You feel ashamed of wanting because somewhere you were taught – rarely in words, usually in laughter – that your desire made you a problem. Not a specific desire. Desire itself: reaching, hungering, wanting to be close. So you froze it, and called the freeze humility or realism. But the wanting was never the crime. The wanting is life wanting more through you. What needs to thaw is not the desire – it is the single word you were denied: allowed.

That thaw is the slow-burning heart of “The Longest Distance,” the eighth song on Deva Nataraj’s The Still Point – a man finally crossing the twelve steps he never dared cross at sixteen.

Where does shame about desire even come from?

Often from nowhere official – no rule, no lecture, just a verdict absorbed on a playground and carried for life. “The Longest Distance” locates it with unusual precision:

The Longest Distance from The Still Point

“Sixteen, in a gym hall under paper stars and string / The band was loud, the lights were low, and she was everything / She stood beside the window, laughing, easy in her skin / And between us lay twelve steps and every year I’d carried in.” The distance is physical – twelve steps across a floor – but it is made of accumulated verdicts: “Because I came already sentenced by the verdicts of the yard / A decade deep in lessons that my nearness was a fault.” The shame did not come from a moral teaching. It came from years of being made to feel that his very proximity was unwanted.

And crucially, the song insists nobody actually forbade anything: “No one ever sat me down and said my body was a wrong / The lesson had no classroom - it was recess all along / Nobody banned the wanting, no commandment named my name / The cage was built from laughter, and the lock was made of shame.” This is why the shame is so hard to argue with – there is no rule to overturn, only a feeling installed sideways. The cage is real, but it was built from mockery, not law.

Is it wrong to want – to desire someone, to reach for more?

No, and the song makes the strongest possible case for the opposite. Desire is not a lapse to be managed; it is the engine of aliveness itself. “The wanting was never the crime / The wanting was life wanting more / Desire is how the divine wears a body / It’s what a body is for.” That is the tantric heart of the whole album: the body is not an obstacle to the sacred, and desire is not its enemy. Wanting is how life moves through a person – how the divine, in the album’s language, wears a body at all.

What was frozen, then, was never the appetite. It was permission. “They never could freeze the hunger / They only froze: I’m allowed / And I am thawing that word by the fire / I am saying it out loud.” Read that carefully – the hunger was always there, undimmed; the thing that iced over was the sense of being permitted to feel it. Healing is not manufacturing desire. It is unfreezing the word allowed. (The broader case that the body was never the enemy of the sacred is made in is desire sinful.)

How do I stop feeling like my wanting makes me a bad person?

You separate the wanting from the verdict that got attached to it – and you address the frozen younger version of yourself directly. The song does exactly this, turning back to the sixteen-year-old at the wall: “So here’s to you, sixteen and burning, standing sentry by the wall / You were not too much, too little - you were not a trespass at all / The wanting was the life in you, the engine you came in on / And it never needed pardon - it only needed to belong.”

It never needed pardon. That is the release. You have been seeking forgiveness for something that was never an offense – treating your own hunger for closeness as a trespass requiring an apology. It does not need one. It needs a home. In the philosophy behind The Still Point, desire, creativity, and vitality are one energy at different frequencies; repressing it does not make you good, it makes you frozen, and expression with awareness is what transforms it. (That reclaiming of the male body from proving-mode into blessing runs through the quiet power of touch.)

What does it look like to finally give yourself permission?

It looks like taking the steps – warm, wanting, and without apology. The song’s climax is not a seduction; it is a man reclaiming his own aliveness in public, out loud: “And I stand here full of wanting / Full of thunder, fully allowed / No apology, no permission / Just a man - warm, wanting, proud.” Note the paradox in “No apology, no permission” – he has stopped apologizing for the wanting and stopped waiting for someone else to permit it. He grants it himself.

And then the crossing that the whole song has been building toward: “Twelve steps / I take them now / Across every room, every year, every doubt / Twelve steps / Look at me walking / Look at me - allowed.” The twelve steps were never really about one girl at one dance. They are every room since, every year of holding back, every time he walked the long way home rather than risk being unwanted. Crossing them now is crossing all of them at once.

The wanting was holy all along

The line to keep is the one the song lands on: “The wanting was holy all along.” Not tolerable. Not forgivable. Holy. The hunger you were taught to be ashamed of is the same force that makes a seed push through soil and a body reach for another body – the sacred wearing flesh, doing what flesh is for.

If you carry shame around your own desire, you are not carrying evidence that something is wrong with you. You are carrying a verdict handed down by a schoolyard that had no authority to pass it, and a cage built from laughter that has no lock but shame. The wanting never needed pardon. It only needed to belong. You are allowed. Say it out loud, and take the twelve steps.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I feel ashamed of wanting or desiring someone?

Usually because of a verdict absorbed early – not from any rule, but from being made to feel your nearness was unwelcome. “The Longest Distance” pinpoints it: “The cage was built from laughter, and the lock was made of shame.” There was no commandment to break, which is exactly why the feeling is so hard to argue away.

Is it wrong or sinful to feel strong desire?

No. The song’s central claim is the opposite: “The wanting was never the crime / The wanting was life wanting more / Desire is how the divine wears a body / It’s what a body is for.” Desire is the engine of aliveness, not a lapse – what froze was never the hunger, only your sense of being “allowed.”

How do I stop treating my own wanting as something to apologize for?

By seeing that it never required forgiveness in the first place: “It never needed pardon - it only needed to belong.” You’ve been seeking a pardon for something that was never an offense. The move is to stop apologizing and stop waiting for permission – “No apology, no permission” – and grant it to yourself.

What does giving myself permission actually look like?

It looks like acting warm and wanting without shame – “Just a man - warm, wanting, proud” – and crossing the distance you’ve avoided for years. The song’s “twelve steps” stand for every room since the first rejection; taking them now, “Look at me - allowed,” crosses all of them at once.

Which Deva Nataraj song is about male desire and shame?

“The Longest Distance,” from The Still Point, is written directly about it – desire frozen behind a lifetime’s certainty of rejection, and the man who finally takes the twelve steps. Its resolution names what the shame denied: “The wanting was holy all along.”