Concluding this little mini-series with a story about getting the girl…
You know, I’ve run a consultancy for the past eleven years. Attraction, dating, and relationship guidance: bespoke and to the point. I’ve seen a good many things.
What dynamic have I encountered most? Men saying:
‘I date all sorts of women I don’t really want; but I never get the kind I truly desire.’
This is something I’ve experienced myself. Painful on all ends.
Let’s work it through…
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Spend Your Attention Wisely
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There has long been an online ‘seduction scene’. You may know it, and may have cranked away at your clandestine keyboard, plotting and scheming what moves to make. ‘Field reports’ and the like. Lol.
In a way, seduction has a real simplicity to it, and requires far less attention than most men give it. Ask any female friend, and she likely won’t get what the fuss is about.
But this is easy for me to say, after eleven years of exploring this full-time. Truth is, there’s a complexity to women that’s beyond most of our grasps. There’s a subtle language to learn. Good masculine leadership has deep refinement to it, and if you are to embody the know-how and assuredness of good masculine leadership, you must pay your dues.
We must feel into our woman, ourselves, and the context that surrounds us. Like any knife-edge moment in nature, we must take the right leap at the right time.
But when learning ‘seduction’, our attention is often in the wrong place.
As I’ve said, if your nervous system isn’t overflowing with stress, and you’re not over-thinking some grand performance, seduction is built into human biology and, many times throughout your life (your year, or even your month) it will happen of its own accord. We need to let nature take its course, and enjoy the ride half-sat in the witness position.
And yet we ARE overflowing with stress, and certainly over-thinking things. This stops us from FEELING into our woman, ourselves, and the context, in real-time, as the dance of seduction unfolds.
Because feeling and presence are far more important to this than strategy and technique, much attention given to ‘learning seduction’ should really be directed to melting trauma. Much better to let go of where your validation-hunger-for-the-real-attractive-ones comes from in the first place, rather than pirouetting with clever statements to appear like you’re out of her web.
But ‘validation-hunger-for-the-real-attractive-ones’ (and its close cousin, ‘deep-fixation-on-the-unavailable-ones’) are deep topics we might explore another day.
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Now I will not claim there is no use in seduction shop-talk. Learning the truth about women, and what more experienced men say and do, has been important in my path.
There are times in life for sharing your genius one-liners and your bold seductive surprises. We’ve all had them. But the Ars Amorata has always been about this:
1. You’ll do far, far better as a lover if you learn to open your heart to the fullness of what a woman is, and eliminate any rigidity or judgmentalism that lives inside you.
2. And you’ll be most compelling, as seen through the eyes of women, if you take the pains required to understand who you are at depth, and what your life is all about.
Especially when it comes to those ‘high quality’ women who meet your better standards.
We have said all week that ‘a woman doesn’t want to be an adventure, she wants to be taken on an adventure.’
So when she’s thinking of all the men in her orbit, she’s weighing up all the different adventures on offer to her. Think about choice from her perspective for a moment. What adventure are you to her? Is your adventure clear and compelling? What makes you, as an adventure, stand out?
And do you own, in the way you stand and in your energy, in your choice of language and dress, what your leadership is about?
When your validation-hunger is bigger than your sense of personal odyssey, she will feel herself more like a mother to you, than a devoted lover and muse.
But when your personal myth is bigger than your dream of ‘merging’ with her, she’ll look to you with admiration and respect.
This is why it’s easy for you to get the ‘less attractive’ ones.
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Own What You’re About in This World
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You’ve no doubt heard people talk of hollow dating lives. You may even have one. When you have no access to meaning, adventure, and aliveness in yourself, you try and fill those gaps by conquering a woman. Get between her legs for a night, and it’s funny how that existential angst melts away!
For a day or two. But a man can go so far up the hollow dating road that he feels that lonely angst even inside her.
I’ve been there. You can become very skilled in getting this kind of sex, but it tends to give men a subtly vampiric, or puppet-master quality about their relating. It doesn’t give, but seeks to take—and it will never bring you the calibre of woman you want. You know in your bones that a woman who’ll sleep with you as a surrogate for what you need to be doing with your life is not the kind of woman you want to be with, long term.
When I was in this phase of my life, there were always two or three ‘Goddesses’ around me that would never jump into bed with me. They could sense how I would use their validation as a substitute for my soul’s true life.
These women were always a blessing to me. Always gave me that slightly motherly, slightly sisterly kind of love. But I got some humbling feedback.
One time, I fell head over heels. Got caught real bad in the spider’s web, I should say. A woman I absolutely wanted. You know what she said to me?
‘I’m almost seduced by you,’ she said. ‘If you were a little bit more in your body, and if you owned what you’re doing in the world with a little more conviction, I’d have no choice but to surrender my entire body to you…’
I stared at her for an eternal moment, my mouth dropping down to the floor.
