Have a listen to the pre-christian rituals my ancestors are still doing against he church’s wishes even year in devotion to the “grieving Mother.” In the middle of hte night the village goes silent and a group of men do a blood letting ritual at every Mary station in teh village (there were at least 8 of them.)

We went into a trance following the men in this ritual well into the night - they started around 11p. My takeaway is more about the art showing up as the present and the possessions we can learn t cultivate choice inside of (with the right support pic.)

This writing and podcast on my bloody ancestral rituals and my body as the place that deserves to be ask questions and listened to as much as she is told, pushed and penetrated without presence…welcomes you into the taboo.

Maybe the taboo is not simply the place we are forbidden to go. Maybe it is the place where something sacred has been set apart.

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This is 10 years of practice in a form that didn’t even have a name when I began doing it. I was following grief and heartache that needed to be danced, to be written and spoken…

Its roots are connected to my Italian ancestors, to trance work and Italian shamanism, to dance, grief, Eros, and the underworld—the places we descend into to meet the parts of ourselves we are carrying but don’t always have the consciousness to accept or allow. The flow and body of work that has moved through me and countless others at this point, we call Body Temple Dance™.

And underneath all of it is the taboo.

The things we were taught not to feel. The things we were told were too much. The grief, the rage, the sexuality, the blood, the desire, the death, the pleasure, the parts of ourselves that didn’t behave. The parts that were inconvenient to religion, patriarchy, family systems, or whatever culture taught us how to be a “good” person.

Trauma is not negative the way it lives in us even if it feels unpleasant, it’s a doorway to our True Self.

I grew up around addiction. My father was an addict, and when you grow up around addiction, the addict’s needs can become the gravitational center of the entire family. His survival mattered. His pain mattered. His moods mattered. Him feeling loved or not loved was the priority of the home. His crises took center stage.

And there was very little room left for mine.

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I also grew up around intense sexual trauma. There were things happening in my family system that my young body didn’t have the language to understand, but the body doesn’t need language in order to learn. It learns through sensation. It learns through repetition. It learns through what is safe and what is not safe.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ~ Alice Walker

And underneath so much of it was one very simple survival strategy…

If I disappear, maybe I will be safe.

I learned how to become smaller, quieter, less demanding, less sexual, less angry, less alive. I learned how to be everywhere except inside my own body.

This is why the taboo matters so much to me. Because the taboo isn’t always some outrageous thing. Sometimes the taboo is having a need. Sometimes it is saying no. Sometimes it is wanting pleasure. Sometimes it is being angry. Sometimes it is taking up space. Sometimes it is being witnessed or witnessing another in a way that doesn’t extract from either person.. Sometimes it is admitting that you’re exhausted.

Sometimes the deepest taboo is simply:

I am here.
I have a body.
I have desire.
I have boundaries.
I have a voice.
I matter.

And this is the eternal practice we share called “unhooking” - it is one of coming back to the True Self. To caring for the child inside instead of becoming her.

Not by forcing ourselves into catharsis. Not by trying to shake trauma out of the body as if trauma were something we could simply expel and be done with. I don’t believe we are broken containers that need to be endlessly emptied. Sometimes we need to be filled with something that can meet us fully.

I believe we are bodies that adapted brilliantly to what was happening around us.

What happens when the body gets to have a new experience?

That is the part of this work that matters so much to me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life processing my childhood unless it’s in service to what I am here to create. I want to experience something my childhood didn’t give me.

I love knowing what it feels like to:

• have a need and not have that need become a threat

• take up space and still belong

• be visible and remain safe

• experience pleasure without performing

• have anger without becoming destructive to myself

• surrender without giving myself away

• stay connected to myself while being connected to another person

• inhabit my body instead of constantly monitoring the world around me

We live in a culture that doesn’t give us much permission to be slow enough to feel ourselves, so even slowness can bring us to an edge. We allow the body to begin speaking before the mind has figured out what the story is.

Then we move into activation. We growl, squeeze, shake, push a wall, another’s hands, make sound, and work with boundaries and consent. We reconnect to the part of ourselves that knows how to protect us—the part that says, I got you. Sometimes underneath the depression is rage and our fierce living protector. Underneath the overwhelm is desire. Underneath the numbness is grief. Underneath the stuckness is something alive. Something has been waiting for us to come back.

And then we surrender, a little bit at a time .

