The Gasoline & The Match: Understanding Feminine Desire

Most women have never learned to simply want.

They've learned to want and immediately strategize. Want and plan. Want and work toward. Want and figure out how to get it themselves.

They've learned that wanting without getting is uncomfortable. Unsafe. Something to be avoided or resolved as quickly as possible.

And in doing so, they've cut themselves off from the very source of their aliveness, their magnetism, and their capacity to truly receive.

This is part one of a two-part exploration into one of the most fundamental dynamics that either makes power exchange possible or gets in the way: the ability to separate desire from fulfillment, wanting from having.

Because here's what I've found after years of coaching Dominant/submissive dynamics: the power exchange itself is incredibly easy when you have two people who are fully aligned and whole within themselves. We're built to experience power and love together. That's what polarity is.

But almost every problem people bring to me traces back to a deep discomfort with wanting something they can't control getting.

So they shut down their desires. They manage their lives to avoid the ache of unfulfilled longing. They fill themselves up so completely that there's no room left to be met, to be given to, to be set on fire.

And they wonder why they feel numb.

The Problem With Being Full

Let me ask you something: Have you ever been really, really full? Like, you've eaten as much as you can possibly handle?

How much do you want food in that moment?

You don't. Not at all. You might actually feel repulsed by it.

You can't want what you already have.

And here's where this becomes critical for women who want to experience deep surrender, who want to be led, who want to feel that holy fire of devotion and desire in their relationships:

A woman who immediately fulfills or moves herself toward every desire, who tries to get everything she wants, who fills herself up by going after what she thinks she needs, who tries to fix everything and manage everything so she can have life the way she wants it...

She loses her capacity to be met. To be given to. To be ignited. To be set on fire by the desire of the masculine.

Only one person in a devotional dynamic can be the one creating.

And as a woman, as a feminine being, you have every bit of capability, capacity, potential, and right to create whatever you want out of your life.

What you don't get is to have that AND the experience of feeling surrender, of feeling led.

The Physics of Surrender

It's a basic law of physics: two things cannot occupy the same space.

When you move toward what you want, when you have conditions and expectations, when you've narrowed down the possibilities of what you will accept or how you want things to go, you've limited your ability to be led.

You won't accept leadership that might take you somewhere other than where you want to go.

And again, you get to have that. You can have whatever you want.

But when you fill yourself, you are no longer hungry.

This is the place I see so many women: numb, exhausted, burned out, tired.

The discomfort with wanting leads them to having, leads them to getting, leads them to setting goals and working to achieve them, sometimes without even considering the cost.

The Practice of Wanting

The practice for a woman of staying with her desire, staying with the emptiness, with the longing, will restore her sensitivity. It will restore her hunger for life.

Because the desire itself is her aliveness.

Any of you who have played around with the kinks of edging, orgasm denial, orgasm control understand what I'm getting at here. When you are out of control of having your outcome, there's an entirely different type of sensation available to you. An intensity. A hunger.

The wanting in and of itself becomes the whole point and purpose in those kinks, in those scenes. The desire itself becomes the purpose.

But in life, your hunger, your wanting, your not-yet-fulfilled potential of what may come... that IS the point and purpose of a life lived in surrender, out of control.

Let's not forget: submission is about giving yourself. It's about giving yourself over to another human being.

And in that process of giving yourself over, you are opening yourself to receive.

But YOU, not him, are the one who narrows down what it is you're willing to receive.

The moment you start to occupy the space of moving yourself toward what you think you want, you've taken up the space that he could occupy to give you what it is that you want. What you REALLY want. Which might not be what you think you want.

Chaos and Pure Potential

There's a very important principle in how I teach feminine embodiment: the feminine exists in the present moment.

And when we talk about feminine energy and chaos going hand in hand, most people think of the first definition of chaos: complete disorder and confusion.

But there's another definition. The second definition of chaos is the formless matter that's supposed to have existed before the formation of the universe.

In that second definition of chaos, you have pure possibility. You have formlessness. You have infinite energy that can become everything.

That is what feminine chaos truly is. It's not complete disorder and confusion. It's pure possibility.

A woman who can feel desire without rushing, without moving to try to satisfy that desire, is practicing the deep feminine capacity to hold space for potential. The deep feminine capacity to hold space for what is not yet real.

This is quite literally how you make space for creation to come through you.

You hold the growing thing in the dark until it's ready. Until it bursts forth from you. Until something else reaches in there and touches whatever it is that's ready to explode, and then it becomes.

The Gasoline and The Match

I use the analogy of the feminine being a full can of gasoline.

A can of gasoline on its own is relatively inert. It's just there.

But the moment a match touches it, it's a raging inferno. It's a holy fire.

If you've ever seen gasoline burn, you know: all of that potential, all of that fire, all of that heat, all of that energy existed in that can of gasoline BEFORE the flame touched it.

When you can hold desire, when you can hold wanting without moving, you become that potential. It becomes you. You become one with pure potential.

