Kasia Urbaniak - Unbound: A Womans Guide to Power

This book is a training manual for battle. It will prepare you for war when its necessary and skillful collaboration when you desire it. It is a field guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable. It contains instructions for achieving unattainable goals, ones so far out of your reach you feel stupid or crazy thinking them, let alone saying them out loud.

It is an education in breaking the ingrained conditioning that keeps women silent and accommodating when we should be expressing ourselves and having influence. It will teach you to know what you want and how to get it, which will change the world around you.

It is a guide to power.

My name is Kasia Urbaniak, and I spent seventeen years studying to become a Taoist nun while working as one of the most successful dominatrices in the world.

These seemingly contradictory tracks gave me unexpected and unprecedented insight into how power works. In studying Taoism around the globe, I learned to read the human body, so Id know a persons intention to attack or retreat before theyd moved a muscle or uttered a word. It taught me to follow and trust whats most alivewhats humming with energy and possibility.

From my work in the dungeon, I learned all the ways that imagination can heal us and help us to discover deep emotional truths. In playing games with power, I learned to differentiate between real authority and a performance of it.

From both, I learned about power dynamics: influence on others that exists beyond the level of language alone.

In 2012, I founded a school with Ruben Flores, an emergency field coordinator for the humanitarian organization Mdecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders), to teach other women what I had learned. At the beginning, our school felt like an exclusive but growing secret society of powerful women whose headquarters just happened to be my Manhattan apartment. We were a modern-day, real-world Bene Gesserit, a coven of the righteous, planning world domination and achieving it.

But in 2018, many women began speaking out about their lived experiences of sexual harassment and assault, which gave rise to larger cultural conversations about feelings of powerlessness in family units, in romantic and sexual relationships, and in the workplace.

As the #MeToo movement gathered speed, women at large started speaking a truth that my students already knew and had trained for, that mostif not allof us had clutched in a high-stakes, high-stress situation.

When it was most important for us to know and speak our truth, we were unable to.

The world is on fire, and the concepts I teach are ones that every woman should have access to. That is why I am writing this book.

This book will inoculate you against no and resistance of all kinds, including your own. It will help you to identify the life-force, the juice, the beautiful moving energy in every interaction, which is the key to understanding true desire. It will provide you with a constructive channel for all of the rage every woman has spent her adult life tamping down. And it will teach you to harness one of the most powerful weapons we haveyour attention.

And while there will be erotic absurdity and transcendent insight, what I really want to share with you is what I discovered underneath every interaction. Because power isnt a mood, an outfit, a moment, or a pose. It is the ability to access your deepest desires, express them fully, and use them to influence other people and the world at large.

Ultimately, this book is about relationshipsin the den, in the bedroom, in the workplace, in Congress, and at the bar. It is about the dynamics that define them and decide their fate. It is about strength and vulnerability, dominance and surrender, and how each affects the flow of love, power, and influence.

I use binary termsman and womanwhen I speak about gender, not because I see gender as binary, but because my work is so deeply rooted in the cultural conditioning that all of us received when we were assigned male or female at birth. Regardless of how you identify now, the expectations of and treatment by your parents and society at large imprinted you, and make a difference in the way you behave in relationship to others.

Youll also notice that many of the examples I use are heteronormative. Much of what I teach addresses the ways that women have been conditioned to interact with men, including as romantic partners. But the behaviors outlined within these pages can be used with a spouse, sparring partner, coworker, friend, child, parent, or lover of any gender. Breaking the ties that bind will allow you freer, more powerful communicationwith everyone.

When you play skillfully with power dynamics, the world changes. You stop being a servant of the life youre living and become a creator of the world you want.

Lets get started.