This is essential because we don’t stay in the catharsis. We don’t make intensity the goal. We come back to the earth, into deep rest, into conscious letting go. We practice death and dying because death gives us access to our potency to keep living. We allow ourselves to come into direct contact with whatever we understand as Spirit and ask, Can you hold this with me? Can you show me the way?

This is where integration happens.

Maybe I have always braced, and now I experience support.

Maybe I have always disappeared, and now I take up space.

Maybe I have always swallowed my voice, and now I make sound.

Maybe I have always abandoned myself in relationship, and now I can stay connected to myself while being connected to another person.

Maybe I learned that power meant power-over, and now I can inhabit my own power without harming someone else.

Processing isn’t the end goal. Integration (for the rest of our lives if we choose to live alongside Spirit listening and learning how to love.

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We are allowing what has been unfinished, frozen, suppressed, or disconnected to have movement, sensation, expression, relationship, and choice. And through that, we create the possibility of something we couldn’t previously experience.

We begin to perceive ourselves differently, more clearly.

The body has been the site of so much control, shame, violence, erasure, and conditioning. And the body can also become the site of our return. For so many of us, especially those whose bodies, sexuality, grief, rage, spirituality, or ways of loving have been controlled or erased, simply coming back into intimate relationship with the body is already fucking revolutionary.

So yes, we go into the taboo.

We go into the places we were taught to avoid. But we don’t go there to get lost.

We go there to find what had to disappear.

And then, slowly, we teach the body that it doesn’t have to disappear anymore.

We can feel. We can move. We can want. We can say no. We can say yes. We can rest. We can be witnessed. We can belong.

We can belong to ourselves.

Your body already knows what you need to heal. Your body already knows what you need to be free. And underneath all the conditioning, underneath the shame, underneath the stories we’ve inherited, there is something alive. Something dynamic. Something erotic. Something holy. Something that still knows how to belong.

The work is not to become someone new. The work is to make enough room for what is already alive in you to finally have an experience of itself.

PS. We have a short ritual film we made on our last artist immersion in Santa Fe - where we did a two hour Inanna Shadow Theatre piece and we will show it to yo on the full moon In Pisces next Wednesday. Come we’ll practice the unhooking - we’ll also massage our mouths, sing together, write with our anger passion, shake our asses, release and reclaim. Sign up here!

My friends and I like to say true intimacy is a humiliation ritual. Meaning it’s awkward and will force you to learn to love yourself more, or perish. Plus, we all have to face shame at some point if we rally want to embody the truth of love.

Sometimes all we can do is be patent and wait for the miracle. Sounds like BS, but anyone in recovery knows even when you’re “doing the work,” you will learn through the grit of Grace as much as the gentle face of the Divine. The miracles do come, but you have to be there to pay attention to them and notice when they arrive.

Cancer season teaches us that protection isn’t about building harder walls. It’s about becoming intimate enough with ourselves that we know what deserves access and what doesn’t.

Before recording this conversation with my dear friend Jeff Hinshaw, we found ourselves talking about boundaries. Again. [They have an incredible soul centered astrology certification open check it out here! Also until Sunday we have a sale on mine and Jeff’s Lilith audio course (it’s so good!) An embodied journey through the lens of the queer, dark femme witch in you.]

“The only thing to do with sadness is to introduce it to indestructible beauty.” Heidi Rose Robbins

There isn’t a point where you finally “graduate” from boundaries, or even the basics, somatically speaking. They aren’t a lesson you master once. They’re a living relationship to loving. They evolve every time we become more honest with ourselves.

One of the things I treasure most about Jeff is that they’re one of the few people I know who approaches astrology with both incredible rigor and incredible tenderness. We don’t use astrology to flatten people into archetypes or explain away human complexity. We use it as a language for becoming more intimate with ourselves and one another.

That’s a rare thing.

There is so much astrology online that tells us who we are in thirty-second sound bites. Jeff has always reminded me that astrology is an art of listening to our humanity as a holy thing. Their readings feel less like someone handing you answers and more like someone sitting beside you while you remember and embody your own. This is what we also teach others to do as healers and guides.

I used to think a boundary was something hard. Something you built after getting hurt enough.

Now I think of a boundary more like a shoreline.

The ocean isn’t rigid and it doesn’t negotiate with the tide. It powerfully knows where it belongs. The shoreline changes, but it never stops being itself.

That feels especially true during our reflections on Cancer season.

