Women Love Power®

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

Love

Why Abstinence can be Sexy–and Radical

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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.

It’s Time to Take Inventory of Your Boundaries

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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….

Jada’s Entanglement Was About the Pursuit of Happiness

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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.

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

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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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Three Lessons in Life, Love & Sacred Femininity From Oshun

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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

Dating One Man at a Time is a Terrible Idea

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Why is any single woman in 2017 still dating one man?

It is a riddle for the ages.

At a time when women have unprecedented autonomy and access to the opposite sex, we still commit  to men who are not committed to us– effectively placing ourselves on the losing end of the negotiation that we call romance.

I thought about this in the aftermath of ABC’s historic season of The Bachelorette as I watched womankind rally behind the losing suitor, a man who oozed passion and charm, but refused to bend a knee. In the end, bachelorette Rachel Lindsay chose the man willing to propose, over the man willing to promise– and women were offended.

I get it. Some of us have a real weakness for promises.

After all, promises are the strips of scotch tape that hold flimsy relationships together. When coupled with passion, they  will  keep a woman physically and emotionally committed to a man who is unwilling to reciprocate. Promises are kindling for situationships-– fuel for the virtual harems that have become the norm in this hi-tech age of un-innoncence.

Forget reality tv– in reality, there are women who choose  promises (and pillow talk)  over power– every single day.

The Last Supper

My former lover thought I was one of those women.

I know because he invited me to dinner, not once, but three times about a month after our liason had flat-lined. I politely  declined.

Maybe another time.

Our situation, after all,  had ended in an ellipses…polite communication punctuated by extended periods of his absence. And when I discovered that he’d taken interest in another woman–  I made peace with the ordeal and quietly moved on.

But after his fourth offer, I caved. Perhaps it was his persistence, or my own fatal curiosity, but on a random weeknight in summer, I found myself  anointing my pulse points in Chanel and wiggling into  a blue dress that  hugged my curves like  an Audi on the Audubon.

We met at a restaurant where the most delicious power struggle ensued.

He was an attractive, older man with oceanic eyes and sandy, leonine locks that like him, resisted being tamed, but on that night, they were bridled by a taut black headband, and he’d swapped his usual graphic tee for a crisp button-down shirt.

He greeted me like we were long-time lovers, and gallantly reached for  my chair. He even caressed my fingers from across the table as he swan dove into my eyes, telling me everything he thought I might like to hear. He had been busy with work, so busy there hadn’t been any time for romance–with anyone. But he would make it up to me in the Fall. He promised.

At the suggestion of a future date, I  smiled, and took to his ego like a butter knife to bread.

I told  him how  grateful I was for all he’d done for me. I assured him that he would  always have a special place in my heart (this is true). I told him he was so smart,  sexy and successful that I knew he could have any woman he wanted.

But right now,  I said just as his chest began to  swell, I want to be with a man who adores me.  A man who is serious about me.  A man with whom I can travel and enjoy life.  A man I can respect. A man who respects me.

And right now— that’s not you.

I reached for my water glass, and politely changed the subject.

He spent the rest of the night  shifting in his seat, searching for the perfect comeback–casting rhetorical lassos that failed to ensnare.

As exhilarating as it was to offer my cheek as he leaned in for a parting kiss, that encounter was not about revenge. It was about power.

His sudden rebound had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with his ego. He was the kind of man who needed the reassurance of knowing that  his charm had been so intoxicating– so virile and strong– that I’d be spellbound, even in his absence. He was like a bull in a china shop– let lose, he would break every beautiful thing in his path.

He wanted me in his harem– that is, he wanted me, the woman he was seeing, and anyone else who caught his fancy at the same damn time. This is how harems are formed– around men who offer just enough passion and promise to keep women physically and emotionally invested.

I had to give it to him– he was good at what he did. But I was  nobody’s concubine.

 You might win some… but you just lost one. – Lauryn Hill

A Woman’s Right to Choose

Some of us want butterflies and nothing less. Some of us need fire, even at the risk of getting burned. And maybe our partiality to men who fuel our deepest fantasies offers some insight into why modern dating is the way it is– and that is nothing like Mother Nature planned it.

We find bands of women in these  informal harems of lovers, ex-lovers and friends,  their love lives more-or-less mirroring episodes of  The  Bachelor, when  women are biologically predestined to be The Bachelorette. We were designed to have options.

The closer women get to real power, the more they cling to the idea that they are powerless.”- Hanna Rosin

The power of choice is our birthright.

That’s not a feminist mantra. That is scientific fact.

To understand our enormous power, we must first understand how humans came to exist.

