A woman who is willing to live in her surrendered state is a woman willing to be firmly seated in her power. She is willing to claim this power back from her conditioning, to learn how to wield it consciously and well. But power is responsibility, and the responsibility is so great that many women choose to deny or cut themselves off from their power, allow their conditioning to drive it, or attempt to co-opt it to seek egoic attention.
Women are given the most powerful force on the planet to wield—the power of call. A female monkey can draw a male monkey over 200 miles with this call. Women have the capacity to switch this call on and off volitionally. One-third of the human brain exists to feel into the feeling states of others. Females have an additional capacity to send out a frequency, a signal or call, to others. This capacity to confer a type of presence that elevates the nervous system of another is the place where life is actually happening.
Responsibility with respect to call means she admits that the state of her nervous system profoundly affects other people. This happens regard- less of what she puts on top of it, whether others perceive it consciously or not. It is therefore her responsibility to ensure she is in an open Erotic state. Call contributes more to the world than any action she could take. Were every woman to take responsibility for her nervous system, we would experience the healing of the world.
No matter what she says, how she acts, what she tells herself, or how many affirmations she speaks, others are at the mercy of how she feels. They can try to tune it out, but it will be like trying to tune out the sound of a siren. She can shift the states of everyone around her by elevating her own state. She can do it silently and with profound impact. However, performance cuts off all power, so anything that she performs is delivered with tightness.
An erotically powered woman is an adult who doesn't afford herself the luxury of non-powered states. This does not mean she doesn't feel sad or angry. It means when she feels this way, she inhabits, eroticizes, communicates these emotions exactly as they occur. This allows her to generate rather than construct who she is.
Operating call is a woman's path. It takes tremendous cultivation, determination, and focus to not become power drunk or complacent and use call solely for conditioning; to face what a woman needs to face to liberate her call from pride and shame; to face the doubt she and others have of it; to learn to be steady and focused with it so it doesn't blast a room, over-activate another's nervous system, or get so low that the impulse to subside call with control enters and begins to take over.
She is living with this force inside of her that requires ambient attention 100 percent of the time in order to maintain its optimal state. The repercussions in any direction are serious.
Every woman knows the visceral experience of arousal, of lighting up and drawing in attention. This capacity blooms in teenage girls, and more often than not, gets tamped down or driven underground. As a culture, we have agreed it is dangerous. And yet, this emanates from the center of women's power. It is the doorway. It is the place that has men sense there is something happening between the women in the room that they cannot tune in to.
Unfortunately, disconnected from power, run by the ego, and under the influence of masculine values, call is co-opted for competition, female peacocking, and "grabbing" someone's attention in order to feed a never-ending hunger for attention. She will use it to soothe the feelings that arise when she is not in her power, such as a lack of safety, feeling unattractive, feeling lonely. She will try to feed her hunger for the very power she already has by sucking in a finite source—either a person or by engaging in the masculine form of working harder—which she hopes will require less maintenance. She wants to go on autopilot, but another person or project is never enough to fill what only her activated power can.
What looks like an easy out—an external source of power—proves to be more work than it's worth. There are diminishing returns and ever-increasing maintenance costs with payment due on the back end, yet, as with an addiction, she continues with a behavior that brings neg- ative consequences to her life. The primary addiction of the collective of woman is to attempt to find power in relationship with a partner— because she can control her call enough to draw him in and it does not threaten to get unwieldy—or through masculine forms of production or spirituality. None of these ever activate her feminine power.
As a consequence of looking for extrinsic power rather than develop- ing, on feminine terms, her truly interior power, she eternally seeks out- side of herself without gratification, having to sell herself and conform to externalized ideals for a drop of power. She lacks the power to guide and educate the people around her, while relying on them for the income of external approval, thus she carries the lion's share of work and emotional labor, all while they have an overinflated sense of their value.
Because she "needs" him for her limited access to power, she endures or cuts off Erotic experience. Her access to power is on his terms and in a way that is often so unpleasurable that she does not surrender. She lacks the power to respond and instead freezes in the face of aggression. She doesn't have enough fuel to establish an energetic boundary around herself that would determine organically and with ease what enters and what does not.
She lives in a constant state of vigilant maintenance. She is necessarily in competition with other women who she deems as more powerful than her as they threaten her source, and she edges in on women she views as less than her. She loses access to the generative power of other women.
This vicious cycle descends into a compounded state of resentment. Not only is she resentful, but in order to get scraps, she has to people-please. And not only does she have to people-please, she does not have the power to convert the resentment into fuel. She descends into a state of feeling deeply powerless, victimized, and hypersensitive. And yet, even this is often not enough for a woman to choose to pick up the mantle of her power.
To take ownership of her call, then, is the first step on a woman's path. First, she admits she has it and she uses it. Next, she agrees she wants only to use it in service to her deeper power, her sense of self-possession, and that there will be a letting go of empty-calorie behaviors that do not serve. Then, she honestly faces the fears around why she would make any other choice.
In our culture, we do not often acknowledge that anyone would fear their own power. Men have defined the culture and for a man, accruing more power typically only adds to his status. Women and marginalized people accessing power occurs as a threat in the world, which triggers a counter threat to cut off whatever goods and security they have accrued. This is how we have maintained cultural homeostasis. Therefore, a woman taking the mantle of her power is an act of courage, a journey of its own, rife with danger and loss. But it is ultimately the only journey there is for her to make.
The next question she faces is: how? How does she access this power? Simply put, she must reverse every system that has been put in place for her to exist without it. First and foremost, she needs to access the raw power of Eros on her terms. Next, she will have to turn her outward-seeking attention inward, in order to shine out rather than attempt to draw in. Then, she will have to repair her relationships with other women, since this is a level playing field of power and the best place to begin to practice.
She will need to examine what she uses her call for. She will need to admit when she sends mixed signals, where her call is turned up high but her expression looks innocent and denies it. She will have to learn to listen to what her call brings in rather than trying to direct it to fit in with her conditioned preferences. She will have to bring every under-the-radar activity to the surface, and be overt. She will have to forego turning it on to get attention or to get a result.
With the call force liberated, she is granted a self-possession that relies on not anyone, but everyone. It self-organizes for her safety and for what she draws in. Most importantly, it allows her to be seated in a true power that confers power onto others. When seated here, she makes the people around her great and, as a result, she is able to live in interdependence with others.