One of the things I’ve noticed so many of us do, myself included, is confuse knowing a thing about ourselves with the need to take action. Clients routinely resist exploring tender spots in their lives because they’re terrified that if they discover something it means they have to upend their lives or immediately do something about it.

But what if there is a vast, nuanced space in between? What if naming a hunger, a desire, a need, or a want didn’t require DOING anything, unless you chose to?

What becomes possible when we can say, “Yes, I am hungry for touch. Yes, I want that cake. Yes, I have an appetite for connection. Yes, I desire you.” and the only doing that’s required is honoring our truth?

Whether it’s food, sex, love, movement, adventure, fantasy, or something else entirely, naming our hungers is a way to validate our experience. But it does not automatically mean we must spring into action.

If we begin to notice a relationship doesn’t feel as nourishing as it once did, what if we allowed ourselves to simply be in this place of acknowledgement while gently feeling into new questions and possibilities BEFORE we did anything with that information?

I suspect many of us are so uncomfortable with these uncertain, messy spaces, that we jump into action as a way to avoid feeling…well, anything. How often is action a way of escaping and numbing ourselves from the messier space of inquiry and possibility?

Inspired by Caroline Knapp’s words: “Unnamed hungers become frightening hungers, sources of mistrust. This is another one of appetite’s golden rules: we learn to fear that which we cannot discuss or explore, we are both drawn toward and terrified of the forbidden.”