Going through the ups and downs of life, one will realize soon enough that “what one wants” and “what one needs” are seriously not the same thing.

You’ve probably discovered on your own – and many times over – how unsatisfactory and short-lived getting what you want feels like. Worse, sometimes there is an overwhelming emptiness when achieving a lifelong goal. And there is another distressing category of events where, no matter how much effort and sacrifice we make, we can never get close to what we desire as it continually slips away every time. In all cases, we are left with the distasteful conclusion that we are either never valuing the right thing, very good at deceiving ourselves, stubbornly swimming against the current, or completely wrong all the time (I’ll let you choose which one is more appropriate).

After this humbling conclusion, it’s usual to sustain an introspective or therapeutic effort. This is where I discovered that the root of many of my problems was completely different from the problems themselves. For instance, a dysfunctional desire to please people might come from a lack of self-love.

If we are poor arbiters of our own lives, having our choices unknowingly influenced by all kinds of unconscious emotional drives, how should one make choices? Is there any way to assess the difference between a good or a bad choice before having to fully live through it? Or, more pessimistically, if we can’t make any good choices, how do we learn to choose the least disastrous option out of many?

Some people assume that rationality is enough to weigh good and bad decisions. This can never work for the complexity of the world is such that it is impossible to take into account all factors, let alone weigh them objectively against each other. It’s true that rationality can reduce the complexity of making a decision, but we are more likely to dismiss key factors (willingly or not) instead of achieving some level of objectivity. For these reasons, as well as many bitter deceptions, rationality is clearly not a viable solution on its own.

This article will now focus on the mature and existential question of how to make choices assuming that factors like blind spots, self-deception, stubbornness, dysfunctional behaviors, and limited knowledge in an infinitely complex world are continually plaguing us around every corner.

Let me restate the problem: how can we make any decision if we try to aim towards “what we need” (instead of “what we want”) if we don’t even know what we need?

I have been in many situations where I was unable to make decisions, being both completely lost and afraid to make choices that could turn into serious mistakes. Knowing I could not trust my intellect nor rely on my will to force situations to happen, I had to find another way to orient myself. I came up with the idea of deferring to different levels of intelligence that were not centered around the will or the intellect. After a bit of experimentation, I ended up differentiating three frameworks:

• 1) Unconscious orientation – listening to dreams and acting on their insights.
• 2) Mind-body-heart negotiation – balancing the four psychic functions with body responses.
• 3) Social feedback – outsourcing judgment by paying attention to social cues.

I am now going to explain each level separately.

If you are familiar with this website, you already know how much I value dream analysis. In short, dreams sketch future potentials of what could happen, as well as providing compensation for our blind spots. If done genuinely and authentically (beware inflation), dream analysis provides an invaluable basis to limit self-deception and orient ourselves in an impossibly complex world.

Therefore, the first thing I do in the morning is to engage to the best of my ability with my dreams to see if I am in or out of alignment with the unconscious, paying special attention to distressing dreams.

Some people won’t be convinced about the value of dream analysis and I respect that position. Not only that, poor dream interpretations might make matters worse so I do not recommend dream interpretation lightly. However, this website would not exist if I did not value the life-changing insights that can be gathered from our dreams (three examples here).

In his typological model, Jung established there are four psychic functions available to apprehend reality (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition), as well as two modes of adaptation (introversion and extraversion).

By mentioning these four functions, I am not interested in discussing typology as such. Rather, I am making a point that, if we have more than one avenue to apprehend reality, it becomes essential to become familiar with each of them. A concise summary can be found in the following quote:

So the first step is provided by the sensation function, that says, “There’s something there, there’s something really there; that’s real!” Sensation tells us that. It’s a fact. Then the thinking function will tell us what it is, what category of understanding is to be attached to it. The feeling function tells us whether we like it or not. And intuition tells us where it came from, where it’s going, what it’s good for and what connections it may have. If one applies all four procedures to a newly emerging content then that would correspond to fixing it on the fourfold cross, so to speak, and once that’s taken place it’s not likely to drop out of consciousness; it’s been nailed into consciousness and it’s going to stay there. 

