaning onto it — security, potential, maybe even proof. I still feel a subtle charge when I look at numbers. That charge is evidence that I am not done here. The pattern is not complete.
This is why I can write about this honestly: I am not reporting from a perfected state. I am writing as someone in the thick of his own curriculum.
What Resolution Actually Involves
Resolving a desire — allowing it to lose its charge through lived understanding — is not a neat process. It is not indulgence, not abstinence, not rationalization, not moral superiority.
It looks more like this:
You allow yourself to feel the pull without acting blindly.
You notice the full arc of the experience rather than the peak.
You stay present for the aftermath rather than distracting yourself from it.
You stop narrating the experience with morality — neither elevating nor condemning it.
You let the pattern reveal itself in its entirety.
Over time, the intensity lessens.
Not because you fought it, but because you understood it from the inside.
Understanding removes the mystery, and without mystery, the compulsion fades.
When a desire truly loses its power, it doesn’t become forbidden — it becomes boring. Not intellectually boring. Somatically boring.
The nervous system stops responding because it finally knows the outcome.
That is the real resolution.
Conclusion: Ordinary Life as the Real Initiation
We don’t need caves, or rituals, or extreme deprivation.
We need a willingness to stay in contact with life as it is, especially in the domains that still catch us off guard. The uncertainty — “has this dissolved or am I lying to myself?” — is not a flaw. It is a safeguard against delusion.
In surgery, every practitioner knows the feeling of the patient they hesitate to confront — the case that seems more complex, more delicate, more demanding. But avoidance has never closed a wound. Resolution comes from engagement, not distance.
The same principle applies internally.
So the real question becomes:
Which domain is yours?
Which “patient” is waiting for you to stop avoiding?
To more from life,
Nicco
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