It’s the last thing I expect to find in an automotive waiting room.

Tucked between a dog-eared Outdoor Life and a wrinkled Southern Living is a small, colorful book — the kind that looks, at first glance, like it belongs in the children's section of a library.

I've already flipped through the magazines, waiting for my car to complete its routine oil change. The minutes are crawling. The smell of motor oil drifts in from the garage and mixes with the smell of burnt-coffee from the machine in the corner.

I’m restless in the way you only get when you have nothing to do and nowhere to be.

So I pick it up.

It’s an explanation of an ancient four-line prayer — complete with colorful illustrations and bold promises that a daily practice of these four lines could be life-changing.

I'll be honest. My first instinct is skepticism.

It may sound surprising, but even as a scholar of religious history — someone who has read the Bible alongside dozens of other ancient texts — I have a complicated relationship with overly biblical language.

The war metaphors. The authoritative declarations about what "God" wants us to do. I've always found those frameworks more limiting than liberating.

But something about this little book reaches through my skepticism and hooks me anyway.

Maybe it's the simplicity. Four lines. That feels manageable in a way that most spiritual promises don't.

Maybe it's the hope it's offering, and the fact that in 2018 I was quietly desperate for some:

My relationship had recently ended. I’d been treading water in the post-graduate purgatory of student loan debt, hadn’t yet hit my full stride in my career as a sex therapist, and, as if that weren't enough, I'd been dragged back into family court for what feels like the hundredth time in nine years.

I am tired. I am worn down. And I am sitting in an automotive waiting room, smelling motor oil and burnt coffee, holding a children's book about prayer.

What do I have to lose?

So I give it a go.

For the next several months, every morning, in the dark hours before my kids wake up, I sit at my meditation altar and move through those four lines — slowly, deliberately, like I am feeling my way through a dimly lit room I've never been in before.

At first, they are just words.

But over time — gradually, and then all at once — something shifts.

I stop hearing the words and start feeling something beneath them. Like dropping into an undercurrent that has always been there, running quietly and invisibly. A kind of matrix. An undercurrent of energy and insight that the words themselves are only ever pointing toward.

And in that space — in that current beneath the words — I begin to experience something I can only describe as a gateway.

A gateway through the fear.

Not around it. Not away from it.

Through it.

I begin to feel — in my body, not just my mind — the things that keep us locked outside of experiencing the "King/Queendom of Heaven" inside and all around us:

• The guilt, shame and unworthiness that pushes love away.
• The doubt that whispers “what if I fail.....what if I make the wrong decision....what if...what if...."
• The denial we use to keep inconvenient truths at bay so we don't have to feel the pain.
• The self-betrayal in the name of "love" that ultimately harms us and hurts others..

These are just flavors of fear. Different textures, different disguises — but the same root.

And here's what the prayer is teaching me, morning after morning in the dark:

Fear is not the enemy.

It is the invitation.

It's a door.

But only if we know how to enter through it.

Most of us run. We numb. We distract.

We let the guilt or the doubt or the shame convince us that love isn't possible, that connection isn't safe, that we are fundamentally, irreparably broken.

We slam the door before we ever find out what's on the other side.

But on those silent mornings of 2018, in the quiet of a half dark room, the prayer teaches me something different:

What if instead of running, you turned towards it?

What if you met your shame? What if you surrendered into your doubt? What if you opened into your unworthiness, and allowed yourself to receive more deeply in spite of it?

What if you Embraced these fears? Fully. Openly. The way you'd comfort a frightened child.

Not because it feels good, but because you finally understood it was never there to destroy you?

It was there to lead you.

This is what I mean when I talk about moving through fear into love. Not bypassing it. Not transcending it. Walking right into the center of it — and discovering that the center isn't darkness at all.

Now — I can already hear some of you asking:

"Susan… what does ANY of this have to do with sex, relationships, or intimacy? I thought you were a sex therapist. What’s all this talk of ancient prayers and the Kingdom of Heaven and Jesus dreams?"

That is exactly the right question.

And the answer is everything.

I am inviting you into a conversation that goes far beyond body parts and physiological functions; A deeper journey into yourself, and a more more profound understanding of what intimacy and "sex" are really about. It's far more than orgasms and erections.

Because what I discovered in those early morning sessions at my altar, what the prayer has taught me, turns out to be the same thing I watch my clients struggle with every single day.

The same fear. The same flavors. The same slammed doors.

Just wearing different clothes.

• The person who can't let themselves be truly seen by their partner.
• The one who craves intimacy and connection but sabotages it every time it gets close.
• The one who has never felt fully at home in their own body.
• The one who is afraid of feeling “too much" emotion.

Fear. Guilt. Doubt. Denial. Self-betrayal.

These aren't just spiritual concepts.

They are the invisible architecture of every broken relationship, every unfulfilling sexual experience, every moment of disconnection you have ever felt from yourself or from someone you love.

And if there is a way through them, and I am here to tell you there is, then that path matters just as much in a bedroom as it does at a meditation altar.

That's the bridge I want to build with you.

And we start building it in my next email....

Let's Get It On!

Susan

Susan Morgan Taylor, MA

Renegade Soul Guide. Mystic Priestess Healer. Rebel Therapist Freak.

www.pathwaytopleasure.com

www.susanmorgantaylor.com

Susan Morgan Taylor, MA is a sex therapist, spiritual teacher, mystic and healer who helps awakening women and couples unlock deeper intimacy — within themselves, each other, and life itself. She believes love isn't a destination; it's a practice. Susan is the creator of The Pleasure Revival Experience, an 8-week online program for women who refuse to let midlife dim their fire.