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Feminine Power, Self Discovery & Sacred Sensuality by Ayesha K. Faines

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Article & Video Library

Why Abstinence can be Sexy–and Radical

January 17, 2021 By Ayesha

Remember sex?

We went from hot-girl summer to celibate-girl winter in the blink of an eye. Covid-19 put an abrupt end to barhopping — and bed-hopping — shuttering us indoors to be alone with our thoughts and our most instinctive cravings. But these days, women are less likely to view celibacy as a sentence and more as a form of self-care, especially at a time when protecting your energy and prioritizing mental health are tantamount.

It’s hard to even have a conversation about female celibacy that isn’t connected to religion, relationships, or respectability. Celibacy so often entails taking a vow of chastity for the love of a father, the Father, or a future husband. This is why purity balls, where teenage girls promise their fathers and God to remain chaste until marriage, are still a thing. For so long, sexual abstinence was less about a pause and more about the wait for the one — or anyone. Celibacy was either an act of devotion or the maligned mark of spinsterhood. But it’s time to change the conversation altogether.

Celibacy can be radical, self-indulgent, and, dare I say it, sexy. It can give us the space and time to take command of our sexual desires and prioritize pleasure in our everyday life.Celibacy can be the catalyst that we as women occasionally need to switch our focus from pleasing others to pleasing ourselves.  And in a culture of no-strings-attached love, taking sex off the table can clear the path to deeper, more gratifying relationships.

Rarely do we enter the bedroom solely seeking sex, anyway…

Read the rest of this article from my Love & Sex column at Zora here.

Filed Under: Featured, Love, Self Care, Sensuality

Danielle Murrell on the Five Laws of Feminine Power

January 17, 2021 By Ayesha

“I can’t say enough about how awesome this course is! After I enrolled, it only took me a couple of days to get through all the content! Not because it was quick because Ayesha really put in the hours and the research to bring you a comprehensive breakdown of the 5 laws but I couldn’t stop watching!!! Her professionalism and quality of presentation, her own personal self mastery and feminine embodiment and her ability to elevate the conversation about women and power. This is a mandatory course that I will make my high level female clients take as part of their personal and business development to go to the next level. In a world that encourages women to move in the masculine and do do do this program helps you step into your true feminine essence by who you BE!”

Danielle Murrell is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Rich Girl Business. Learn more about the Five Laws of Feminine Power here.

Filed Under: Power, Videos

It’s Time to Take Inventory of Your Boundaries

December 23, 2020 By Ayesha

I’ll never forget the woman who asked me how she could open herself to love again.

I was speaking on a panel in Brooklyn, and I can still picture the vacant look in her eyes. She said that after multiple heartbreaks, she felt she’d become invisible. The few men who did approach her all seemed to have bad intentions. So, every time a man hurt her, as I came to understand it, she raised her guard until she became a prisoner, trapped in the invisible fortress of her own making.

She felt invisible because that’s what walls do. They hide us. They isolate us from connection and community, and, as was her case, they don’t even keep people out. If anything, they invite the wrong people in, people with the clever ability to scale high walls by identifying your emotional voids and lowering your defenses. I like to call these predators “emotional cat burglars.” When we’re worried about being hurt, we naturally keep people at a distance — even deterring those with good intentions.

Since the biblical days of Jericho, walls have sated our fundamental human need for security, but they provide a false sense of security at best….

Read the rest of this article from my LOVE & SEX column at Zora Magazine here….

Filed Under: Love, Power

Jada’s Entanglement Was About the Pursuit of Happiness

December 23, 2020 By Ayesha

When Jada Pinkett Smith confessed to an affair with a 27-year-old musician, August Alsina, during a tell-all episode of her Facebook show, Red Table Talk, she laid bare the reality of her complicated marriage to actor Will Smith. In the candid, at times uncomfortable, 12-minute conversation, Will sat beside her and resolved to “love her through anything.” There was even that awkward toast to their “bad marriage.”