Edward Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures, Lecture 21

In my case, my primary function is intuition. The problem of intuition is that it can as easily be right as wrong. Therefore, I need to weigh “what I think” and “what I feel” on any given intuition. The sensation function, being my inferior function, cannot be easily brought into the mix though I make an effort every now and then.

If you’ve never tried using more than one function, a simple exercise is to choose a topic and start freely talking or writing about it. First, try starting every sentence with “I think” (or any equivalent like “my mind thinks”, “my thinking function informs me that”) and, after a while, start your sentences with “I feel” (or “my heart feels”, “my feeling function tells me that”). If you give this exercise a try, you might experience a striking difference between the sentences that start with “I think” and the ones that start with “I feel”.

This is in fact the essence of my journaling practice (inspired by Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages): I unload on paper everything that bothers me until I am able to start exploring my feelings, or whatever is underneath the shallower aspects of problems I am having. In other words: when I am conflicted about something, I first explore “what I think” and, once I have exhausted that function, I start to explore “what I feel”.

Given this is how my functions are prioritized and that I am heavily introverted, this act of negotiation might be completely different for you. The main point is that one should learn to balance these functions with each other.

To better understand the technical language here, I recommend consulting the lexicon on entries like “typology”, “function”, “introversion”, “intuition”, “inferior function” or going straight to Jung’s Psychological Types, CW 6.

Outside of the four psychological functions, we need to consider that the body has a kind of intelligence that is worth getting acquainted with.

When I was in Somatic Experiencing, my therapist pointed out loud every time I changed positions or when my breathing was altered. She also asked me to locate emotions or discomfort in my body, as well as noticing the difference between how the left leg felt compared to how the right leg felt for instance.

It’s clear to me that the body intelligently reacts to language, thoughts, attitudes, and will betray you when you are out of your depth. A common issue I have noticed is me shaking my head left to right (as if I was saying no) when talking to someone. As soon as I notice this happening, I reconsider what I am saying as my body seems to disagree with the words I am using. Other times, hearing some people talking causes a kind of light buzz around my skin, which I have read described as the experience of cellular memory.

There are two more centers of the body that should be talked about: the gut and the heart. In my understanding, the gut is responsible for all instinctive decisions, whereas the heart is a mediator between many contradictory impulses.

Similar to other body responses described above, I value instinctive reactions more than any intellectual decisions. Thus, I never ignore gut instincts when they happen. Similarly, I put a lot of emphasis on observing my heart responses: if I feel my heart sinks down or feels constricted when I approach a topic or an event, I know something is off. On the other hand, if my heart feels like it’s opening or brightening up, I assume that I can safely rely on its discernment.

I have gone fairly quickly about all these concepts because I am no expert at this. The main takeaway I would like the reader to keep is that one should include body responses, gut instincts, and heart reactions into their thinking. This is what I mean by mind-body-heart negotiation.

If you want to read more about this, I can only recommend a few books.

Anything by Peter A. Levine, the originator of Somatic Experiencing.

Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (video)

Miller, Alice. The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

I recommend this video as an introduction to the subject of mind-body unity.

A few years ago, I found the work of Stéphane Leroy, a French doctor. He teaches a few unconventional techniques but I would like to focus on his C3I or “Cohérence Cérébro-Cardio-Intestinale” (Cerebro-Cardio-Intestinal Coherence).

The basic idea is that we have three essential centers of life, all connected by the vagus nerve. These centers are known in different cultures, but let’s use the traditional term of dantian. The lower dantian can be approximated by the gut and is a center of vitality, presence, and libido. The middle dantian is the heart, a center of love and discernment. Finally, the upper dantian is the mind and a center of wisdom. The idea then is, when we are struggling with a choice, to engage all three centers in a process of alignment.