The Stars Are Ancestors, Not Algorithms

One of the things I love most about astrology is that it offers context instead of conclusions. Jeff reminded me that Jupiter has just entered Leo, completing a full twelve-year cycle since we first met.

Every Cancer season I become a little less emotionally stable and interested in certainty and a little more devoted to getting good support, listening and letting myself be loved more by those who can see the real me.

Listening to the body.
Listening to grief.
Listening to the places where I keep leaking energy and being kind enough to tend to those holes so my ship doesn’t keep sinking in the same way.

Cancer season for me feels like a familiar initiation, like a deep return to the waters that remember who I am beneath performance. It’s the season that asks me to come home—not to an idealized version of home, but to the complicated, ancestral, vulnerable landscape that lives inside the places where my soul meet my nervous system.

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My North Node is in Cancer, so every year this season feels like another invitation to soften without collapsing, to open without abandoning myself, and to remember that vulnerability and boundaries are not opposites. They are lovers.

Jeff remembered exactly where Jupiter was when we met, exactly when it entered Leo, and exactly what that reflected in both of our lives. That’s one of his gifts. They pay attention to time in a way that makes life feel on purpose rather than predetermined.

We laughed remembering our cross-country road trip, the Emperor card we pulled before leaving, the feeling that life was opening in front of us.

Jeff shared something during our conversation that has stayed with me. Whenever Jupiter enters a new sign, they go back through their camera roll to that same twelve-year period before. They revisit the photos as a way of tracking the story their soul has been living.

It reminds me that astrology isn’t separate from our lives. It’s woven through our memories, our relationships, our heartbreaks, our joy. The chart isn’t asking us to escape our humanity. It’s asking us to become better witnesses of it.

The planets become mirrors. We also say, they are our ancestors.

Not because they’re controlling our lives, but because they invite us into relationship with time itself. They remind us that life moves in spirals rather than straight lines.

The stars as ancestors. They are constantly offering feedback from the future light in the dark.

Showing us where we’ve been. Reflecting where we are. Whispering about what we’re becoming. But only if we’re willing to listen.

Twelve years. Who was I twelve years ago? Who were you? (sending love to them!)

I was moving across the country with everything she owned packed into a car with no money but lots of hope for miracles. Spiritually delusional and deliriously co-dependent but full of devotion and a subtle terror quivering beneath. She didn’t know how she would afford her rent when she got there, that the work she was doing would become Body Temple. She didn’t know she’d spend the next decade helping thousands of people return to their bodies. She just knew she had to keep saying yes.

I’m grateful for every version of myself who kept walking before she knew where the road led.

A New Era, Felt Through the Body

One of my favorite moments in our conversation was listening to Jeff describe the larger planetary movements.

As they spoke about Jupiter entering Leo, Pluto in Aquarius, Uranus in Gemini, and Neptune in Aries, I noticed something happening in my own body before I fully understood the astrology.

I felt relief just hearing Jeff use the word basket lol.

Jeff described the planets forming what astrologers call a basket configuration, and before I could intellectually grasp the geometry of it, my body had already responded. I could feel something clicking into place.

I would call it…

a basket of leadership rooted in grief and love, communication what is true and transformative in the heart and what happens when we get help coming out of delulu.

That, to me, is embodied astrology. Allowing your body to participate in the conversation. To move from addictions and the chaos of our childhoods to a more current and cohesive place that isn’t devoid of pain (if you’re paying attention,) but that has the power to pull you closer to love at the same time.

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Jeff has such a beautiful way of translating complex astrology into something you can actually live. Rather than overwhelming people with technical language, they continually brought us back to what this moment is asking of us.

They spoke about Jupiter in Leo inviting us into leadership.

About Leo asking those of us with strong Aquarian tendencies to leave the safety of the internet and become visible in real communities again.

Not because online spaces aren’t valuable—they absolutely are—but because embodiment asks something more of us.

As Jeff shared that they had unexpectedly begun teaching yoga in person four days a week, I couldn’t help but smile. At almost the exact same time, I found myself returning to teaching in-person classes again and restructuring my own trainings so that people could gather physically after years of primarily meeting online. COME TO UNLEASHED IN SPAIN IF YOUR WAITING IN PERSON SOMATIC TRAINING! We begin August 9th. Or reach out if you live or are near Ojai, California we have monthly Body Temple Dance Rage Rituals and kirtans.