Many saw a cuckolded man and a selfish wife, as the slew of “entanglement” memes reveals. But I’d argue that the episode’s response reflects a larger turning point in the ways that Black women idealize and navigate romantic relationships. …

Read my full article at Zora Magazine.

Filed Under: Love, Pop Culture, Power

How to Let it ‘Flow’: Lessons In the Art of Surrender

January 29, 2019 By Ayesha

What would life be like if you stopped resisting, and began allowing? What does it mean to connect with the ‘flow’ and how do we marry instinct and desire? In the latest edition of the Women Love Power video series, we dive deep into the heart of the feminine journey, exploring how we, as women, have the power to endure, manifest, and forge profound connections when we tap into the ‘flow’. We explore an alternative approach that ignites our our ability to captivate, strengthens our resilience and connects us to our desire.

Curious as to how to connect to the ‘flow’ on a daily basis and ignite your feminine energy? Get instant access to the Five Laws of Feminine Power today for a play-by-play in module I of how we cultivate feminine energy– and use it to ignite attraction and sustain vitality.

Powerfully yours,

Ayesha

Filed Under: Featured, Feminine Energy, Mythology, Seduction, Self Care, Sensuality, Videos Tagged With: art of surrender, ayesha faines youtube, chi energy flow, how to learn the art of surrender, surrender to the flow

Aretha Franklin: Case Study in Respect & Feminine Bravado

January 29, 2019 By Ayesha

When I think of Aretha Franklin I think of feminine swag, soul, and over-the-top extravagance. I think of a woman who excelled because she shared her gift with the world, and she lived totally and completely unapologetically. Her life is a grand case study for how we command respect, take charge of our destiny, and live with soul!

Aretha Franklin is the DIVA archetype, like fellow super-star Beyonce. Learn more about the feminine seduction archetypes here!

If you enjoyed this video– there are more! Be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel.

And if YOU are ready to get in touch with your own feminine swag, and your ability to control your own destiny, be sure to get the Five Laws of Feminine Power.

Filed Under: Case Studies, Feminine Archetypes, Power, Videos

For Most Women, Power Is More Attainable Than (Equal) Love

October 18, 2018 By Ayesha

An honest look at woman’s quest for love, in the age of rising feminine power. Do we trade love for power– or can we get both?

Would you rather have love or power?

In Greek myth, the goddesses of Mount Olympus were rarely loved. They were lusted. They were tricked. They were possessed… often even subdued. But rarely were they loved.

Depiction of Sky God Zeus and his wife, the goddess Hera. Note how she prostrates before him. Zeus was known to humiliate Hera by taking on many consorts and affairs. She remained steadfast in her love for him, but was known for her rage, directed towards the women her husband chose.

Take Zeus, the omnipotent sky God and  Patriarch  of Mount Olympus. Zeus forced himself on Hera in order to shame her into marrying him— and then humiliated her   throughout their union by taking on countless consorts. He swallowed Metis, his then pregnant lover (whose name means cunning wisdom) after it was prophesied that she’d deliver a son smart and powerful enough to overthrow him, and disguising himself as a white bull, he even deceived,  abducted and raped Europa, a story that to this day is ubiquitous in the European Union.

Even the goddess Persephone’s rise as Queen of the underworld comes only after her husband, the chthonian God Hades attacks and kidnaps her, forcing her to live with him for half the year.

The goddesses of Mount Olympus loved their Gods, often in spite of the abuse, but rarely were they loved or revered in return. Figuratively speaking, they were the women who tithed while their men preached. They had power, ruling over their limited domains, and they had men–but not love.

These stories matters because the Greco-Roman mythological tradition is the  archetypal  blueprint for Western patriarchal society. These myths  assisted the decline of ancient matrilineal, goddess-revering societies, and they continue to exert a powerful pull on the collective unconscious–shaping our worldview,  gender norms, and the ways in which  conceptualize and actualize  love.