In practice, Leroy prescribes five steps:

Step 1 – Engage the parasympathetic system and stimulate the vagus nerve by breathing slowly to relax into a meditative state. This is mandatory otherwise the vagus nerve, the “information highway”, will not be able to engage the three centers.

Step 2 – With a clear and precise intention about the problem you are having, let a symbol emerge spontaneously from within. That symbol will be the container of the problem you are trying to address. For instance, being undecided about a topic, the color red spontaneously shows up from within.

Once that symbol is obtained, we can “present it” to our three centers by “traveling” along the vagus nerve. “Presenting” means to focus your attention with the symbol on a specific dantian.

Step 3 – Present the symbol to the lower dantian, the gut. Pay attention to how it responds.

Step 4 – Present the symbol to the upper dantian, the mind. Pay attention to how it responds.

Step 5 – Present the symbol to the middle dantian, the heart. Pay attention to how it responds.

The idea here is to integrate those three centers by first visiting the gut, then the mind before landing on the heart. By doing this, we have a nuanced and integrative approach to making choices.

Many people will be disappointed to hear that this technique is only taught in French and at a cost (YouTube presentation, official page, special offer). Given how frequently I use it, I could not avoid talking about it. Indeed, I use this practice every day on every occasion I can: I use it to decide which books to read or videos to watch, what food to order at a restaurant, which events to take part in, etc. This practice appears to be almost infinitely flexible and it has proved itself in enough times for me to consider it to be essential to share.

Once we are oriented with our dreams and are working in an integrative manner (i.e., using a mind-body-heart negotiation), we can start acting out our alchemical processes in the real world. This means starting drafts, prototypes, sending invitations, picking back old habits, trying new things, anything that is actionable and ripe for criticism.

This sounds great in theory but, in reality, it’s usually a humbler undertaking. It’s about doing things that are “below you”, the things that call for your attention but that you’d rather not do. I have another article about this.


In any case, by acting out our careful mixture of ideas, feelings, and instincts into the real world, people will react to it. Here is the crucial thing: let your actions speak for you and pay attention to how people react! In my experience, people will tell you exactly what you need to know about what you are doing. There are all kinds of verbal or nonverbal clues that will help you to understand if you’ve made any mistake along the road or not.

For a personal example, after three months of being with my girlfriend, we met with some family members and my aunt started joking about “what color is going to be the wedding dress?” While this is seemingly unimportant, it clearly meant that she approved our relationship to become more serious. A week later, taking into account that everyone up to this point has been positive towards our relationship, I proposed to her.

As Jordan Peterson says, we outsource the problems of sanity to others. Maybe you’ve been inflated this whole time and are running towards a dead end or maybe you are acting in a forthright manner. Who really knows? Social feedback, coupled with the previous steps, will be able to testify whether you are engaged with the right things or not.

To conclude, I am making a case that one needs to rely on more than one framework of orientation. I’ve laid out which ones I used and why.

This came from a moment in my life where I was cornered by anxiety. Every choice that I made was carefully researched and thought through, but this was having disastrous effects on my health and started to invade my dreams with nightmares. At an intellectual level, everything was tightly argued. But at an existential level, nothing was working the way it should.

To remedy that, not only did I have to give up on my future plans but I also had to give up on my ability to make plans. Indeed, as they all backfired on me, I resigned myself to the fact that I was bad at making plans and should not make any, at least temporarily. This is where I had to rely on dreams and the intelligence of the heart to consider other viewpoints than my own.

It took a few months to get good at it, as I was making a lot of mistakes mainly because of inflation. But I reached a point where every small step forward felt like I was doing the right thing: my anxiety diminished, my conscience started to let me breathe, my dreams became more peaceful, and people started reacting positively to me. For the first time in my life, the ground under my feet was solid despite the fact that I was clueless about where I was going.

This is the motivation behind writing this article. I hope it brings a partial answer to people whose choices continually backfire on them the way they did on me.