Dear Lover by David Deida Page A

heart-demand. Yet another step in love’s flowering is to trust and open fully as the love that yearns to shine through the hearts of all beings.
    In bed, you may enjoy taking charge, teaching, and leading your lover on occasion, but if your man is inadequate—if your spiritual and sexual guidance is necessary because your man’s capacity to navigate is untrustworthy—then you remain unsurrendered, and your body accumulatesdiscontent in the form of tension, stress, exhaustion, or depression. You want your man to know you and reach you; you want him to know your body and how to bloom your openness.
    If your man’s depth isn’t sufficient to feel you and open you, then your body becomes edgy, your voice sharp, your movements ungraceful. Your belly is not full with pleasure. Why? Because as much as you may genuinely enjoy guiding your own life professionally, artistically, or politically, your feminine essence yearns to surrender as all love rather than maintain control and make all the decisions spiritually and sexually.
    Have you ever leaned into a man’s loving guidance? Have you relinquished control and allowed your sweetly surrendered heart to flow open like the ocean, wild and deep, rather than holding the narrow direction of a functional canal? Spiritually and sexually, your heart wants to be entered and inhabited by deep love and impeccable integrity. You want to swoon as love’s fullest offering without always having to initiate the lead and guide your lover.
    You may not mind managing the 100 employees at your corporation, but your heart finds little pleasure in managing your man. As a human functionary—a businesswoman, a professional artist, a mother, a politician—you may genuinely love to be in charge. But if you have a feminine essence, then when it comes time to open in spiritual and sexual intimacy with your lover, you wish you didn’t have to always be in charge, telling your man what to do, directing him into greater depth, teaching him how to open. You want to offer yourself open without always having to initiate and lead.
    Your heart longs to be felt, known, entered, loved, and commanded open, yet you may also be afraid to trust.
    Every man has his limits, so you may be afraid to receive command from your man, knowing he may falter, seeing that he does falter at times. Your man may lack intellectual capacity. Or he may be energetically insensitive. Your man may be clumsy, hesitant, or too safe and unadventurous. Yourman may lack the depth, force, and gentle insistence necessary to earn your surrender. If you don’t totally trust your man’s command sexually and spiritually, then you have chosen him so that you do not have to surrender open, offering your heart’s deepest yearning.
    If you are with a man you don’t trust, it is only because you prefer unsurrendered love to surrendering wide open in total trust. It feels safe. You are afraid to let go of control—part of you doesn’t trust love’s command—so you have chosen a man who doesn’t demand your surrender with his depth of integrity. If you did trust the command of love, you would only settle for a deep man capable of opening you more deeply than you could instruct him.
    Men are like trains. They are going somewhere. Choosing and staying with a man is like choosing to get on a train. You will end up going where your man goes, spiritually and sexually, or you will have to get off his train. You cannot change a man’s direction to yours without losing trust in his capacity to navigate.
    You don’t want a rigid man, but you want a man whose heart’s courage and authentic truth runs deep. You want a man who feels you, listens to you, considers everything you have said, and then claims you, taking you to where you couldn’t tell him to take you, even if you tried. He takes your heart to new depths of adventure and openness, and he shows you new aspects of life.
    You can—and should—give your man your fullest expression of