Depiction of the Rape of Europa. Zeus disguised himself as a seemingly harmless white bull in order to lure the mortal Europa. He later kidnapped and overcame her. Sex by deception and force is a recurring theme in Greek myth.

The imbalanced, exploitative relationships of Mt. Olympus were a prelude to the romantic conflicts that pervade Western society to this day. In fact,  I am convinced that much of the women’s movement of the 20th century was not just an effort to get equal power, but also equal love.

But equal love is hard.

Equal love is hard to achieve in a society that conditions men to resist emotion while conditioning women to seek it at all costs. Equal love is hard when we equate masculinity with domination,  teaching men they have certain rights over a woman’s body and it’s  hard when we assume that women are just ‘better at love’.

Game. Set. Match. Maybe Love.

I began thinking about our cultural conditioning and  our expectations for  heterosexual love,  while reading a controversial ‘think-piece’ published in Slate Magazine.

In the article, writer Heather Schwedel  says Alexis O’hanian, Reddit founder and husband to tennis champion Serena Williams, is  ‘performing’ love for likes on social media.

O’hanian, who once commissioned a string of billboards along a  California highway to welcome his wife back to tennis after  her life-threatening pregnancy, is known for his public displays of  affection. But rather than elicit a nod of approval, the author calls his efforts  a “baroque and labor-intensive domestic charade” selfishly designed to  solicit praise for “killing the feminist-husband game”.

This is what baffles me.

Everyday women erect emotional monuments to the men. We build towering edifices of  love, sacrifice, longing, and grief.

Why is it so hard to believe that a man in love might erect a billboard?

Williams is the ultimate powerful woman, and, thanks to the cliché that men don’t want to be with women who are more successful than they are, it’s nice to see her with a partner who, despite being a (lesser) hotshot himself, seems happy to take a back seat to her career.”-Heather Schwedel, Slate

At first glance, Schwedel’s cynicism speaks to our broad cultural assumptions about womanhood, race, and who we deem worthy of love. She frames her argument  in  the same beauty politics that have haunted  Serena’s career since its inception, joining the long list of detractors who depict Serena as too powerful, too masculine, and too brown for accolades, no less  love.

(Women are supposed to win approval, not championships.)

But perhaps more covertly, and speaking to my original point, Schwedel’s misguided thoughts also  mirror our own cultural expectations for women in heterosexual relationships– beliefs that undermine the  female  quest for fulfilling, unconditional, egalitarian love. We expect women to revere their men, but we’re a bit suspect when men do the same.

In order to  reach communion, or mutual love and acceptance, both men and women have to first consider  themselves equals, but patriarchies center around male domination and the assumption of male superiority, so herein lies the problem. In order for equal love to even have a chance, both men and women have to unlearn their most basic beliefs. We have to abandon the assumption that emotional withholding is masculine and that men are less than capable of love. We have to abandon the notion that women  must make ourselves worthy of male love, and that arduous emotional and physical labor is the price we pay to keep that love. We have to discard the idea that women are objects of male desire, rather than agents of their own.

The Truth About 80/20 Relationships

There are few things as demoralizing as being in an emotionally unbalanced relationship– where one partner out-loves the other.

But this unequal distribution of emotional and physical labor is commonplace, particularly in modern heterosexual marriages where studies show that married men reap the benefits of their spouse’s emotional and physical labor in tangible ways. Overall, married men are  happier, healthier, wealthier and have better sex  than their single counterparts, where as married women experience adverse health effects unless they are highly satisfied in their marriage. I’d conjecture that  these healthy, highly-satisfied wives are not burdened with performing the bulk of the emotional and physical labor. In fact, an AARP survey of 1147 men and women ages 40-79 who experienced a divorce in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, found that two thirds of women said they initiated the split.

These studies poke holes in our cultural assumptions about who benefits from marriage  while supporting the idea  that our cultural  blueprint for love is flawed.

