By Jillian

Desire can be an ember. It can be slow burning. It can be tentative and hesitant; cautious and unsure. Desire can be provisional and exploratory; unsettled and indefinite. Desire can be open to consideration; speculative about how it will be ultimately fulfilled. Yet, always hungry and eager to be fed.

My desire has been ravenous at times; eating up greedily, swallowing up, galloping ahead, making hasty choices and rushing in, eager to finally feel satisfied. This hustling, mad dash to the finish line, has led to rushed decisions at times and hurried commitment to situations that were more frustrating than fulfilling.

This rush to gratify my own desires impacted my marriage by creating a dynamic between me and my husband Wayne where I was leading, charging ahead, and he often felt that his desires, concerns, and leadership didn’t have much room to be expressed. It was if the fire of my desire and my vision would consume us both. While I loved feeling that passionate surge inside of me, what I came to realize was that what I really desired was to collaboratively create, and lead with Wayne as an expression of our intimacy and closeness with each other.

I’ve experienced that intimacy invites us to heal by offering a ground of deepening familiarity and closeness with another person that also provides us with a powerful mirror in which to see ourselves. As the saying goes…Into-me-I-see through intimacy. Through my relationship with Wayne, I was able to see that the way I related to my own desire was more masculine in nature than feminine. I feel that the invitation to a woman in intimacy with a man is to respond to male leadership with her own desires and leadership. Responding this way allows a woman to rest in her heart, in her trust, and in her yin power.

Female Yin power, to me, is not so much about creating results and taking action (although of course we do!), as it is about feeling the emotional truth of a situation, leading with our heart, supporting our mate, and trusting that where he is leading is where we need to go next. This does not mean we are blindly following along or being subservient to our mate.

I had been a single woman and mother for many years before my marriage and was used to following my own desires to the exclusion of any one else. I was my own mate in this way, married to myself, and got used to not having to collaborate with anyone around major life decisions or choices related to following my passions. Yet, I also ached for that mirror of Intimacy to offer me a deeper look at myself; and I desired for a mate that I could collaborate with, be inspired by, and co-lead with.

Three years into my marriage, I am now in a phase where I feel that what I most deeply desire is to feel that my desire can heat up, it can be a seed or a flicker. And, most of all, that it can be fanned by, inspired by, and ultimately gets fulfilled by the beautiful union of my husband’s desires with mine.