Mary Oliver, the Bridegroom, and Coming Home to the Body

Recently when I was in NYC I watched the new film about Mary Oliver, and I found myself crying because it reminded me that a life devoted to paying attention is a radical life. Mary Oliver never seemed interested in becoming impressive. She was interested in becoming intimate.

There is a line from her poem Bridegroom that has lived inside me for years. She writes of wanting to be “the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

Every time I read that poem, I hear an invitation that is so different from the way so much spirituality is taught.

Not to transcend the world. To embrace it. Not to escape the body.

To become intimate enough with life that nothing is left outside our devotion. That feels like Cancer to me. The path of the Divine Mother in all her wild. The sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s here. In the trembling. In the tears. In the conversation with a friend who helps you see time in a new way.

In the boundaries that allow love to breathe instead of suffocate.

Embodied Astrology Instead of Spiritual Entertainment (or worse entrapment)

This is why I’ve become less interested in astrology as information and more interested in astrology as embodiment. This is what one of my friends and mentors Heidi Rose Robbins has taught me. Heidi has a new book called ‘Ask Me’ coming out alongside our friend Christena Cleveland’s new incredible book called The Black Madonna. Go immerse yourself in worlds of the Divine Mother that will not only hold you, but call you forth.

Knowing your birth chart means very little if your body doesn’t know how to receive what it reveals. You can memorize every transit and still override your exhaustion. You can know Mercury is retrograde while continuing to violate your own capacity. You can understand your Venus placement and still abandon yourself in love.

Astrology without embodiment becomes another way we stay in our heads. Another way we consume spirituality instead of living it. I don’t want astrology to become personality content.

I don’t want it to become another identity we perform unconsciously, I want us to prayer-form what we’ve been asked to hold. I want it to become a practice of listening.

That’s one of the reasons I wanted Jeff on the podcast. I wanted people to experience someone whose relationship with astrology is devotional rather than performative. Someone who remembers that behind every chart is a human being with a nervous system, an ancestry, a body, and a life.

For me, astrology has always been something I feel before I understand.

I notice the contraction. The tenderness. The longing to retreat. The impulse to emerge.

Then I look at the sky and realize my body already knew. The chart simply gives language to something my soul has been whispering all along.

Before we lead, we learn how to care. Before we expand, we ask what is actually worth protecting. Cancer reminds us that the strongest boundaries aren’t built from fear.

They’re built from love. In service, to the whole.

Have a listen to our recent Mother of the Sword Podcast exploring these themes that feel fiery as I personally dive into a restructuring of my own body, heart, mind and body of work. Read on for an essay connected to the pod.

Most people I know right now want support making money. Given the economy, and how capitalism wires our sense safety to what we can get and produce alone…that makes complete sense.

We live inside a culture that tells us if we have enough money, we’ll finally feel safe, mentally, emotionally, and physiologically. There is truth in that. Financial stability matters. It’s one of the reasons I help people examine their relationship with money, create offerings that are sustainable, and move beyond constant hustle into a life that includes vision, planning, and meaningful action.

But alongside that work, I can’t ignore the deeper hunger I see everywhere. A hunger that money cannot touch.

A desire to relate to Truth within, to care that can touch the grief that does not go away. A path of admitting animism is just as real as accolades.

I believe we are arriving at a moment where pathology and psychology—particularly the pathology that emerges from a Western psychological framework—cannot replace lineage.

This isn’t a rejection of psychology. I’ve spent eleven years in Jungian analysis with the same therapist, and it has transformed my life. It gave language to experiences that otherwise would have remained unconscious. It taught me boundaries in relationship. It helped me survive. I’ve also witnessed medication and diagnosis save lives, helping people navigate unbearable suffering with greater choice and stability.

And yet there are experiences that psychology cannot fully translate.

There are moments of grief, ecstasy, devotion, trance, communion, and altered consciousness that become diminished the moment we reduce them solely to physiological or psychological events. Throughout most of human history, these experiences were never understood as isolated symptoms. They were held inside living traditions—supported by elders, songs, myths, initiation rites, cosmologies, and communities that knew how to accompany someone through mystery instead of immediately explaining it away.

Today we breathe together, dance together, regulate together, and something ancient wakes up. People remember belonging. They remember God. They remember their bodies. Something profoundly real happens.

But filtered through a culture obsessed with productivity, optimization, and individual achievement, these experiences are immediately translated into something else.

