Perhaps I should confess.  Sitting across from each woman – I am in silent prayer.

Please God, let it be that she is totally, utterly, completely consumed.  By something.  Anything.  Okay, maybe not sugar or shopping.  But let it be that this woman in front of me – this intelligent, put together, gorgeous woman finds herself on her knees tonight, crawling, reaching, yearning, aching and tormented by something she cannot outrun.

Let it be that someone or something reaches up through her pussy, her heart, into her mind and yanks down.  Hard.  A grip in the center of her soul that re-orients her – forces her to live every moment in relation to that thing.  Let her flail against it, rage, ignore, withdraw, cry, pray, beg.  And let it be that it remains unmoved and unmovable.  Something entirely, for once out of the domain of her control.  Let it please take her, trembling and if necessary, humiliated, out of control. 

Get her out of the room of her suburban good girl mind, humming alone and playing with Barbies, writing the script for all the players.  Let her lose her place in the script and find herself having to improvise.

Let it be that the lure, the undertow is so unbearably powerful that she finds herself totally lost, bat shit crazy lost, naked clothes shredded, shipwrecked lost.

And let it be there breathless and spewing that she discovers that she was not who she thought she was, or better yet, that she doesn’t care about the things she thought she did – the artifice of intelligence cultivated to compensate for a lack of the thing she really craves, the raw power sex, the security that the others all believe is for her but really is there to imprison this beast inside, lest it devour all it yearns for, the success and achievement she believes are necessary to claim her birthright of pleasure.

Let the sex, the beast, the pleasure to the point of paralysis, come directly to flood through the dams of composure.  Let it be that she cannot in fact put it all back together – like she has done since time eternal.  Let it be that she is so nailed that she cannot even put a thought together, that the minute she does it fractures into a thousand tiny little pieces.  And in that gap, let it be that what lies deeper can finally rise up and ooze out – into her tissues and sinew, blood and bones.  Let it be that she becomes heated and swollen, fat and woman.

And let it be that her fear enters with all of its marching orders, black boots and linear instructions - that it gets absorbed into this molten liquid that she has become.

And please god, give her the opportunity, in this lifetime to know the feeling of living on the tip of another’s finger and feel how he could so easily just flick her off like an irritating gnat as stroke her, to stroke from her even the prayer that she could ever hold back.

Let her love too much, be too much, cling too much, want too much.  To the point of total consumption.

I say this prayer prior to writing out my prescription.  Prior to locating the blockage.  Prior to sending her there, just there, to the man she believes will destroy her, to the one her pussy throbs for but cannot be tamed.  And I instruct her to prostrate herself before him, to tell him every thought, every desire, every yearning.  To offer herself to the lower nature.  The sacrifice of the virgin she has attempted to remain.  Untouched and untouchable.

And then I wait for the inevitable immune response, the sexy savvy woman suddenly sounding like a grandmother, “but I could never…do that” cheeks flushing, lips swelling, thoughts churning.  I watch the movie play out of her phone call to him, the innocence of a desire unrestrained.  And then she tells me that this just doesn’t seem right – all of her friends would agree, cab drivers and therapists would agree – this can’t possibly be right.  But she knows it is.

I watch her negotiate with her various censors and guardians.  She has to put up the good fight. She half-heartedly says, like a bratty teen, “Yeah, sure, easy for you to suggest.”  To which I respond, “Yes, it is, because were I not so goddamned consumed with getting women on this underground train, I myself would be getting fucked by the conductor.”  Or smoking crack in a live-in van with a mind-fucker so intense that he would laugh uncontrollably when I asked him to stop.  Or chasing after some guy who has learned to run like an Olympic athlete all charged up on fear.  Oh the possibilities are endless. But no.  I am here with her, where I can only dream.  And fucking do yoga and eat brown rice.

Someday my Anti-hero will come, and maybe then she will be there to scrape me up off the sidewalk.

She concedes because she wants what I have, or more precisely, wants to rid herself of what I don’t have, which is the pride that would take hostage my desire for very dangerous things.

There is this story.  A Buddha story.  It is about how this dumb monk spent 7 years in a cave meditating.  He gets ticked off that he is not enlightened and heads back to town and there is an old woman who asks for his help.  He is so consumed with his frustration that he pays little attention.  He goes back to the cave.  7 years.  No enlightenment.  Comes back. Little boy on a bike falls and he steps right over him.  Back to the cave.  Nada.  Back to town and for some reason this time he sees a dog that has been hit on the side of the road.  This dog has an injury that is gross and pussy and maggot ridden.  But the monk is flooded with compassion. Unbelievable compassion.  A compassion that drives him to remove the maggots.  But then he feels compassion even for the maggots and takes them out gently with his lips so as to not injure them.  The dog suddenly becomes the Buddha.  And when he does, the monk asks, in so many words, where the hell have you been?  To which the Buddha responds in his inimitable  way, “I have been here all along, you have simply not had the compassion to see me.”

This is a great story for the male monk realm.  But as women, we are hardly deficient in the realm of compassion.  We can just skip the peace, silence, renunciation, love-and-light bullshit.

What we need to awaken our souls is power – raw, chaotic, unruly, untamable power.  And that power comes in the form of desire.

I wrote a little corollary story for women.

A woman goes into the bedroom and suffers for 7 years hoping to discover the sex she yearns for. She comes out and tries to find it in vibrators and self help books, independence and spiritual pursuits.  She hauls her ass back into the bedroom.  Suffers stultifying boredom.  She comes out and what she has been yearning for is there is waiting for her dressed in bad and dangerous and inappropriate.  She bypasses them every time on her way to do errands, or do yet another thing for another friend.

And then one day.  She meets a man.  And he grabs her by the scruff of her neck. And he musses up her hair.  And he doesn’t give a shit about her schedule or her rules or her fear.  And maybe he smells of smoke and beer.  And maybe he’s dumb and poor.

But this time, for some reason, she can’t tamp it down, she can’t control herself.  She’s driven.  And the minute he lets go, she finds herself on her knees begging him to stay.  Just one more time.  Please.  Touch her. Kiss her.  Say anything, anything. She doesn’t care. She only wants to feel him.

And in that moment he becomes everything she has ever desired and denied herself.  And she starts to cry and asks him where he’s been.  To which he responds:  I’ve been here all along, you’ve just had the surrender that could see me on lock-down.”

And she discovers the laws of the land: that for a woman to get free she must give herself over totally and completely to something she perceives as less than her, beneath her.  It is not when her king saves her and she is locked away in the castle that she will feel it but rather when the wrong one subdues her using her own desire that she will discover that surrender, so misunderstood, is where all power lies.

And if she is lucky, very lucky, he will bow to this power by evoking greater depths of surrender than either could ever imagine.  And in this, for the first time ever perhaps, a man will meet a woman.

Nicole Daedone is the founder of OneTaste and the author of Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. For more information about OM, visit www.onetaste.us.