Sub-Communication.

This is my favourite of all the themes.

Why? 

Because choosing to place our attention on the subtext, the subconscious communication of any given situation, gives us a portal through which we can understand everything we need to know about relationships, seduction and life.

Taking the iceberg metaphor, I think we can safely say that most people are aware of the top 10% of what’s being exchanged in a social interaction. People usually notice the explicit stuff: spoken words and a basic bit of body language. But what makes up the remaining 90% of the dance between a man and a woman — the submerged or hidden part?

Under the surface we can learn to feel another’s psychology. We can feel the sexual or emotional chemistry (or lack of it) between potential lovers. We can see a person’s history. Their fears. Their judgments. Guarded dreams and power-games. Withheld erotic intentions! And sometimes, occasionally perhaps, we can be granted a revelation of someone’s authentic self.

But if my eyes are accustomed to surf at surface level, how can I start to see more of what lies beneath?

First of all, we can choose to notice. Be mindful during the rest of your day. What signals, among women, can you begin to see that you normally don’t pay attention to? What more can you hear, feel, even smell, in each of your interactions today?

Someone once told me that they could see a woman’s skin turn a very slight shade of blue when she was ovulating. I never saw that, yet I find a woman’s heightened promiscuity easier to feel in my body. Increased tingles in my lower belly, the alarm of an inner radar bleeps as this wide-open feminine energy enters the room: Sex F.M. is transmitting loud and clear, telling me that opportunity is near!

By slowing down, entering into and fine-tuning our five senses, we sharpen our perception of this subtle communication. And by feeling the moment-to-moment wisdom of our bodies with more precision, “sub-communication” starts to become less “sub”, and more overt than ever.

How else can we learn to see what’s under the surface? This has always been helpful for me:

In any communication, there’s *what* a person said, and there’s *how* they said it. Tonality, body posture, slight tell-tale nervous ticks… things we wouldn’t usually devote much attention to… well, they reveal all. While facts are spoken in objective language, sentiment arrives through the *feeling* of another’s communication. And on receiving the sentiment of a woman’s communication, we learn everything we need to know in order to dance with her. We know if she’s lying and is likely to flake. We know if she’s subtly off today and holding emotion back. We know if she’s secretly into us, and we can enjoy every layer of shyness that lies in the way. The signs that arrive through this felt-sense become obvious.

Most of the time, when I speak to women or men, I pay little attention to the actual words spoken. They fly in without much analysis or consideration, and fly out the other side. It means I’m less “clever” in verbal sparring than other men, and perhaps less convincing in debate. But I pay whole-hearted attention to the *how*, to the sentiment of her interaction, to the energy transmitted underwater. This makes me a dancer of the highest calibre; an intuitive to the core. I usually know what someone else is feeling long before they realise it themselves.

Now here’s a practical question you can ask yourself, which might prove lethal for your sense of empathy:

When I absorb a woman’s words and feel deeply into the way she speaks them, I sometimes ask myself the question, “who must she be as a woman, in order for her to be showing up in this way?”

I ask, “what must be going on in that woman’s reality — what must be deeply true about her — for her to be showing up like this?” And at this point I get very curious.

— If she feels guarded and judgmental, I wonder what might have happened in her life.

— If she feels light, open and curious, I wonder who might have loved her and taught her wonderful things.

— If she’s radiating a sumptuous, flickering energy, I wonder what practice she does to keep that, and what keeps her so committed to it.

— If she’s hesitant or protective, I wonder if seduction is a comfortable process for her, if I could relax my approach a little, or if it’d be more graceful to walk away.

— If she seems disconnected from conversation with other women, yet not disengaged from the rest of the party, I wonder what on earth she’s looking for.

— If she has a hot body, I try to see how comfortable she is in it, and I wonder if she finds it a blessing or a burden.

— But sometimes things just go up in flames, and I wonder how the shape of her body would feel in my arms and between my teeth, and what her face would look like in the throes of orgasm. This points to something more significant in nature – something worth slowing down for and enjoying!

— And so on.

I may consider these questions for two seconds and head somewhere else. Or I might consider them for weeks. I don’t need to ask her these things (and it might be far too direct and off-putting if I did). Nor do I need to find answers. But this is witnessing; this is curiosity, is it not? The attitude of contemplating life’s mystery, of being a student of women.

Try it out. I find that when I consider this question, I start to see more of her humanity. I start to truly see the beauty in front of me. And our interaction, once begun, seems to take on a whole new level of depth. Something the surface-surfers never get to see.