Instead of asking, How does this change my relationship to my community? we ask, How can I monetize this? Instead of wondering, Who can help me integrate this over the coming years? we ask, How do I recreate this feeling next weekend?

Ritual becomes another product. Transformation becomes another performance. The nervous system becomes another thing to perfect.

Just as yoga was extracted from thousands of years of devotional, philosophical, and communal context to become another wellness commodity, I believe somatics is now walking the same line. The practices themselves remain powerful, but without roots they become vulnerable to misunderstanding.

A healthy dissolution of the ego inside ritual can be mistaken for pathology. Pathology itself can become romanticized as spiritual awakening. Without mature cultural containers capable of distinguishing these experiences, we swing between over-pathologizing and over-spiritualizing, unable to hold the nuance that real transformation requires.

Healing communities that cannot survive conflict, grief, ambiguity, disappointment, repair, and longing often recreate the very childhood dynamics they hope to heal. Tenderness is essential, but initiation also asks something of us. Safety isn’t the absence of rupture. Sometimes safety is what is rebuilt because we have the capacity to stay present through it.

For centuries, women, queer people, mystics, and devotees who entered ecstatic states of prayer or grief were labeled irrational, hysterical, or possessed. Even now, there is discomfort around encounters with mystery that refuse rational explanation. We rush to interpret rather than participate. We diagnose instead of witnessing.

I’m not suggesting we abandon psychology. I’m not romanticizing the past. I’m asking us to remember that psychology cannot replace lineage. It cannot replace ritual. It cannot replace community. It cannot replace a cosmology that understands human beings as more than isolated individuals seeking symptom reduction.

Body Temple Dance™is a ritual pedagogy that understands the nervous system as inseparable from beauty, devotion, Goddess, relationship, creativity, ecology, and collective ritual. Ritual as the deliberate shaping of attention through embodied action in order to transform relationship. (We are leading an in person training in Spain September 1-8 and tonight the early rate ends - we have 3 more spaces.)

Many of the people carrying this work today are deeply intelligent, generous, and devoted. But gifts alone are not enough, just as love alone is not enough in an intimate relationship. When the roots beneath our work are no longer tended, we begin to feel the effects. That isn’t failure, it capitalism and caring in a sick world—it is an invitation to return.

Again and again, we are called back to the deeper threads of devotion. Back to practices that ask less about what we are producing and more about what we are becoming. Back to traditions that remind us that profound experiences require equally profound containers.

Because without context, we may awaken something ancient. But without lineage, community, and devotion, we may never fully learn how to live with what has awakened.

Trauma-informed research increasingly affirms what many contemplative traditions have carried for centuries: human behavior cannot be separated from the physiological, relational, and cultural conditions from which it emerges. We are not simply minds having experiences—we are embodied beings whose nervous systems, histories, communities, and environments shape how we perceive and move through the world. My father’s life and death invited me to witness these truths long before I encountered them in books.

His addiction was not simply happening in his mind. It was happening in his body. His shame was happening in his body. His loneliness was happening in his body. And my attempts to save him were happening in mine.

In many ways, Body Temple Dance began beside that hospital bed. Not because I suddenly understood what healing meant. But because I understood what healing could not be.

Healing could not mean erasing pain. It could not mean avoiding death. It could not mean transcending grief. It could not mean becoming untouched by loss.

Healing had to include our humanity.

When they turned off the machines at my father’s dead bed, a mantra came through. Out of nowhere. Not Catholic not one I knew. Sanskrit. Sure I was attending yoga classes at the Laughing Lotus in NYC, but I was also blowing lines of coke at night and smoking weed all day. This mantra was not something I had memorized from a book or something I even knew I knew. The room was full of fluorescent light and death and I was held by the first miracle that came after surviving childhood.

This was my initiation into adulthood two weeks before my 25th birthday.

My father was leaving—the man who had broken my heart a thousand times before his own finally stopped beating. In that moment, I prayed. Not the way I had been taught. Not from obligation or fear. I prayed because there was nothing else left to do. And something—call it Grace, call it God, call it madness—met me there. Something held me up when I should have collapsed in my inherited fear of death and real heartbreak. Sometimes, disassociation works in your favor.

