Last Tuesday the 23rd of November 2010, iDecode was launched with the first pioneering group that have aimed to decipher their internal code and discover their life purpose.

It was an amazing experience for me. The group of participants are showing extreme keenness, and the level of conversation is very interesting and mind teasing.

Among the things that we talked about in this first session was the concept of needs. The conversations that took place made keep thinking about the importance of needs and the level of attention that we really need to give them so as to be able to move forward with our lives.

Unsatisfied needs have a certain effect on our lives that they work as hooks that pull us back or away from any goal that we aim to achieve. "Needs" need a certain immediate attention and they keep on nagging until we satisfy them. Therefore, within the iDecode workshop design it is one of the first things that we tackle to discover and understand.

What crossed my mind yesterday when the conversations of the iDecode session where playing in my head was the type of people that try to fight off their needs, and they train themselves on ignoring their needs rather than pay attention to them. When we watch such characters displayed in a movie we tend to admire them. So the question that tends to pose itself, what is the importance of needs?

It seems that needs are extremely important. If it takes monks and their likes to train themselves vigorously to fight off needs, and to discipline themselves not to pay attention to the nagging calling of those needs, then the concept of needs is really important and detrimental in the path of our personal development.

Now which way is the best way to handle needs? Do we ignore them and train ourselves to suppress them? or do we try to satisfy them? To be able to answer these questions we need to set some principles first. 

When we talk about satisfying needs, we must stress the fact that we are talking about satisfying a need and not indulging ourselves in the pleasures of a certain need. For example when we talk about the need for financial security we need to be careful not to reach to the level of greed but justification that we are satisfying a need.

On the other hand when we talk about suppressing needs, do we mean that we are denying them totally. In my point of view that is impossible. If everything in the universe is energy, then needs must be some kind of energy. Looking at the principle of energy conservation which some call it a law that states, "the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time (is said to be conserved over time). A consequence of this law is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only be transformed from one state to another."

According to the above energy conservation law, if we treat needs as energy then needs are always there. For that energy to be released (satisfied) it needs to be channeled into actions directly related to the source of energy (need) or to transform the energy to channel it to other activities. So monks and their likes who train themselves on ignoring certain needs, what they do is try to channel the needs' energy into activities that are not directly to the source of the energy/need.

My 2cents worth, is that moderation is key in our lives. We should not become slaves to our need urges, nor do we need to deny them totally. There are times when we are not capable of performing activities that satisfy certain needs, we need to become creative in finding ways to channel the energy to perform substituting activities.

To conclude, we cannot deny the importance of needs and the role that they play in our lives. What is more important and crucial to our self development and progress is the way we deal with and handle our needs.