Expectations vs Transfiguration

Seeing the best in someone is an encouragement for them to be and do their best and studies have shown that children whos mothers have high expectations on them outperformed their peers in school. Some people call this process “having expectations” and this is bad, we shouldn’t have expectations.

Cause people are bad and they will dissapoint us with their inevitable human behaviour.  So we should not trust that the best can happen and expect the worst. There goes optimism. Are u a believer or a cynic?

Let s look at it trough the lens of spiritual traditions.

In Buddhism, expectations are closely tied to attachment and desire, desire is the cause of all suffering. Since desire is also the driver of all human behaviour, we cannot just stop having desires. Instead, we should practice mindfulness and equanimity.

Classical Hinduism addresses expectations through the concept of Karma Yoga (the yoga of selfless action). The solution is to mindfully surrender the result of our actions and to do every little act with devotion.

Tantra (found in both Hindu and Buddhist lineages) takes a radically different approach than mainstream ascetic or monastic paths. While traditional paths might tell you to suppress or move away from desires and expectations, Tantra says: Use them as fuel. Instead of judging yourself for having an expectation, a Tantric practitioner dives into the feeling of the expectation. By bringing intense, non-judgmental awareness to the expectation, its binding power dissolves, and it gets transformed into spiritual insight.

In Tantra, your true nature is divine, sovereign, and completely free. Tantric self-respect means you know your value. If someone disrespects you, it doesn’t diminish you because their behavior is a reflection of their state of consciousness, not your worth. From this place of absolute inner security, you can cleanly say, “No, I will not tolerate this,” without needing to change their mind or to get their validation.

In Tantra the antidote to “having expectations” is the process of Transfiguration.

The process of looking at someone’s qualities and expecting them to live up to those gifts they have been endoud with, is called Transfiguration.

Transfiguration is the practice of deliberately looking past the physical, flawed, mundane form of a person or object to perceive the divine, archetypal reality underneath. If you can look at your partner and literally perceive the cosmic interplay of primordial masculine and feminine forces (Shiva and Shakti), you have entered the domain of Tantra and surpassed the mundane relationship dinamics. It is not about imagining or pretending someone is a god; it is about purifying your own mind and heart so deeply that your perception shifts to see what is already there. Without transfiguration, sexual energy remains purely biological—a seeking of physical pleasure or ego validation. Through transfiguration, a physical embrace is elevated into an act of cosmic worship. Without transfiguration, sexual energy remains purely biological—a seeking of physical pleasure or ego validation.

Transfiguration completely flips this script. When you transfigure someone, you look at them with total reverence. You see their flaws not as annoying personal insults to you, but as the rough edges of a beautiful sculpture being carved by the universe. You respect them because you see who they truly are at their core, completely independent of whether they fulfilled your expectations today or not.

So it’s not about not having expectations but how you understand and manage them.  People saying “you should not have expectations” is looking at the surface of things only and not knowing human psychology. It s like “don t think about the pink elephant” So.. Have expectations just don’t expect them to be fulfilled. Trust that they will.

With love,

C