Looking back, I can see that Grace had been showing up long before that hospital room. It was there in my babysitter Dottie, who taught me to paint and introduced me to beauty as a living thing. It was there in the telescope I pressed my eye against as a child, staring into the night sky and feeling safe searching for something I couldn’t yet name. It was there in Sunday Mass, even when I rolled my eyes through the Our Father’s and counted the minutes until it was over. Long before I understood spirituality, I understood awe and chaos. Two defining qualities of the feminine. Long before I trusted people, I trusted Mystery. Redemption and grace were my oldest companions.

I buried my father on my twenty-fifth birthday.I felt nothing but became everything.

People imagine grief as a tidal wave, but sometimes it arrives as numbness. Sometimes it settles into your bones after years of surviving and teaches you how to function without feeling. I didn’t collapse. I didn’t unravel. I simply kept moving. I got off hard drugs and started practicing yoga like my life depended on it because, in many ways, it did. Two classes a day, sometimes three. I practically lived at Laughing Lotus. They served tea and cookies after class, and I swear those cookies saved my life. Years later it would be chai and biscuits in India. There is something sacred about being handed a warm drink when your world is falling apart. Sometimes healing arrives as enlightenment. Sometimes it arrives as a tea-soaked cookie.

I was still smoking weed constantly. Anxiety hummed beneath my skin like an electrical current. I got a dog because I couldn’t regulate my nervous system. I dated everyone I could. I explored sex and my body through pole dancing classes. Strippers became my muses because they embodied something I had never been given permission to claim: presence, power, pleasure, unapologetic embodiment. I grew up hanging out in strip clubs like the AfterDark my dad’s best friend Tony Spalero owned (I swear TG that was his name.)I danced on bars, took ecstasy, dated writers with big cocks and even deflated egos. I had threesomes. I chased fantasies. I collected experiences like evidence that I was alive. I was.

I was really chasing was feeling. Enough sensation to crack through the numbness. Enough love to fill the hole. All the holes. Enough ecstasy to outrun the grief. Looking back now, I can see that every choice was a prayer disguised as rebellion. Every reckless night was a conversation with death. Every lover was a doorway. Every dance floor was an altar. Everything I did was an attempt to stay alive. A scream to be loved. A longing to belong to myself.

What I didn’t understand then was that I was moving through an initiation that women have traveled for thousands of years. The language was different, but the terrain was ancient. I was walking through the archetypal landscape of the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Not as fixed identities, but as living forces within the soul.

The maiden in me was Medusa not yet ready to embody the boundaries needed, hormones dictating every fawn, dream and desire. Not the monster from the stories told by men, but the woman before the curse. The woman whose boundaries had been violated but there was no one there to say I see you, this must be hard. The woman whose rage had been turned into something terrifying: addiction, mediocrity and a pending desire for liberation.

For years I had been taught, like so many women, to fear my anger. To ignore nad soften it. To explain it away. To make myself more palatable. To try and hurt myself as a way out. But healing required something different. It required reclaiming the parts of myself that had been exiled. It required understanding that rage is often love wearing armor. That anger can be a holy force when it protects what is sacred. Every boundary I learned to set brought Medusa back to life. Every time I stopped abandoning myself, another piece of her returned. As protection. Not as bitterness, but as sovereignty in service to the soul.

As I matured spiritually and emotionally, the mother arose from within me. Safety, shadow. Not easy, and not necessarily the mother of children for me, but the mother as creator, nurturer, and keeper of life force. The mother teaching me how to stay. How to tend. How to build something from the wreckage.

Yet I also began to see the tragedy woven into so many stories of womanhood: the way women are taught to care for everyone except themselves. The way domestic life, service, and responsibility can slowly disconnect a woman from her own desire. The mother in me had to learn that devotion without eros becomes martyrdom. I became murderously angry at everyone, espied calls men, and the man inside myself. The boundaries needed to be set from the inside out. She had to remember that pleasure is not a luxury but a necessity. That a woman cut off from her life force cannot truly nourish anyone. Reclaiming eros was not about sexuality alone. It was about reclaiming vitality, creativity, joy, and the right to be fully alive.

And then there is the crone, the one I am started to sense. The crone is not the end of the story but its deepest revelation. She no longer believes she has to earn her worth through suffering or prove her value through sacrifice. She understands that wisdom is not certainty but intimacy with mystery. She has stopped trying to save the world and has learned instead how to love it. The crone knows something the younger versions of herself could not understand: that her love itself is the blessing. Not her accomplishments. Not her healing. Not her teachings. Her love.