For the better part of modern history, marriage was an oppressive institution that regarded  women as possessions, so in spite of our gains in the public sphere, remnants of that oppression still exist.

Women are working while  carrying out the bulk of the household and child care duties. Women are still performing the bulk of the emotional labor.  Women are enjoying the sexual liberation without the leverage the sex once offered in a culture that increasingly pressures women to engage in sex without investment or commitment. Our progress is benefiting men.

A 2009 National Bureau of Economics report sheds light on women’s perspective of marriage, suggesting that women in industrialized nations are experiencing a decline in overall happiness, inspite of epic gains in power– in large part, the report explains,  due to the complexity of modern romantic relationships, modern marriage, and the endurance to oppressive female roles.

Empowerment has become the catch phrase of the 21st century, and maybe we are so focused on power because it seems more attainable than equal love.

And this is not to say that true love does not or can not exist in our current society—it often flourishes  triumphantly, but the journey towards finding this mutually  loving  ‘communion’ is severely challenged by our cultural assumptions.

Love and Power are Not Mutually Exclusive

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

I have long been fascinated by women who excel in love and life– in fact that’s one of the many reasons I created this platform– to celebrate, and better yet,  to understand them. For years, I’ve mined the biographies of phenomenal women with chutzpah, gall, and larger-than-life personas, — women like Josephine Baker, Cleopatra, Pamela Churchill Harriman,  Lous Andreas Salome, Jeanne Moreau, Josephine Bonaparte, Eva Peron and Erykah Badu. These sirens, like Serena, also inspired the kind of love and devotion you can see from the highway.

And I realized something.

The common thread in all of their stories was not  just romantic success. In fact way too much attention had been given to their romantic conquests — a reflection of our shallow tendency  to define  women  by the powerful men who love them.

No, with time,  I realized  that romantic and worldly success go  hand in hand — and neither have anything to do with looks, privilege, or ladylike behavior.

It’s mindset. Mindset is what catapults mortal women into the pantheon of living goddess.

Their lives and behavior aren’t defined by patriarchal mores and sexist social codes and their life trajectories are not determined by gender.

Mental liberation enables captivating women to form solid self-esteem, the kind we all find hard to resist. It frees them to live full, individuated lives, to know their worth, and to ultimately choose men who are willing and capable of doing the same. These women are confident, cool, and comfortable in their own skin and they understand how to love and be loved. They resist conformity,  know their purpose, and play the field until they find  the man  (or men) best suited for their brand of love.

These women realize that they don’t  have to choose between love and power. For them losing personal power is not the price we pay for winning love. These women prove that a loving power can attract a powerful love.

The women who win  mutual, monumental love,  aren’t just lucky victors in a flawed system. It’s not a matter of chance. They foil all systems of power by means of subversion and self-definition. They are  indifferent to criticism and persecution and they give us a working example of what liberation looks like when paired with agency. They are the  true progressives of our lot, proving that fantastic success and monumental love is possible when we mentally get of the grid.

As Belle Hooks writes that “Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women’s working harder.”

So often, when women encounter the kind of lovelessness endemic in patriarchies, particularly in our culture of casual sex, we respond by buckling down on our sexist thinking. In our quest to improve our romantic plight, to get the monumental love our dreams, we often resort to self-blame, self-pity, and self-correction rather than the most aphrodisiacal quest of all— self-love.

Man’s Fear of the Powerful Love

Samson led the people for 20 years until he was betrayed by his wife, Delilah, and captured by the Philistines. It’s a parable cautionary tale against excessive pride and charming women.

In our society, women who buck social expectations by loving how and who they want, threaten the livelihoods of men and women who are fully invested in an oppressive system. They defy  all that we’ve been told about female chastity, purity, fidelity, loyalty and emotionallabor. They challenge our beliefs about which women are ‘lovable’ and and the terms of the love.  They foil our caste systems of desire.

