Sovereign Desire: How Men Build Magnetic Power

Most men are absolutely terrified of desire.

Not the pursuit of desire. Not the chase. Not the conquest.

They're terrified of the feeling of wanting something they don't have the power to control getting.

Because unfulfilled desire, wanting without the certainty of having, feels like weakness. It feels like lack. It feels like an indictment on everything you haven't achieved, everything you're not, everything you've failed to become.

And men do not like feeling weak.

So we do one of two things: we either suppress what we want (push it down, act like we don't care, call it "stoicism"), or we chase after everything we can get, becoming slaves to our appetite, our whims, our need for validation.

Both strategies cut us off from the actual experience of desire itself.

And both strategies make us weak.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on separating desire from fulfillment, wanting from having. In Part 1, I explored why this practice is essential for women, why feminine desire must be held rather than fulfilled, why the wanting itself is the point.

Today, we're looking at this from the masculine perspective. Because while the practice of separating desire from having is essential for both men and women, the reasons why and the way it works are completely different.

For a woman, holding unfulfilled desire reconnects her to her aliveness, her magnetism, her capacity to receive.

For a man, holding unfulfilled desire is what gives him sovereignty, discernment, and the gravitational power that makes him trustworthy enough to lead.

The Problem With Always Getting What You Want

Let's start here: most men believe their power comes from their ability to get what they want.

The promotion. The money. The car. The woman. The validation. The win.

And there's nothing wrong with a man who wants to achieve, who wants to build, who wants to move toward goals. This is essential to your being as a man.

But if you can't tolerate unfulfilled desire, you become a slave to your appetite.

You become very, very easy to control because all someone has to do to control you is get you wanting a little bit.

This is the place from which we lose discernment, where we make bad decisions, where we end up chasing our tails or chasing tail or chasing something that's completely wrong for us because it activated some little state of noticing what we are not.

You will always be a slave to this if you can't separate the feeling of wanting from the need to have.

You'll always go after the available thing instead of the right thing. You'll always choose what feels good in the moment rather than making a conscious decision with integrity.

And you'll either settle, or you will grasp, or you will push down the things you really want. And then that desire won't go away. It'll just come out sideways and you'll do some stupid shit.

Desire as Lack vs. Desire as Compass

Here's what happens for most men: desire gets instantly morphed into a judgment we hold against ourselves for what we have not gotten or what we don't have.

We're living in a lack mentality.

We can't want something just for the sake of desire. The desire itself becomes evidence of our shortcomings, our weakness, our failure.

This hits on all sorts of really deep wounds: not being good enough, not being powerful, wanting too much.

We learned this early. As boys, we were noisy, loud, destructive. We liked to climb shit. We liked to break things. We were doing what we wanted to do.

And what happened? We were constantly being told: "No. Don't. Stop. Sit down. Be quiet."

Eventually, you got broken from following your own desire. You abandoned it. You learned you could only go after the things that were acceptable, allowable, "good."

And if you tried things and failed, if you were teased or bullied or had an overbearing parent who was hard on you when you didn't do everything perfectly, you got programmed with the idea that if you fail, you're bad. If you do what you want, you're bad.

This drives most men into a very narrow lane of wanting that looks something like: "I will look at the available options in front of me that I know I can accomplish, and I will pick one of those."

This leads to unfulfilling career choices. Unsatisfactory marriages. Half-assing everything.

A small life.

Because you only pursue things you don't really want and things that don't stretch you enough to ever experience something bigger than the edge of where you assume your potential to be.

Whatever you get isn't what you wanted. Whatever you achieve feels empty because you didn't really give a shit about it in the first place.

And so it's onto the next thing. A different car. A promotion. A new hobby.

Most guys hit somewhere in their forties or fifties and wonder why they feel dead inside.

It's because he never learned to live inside the state of desire itself as a state of being.

He abandoned his own wanting.

The Power of Holding Unfulfilled Desire

A man who can feel his desire without needing to immediately possess, without needing to immediately move toward completion. Who wants something bigger than he knows how to get. Who wants something more than his current life circumstances allow. Who can let himself feel that want and then just let it burn...

Has access to a completely different texture and quality of power.

Because when our desire is outside of our reach (either because it isn't possible for us right now, or because the thing we desire isn't available, or because we've made the choice not to pursue it because it's not the best decision right now), he's free from neediness. He's free from grasping.

A man who's trying to get everything he wants, who's always trying to fulfill every desire, is driven by neediness. Driven by lack. Driven by fear of what it means about him if everything doesn't go his way.

That is an incredibly reactive and weak state to live in as a man.

You have no access to your own power because all of your power is in the hands of things outside of yourself.

You have to get there. You have to finish. You have to win. You have to get the promotion. You have to be able to afford the thing in order to validate yourself. You have to have someone else tell you you're good in order to validate yourself.

When you can be free of that rat race, you're not grasping anymore. You don't have to prove yourself anymore.

When you can hold your desire, when you can hold your wanting, you become a gravitational center rather than a pursuing force who's trying to empty yourself out to get something back.

This is the difference between a magnetic man and an empty man.