This is the spiritual guide hidden inside the feminine journey. The realization that what transforms the world is not perfection but presence. Not nice but the knowing int he body. Not transcendence but embodiment. Not escape but intimacy. The crone understands that blessing is not something we bestow from above. She gets us close to the Earth. She asks questions and doesn’t need anyone to know all the answers she carries. She knows they are already heard by beings far more intelligent. Blessing and being blessed by another day is what naturally happens when we meet life with an undefended heart.

So much more I cant't channel yet because parts are still worried by what people will think.

When I look back now, I can see that I was building something all along. Beneath the drugs, the yoga classes, the lovers, the dance floors, the grief, and the prayers, something deeper was taking shape. I was building a body that could hold intensity. A voice that didn’t flinch from truth. A heart capable of loving what was broken without turning away. None of it was wasted. Not the heartbreak. Not the addiction. Not the longing. Not the confusion. Not even the mistakes.

This isn’t a story about redemption (although my Venus in Pisces loves a good redemption) but redemption implies there was a version of me that needed saving. There wasn’t. There was only a girl trying to survive, a woman trying to feel, and a soul trying to remember through every rebirth the mission at hand, especially when it’s rest.

This is a story about memory and myth. About gathering the scattered pieces of a life and recognizing that they all belong. About discovering that grace was present in every chapter, even the darkest ones. About realizing that Medusa’s rage, the mother’s eros, and the crone’s love were never separate paths, but different faces of the same initiation. Ongoing, eternal. Nonlinear.

This life—this mess, this miracle, this permission to create new meaning—is not only mine, but in service to the Divine.

My father in the afterlife guiding me as he was becoming. I rest and receive the worth that is of a billions suns and within us. When I look the light in your tear filled eyes, when I collapse in exhaustion, I can still rise to meet me, inside. I am forever found in this ancestral re-member-ancestral., this eros that comes in waves.

The Sun. My father. Offers with no expectation. Nothing needed in return knowing I am here to give back to humanity, to hold what hurts, to heal this dangerous split, from the Earth.

a warrior of the womb is a guardian of thresholds. taurus rules the third eye and the throat where the un-manifest becomes manifest.

Just because my father was an addict doesn’t mean I can’t love men. (right?!) Between the hatred, fear, and loathing lives a dangerous swell of compassion — a paradox so dense only the jungles and forests of this world could carry the scents that represent the infinite flavors of my love for them.

My father was an opioid addict who also happened to be a pilot. Every Sunday we would fly from Marlboro Airport in New Jersey headed toward New York City. He loved to fly on the edges of where he wasn’t supposed to go, literally. I loved it and the feeling of being afraid, and I was also bored most of the time. I’d fall asleep. We’d put a coin on my knee and he would descend just fast enough fo fit to be suspended in mid-air. Pete loved to fuck with gravity.

Other weeks we would fly down to Cape May, a cute little town on the coast, for breakfast. Outside the obvious danger=love embodied metaphors swirling here,

it makes sense that I was hard-wired for possibilities beyond the norm.

We have an embodied performer immersion in Ojai this July, an in person somatic dance and feminine embodiment all inclusive rearer in Spain this September and our virtual sacred sexuality training is here…

Dark Goddess Doula Training

His two-seater Cessna with green stripes along the sides would start up and I would get in — an excited eleven-year-old who was still madly in love with her favorite person in the world. Pilots speak in code, int heir own language which as a Gemini moon, I loved. My mom would be there anxiously saying goodbye…telling him to be careful. She wouldn’t be caught dead flying with him and definitely didn’t want me to, but we didn’t really listen to her very much. Years of their abusive marriage had eroded all trust between them. But not me. I was ready.

No reason in the world not to trust.

The loud sound of the blades on the front of the plane soothed me. The way my father talked through the headset in that different language I didn’t understand enthralled me. The risk of the takeoff, the suspension in air — my father opening the little side window right next to the carbon monoxide detector to smoke his Marlboro Reds — all of it gave me a sense of peace.

These days when you leave your body for survival, somatic therapists and healers like myself call it dissociation. But I also know the resilience and capacity built in a body who has left and come back more times than stars in the night sky.

I learned about God in that little Cessna, my love for the sky completely solidified. And during those Sunday breakfasts in Cape May after landing down safely — my dad making friends with everyone at the restaurant, showing me, in his own way, how to love.

