Just over five years ago, Kasia Urbaniak founded The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. Today, her teachings are more popular than ever. Her unique curriculum represents a total paradigm shift for both women and men.
Neither is inherently superior. This exchange of self for other is common to many Eastern spiritual traditions, including both Daoism and Buddhism. Contrary to what Western culture teaches us about the primacy of the self, a shift in focus towards the other can be surprisingly liberating, expansive, and empowering as well as compassionate.
When we focus on the other , we let go of our limited, perhaps somewhat fearful and defensive sense of self. In essence, forgetting we exist in this way allows us to realize our fullest potential and to become much more beneficial and effective. It was the best way that my nineteen-year-old self could pay for college, support my sister, and travel around the world looking for all the most magical masters I could dream of studying with; I could afford to be fanciful and adventurous.
But as she began to see both experiences as trainings, her occupation and her avocation started playing together in unexpected ways. I was doing one in order to do the other. They were energetically super grounded and also willing and able to penetrate energetically the space of an other.
In the case of the dominatrix, meaning the space of a man. On the one hand, I saw how both dominatrixes and Daoist nuns were solidly grounded in their power, while the vast majority of women I knew were struggling with a mass of assumptions, superstitions, and fears about men, love, romance and men, power, work, career.
