20 Seconds of Insane Courage to Save Your Relationship – Transcript
Every single life-defining moment I’ve ever had has always come down to how much courage I had. Did I step up to the plate? Did I push myself out of my comfort zone and take a risk for something more?
One of my favorite mantras is: If you’re not scared shitless, you’re not aiming high enough. This applies to dating and relationships and truth-telling, business decisions, and even the waves I take when I’m out surfing. Every major milestone and up-leveling of my life is always preceded by a moment. A crossroads where I’m asked to leap off a cliff.
Or I can choose to retreat back down the mountain and hang out and chill for a while longer. The biggest moments of my entire life have been when the universe was offering me a way out, a way up, a higher path into a new dimension of reality. But there is always a price of admission, and it’s courage.
The decision will involve risking something, and usually I have to let go of that something without any guarantee of the outcome.
The universe rewards courage. I believe this with all my heart and being because I’ve seen it over and over. Your life can change in a second or in 20. [Laughs] A time- and space-bending quantum portal opens up, and you step through, or you back off.
The 20 seconds of insane courage idea comes from a movie that I’ve actually never seen, but I’ve been told about because of this idea. The movie is called We Bought a Zoo, with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson.
Every year in the Well-F**ked Woman Salon, we run a contest for the Well-F**ked Woman Hall of Fame. Many years ago, actually the first year I ran this contest, a woman who was in the salon was separated from her husband, and she was doing the Well-F**ked Woman to find herself again.
She was diligent in doing the practices and reconnecting to her sensual and feminine self. Her estranged husband was living in a trailer on their ranch property. One night, she worked up the 20 seconds of insane courage to go and speak to him as her newly reclaimed, Well-F**ked Woman self and make a last stand for their relationship.
He saw and felt the changes in her. They reconciled, and they came to my Orgasmic Enlightenment Retreat in Mexico a month later. It was beautiful to see them together. Twenty seconds of insane courage.
It is said that only the bold find true love. In relationships, there are two key times when these moments show up. The first is in the beginning, to even create the relationship. The approach, the line, or the crossing of one. The all-time top two pickup lines, if you want to call them that, that were ever used on me were:
1. “I have a lot of stamina.”
Pretty good.
2. “I already have your name tattooed on my body.”
And he did. [Laughs] It’s that moment of declaring your intrigue, your love at first sight, your “I can’t let this person walk away from me because I know they’re going to change my life” knowing.
The second is when you’re in the relationship and it’s grow or die time. Courage within your relationship looks like radical honesty. Daring to speak your truth. Not hiding behind “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” white lies, sins of omission, or being afraid of whether you’ll really be accepted for who you are.
When couples go through my salons and they take the risk of saying the things they’ve been holding back for years and even decades, that is when the magic happens. All that stuff and suppressed energy they’ve been dragging around like dead weight, and the weight that’s been getting in the way of them deeply loving and fucking each other is now liberated. They are free to deeply love and fuck each other.
We all know the truth on some level anyway. We can feel it below the surface, even if we can’t always articulate it consciously. Meaning all the things you think you are doing such a good job of hiding and pretending about, your partner already knows them anyway on some level. All that does is erode the fabric of your relationship and build walls between you.
Think of every white lie and sin of omission as being another brick in that wall. And every time you come clean, you take a brick out and dismantle the wall. Honestly, a really good dismantling will inevitably lead to a really good fucking. It’s the ultimate palate cleanser and reset for both of your systems.
You are much better off taking the chance of revealing yourself and your truth and letting the cards fall where they may. The truth is that your relationship of shallow white lies and hiding will never bring you the kind of life-changing depth I talk about in my work. Never.
The pathway to gourmet sex is through having the courage to be honest and to throw it all down. If you choose to keep lying in your relationship, I guarantee it’s doomed.
What are you even doing with this person if you can’t be yourself and express yourself? What is the point? Risking telling the truth is your only shot at making it into superpower couple-dom and the Anami Well-F**ked All Star Hall of Fame.
One of our Well-F**ked All-Star Couples, Jim and Meg, talk about how in one of their 20-seconds-of-insane-courage conversations, he shared that he wasn’t sure if he ever really loved her. How is that for a bomb drop?
But saying that thing and tossing everything into the fire, where you basically have nothing to lose after that, freed them to keep speaking the truth that lingered beneath.
The moment of courage is saying the first thing, the scary thing, and once you get going, it becomes so much easier.
Then there is the business of daring to open emotionally and sexually. I always say that the key ingredient in gourmet sex, the kind of sex that changes your life, is surrender. Building up walls and only choosing to give so much of yourself, trying to never lose control, all that stuff is the kiss of death. They are all coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms from past trauma and hurt. They are not the stuff of love or life.
To get to the cataclysmic places I speak of that I say everyone can get to, a la Anami guarantee, means you have to risk baring your heart and your genitals.
Sometimes we get so used to our defense mechanisms, and we’ve had them for so long, that they are woven into the fabric of our being. They become instinctual.
A woman might think that she’s just one of those women who can’t have vaginal orgasms, such as G-spot and cervical orgasms. But what happens in the moment is that she reaches a precipice where she’s got to jump. She reflexively recoils and pulls back. It might happen so fast and so automatically that she barely recognizes that there was a moment of choice, but there was. There always is.
But she’s trained herself to avoid it. To sidestep it. To never fully engage and crack herself open. Which is the only game in town.
Men bail out of intimacy by coming too quickly. If you’re only ever having five-minute rounds of intercourse, you will never reach any kind of cataclysmic, life-changing sexual transformation. You just won’t get the chance. The more you do this as a man, the more your woman will avoid opening because the moment she starts to—boom—you pull the rug out from underneath her. She’ll get tired of taking the chance when you keep bailing.
Life-changing sexual medicine happens in extended encounters. Period. That is why I am such a proponent of the weekly three-hour sex date. It gives you time and space not to hide. You just can’t when you’ve got three hours staring you in the face and the genitals. There is no escape.
The best people in my life did not let me escape. They held my face in their hands and didn’t let me turn away when they were loving me. They held my hips in their hands, and they didn’t let me stop when they were fucking me. They were relentless in the pursuit of love and surrender and cataclysms.
This episode is an ode to stepping into these moments and walking through them and not backing down. It’s not even 20 seconds of insane courage; I think it’s one second where you decide. The other 19 are you holding yourself in place and not backing down from your decision. Once you ride through those 19 seconds when you might second-guess yourself and retreat, then you’ve made it. You’ve done the hardest part.
I see this in my surfing. I am training to surf bigger and stronger waves. The one-second moment is me deciding I’m going for a bigger wave that’s coming toward me. The other 19 seconds are me paddling toward it and locking in my commitment.
Once I’m on the wave, I am past the hard part. The wave might be a beast and far out of my comfort zone, but I’ve already paid the price of admission. All I need to do is stay connected to my commitment. When I execute it well and ride it with style and grace, that is the best feeling.
Or sometimes I might choke, and I don’t trust my instincts in the moment. Like a wrist slap from the universe, I get dumped into a tornado of ocean spew that somersaults me and knocks me all around, and I take ten waves on the head and have to paddle back out through a frothing mess of if-you’d-only-committed seafoam.
But real commitment rarely misses the mark. It all starts with 20 seconds, or even one second, of insane courage.
The Coming Together for Couples Salon opens for registration in the middle of April. In the meantime, you can sign up for our Seven-Day Sex Cleanse for Couples by going to KimAnami.com. Look for Sexual Savant Salons, and then click on Coming Together for Couples.