Most women have never practiced wanting this deeply. Wanting while refusing to act. Wanting while waiting.

The important piece here is that you can't cut yourself off from wanting just because nothing has yet come of it.

There is a deep surrender to wanting without being in control of what comes of that.

But just because you want something does not mean you must immediately do something about it.

Why Women Don't Receive

I hear from women all the time that they want to receive more from men than they have been receiving. That their experience of men has been bare minimum, a lot of disappointment, a lot of letdown.

There is a desire to receive that aches inside of the heart and soul and womb of every woman.

And the reason, more often than not (I would say most of the time), that women aren't receiving what it is that they want is one of two reasons:

One: they think they know what they want so surely and so certainly that they won't receive what's actually there for them.

Or two: they move so quickly out of wanting into planning, getting, acting, moving toward that desire that they've already occupied the space in which they could be met.

If you want to receive more, if you want to receive more from men, if you want to receive more from God, from the universe, the first step is surrender.

It's surrendering through all of that need back to the pure wanting itself.

Desire as Devotional Practice

That ache, that desire, is a prayer of sorts.

When a woman is able to sit in her ache, in her desire, in her unfulfilled potential, and wait and let it be uncomfortable, she's practicing a form of presence. A form of openness and magnetism that allows her to receive.

The more she feels that unmet need without collapse (because the moment that unmet need starts to feel like "I'm never going to get this," you're not wanting anymore), the presence to stay with your desire opens you to receive from the masculine, from God, to receive what it is that you really need in that moment.

It allows you to receive what you can't, and quite frankly won't allow yourself to receive when you are living in pursuit or in fulfilled contentment.

There is a deep devotional practice in devotion to your own wanting. When you refuse to move off of zero.

When you let that can of gasoline grow and grow and grow, and you let that desire consume you and everything that you thought that you were, and everything that you thought you needed, and you just let it get bigger and you let it get bigger and you don't give and you don't take and you don't devour just out of discomfort with not yet having...

Not only will this set your life on fire, it will open you to receive more than you could ever have imagined or dreamed up for yourself.

Desire as Compass

There's another problem with the disconnection between wanting and having, wanting and getting.

When women are disconnected from their desire (and you disconnect yourself from it the moment you step out of it, the moment you turn your wanting into a plan or turn it into action), you begin to navigate by obligation, by "should," by "how do I get it, how do I manipulate it, how do I change myself or change someone else or convince someone what to do or what do I need to do to get what I want?"

You lose yourself. You lose the truth of the wanting in the pursuit of the having.

Your desire is meant to be a compass for you.

And let's be real: desire is subversive. What you desire is going to point toward the truth, even when the truth is inconvenient. Even when the truth hurts. Even when the truth is that what you desire is something far more than what's present in your life right now. Even when that desire feels like it requires your entire life to burn down.

Desire is transgressive. Desire doesn't care about morality. Desire doesn't care about what's good or bad, right or wrong, should or shouldn't. Desire just wants for wanting's sake. It doesn't comply with social norms. It doesn't comply with anything.

Desire is an end in itself.

Your desire will lead you toward what's right for you, but not if you're living in "should" and "shouldn't." Not if you're living in trying to be good or right. Not if you're trying to get what you think you need.

You have to be able to feel wanting separate from fulfillment in order to trust it as guidance.

You have to be able to feel the truth of your desire separate from guilt, from shame, from fear, from all of the things that influence what you think you want.

If you can only recognize desire, if you can only let yourself want what you know you can have, or if you only let yourself want what you believe you have the capacity to go get for yourself, you are always looking backward.

When you can sit with unfulfilled desire, when you can be with the feeling of wanting, it trains you to recognize the signal itself of what's right for you. Of your intuition. Of your body's wisdom saying, "This direction is where I want to open myself."

Discernment and the Sacred Fire

This is the ultimate point and purpose of a woman's masculine energy: her discernment. The decision of to whom, to what people, circumstances, situations will I open myself?

It's the ability through discernment to make single decisions about from whom will I receive. Who will I let come close to me with that match?

Because if you really start to connect to and feel your own desire for itself, for its own purposes, and you hold that, you can't just let anyone come up to you with a match.

Not everyone should light that fire.

That is a sacred fire.

Your discernment is telling you what's right for you. Where do you open yourself? Where do you keep yourself closed?

It's not about lighting yourself on fire. It's about deciding from whom will I receive that? Who can be the spark?

Your desire serves as a compass, but only when you can separate it from your need to fulfill.

Beyond Sexual Desire

It's important to realize and remember that desire isn't just sexual.

Sexual desire is a powerful teacher. It's the most powerful teacher because it's the root, it's the base, it's the place we all came from. Eros, life force energy. All of us came from the energy of sex.

Sex is the fundamental yes to being alive.

For the most part, we get our connection to our own sex, our own authentic sexual desire, punished out of us at a very, very young age. A kid puts his hand in his pants and is told, "No, don't do that in public."

Everything that goes into disconnection from our own essence because of the shame and fear of society.

