Desire: The Workbook

Chapter One

The Five Core Desires

All of us are born with five core desires: Wholeness, Growth, Intimacy, Pleasure, and Meaning.

Each is foundational to your emotional, relational, and spiritual flourishing. Some of these desires may already feel familiar, even central to your life. Others might feel uncomfortable, underdeveloped, or unattainable. That’s not a fatal flaw—it’s a reflection of how life has shaped you. Most of us rely on a few desires, while other desires remain hidden or neglected.

This chapter will help you explore why the foundation of certain desires feels solid for you—and where intentional work might be needed. The goal isn’t to master each desire, but to integrate all five into your everyday life. In doing so, your desires will no longer compete with one another; they will instead work together to reveal the full terrain of your heart, guiding the journey ahead.

An Overview of the Five Core Desires

Let’s take a closer look at each one:

Wholeness: Our Longing to Know and Love Our Story

Wholeness is the desire to understand where we come from and how our early experiences shaped the longings we carry today. It’s not about fixing or overcoming the difficult parts of our past, but becoming an empathetic witness to them. This desire will guide you into the formative relationships and plotlines that continue to influence your present life.

Along the way, you may discover that your younger self isn’t someone to move past or pity, but someone who has essential truths to share. The invitation is not only to know your story, but to love the central character within it: you.

What comes to mind first when you think about engaging your childhood story?

Growth: Our Longing for Authenticity

Growth is the desire to become who we truly are—to confront what is false, shed what no longer serves us, and walk into who we are in our full authenticity. Most of us have developed stage masks or provisional selves to make life work. We became charming, hardworking, rebellious, or compliant. These strategies helped us survive, and therefore need to be honored. But over time, they can become burdens that keep us from developing authenticity and connection to others.

Authentic growth is not about optimization or growth protocols, but courageously engaging the crucibles of our life with honesty and hospitality.

As you begin this journey, where do you most want to awaken or deepen your desire?

Intimacy: Our Longing to Love and Be Loved

Intimacy is one of our most sacred longings—and one that is often misunderstood. Few of us were taught how to give and receive love well. As a result, we often enter our closest relationships underdeveloped and uncertain, sometimes sabotaging the very connection we ache for.

This part of the book will help you identify the patterns that keep you distant, and invite you into the slow, beautiful work of learning how to build the kind of intimacy that lasts. Love isn’t something we stumble into—it’s something we must learn to create.

Who do you feel the most connected to in your life right now? The least?

Pleasure: Our Longing for Embodiment

Pleasure is central to our desire for comfort, delight, rest, and vitality. Yet for many, it’s tangled up with shame, secrecy, or excess. Some of us use pleasure to escape pain. Others avoid it entirely, believing we don’t deserve it—or have time for it.

This part of the book will guide you to reflect on your relationship to pleasure across your life, and reframe it not as a distraction or liability, but as a doorway. Pleasure is meant to reveal who we are, provoke us to significant risk, and bring the deepest healing to our minds and bodies. Pleasure teaches us how to live an embodied and passionate life.

What comes to mind when you think about pleasure? How does that feel?

Meaning: Our Longing for Purpose

We all long to know that our lives matter. But in a culture obsessed with success and validation, our desire for meaning and purpose often gets hijacked by external metrics: money, status, acclaim, or loyalty to unhealthy systems—whether in our families, workplaces, or broader culture—that don’t ultimately care about our well-being or authenticity.

This desire will guide you back to the moments when you felt most alive, most aligned, and most deeply connected to your heart and influence. Within those experiences are clues to the purpose you are uniquely called and qualified to pursue.

Where do you feel like your life matters right now?

A Holistic Relationship to Desire Is What We Want

Although we’ll explore each of the core desires individually, it’s important to remember that they don’t live in isolation. They are deeply interconnected. Healing in one area is meant to unlock clarity—or stir tension—in another. For example:

• Understanding the lack of emotional connection in your childhood (Wholeness) might shed light on why romantic relationships have felt so difficult (Intimacy). That insight might then open your eyes to patterns of low sexual desire or compulsive sexual behavior (Pleasure).

• A powerful and embodied sexual experience (Pleasure) awakens a sense of vitality and life force in you—one that provokes you to live with intention and purpose (Meaning), or to connect more authentically or passionately with others (Intimacy).

In Desire, I share about a client I worked with who obsessed over sculpting his body to achieve peak physical and sexual desirability. On the surface, he was pursuing physical fitness goals and learning the sex education he lacked growing up. But beneath these goals was a story of childhood shame and rejection. His desire for transformation was less about looking better and more an attempt to hedge against the fear that he was unworthy of love.

That’s what it looks like to explore our relationship to desire. Desires that seem straightforward are often rooted in complex stories of fear, pain, love, beauty, and hope. The more honesty and self-awareness we develop, the more integrated and connected we become in our relationships, our bodies, and the world around us. The goal is not to draw hard-and-fast conclusions but to ask better questions about your desires.

Let’s begin that work now.