And they are powerful.

That’s what scares us the most.

To render any lover spellbound is  form of power, but especially when that lover is a man.  A captivated man is taboo in a culture centered around male domination and control.

Right now I’m talking about a power beyond sex, but the power to plunge men deep into the emotional abyss where he may lose control— lose his ability to understand, to distance himself with logic, to detach  and to resist. His own sexual destiny may be at the whim of a woman which really turns this who patriarchy thing on its head and the fear of such an occurrence is embedded in the culture.

Consider the most famous femme fatales in history.

Jezebel. Salome. Delilah. Cleopatra. The ubiquotious dark siren  of 1940’s film noire.

What do they have in common?

A touch of evil.

Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in the iconic neo-noir Body Heat. Turner plays a textbook femme fatale, using her captivating looks, charm, manipulation and sex to lead her mark to his demise.

These beautiful and beguiling  pose a deadly threat to every man they encounter. Their pleasure comes at a steep price. She is his weakness, never his strength. They  are seductive landmines stirring both desire and terror, and in the end, they must meet their demise lest men meet theirs.

But sometimes men do encounter, and fall for these powerful women, and the only death that ensues is the fragile ego that keeps him trapped in a system that denies him full love, acceptance, and wholeness too. Sometimes love leads to  a pleasurable death, followed a powerful resurrection.

The Taj Mahal is an enormous mausoleum complex commissioned in 1632 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the remains of his beloved wife. It was constructed over a 22-year period on the southern bank of the Yamuna River in Agra, India.

The world’s largest diamond was purchased for a woman. The Taj Mahal was created in honor of a woman. Some of the world’s  most beautiful castles were erected for women . One might even argue that civilization itself is a testament to what men are willing to build in pursuit of female sex.

Since the beginning of time men have been demonstrating their love in extravagant ways because contrary to popular belief, powerful women really do inspire powerful love.

We should not feel threatened by women who evoke magnamious gestures of love, or even skeptical; we should be inspired. By freeing themselves from the tyranny of patriarchal attitudes, these women cease to enable toxic masculine behavior in their own lives, and often inspire the men in pursuit of their love to find their own psychic freedom, a gateway to  self-love, healthy emotional expression, and ultimately communion.

Powerfully yours,

Ayesha

Want to dive really deep? Learn the ways women have cultivated their power and beguiling abilities since the beginning of time here.

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Filed Under: Featured, History, Love, Mythology, Power, Seduction Tagged With: famous femme fatales in history, is marriage worth it for a woman, serena williams alexis ohanian, serena williams slate article, women's perspective on marriage

Three Lessons in Life, Love & Sacred Femininity From Oshun

November 27, 2017 By Ayesha

Oshun is the Yoruban goddess of the rivers and fresh waters, sensuality, fertility, beauty, art, wealth and love. Brought to the America’s via the Transatlantic slave trade, today, she is revered in Santeria, Candomble, and Afro-Haitian religious tradition as well.

She is such a strong force in the collective unconscious that she turns up, sometimes  unintentionally, in contemporary popular culture. From the universal image of a beautiful woman emerging from water (as in 007) to Pam Grier’s ‘Foxxy Brown’ and Beyonce’s’Lemonade’, the powerful orisha still makes her scintillating presence known. 

Even today, the ancient mythic stories that surround Oshun offer inspiring insight into soft power, transformation and the sacred feminine.  For women, myths offer a significant pathway to understanding feminine power as these ancient deities predate patriarchy and our contemporary concept of feminity. 

In this video, I explore the deeper meaning of several Oshun patakis and offer insight into soft power, radical transformation, and the purpose of pleasure.

 

xo,

Ayesha

Filed Under: Feminine Archetypes, Feminine Energy, Love, Mythology, Power, Seduction, Self Care, Sensuality, Uncategorized, Videos Tagged With: beyonce oshun, oshun santeria, oshun yoruba, oshunss

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