But this isn't just about sexuality. Did anyone else besides me get told, "Don't want so much. Don't be greedy"?

We are all born with a very deep connection to knowing what we want. Every little kid knows very, very well what they want, and they learn the word "no" very early. They're trying to set some sort of boundaries around their own authenticity. They want to do what they want to do.

You, as a child, wanted to do what you wanted to do.

But then you started to see that displeased your parents. It started to get you punished or get you in trouble when you did what you wanted. So you learned to stuff away what you want and started to listen to who you needed to be.

This goes beyond sex and sexual desire. But sex and sexual desire is the most powerful because it's the most basic to our existence.

When we can reconnect to that energy of sex and sexual desire and practice this desire without fulfillment, we can reconnect beyond sex to everything that we want again.

The Path Back to Aliveness

When a woman reconnects with her sexual desire, she's reconnecting with her own aliveness.

That part of you that maybe feels like it's been dying with every passing year. That spark you used to feel. The joy that's been overtaken by a feeling of jadedness and tension that just builds and builds more with every passing year.

When you reconnect with your own aliveness, with your own desire, with your right to take up space, with your right to want whatever you want for your own sake, to be a sovereign being with your own will...

This is terrifying to many women because it threatens to expose every single compromise that she has made to be acceptable.

It will make you look at the most unflattering pieces of your history and all of the times that you said yes when you really wanted to say no, and all the times you said no to yourself because you decided to say yes to someone else.

All of the times that you start to recognize that the only one who truly stopped you from wanting for yourself was you.

And that will hurt to look at. It will burn to accept that you have accepted your own slow death.

But it is a necessary first step.

Because when you connect to your own sexual desire again, sexuality is always the path back to aliveness. It is always the path back to full embodiment.

Reconnecting to your sexuality, to your sexual desire, will bring the energy back into your body and it will bring you a level of aliveness that will allow you to set boundaries again for yourself. That will allow you to stand up for yourself again. That will allow you to feel something again.

This is the fire that will then burn through the rest of your life.

And in order to do that, to be that, to feel that, to experience that, desire is the end, the point, and the purpose in itself.

Receiving is Not Getting

Most women think of receiving as getting the thing that they want.

This is a really important distinction. Probably the most important thing I'll say in this episode to women:

You think that receiving is getting what you want. That is not receiving.

Receiving is about receiving from yourself first. Receiving is about receiving desire itself.

You receive desire from you.

You get to access that feeling from inside of yourself. It doesn't come from outside of you. You don't have responsive desire. You have cut yourself off from feeling what you want.

What if receiving is only about receiving desire from yourself? Letting that desire land in your body. Letting it move through you. Letting yourself feel it. Welcoming the wanting for itself without urgency, without need.

Instead of saying, "I want this, how do I get it?" instead saying, "I want this. How interesting. Let me feel that."

This practice alone will revolutionize your life because it will separate your worth as a woman from whether or not you get what you want.

In this practice, you become someone who is allowed to want. Period. Full stop.

You are someone who is allowed to want.

This isn't a question of "is that enough?"

It is everything.

The Space Between

There is enormous creative and spiritual power in the space that exists between desire and fulfillment, between wanting and having.

That space? That's where imagination lives. That's where creativity lives. That is the muse. That is your magnetism. That is the way that your magnetic field ripples out into the world and touches the world around you in ways that invite response.

A woman who can sustain desire, a woman who can truly sustain the feeling of wanting in her body without moving, but just wanting, isn't just a magnetic woman.

She becomes one with the energy of magnetism itself.

There is a gravitational pull that men, the universe, everything feels toward a woman who can hold that energy.

This isn't just giving and receiving. This is universe-level manifestation.

Because the alternative, the other end of the spectrum, is a woman who's already got it figured out. She's already met all of her own needs. She's already solved her problems. She has a plan to solve the ones she hasn't yet solved, and she's filled herself up. Or she believes that she can, if she can just get everything that she wants and fill her five-year plan out.

There's no room. There's no room for grace, for provision, for Providership.

The only thing that can enter is someone to help her get what she's already decided she needs to get for herself.

There's no space for surprise, for wonder, for amazement, for being swept off of her feet.

She's too busy.

The Revolutionary Practice

There is enormous value and power for a woman who's willing to do the work to break the bond between wanting and getting.

It's immensely valuable.

And it will both challenge everything that you think that you are and become the path to more than you ever imagined in your life.

This is the practice:

Stay with your desire. Feel it. Let it consume you. Let yourself become the wanting itself without moving toward fulfillment.

Not because you're denying yourself.

Not because you're punishing yourself.

But because the desire itself, the pure potential, the holy fire waiting for the match... that is your aliveness. That is your power. That is your magnetism.

That is you.

And when you can hold that, when you can be that, when you can sustain that without collapse, without rushing to fill yourself up, without moving to make it happen...

You open yourself to receive more than you could ever chase down and capture for yourself.

You become the gasoline.

And you get to choose who holds the match.