Marian Ferris, speaking beside the Seine near Notre-Dame, argues that suppressing your desires silences something vital inside you. She shares a story about stopping to hear an opera singer in the metro, then offers an exercise: write down everything you want and sit with whatever emotions come up. Your wants are part of your DNA and refusing them limits not just you but everything around you.
Hello, bonjour, it's Marian Ferris and I am really in the center of things today. I am right next to the River Seine, which is behind me, and you can probably hear in the background not only some traffic but also the work that's being done on Notre Dame because it's just right over there. And this message today is very, very meaningful to me. And after seeing some of the comments on my videos, I decided to talk about it in its own video. And that is this: you have permission to let yourself want what you want. Let yourself want whatever you want. I know that sometimes it can be scary to let ourselves just want whatever we want because we might be afraid that if we want something really badly and it doesn't come to fruition, that we're gonna feel intense disappointment. We might also have this feeling of fear, Like, what if I really want something and I go after it, but it doesn't turn out to be what I want? And it's scary for me to think about the consequences. Like, what if I want something and I try to do it and I end up losing all my money or whatever loss we might think will happen? Another reason we might not want to let ourselves want what we want is because there might be a relationship that we're in that we think could be jeopardized if we were very honest about our desires and needs and wants. And so we just keep pushing it down. And the fact is, we spend an awful lot of time pushing down, pushing down, pushing down these desires, these wants, these dreams for our lives. Just before I stopped walking here, I got off the metro, and before I got off the metro, I heard a gentleman singing opera in the station that I was in, and I had this immediate thought of, oh, I want to stop and listen. And then I had the next thought of, oh, I don't have time, I don't have time. And I was like, wait a second, I do have time to stop and listen to this gentleman's beautiful voice. I do have time, and it's what I want to do right now, so why don't I just do it? So I stopped and I listened for a few moments, and it was really wonderful. And I was realizing, you know, we do this sort of thing all the time. We might have an idea in the moment of something that we want to pursue or do, and it might be something as quote-unquote small as listening to someone sing in the metro station. It might be something bigger. And yet we listen to the next thought, which is, "Oh, I don't have time," or, "Oh, that's silly," or whatever the thought might be. And what ends up happening— I've seen this so many times— is that we can push things down to the point where we don't even know what we want anymore. It's become sort of a distant bell that we can barely hear. When we do give ourselves time and space to listen to those desires, and when we do answer that bell, even in a small way, life gets a lot more interesting. It gets a lot more fun. It gets a lot more freeing. We have a sense of possibility more and more of the time. Things that looked impossible start to not look so impossible anymore, and we can really start to experience this incredible capability we have that we have barely tapped into. Barely, barely, barely tapped into. Some nice people picking up garbage behind me here. So if you are not letting yourself want what you want, I am giving you permission to do that. And one of the things you might want to try is, after you have finished watching this particular video, you may want to grab a notebook or open your computer or whatever you want to do and start writing down all of the things that you want. When you start to write down all of the things that you want, a lot of emotion is going to come up. I can guarantee it. And I often say to people when they do this exercise that If you have not reached the point of crying, of sobbing, of feeling deep, deep feelings, then you haven't taken this exercise far enough. You haven't really gotten to what you truly want. So let yourself go there too. Let yourself not only want what you want, but experience all of the feelings around those desires. What is on your list? What have you been trying so valiantly to push down that's still there? Because here's the thing, we can try to push the stuff down. It doesn't really work though, does it? It doesn't really work because those desires are part of our DNA. It seems like we have them there for a reason. I'm not sure exactly what that reason is. That's kind of beyond my understanding, but they are there and they're not going away no matter how hard we try to push them down. If you've been around me at all, you may have heard me use this analogy before, but I'm going to use it again because I like it. So being a native Californian, I spent a lot of time when I was growing up in the Sierra Nevada mountain range looking at the gorgeous redwood trees. And one day a few years ago, I had this thought of, gosh, what would happen if just one of those redwood trees, just one, as a teeny weeny little sapling, had this thought of, you know, I'm gonna just push down this desire to grow to my full height. I don't think it's a good idea because What if the tree next to me ends up being shorter than I am? What if it doesn't like me then? What if I'm actually kind of looking down on it and it takes that personally? Or what if when I'm growing, I end up being shorter than the rest of the trees? Am I going to feel inferior? I don't want to feel that way. That will feel like a massive disappointment if that happens. So I don't want to do that. Or what if I become the biggest, grandest tree in this whole forest and I get all of this attention from everyone and everyone comes to visit me? Are the other trees going to start talking about me behind my back or even in front of me and say horrible, mean things? And I remember having this thought of what if just one tree did that? What if just one tree stopped itself from growing to its fullest height and expansiveness, what would the ripple effects be around the world? You would feel it. I would feel it. And yet this is what we human beings do all the time. We try to push these desires down. And what is the net result of that? Well, I think we can see in the world what the net result of that is. Let yourself want what you want. Do that first and then start acting on those wants and desires.