At the dawn of humankind, in a small region of East Africa surrounding Lake Victoria, our predecessors,  Homo erectus females, were dying in catastrophic numbers. The cause— an anatomical bottleneck. The growing brain size  placed expecting mothers in grave peril, as the struggle to push a  large head through a narrow birth canal often resulted in the death of both mother and child*.

And then natural selection came along with an adaptation that gave rise to homo sapiens— and the most powerful female primate on the planet.

A random genetic mutation did away with estrus, the recurring period of sexual receptivity in female primates also known as “heat”. In our evolution from estrus to menses, females gained the power to override their neurological circuitry and the commandment of potent sex hormones. She now could have sex at any time of her cycle, and she gained the ability to choose when, if and with whom she mated.

The power to postpone sex gave women a significant sexual advantage over men. Women came to understand that childbirth could mean death, and developed the foresight to select the best mate—  a man who was not only handsome and virile, but generous and  willing to help mother and child survive the deadly parturition, infancy, child and young adulthood.

With this new adaptation, homo sapien males  needed more than good  looks and hard-ons to get it on. Now, they had to woo women— and our earliest male ancestors did this by offering protection, commitment, and the iron rich meat that women so desperately needed. That means, ancestral men literally risked  life and limb going into battle with wild animals– just to gain access to female sex.

This evolutionary tale is critical in understanding the dissonance between male and female desire that began at the dawn of our species. When Mother Nature gave women veto power over sex, for the first time in primate history, males and females desired different things. Men were after sex; women, a long term investment in the safety and well-being of she and her children. This dissonance would forever force the two sexes into complicated negotiations in order to establish the terms and conditions of mutual sex. Today we call this negotiation dating.

Date, Mate, & Negotiate

If dating is a negotiation where men and women are establishing the terms and conditions of sex, then all too often women fail to petition for their interests. 

We know that the party with the most options, the one most willing to walk, has the upper hand– but our cultural attitudes about femininity,  sexuality and fidelity, in particular our unique practice of “slut-shaming” , systemically  encourages women to act against their own self-interests.

Instead we settle for the intangibles— things like attention, hope and validation— for which, in exchange, we give our most precious resources—  our energy, our emotional labor, our power, our bodies, and perhaps most significantly, our time.

A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up. – Mae West

She’s not promiscuous; she’s pragmatic.

In season 2 of the HBO series Insecure, a heartbroken Issa attempts  to balance multiple casual sex partners at once. She calls it a ‘ho-tation‘– but let’s not confuse a rotation with promiscuity. It’s called being pragmatic.

We need to rethink sex, power and female fidelity altogether.

Sex-without-strings has never served women well, so much so, our species literally evolved so that human females could avoid it.  For the better part of human history, for a woman,  choosing the right mate (or group of mates) was a matter of life and death. Today, our survival may not depend on it, but our overall well-being certainly does.

Today we have normalized the practice of enjoying and disposing of women with cute terms  like “situationship” and “friends with benefits“. The term “hook up” originates in the African-American vernacular, meaning to give someone something of value as a favor. Derrick hooked me up with VIP passes… one might say.  

Women are hooking men up with their bodies, emotional labor, time,  and energy– and they are getting very little out of the deal.

It’s because we’ve taught women that sex is not about them– and that what they are offering both physically and spiritually is of little value. We sold an entire generation of post-liberation women a lie. We’ve lured women into being concubines–under the guise  of keeping it casual. We’ve taught women that not having their needs met is better than being alone.  We’ve taught women to wear their loyalty and self-sacrifice like a badge of honor, even when it means thwarting their own goals.  We’ve taught women how to  defer their power in the name of love.

But we were designed to discriminate. The power to choose is our birthright, and  we can’t choose without options.

Options allows us to hedge our bets. It gives us leverage, and enough emotional distance to discern the intentions of our men. It prevents us from wasting valuable  time with suitors who are unwilling, or incapable, of investing in us. Taking the time to choose gives us a chance to see if those enticing promises materialize, and to recognize the men who fake futures in order to get our presents, in the present.

It flips the script, giving us the means to act on our desire, rather than merely exist as the object of someone else’s.

And perhaps, the  best way to avoid being apart of a man’s harem, is to have one of your own.

xo,

Ayesha

PS: Every single woman has the unique ability to captivate and enthrall. Discover what makes you irresistible with my psychology-backed 13 Feminine Seduction Archetypes™ quiz.

*Even today, human females have the most difficult parturition process. The 96 hours following the onset of contractions is the greatest mortality risk  a typical human will ever face.

