Transforming desires to eliminate baggage

When our desires get blocked or sabotaged by our emotional baggage, we assume our desires are right. We make our baggage wrong for opposing our "noble and highly respectable" desires. We figure there can be nothing wrong with our desires that will improve our image, get more approval from others and even help out somebody else. It makes no sense how our baggage seeks to trash our image, get more disapproval from others or act completely selfish. Our baggage appears irrational. illogical and anti-social.

Once we get where our baggage is coming from, this self-righteous outlook toward our desires gets transformed. We realized our baggage compensates for tainted desires. We see how what we want is as twisted as our sabotaging of it. We recognize patterns in our desires that were hidden from view when we took those desires at face value. Some of the patterns we may identify include:

• Trying to meet perfectionistic standards to avoid any criticism at all
• Idealizing a particular outcome to take flight from a disgraceful reputation
• Putting someone on a pedestal to appear much better than the lowly worm we identify ourselves as
• Seeking to become the showy center of attention to avoid getting ignored, dismissed or overlooked
• Taking pot shots at others to mask personal insecurities and to build up faltering confidence
• Creating evidence of superiority to look down upon the less fortunate, privileged or experienced
• Exalting some accomplishment in order to justify scandalous neglect of something more crucial

With patterns like these in minds, it becomes clear how the solution will be two sided. Our baggage will disappear when we change our desires. We cannot fix our baggage without fixing what we want as well. It's one of those "chicken and egg" problems with no beginning or end. We make the switch from trying to win at our baggage's expense to a paradoxical win/win solution.