This is a letter to my creativity coach Sara
Before our call I always give her a headsup.
.

So although my four pages covered four areas of life, it was the one about career that I knew was the most important one.
The other areas of life were made possible by having the understanding of how to rebuild my new career.

But as I said, mulling things over, not only did I realize it was pretty dry and boring, I also realized I had not been dreaming BIG.
And that a vision of how it- my life- was meant to be, should surpass the level of tweaking and understanding Life in its individual components.
That if you need to write out four areas and five bullet points per topic, that’s twenty bullet points too many.

I needed one vision.
Any and all points that could possibly arise, would fall into place on their own accord.
So I wondered how that would look, and the first thing I realized was that despite all the very important reasons it was all about the money, and worldly success was important and bla bla;
I only found the sexual paragraph relevant here.

That I never started this alterego LS Harteveld, nor my precious work with you as my creativity coach, to then make it about business.
With that singular insight, I could already narrow it down from 4 areas of life and 20 bullet points;
To one area and 5 bullet points.

It was this area of sexuality and sexual identity, where I needed to develop a Vision.
A Vision that would hold, and that I would hold, and a vision which would dictate the right path.
In this case a sexual path.

So I combined all the studying and thinking of women’s sexuality I had done since 2007. In particular;
The White Tigress books and ideas from Hsi Lai;
My own identification since 2015 that I am a mistress, or that that is the identity I am most comfortable with;
And finally my current Femme Fatale project for which I analyze the movie Basic Instinct to articulate why its protagonist (or antagonist) Catherine Tramell radiates so much power.

And what it comes down to is that over the last few months, I have internalized all those three identities or wisdoms, to the point where I no longer a need a man/lover to validate I am a sexual being.

I am a sexual being, and this has become entirely independent from if I do or do not have someone to have sex with.
It has become not so much irrelevant, because of course I hope life has something in store for me!, but it doesn’t define my sexuality.
I am a sexual woman, a dark femme or a femme fatale, I am a mistress and I aspire to transform and elevate my female presence to the level of Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct ;
These things are independent from if I do, or do not, have a lover.

It comes down to the lesson I learned looking back in 2015, to the beginning of my sexual healing and rediscover journey, in 2007.
In 2007 I had ended my long-term relationship because I wanted to meet new men and fall in love. I did not want being in a long-term relationship to be the end of my sexual path.
In particular not because I had an aids-phobia, from which no therapist had been able to cure me. 
My choice for one partner, and for monogamy, was based on fear and on my inability to live life as a single woman with multiple partners.
I knew I had failed to develop myself sexually, and that my relationship status was because I was too afraid to live any other way.

I was very happy finding the Hsi Lai book at the time, White Tigress. It is to this day the only one of its kind, the only one depicting a sexual independent woman, but also a spiritual woman.
For a White Tigress sex is a spiritual practice.
As I now know, it also is for me.

So I dated, I met new men and so on, and in 2015 I found myself being “the other woman”, and it clicked.
I knew being a mistress was the closest term or definition I could find to describe all the characteristics of the relationship I now knew I desired.
I wanted dates to be special, orchestrated, centered, loving, exciting, playful, fun, with a hint of mystery and a whiff of the forbidden.
Being a mistress offered me those things.
All things my (“our”) long-term relationship had lacked, and largely because we had still been in college when we had started seeing each other. We were not mature, when it came to dating and sexuality.
We had started out great, but we had known nothing about keeping the flame burning.

To this day I consider 2015 the year my “White Tigress Journey” ended. The journey that had started in 2007 when I bought that book and set out to find my own sexuality, and to live without fear. 
In 2015 I had been phobia free for years, and I knew I had found what I was looking for.

That was the moment I looked back and thought:
“If I could tell the 2007 version of me something to help her out on this journey, what would it be?”
And it was:
“I could have been that strong, sexually independent woman from day 1. There was no need to let myself be defined by fears of the past, nor did I need to have sex or find a new fearless lover who would heal me.
It was all inside my head, and I could have claimed my new identity as a sexually free and strong woman, from scratch.”

And I always remembered that.
Never look outside of yourself for validation that you have reached a certain level, nor look outside of yourself for healing.
The only healing that is needed is you letting go of your old story, and stepping into the new version of you.
Maybe outside validation will come, maybe not!
What difference does it make.

So the fourth area, and the five bullet points about my sex life and why everything would work out, and why I had a good chance of having a sex life in the upcoming decades?
It can, and should, be replaced by that one image, of the woman I want to be.

This post was originally titled White Tigress Rising, not Dark Femme Rising. Because those two books from Hsi Lai (White Tigress and White Tigress, Green Dragon) are to this day the only spiritual and sexual femme path I know!
But I changed the title, and thereby I changed the name of my project title.

I changed the word which I from now on will use, the lens through which I see myself.

Sixteen and a half years after buying the White Tigress book, and 31 years after Basic Instinct hit cinema’s, I am stepping into the identity;
Of the Dark Femme.

And unlike the White Tigresses, unlike mistresses, and even unlike Catherine Tramell, I do not need a man or a sex life with someone else to be that person.

It is as 2015-me said it was all along;
“I could have been that strong, sexually independent woman from day 1.”

This is day 1.
A dark one.

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~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Books 

My diaries are available at LULU 
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Nederlands blog:
https://zegmaarlauren.com/