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“Hurt Bae”: When A Man Leaves You Emotionally Bankrupt

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There’s a new viral video, affectionately titled “Hurt Bae” that offers stunning insight into the dynamics of many contemporary broken relationships– the type of emotionally lopsided relationships that most of us will encounter at least once (perhaps repeatedly) in our dating lives. Created by “The Scene”, the short features two ex-lovers facing in their first intimate exchange following a tense break-up.

Even in the relationship’s after-life, it is evident that the power dynamics are still uncomfortably skewed in his favor. We see a woman who is visibly broken and looking for an emotional  reciprocity that simply isn’t there (and maybe never was).

I see a woman who has given way more emotional energy than she’s received. I see a woman who is empty–emotionally overdrawn.

It makes you wonder– how many of us enter new relationships in emotional debt, hoping to find someone willing to make a deposit? And perhaps, the first deposit in our emotional bank account has to be the investment we make in ourselves.

In this video I discuss creating intimacy in a way that doesn’t leave you broken and bereft. Watch the original video here.

Powerfully yours,

Ayesha

The “Goddess Complex” aka How to Play Games You Can’t Lose

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“Do whatever it takes. This is a hustle.”

I’ll never forget the woman who christened my TV career with those frank words of wisdom. She was the head of on-air talent at NBC Universal– the woman responsible for turning the likes of Tamron Hall and Brian Williams into household names–and I was a plucky 21 year old who’d talked my way into the C-suite of  30 Rockefeller Plaza.

I sat breathlessly as she watched my demo tape–  a bootleg collection of fake news reports I cobbled together as a summer intern, in hopes that someone  might catch  a  glimmer of star quality in a girl with big hair and a mild speech impediment.

Her feedback was blunt. She told me I was green  (the industry euphemism for terrible) and headed straight for a world of rejection.

And then she swiveled in her chair, looked me dead in the eye, and promised me I would make it.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

I did. I became a local news reporter three months after graduation and I owe it all to her.

I wish I could say she placed a high-level phone call, right then and there, on my behalf. I had no such luck.

The only thing  she did was tell me I would make it— and I believed her.

Armed with the belief  that success was inevitable, even if not immediate, I became fearless. The deluge of rejections I received from news directors around the country never fazed me. I ignored the ‘grown-ups’ who told me I was being unrealistic.

Instead,  I used my graduation money to fly to a media conference in  Chicago where, dressed in my very best pantsuit, I handed those terrible tapes to anyone who’d have them. That is how I met my first boss– the woman who put me on air.

And at the tender age of 22, I had learned the lesson of a lifetime .

Fulfilling our desires has little to do with preternatural talent, beauty or luck and everything to do with adopting this mindset:

Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Winners win because they expect to win. 

How to Play Games You Can’t Lose

We have little control over how the events of our life unfold, but we do control our interpretation and response.

When we  play games we can’t lose, we  expect to win– and every event that occurs, whether positive or negative, is simply working to move us forward. In this playbook, failure doesn’t exist. Neither does fear.

This is the attitude that separates the creme from the crop.

Most people are primed, beginning in childhood, to view failure as fatal. Failure is perceived as some sort of  moral shortcoming, a blemish on our character, or even karma’s bitchy wrath. It means we did wrong. We are flawed.  It checks our faith and brings forth our deepest insecurities. Failure is uncomfortable and as such, we resist at all costs.

In our attempts to curb failure, we play small. We avoid the bold risks  that lead to real change. We end up lusting for things instead of really activating the faith it takes to attain them.

Even worse, when people sense our fear of failure, they take our power.

When a man senses you are afraid to lose him, he loses the incentive to demonstrate his commitment. A boss that knows you are afraid to exercise your options, has little incentive to promote  your talent. A client who senses you need their business  has no incentive to pay you your worth.

A New Definition of Success

We often define success so narrowly that we practically guarantee a loss.

When life gets tricky, we lose sight of the big picture and become obsessed with individual outcomes. We get wrapped up in winning over one particular man when the ultimate goal is deep, committed love. We give up after one failed business venture when the ultimate goal is economic independence.  We rue over one failed  ‘vegan challenge’ when the ultimate goal is simply a tighter tummy or better health. 

We forget that ‘failure’ is merely feedback, and a signal to move forward, perhaps via a different road. Instead, so many stop just short of their destiny, derailed by the inevitable twists and turns of the journey.

When you surrender to the process, when you demonstrate the radical trust of which all women are enormously capable, that is when you  begin to play games you absolutely can not lose.

How to Slay On and Off the Court

“I just never give up. I fight to the end. You can’t go out and say, ‘I want a bag of never-say-die spirit.’ It’s not for sale. It has to be innate.” -Serena Williams

When I think of women who play games they can’t lose– I think of Serena Williams. (Though every woman on my G.O.A.T. list qualifies.)