Sub-communication is endless… but it’s also easy! 

Here’s the route forward:

All you have to do to improve at seduction or intimacy is spend time with someone who’s a little bit more perceptive than you are. As they point out facets of sub-communication that you were previously blind to, you expand your range of perception, and a woman’s communication become less of a mystery. Day by day, under the guidance of a knowledgable mentor, you start to see 11% of the iceberg, 12%, 15%, and so on.

Once you gain a sense of mastery in this one theme, there are no more surprises in seduction: the entirety of her glacier was evident the moment you set eyes on her!

My girlfriend told me one of the greatest phrases I ever heard from a woman. She said, “I’m so glad you let me know how much I liked you, because if you hadn’t have told me, I would never have known!”

(Yeah it’s a bit of a brain-twister, you might wanna let that one sink in!)

But what she meant to say was this: she didn’t consciously realise how much she liked me for about three weeks. Her denial, her self-protection pattern, and the split between her mind’s awareness and the knowing in her body, all obscured this truth from her, threatening to stop her dancing the good dance with Yours Truly.

Yet all was evident to me from the very first moment.

My “seduction plan” (if you can call it that) was simply to wait and to love and to watch and to smile… until she realised just how much impact she felt right throughout her heart and her body, upon meeting me, throughout those early weeks of us getting to know each other, and still to this day. She unraveled in her own time, directly into my awaiting arms…

Sound arrogant?

Perhaps, but one thing that proficiency in sub-communication affords you is some well-occasioned arrogance. I mean, once you can already feel the truth, all you are is a vessel for speaking it.

Now the problem with studying sub-communication is that for many men it quickly becomes a by-pass — the perfect excuse — from actually showing up.

“I didn’t approach any women tonight because I was watching the sub-communication,” is a phrase I’ve heard spill thousands of times from the lips of Amorati. The saboteur can easily co-opt the notion of ‘signal-spotting’ as an excuse to avoid doing the hard part: you know, facing your fears and actually doing that initial approach. Be very suspicious of your own tendency to do this.

But then, showing up, showing up, showing up in the world of women without perception or attunement… well, that’s not particularly elegant. And in my world, neither is it particularly erotic! But hey, each to their own. Talk to enough women in a rowdy bar and yes, you will get laid, but in my world it takes a subtle and developed perception to spot not only the opportunities to seduce the woman you’re genuinely drawn to, but also to take her to places of depth, intimacy and ecstasy during your seduction of her.

As we talk about during the Mastery course, we each need to find the sweet-spot between having the SUB-COMMUNICATION to read what’s going on in the women around us, and the AUDACITY to do something effective about it.

Somewhere in that sweet-spot you will find relevant, attuned, and powerful action. And you can trust that, as you walk this path, you will get more of it… piece by little piece.

The old seduction maxim said that a woman can tell everything she needs to know about a man as soon as he enters the room. And I find that where a woman or a man is perceptive enough, they can indeed know it all.

There’s a more spiritual maxim which says that on a couple’s first encounter, both partners instantly knew everything there ever was to know about their new lover. The rest of the relationship therefore becomes the game of re-discovering everything we instinctively knew about her, but subsequently forgot.

Reading the language of women is reading directly from the book of life. It’s the key that stops seduction and intimacy being about guesswork, grunt-work or luck, and forms the basis of genuine skill. And it’s one of the greatest things I may one day pass on to you.

* * *

When I first met Zan at Casa Amorata, I was mystified by the notion of “sub-communication” and “the language of women”. How this guy could use a kind of information that was totally invisible to me was awe-inspiring. The work of a Jedi — I stood there, some nights until 5 a.m., hanging my head, astounded.

But it’s not magic… women’s clues are before us in plain-sight: we just need to get out of the way so we can see them.

All these years later, I now have hundreds of stories about how this “secret” language of women got revealed to me, interaction by interaction, and I’m sure I’ll share a few of these tales with you if we should ever meet one day.

For now, below is one of my favourite clips on the topic. Check in the video, when does the first piece of “sub-communication” happen between the woman and the young Che Guevara? In which moment can you see it’s on? How many times does she hint to him, giving him exactly the moments she’s open, or unavailable? What must be raging through his mind, as he consecutively screws things up?!

* * *

We go right down the rabbit-hole of sub-communication, in The Mastery of Ars Amorata: