The rigid woman lacks vulnerability and assumes her head can tell her body what it wants and what it feels. She tries to be put-together—suppressing, denying, and rejecting any information located in the body that differs from the idea of what she thinks she wants. She dismisses the inconvenient and the difficult until it is packed like landfill in her system—becoming the "scent" emanating from her. People in her presence may feel tight, irritated, or anxious and not know why.
She wants to present as the face of balanced peace and calm, but what she believes to be steadiness is, in fact, rigidity. What presents as calm or acceptance is disassociation. It is the valuing of the appearance of calm over the experience of calm, which, in turn, produces anxiety. The only way to true calm is to feel through all of the sensations so they may carve out her interior world in order to allow for more. Calm is the result of space, made sturdy with awareness. Material must be digested through attention and converted to psychic nutrients.
The woman without power must rely on the masculine notion of attractiveness. She must present as a calming, beneficent, "untouched" presence, so he can be the first to touch her. In other words, her interior world must appear virginal. She must not enter into the unsavory domain of her emotions, inhabit them, and get sullied by visceral experience.
But, this makes a woman hard on the inside. Emotions are the dynamic aspect of being, what keeps the interior world fluid. Deep and difficult work is required for the emotional viscera to be pliable. We cannot "tell" emotions what to feel—they tell us. We cannot dismiss them or act over them. They are not on our time and they do not go away.
A funny quality of the rational mind is that it believes if it ignores something, if it cannot see it, then it is not there. The primary reason for this belief is a lack of power. Lacking power, it cannot afford to face emotions because it will get lost in them.
A woman who is erotically powered is like seaweed—deeply rooted on the ocean floor but flexible in the movement of emotions. She is strong in her fluidity rather than rigid like a fortress. Her body demonstrates this strength; rather than an austere or upright posture, she moves with fluidity.
A woman who is rigid cannot "take" much. As there is not much room for movement, she must withdraw in order to digest. Her engagement with people is confined to certain areas of consciousness while she presents other areas as not to be entered. When someone does enter and tries to communicate in one such region, she will be triggered and either react or withdraw. She has a lack of flexibility in her preferences and expression.
The woman who is erotically powered is made strong precisely because of her flexibility and resilience. Those around her feel a comfort that they can be themselves. They can express naturally without fear of activating anxiety, hypervigilance, judgment, outrage, or hurt—not because she is in any way insensitive but because her sensitivity does not have a collection of impurities built up. A system without buildup can be touched anywhere. A system with buildup can never be touched "correctly."
Strength, which is the capacity to be with life, can only be had when the cleansing power of Eros flows through the system. This is uncomfortable at first and does not happen merely when a woman puts herself in Erotic situations. Being in Erotic situations without having made the choice to surrender only creates more buildup that occurs as rigidity, and thus as trauma.
That initial choice of surrender must occur or she is only adding rigidity to rigidity, no matter how long she practices. But the woman who opens to the power flowing through, converting the landfill into dynamic and alive emotions, carries with her the strength to hold anyone.