Generative vs. Depleting

When a man separates his wanting from getting, something immediate happens: you become generative rather than depleting.

When you can hold your wanting, when you can hold your desire, you are able to use the energy, the pull you feel toward the thing you want, to power your life.

If that desire is in control of you, you're going to feel pulled in a thousand different directions. You're not going to feel grounded or calm or centered, ever, to yourself or to anyone else.

Because you're not.

But the ability to push the pause button when you feel that wanting and to let it build inside of you completely flips that energy on its head.

It will feel uncomfortable.

But desire that has to be immediately satisfied (or said differently, the need for immediate gratification of your desires) drains you. You're just pursuing, chasing, getting, winning. You get the little pat on the back and the little "good boy," and then you're empty again.

Why? Because there's something else that grabs you and hooks you, and now you need to go again.

This isn't a warrior mentality. This is a loser mentality.

Because you'll always lose that game. You will chase shit around your whole life, and then you'll be laying on your death bed wondering why nothing seemed like it mattered.

Because you didn't connect to your discernment through your desire. You didn't let some desires sit there and feel them so you could choose what mattered the most to you.

Desire that you can hold onto, that you can investigate, that you can feel fully without grasping, without pursuing, becomes a source of ongoing aliveness.

Have you ever seen someone who has just a spark in their eye? It just feels like they're a little bit more alive than everyone else?

I guarantee you, on some level, this is a person who can feel their own desire without having to get everything they want.

It keeps you hungry for life.

That hunger for life is what will drive and motivate you toward what really matters to you. If you can just pause a little bit and just wait a moment and let yourself feel it.

Values, Discernment, and Choice

One thing I tell men all the time: it's essential that you do the work to decide consciously what you value, who you are, what is your code that you live by.

If you don't know this, you don't have any sort of anchor. You don't have any directionality with your life.

Because when you feel a desire and you stack it up against your values, and you say things like "I value integrity, I value honesty, I value beauty, I value [whatever it is that matters to you]," if you aren't making decisions that bring you closer to being your authentic self and the man that you are, and you are just deciding what to do based on what you want...

There's nothing to you. You're just being blown around by the wind.

The practice of being able to hold your wanting without pursuit creates space for wisdom. For you to make wise choices. To ask the questions like:

• Does pursuing this desire align with who I want to be?
• Does pursuing this desire serve my mission and my vision and my purpose?
• Is going after this the right choice or just the easy choice?
• Is this what's actually best for me, or is this what I think I should want?
• Am I settling?
• Am I afraid?

You can't ask these questions when you can't slow down and hold that desire separate from fulfillment or separate from action.

If you are being led around by your whims, you won't be able to discern and make the right decision, to make a conscious decision.

And there is nothing that identifies embodied masculine Dominance more succinctly than the responsibility of being the embodiment of consciousness.

Being led around by your whims, being a slave to your needs, is the epitome of weakness for a man.

Which is a paradox, because in that moment it feels like not getting what you want, not getting your needs met, feels like weakness. Like surrendering to the uncertainty of whether or not you're actually going to have this thing feels very weak. Like you're out of control.

But the actual weakness is not being able to hold that.

Wanting vs. Needing (Especially in Relationship)

There's a really important distinction that we have to make in relationship for Dominant men who want to be in relationship with a submissive woman.

We have to know the difference between wanting her and needing her.

It's going to feel like you need her. There's something romantic in a way about the idea of two people who just need each other.

But that's not ever going to actually feel like a truly powerful relationship.

Because when you need her for you to feel okay, when you need her to fulfill your desire, when you need her to validate you, when you need her to give you some relief, when you need her as evidence that you're doing a good job, whatever it is...

You become only as strong as she is able to give you validation.

There's an emptiness to that when your value rests on her, and her validation and her approval and what she gives to you.

It sounds romantic: "You give me everything I need and I'll give you everything you need, and then we'll both be happy."

No, you won't. You won't both be happy.

You'll both feel empty and you'll both feel like you constantly need more because you will never get enough from another person to fill the void that exists inside of you.

The big problem with this: when you need her, your desire becomes a demand on her.

And she will feel that as pressure, as a burden, as neediness, as your weakness.

Because you aren't okay unless she does something for you.

And she's going to shut down little by little by little, and you will take it as "she's not giving you love."

The problem isn't that she's not giving you enough. The problem is you've put your okayness on her because you can't let yourself want, because you need to get.

Really hear me on this one, guys: when you can want her, desire her fully, but also maintain sovereignty over that desire (meaning you hold responsibility for meeting your own needs, she's not responsible for making you feel good)...

When you can say to yourself and to her, "I'm with you because I choose to be. Because I want you in my life. Because you are the one that I want to do this life with," and really mean it...

The pressure's off of her. She doesn't have to do anything for you.

The only way you can come to that point is by being able to want, having the capacity to want without needing.

And that's frankly fucking terrifying.

Because when you release her from the expectation of giving you everything you need, there's going to be a fear that you're not going to get what you need.

And that responsibility falls on you. It will always fall on you.