‘…but as it is,’ she said, ‘I can just about hang on.’
‘Hang on?’
She could just about hang on.
I threw my best seductive arsenal at her, and she could keep herself together. Body still under control. Not about to give it over.
And still, she fed me the image of surrendering her entire body to me.
Did you ever get caught in the spider’s web, and give a great woman the possibility of ‘hanging on?!’
You can build up a seductive arsenal, but lack a fundamental thrust in your tank.
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‘Ensoulment’
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To be embodied, or in your body, is to be able to feel the sensations and signals that move through your body, in real time, as they happen. Embodied awareness is what separates masters in any domain from beneficiaries of happy accidents*. People who are embodied, who have awareness of their bodies, are simply more compelling and vibrant.
In light of our recent discussions, I throw a new word out on the table: ensouled.
What does it mean, to have ensoulment?
I see a couple of definitions—
1. Bringing the wisdom of your soul into your mind, as a way to inform your perspectives and decisions. (A wisened, soul-informed ego.)
2. Subsuming the operations of the mind into the soul, so that you fundamentally live your soul’s life. (And ego becomes a servant to your personal myth.)
What an adventure! To untangle the ego to such an extent that you live a life of pure soul!
When I think about it, this is what is most attractive to me in a woman. A feminine life devoted to a deeper sense of soul. Mmmm. This is Emily from The Alabaster Girl (‘a woman intent on a task’). It is the most captivating thing I can imagine.
But what is it to live the true life of my soul?
‘Dreamers and iconoclasts.’
I can’t say it in words, but I surely can feel it.
’He wanted a mission and got a lawn that needs mowing.’
Soul is the adventure I want to be on!
’Lost and waiting for you. Go!
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One of our members posted a quote from James P. Carse, which was the final line of his book, and the essence of his philosophical thesis:
‘The only true revolutionary act, is not the overthrow of the father by son – which only reinforces the existing patterns of resentment – but the restoration of genius to sexuality.’
‘The only true revolutionary act is … the restoration of genius to sexuality.’
What does it mean?
Looking at the history of the word Genius, we see it used among the Ancient Greeks as a synonym for the Daimon, or for Soul. One’s personal genius, their deep intelligence, is an expression of their soul.
The only true revolutionary act is to restore soul to our sexuality.
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A number of the men I work with feel they’re lacking experience with women, that they have to make up for lost time. In a sense, if you want to build dating skills, it’s worth exploring seduction and attraction with every somewhat-interesting woman you can find.
But if you’re on the route to soul—if you’ve known abundance and your standard has risen—celibacy, and I’m not kidding when I say this, might be a better bet. Or, as a wise elder said to me, ‘only make love when you are truly in love. Because when you have sex without love, if you pay attention, you will always find there is a subtle sadness.’
Yeah, I didn’t like this advice either.
But when I stopped using sex for subtle validation, for telling myself the story that I could get sex (‘I’m worthy now’), I spent an eery and meaningful few months of tender solitude, and got to know the stranger textures that made me up as a human being. It was as if I grasped something of my existential condition as a mammal in this hostile world. When I think of the art I wish to create, my mind goes back to those months of solitude, which later became some of my most cherished memories.
Interestingly, I found, when you’re able to feel the existential texture of your fragile human condition, it seems to make for very good sex. I cannot overstate just how life-affirming this kind of sex is. All separation evaporates—and there is only, radically, NOW. And it’s why I harp on about solitude (not loneliness, solitude). For only when you accept your fundamental aloneness, your infinitesimal sense of self, can you ever create this explosionary kind of intimacy with another.
Life, as we know, is a giant game of sex.
Penetration, reception, power-games and rape. Everyone’s at it.
And we live our lives as we live our sex: with abandon, with standards, with depth, or with compromise.
Those ‘high-quality women’ seem to have a good radar for this in men.
If she knows anything about soul, she can feel where you’re off.
Which is why she’ll never surrender herself over to you… until you can sustainedly be ‘on’.
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So what is your soul’s adventure, my friend?
What is your soul’s adventure?
How much fear is there, in the way you have sex?
How much compromise, in the way you live life?
To fashion a life where you live according to the true needs of your soul… where you don’t plump for secondary wins as a way to assuage your fears… takes something. The only question is: do you have the guts for it?
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Will that desire you had for that woman you made an adventure…
… lead you to pursue the adventure that’s within yourself?
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If you are gripped by the prospect by the real adventure in life,
I am here to guide.
~ Jordan
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Where Next?
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To bring all these topics together in fantastic, unrelenting company, come and see us live.
Check out the upcoming events on our calendar: Salóns in San Francisco, LA, Santa Barbara, San Diego, New York City, and West Palm Beach.
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