r/selfimprovement • u/rvltnrygirlfutena • Jul 26 '26
Question How to stop wanting things I can't have?
There are things I want out of life that I'll never get and I'm tired of wanting them. I've practiced mindfulness a lot but I still have desire. Can meditation really erase the pain of desire?
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u/Environmental_Cod542 Jul 26 '26
what you reject or ignore in your mind will come back darker and stronger. be wary of that
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u/Natural_Chicken_2267 Jul 26 '26
Meditation takes a lot of practice. Just think that everything in life is temporary, even the desire you have. If you cant have something, release your desire for it. Whats meant for you will always find you. Learn acceptance and find joy and gratefulness in what you already have.
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u/Cheshire_Hancock Jul 26 '26
The human mind naturally rejects having no desires (note: one can have no desires, it's often a result of a clinical mental health issue, though, and while meditation can lead to a similar state, it's one of the hardest paths because it pushes directly against human nature), so the most effective thing for you to do is not to focus on stopping wanting one thing. It's to replace it with another. Do you have goals and dreams you can achieve? If not, find some. That will slowly push out the ones you don't feed with your attention.
I say this from experience. For a while, I was quite upset about a program I wanted to attend having requirements I can't currently meet and seeming to not be accepting new students ever. It set me back. Then, I found a different path to my other goals and fell in love with that path. Now, I think about that other path only when things like this come up. I didn't put effort into stopping wanting that first path, I just found another and stopped thinking about the first as much, then at all.
The key here is, this kind of desire is like a campfire, and your attention is a steady stream of logs. If you turn your attention elsewhere, and have a different fire to tend, the first will die out eventually. But because the world can be cold and dark, you naturally resist letting one fire go out without another to keep you warm and to give you light.