The Zen monastery where I train is not what most people would expect. Its founder was a thirtysomething Englishwoman who baffled onlookers when she – a foreigner and a woman – persisted in meditating outside the men-only meditation hall in Japan, until she attained enlightenment and received dharma transmission.

Enlightenment and Zen, hadn't been part of Houn Jiyu-Kennett's original plan at all. Her calling was to be a priest, but the Church of England was not to ordain women for another 35 years; so she was pushed to search further afield.

As the first woman sanctioned to teach Soto Zen in the west, Jiyu-Kennett established a monastic order where the sexes are held in theory and practice to be completely equal. About half of the 50 monks and masters in her two American and English abbeys are female, and the men and women live and work side by side.

On the train back from my first retreat, I devoured her autobiography The Wild White Goose. It was dedicated "to all women seeking spiritual truth, and especially to those who have ever entered into Zen training".

For the first time in my life I felt called to do something because I was a woman, rather than despite it. I hadn't realised until then how disheartened I had felt from reading mostly of men's feats, opportunities and status in Buddhism. Scriptural passages tend to mention women only twice: when referring to the Buddha's mother, and when warning against the terrible temptation and pointlessness of sexy women. The bloodline, which traces the teaching 2,500 years from the Buddha to each modern student, appeared entirely male. It led me to wonder whether I, as a woman, was capable of training at all.

To ease my spirit I imagined libraries full of books about women's adventures, high status held equally, scriptural passages that warned against the terrible temptation of sexy men (kidding) and a lineage that traced the teaching from a female Buddha through a bloodline of great women. I imagined an abundance of women known for achievement through perseverance, hard work and ambition, regardless of whether they were mothers or not.

At least I knew of one.

The thing that surprised people the most when I told them about the monastery was that men and women are happy to work together without sleeping with anyone. The sceptical majority assumed that humans have to have sex, and that those who don't were therefore dangerously repressed. Their trump card was the case of abusive Catholic priests: conclusive proof, they imagined, of what happens to everyone who tries to be celibate.

So it may be shocking that sex and romantic love didn't take up most of the contemplative space at the monastery. Some people sometimes had rampant sex drives, or fell in love (I know this because they were my friends) – but they didn't indulge it.

Choosing not to act on instinct, I found, got easier with time. The emotion and physical urge was still there, unchanged, but the landscape around it opened up and showed it in greater perspective: inconsequential in itself; a ripple in the stream; not something that had to be either indulged or repressed. It was just there, without being a problem.

Free of the game of attraction, people grew into themselves. We were less prone to looking at each other through fantasy, or to interact with an agenda in mind. People revealed both "masculine" and "feminine" traits regardless of gender. Men were not either "strong" or "weak", or women "nurturing" and "sexy"; we were all a mix of everything, and were the richer for it.

I'm not suggesting that men and women are the same, of course; male and female natures are different – to a point. But the difference is in "flavour" rather than in the hard realms of character, appearance, work and even sexuality. Manly men can still be passive, sensitive and nurturing; powerful and ambitious women can still be feminine without having to talk to the press about their lingerie.

Sex is great but we're doing it a disservice by turning it into an imperative, a currency, even a weapon. Our attitudes have the opposite effect to our deeper wish, polarising rather than bringing together.