Until you can take ownership of that fact, that you have to be able to meet your own needs, that you have to be able to give to yourself, that you can choose to want rather than needing to need...

Then she can feel wanted without feeling like she's used or that she needs to perform to an expectation.

This is the foundation of any conscious relationship, of any real relationship you can have as a Dominant man with a submissive woman.

It's the ability to say: "I want you, but I don't need you. I'm choosing you because I want to, not because I'm afraid of what happens if I don't have you."

The Gasoline and The Match (From the Man's Side)

In last week's episode, I talked about the analogy of a woman being a can of gasoline who doesn't move off of the experience of being desire itself.

To truly be in a feminine expression of desire, she becomes wanting. And her discernment, her masculine capacity, is the choice of where she will open herself. From whom will she receive? Who will she allow to get close enough to her with a lit match to light that can of gas on fire and set her aflame?

For you to play your role as a man in this, you can't just be waving a blowtorch around at everything you can light on fire.

It will never feel good to her. She will always feel like she needs to be in control. She will always have walls up toward you because you don't feel safe to her.

So this is a two-way street.

Her role is going to be to stay out of the doing, out of the fulfillment, out of the acting.

And your role is going to be to move toward what matters in your life. And when you move toward her, you're going to need to be able to do it with intention, with solidity, with certainty, with knowing who the fuck you are and why you even want to come close to her.

The magnetism between a man and a woman, the polarity that so many people come to me seeking... "I want the polarity in my relationship."

Okay. You want some polarity? Sit apart from each other and feel yourselves wanting each other for a while. Stop trying to get shit from each other.

Polarity just happens when you stop all of the codependent, needy behaviors that you're both doing.

Sexual tension is inherent to polarity. If you as a man want to bring fire to her and set ablaze in a relationship with a woman, you need to be able to hold the tension.

To feel her desire for you and your desire for her.

Because all of the polarity, all of the desire, all of the tension lives in the space in between wanting and having.

The moment that you cross that bridge, the moment that you collapse that space, now you get to have the fire, but the polarity is dead.

Polarity exists in the space.

And so when you cross that bridge, when you have the experience, when you have the moment that you feel that fire, you be fully present in the experience of that ignition, and then you come back to yourself.

You don't get to live there. You don't get to live in constant fulfillment. Not if you want to feel alive.

It is the pull toward where aliveness lives.

And a man who can sustain desire, who can let her feel how much you want her while also demonstrating that you are not being controlled by that desire, that that desire doesn't own you, that you own it...

That man creates the container where her surrender becomes possible. Where she doesn't have to do it for herself because she trusts that you will, when the time is right.

She can only open to you when she's not responsible for managing your neediness.

Dominance is Sovereignty Over Your Wanting

Let's remember: Dominance is not about always getting what you want.

You can't always have what you want. You aren't in control of the whole universe, and you won't ever be. You cannot control everything in the world no matter how hard you try.

Being a Dominant man means being sovereign over your wanting.

It means being able to feel it without letting it control you. You own it.

If you don't own your desire, if you can't hold your desire, if you can't feel it and let it stir inside of you without having to jump...

If you can't do that, you are going to be dominated by your impulses and no one will ever feel safe with you.

A man who cannot govern his own desires has no business trying to lead anyone else.

Can you feel the full force of your wanting and still hold your center? Not let it move you. Not let it shake you. Not let it take you out of your clarity.

When you can do that, you've become trustworthy.

When you can hold that space around your desire, you can also hold space for a woman's surrender because you're not going to collapse the moment you're not getting what you want.

This ability to separate your wanting from your having is the foundation of authentic masculine Dominance.

It's the foundation of the ability to be with your own intensity.

And it is the route through codependency, through neediness, and beyond reactivity.

The Practice

So how do you feel your desire as a man without getting graspy or needy or chasing?

Notice it.

You have to be able to notice when you feel yourself wanting something and to sit in the enjoyment of that feeling. Let that move through your body.

And then make a choice about whether to act on it, whether to pursue it, whether to move toward it, when the right time is.

Make a conscious choice. Not a suppression, but sovereignty.

Make sure that you are considering all of the available options, one of those being not acting, one of those being holding, waiting. One of those being moving toward the thing.

What you have to be able to step away from is the automatic reaction.

When you can do this, when you can practice this feeling your desire without moving right away, you build capacity. You build strength. You build your presence.

And this isn't just about sex. This isn't just about women.

Do this with food. You want to eat something? Let yourself feel how much you want it for a little while first.

You want to buy something? Let yourself feel how much you want to buy it.

Do you want to do something different with your work or take on a new project or maybe start a business? Let yourself feel that for a little while first.

Do this with sex. Do this with her.

Can you feel what you want without being enslaved to the need to go get it?

This is power. This is masculine magnetism.

This is everything you need to understand and feel in order to light your life on fire.

This is one of the hardest pieces of self-mastery for men.

But a man who cannot govern his own desires has no business trying to lead anyone else.

Can you feel the full force of your wanting and still hold your center?

When you can do that, you've become trustworthy.

And that is the foundation of everything.

Listen to the full episode:

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Read and listen to Part 1 (The Feminine Perspective):

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