With 23 grand slams under her belt, this is a woman who knows how to win. Her entire career has been built on defying expectations. She shrugged of those who ridiculed her muscles and her curves. She ignored those who doubted she could prevail well into her thirties. She even ignored those who labeled her confidence, arrogance.

And that’s not even taking into account her wins off the court– her  romantic hit list is a sampling of Hollywoods most notorious–and enticing– bachelors.

That’s why people were shocked  when she announced her engagement to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. She’d kept the relationship under wraps (smart woman) and few even knew they were dating. In fact, the gossip blogs, for years, had been playing a game of ‘Guess-Which-Ex’ — as early as a month prior to her engagement announcement, rumors swirled that she’d reconciled with her long time romance, hip-hop heartthrob Common.

But women like Serena don’t make u-turns.

On and off the court, she doesn’t lose sight of her ultimate goal. She plays to win. And she has never allowed anyone– no man ( no matter how intoxicating), critic or  opponent, to derail her .

This is what I call the “goddess complex”, an unshakeable belief in oneself that unlike the pseudo-psychological “god complex”, is rooted in healthy self-awareness.

How to Win… in Love

As women living in a society where rules of the game were largely established by men for the benefit of men, it is imperative that we bring this “goddess complex” in to the realm of love.

One of my favorite sayings is “people enter your life for a reason, a season and a lifetime”.

For me, growing up meant learning to tell the difference.

It’s easy, during the initial stages of romance, to fantasize about a lifetime of happiness with the interesting man sitting across from you at dinner– but that’s a slippery slope.

Every man we encounter on this journey to deep, lasting, spirit-based intimacy is not meant to be a soulmate.

Some men come into our lives bringing pleasure. Some men bring us wisdom. Some relationships, even those that end in heartbreak, bring us greater inner-strength and self-awareness. You may meet men who introduce you to new experiences, new people, or challenge you in exciting ways. You may meet game-changing men who bring you deeper into the depths of intimacy. Some men are in fact in your life soley to prepare you for the real love you seek.

We run into trouble when we try to make seasonal men the love of a lifetime. Not only do we sabotage our chances of encountering the real love we crave– we often overlook the ‘gift’ of the liaison.

All love begins with authenticity and intention.  Honor your authenticity. Set you intention. And then surrender, completely,  to the process. This is the only way to truly enjoy men, and lets face it, romance should be about pleasure.

The irony  is that the more we are capable of loving with a light touch, the more the men in our lives crave being near us.

By raising our expectation, we raise our vibration and our energy shifts in palpable ways.

You develop something greater than courage and confidence– you  develop conviction, the sense that nothing can stand between you and your destiny. You stop operating from a place of fear– and start acting from a place of love, deep self love. This changes the power dynamic in every relationship. You begin to attract the people and opportunities that are aligned with your best interests.

When you expect to win– you literally change the game.

How to Adopt a “Goddess Complex” in 3 Minutes or Less

It’s no secret that most people live their lives avoiding failure, and yet find it at every corner.

You can forever shift  this  power dynamic by  shifting  your mindset. In fact, by the time you finish reading this passage you will have adopted what I call a “goddess complex”.

Unbeknownst to you, you probably already have a “Goddess complex”, but only in certain situations.

Like driving.

Driving is as liberating as it is dangerous. Every time you get behind the wheel there are a number of potentially fatal events that can happen.  And yet, every day, we pile into the drivers seat and push the gas.

As we head for our destination there are red lights, traffic snarls, detours, tolls, accidents, slow pedestrians, fender benders and bouts of road rage– and yet none of these occurrences, aside from complete catastrophe,  deter us from arriving at our destination.

Why?

Because we totally expect to arrive.  If we, for a moment truly doubted our ability to arrive safely, we wouldn’t drive in the first place. We’d be too scared!

But  society doesn’t condition us to fear driving. Society conditions us to fear the big stuff– like romantic rejection, starting anew, or pursuing our wildest dreams.

But these destinations are no different than those on the map. When you drive, the only thing that matters is that you know where you’re going and you trust that you’ll arrive.

The same principle applies to everything thing else you desire in life.

One Final Note

Women at the top of their game succeed because failure is NOT in their playbook.

Think about your greatest desires– not those that have been chosen for you. Not the dreams you feel you should have. Consider the visions  you have for your life that speak to your spirit.

Remember this, so long as you are willing to play the game all the way to the end– you can not fail.

No one and nothing can stand between you and destiny.

So love like a goddess. Work like a goddess. Live like a goddess.

You are indomitable. The world is yours for the taking.

With persistence and power,

Ayesha

The whole world steps aside for the woman who knows where she is going…