PS. I am leading a ritual theater and somatic writing training called Dark Goddess Doula (think Lilith, Kali, Black Madonna, Magdalene, Mother Earth, and more) about sex, death, God and money this Spring for people who want to gather and transmute the energies through creative expression and space holding. All the information is here and if you want more info email us!

PPS. Since writing has saved my life, here are some writing prompts for anyone who feels stuck in anger on this Taurus new moon. Prompts are meant to be followed, disobeyed, pushed against or leaned on for support…set a timer for 5 and whatever you do…don’t lie and don’t follow the rules...

“Whatever you do, do not write authentically or honestly.”

“If you only knew”

“My least authentic self is starving for…”

“My breasts need to tell the world…”

“13 levels of the underworld”

It’s incredible how much depth can emerge from simply being honest. We gathered on Wednesday on zoom for an ‘Underworld Party’ with over 100 humans and women to explore our first bleed or our first consensual sexual experience from the body we are in today. It was glorious to feel how not alone we are on the bottom of the ocean floor collecting treasures.

The rejection of the father is an impulse that when reclaimed give us endless energy to create and worship what deserves to fed instead of endless focusing on what hurts and what harms…it’s worth it to explore with good support. I am here holding on for dear life honoring the mother in us all...

Now I get it.

Dark Goddess Doula’s swimming, drowning and floating, finding one another in the ocean of shamelessness. This is where I live and what I long for. The connection between us and the unseen that slays shame.

We are obvs all here for alchemy, for the pleasure and ecstasy they told/tell us was/is demonic. Who's the real demon here I wonder when I look at this picture? Looking back at the word… Greek daimones could be good or bad (Socrates' daimonion), the term was also adopted into the Septuagint and Vulgate to translate Hebrew shedim (idols/false gods), turning it into a "malevolent spirit" by the early Christian era. Typical.

Terrible abuse of the feminine. Shame on them all for rejecting that which has given them life. I have been studying energy (Shakti/power) and the body in devotion to Goddess for 20 years now consciously, and more is always revealed with each step and each stone turned (literally.)

There are many Mary Magdalene devotees these days—dressed in linen, singing in high, angelic tones, middle names changed to Rose. And I feel that red thread winding us altogether. But my lineage carries something else alongside it. It’s more chicken wing eating in the woods kinda vibe. Lived experience and grounded wisdom.

UNDERWORLD PARTY

More divine comedy, drama dharma, blood, grit, guts, and wit and perhaps this is why. (Join us online to find out here May 14th ritual theater blood rite of passage group healing session,) or in person in Ojai, CA or Santa Fe, NM email me for links.

My great-grandmother, Rosa Silvestri, from the same Southern Italian village where they perform the Good Friday blood ritual—the thistle and the rose—was said to have murdered her husband before immigrating to the U.S.

So when I speak of the blood mysteries, I’m not speaking just metaphorically.
This runs deep and although metaphor matters int eh meaning we can make that does change culture, sometimes the Goddess is also literal.

The Marys. My ancestors in Southern Italy still carry this. On Good Friday, in the middle of the night, while the whole village watches in silence, they perform a grief ritual. I know because I’ve been there. They offer a blood sacrifice at each threshold throughout the village—for each Maria, each Ave Maria. The whole procession is, in truth, a blood ritual. They beat their legs intensely with corks filled with glass on the fronts and backs of their thighs, dressed in red, as bright blood rises to the surface. From their bodies to each threshold of Mary. They leave bloody handprints along the way, marking what feels like their Nonna’s homes, their lineage, their devotion.

I went into a blood trance there, with an occasional look that said..”wtfah!?” to my partner and friend Nico who came with. Something wild and ancient opened mourned hte blood rite of passage we hold in our womb mystery school. So much Mae sense from my self harming to the alchemy we hold space for to transmute the energies of hatred into more generating life force energy. The blood mysteries came alive in me—the feminine mystery school we’ve been sharing, the rites of passage carried through the line of women who came from the sea.

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The mythology behind this runs deep—stretching through the Mediterranean, into Egypt, into Greece, into Southern Italy. The Black Madonna, often hidden in caves and crypts, is linked to older goddess traditions—Isis in Egypt, Demeter and Persephone in Greece—lineages of the Great Mother that were never fully erased, only transformed. The Goddess in India named Lajja Gauri aka the shameless one who I went to worship earlier this year that pre-dates the vedas. The Magdalene carries this current too, with stories placing her in the caves of the South of France, living in devotion, in descent, in embodied prayer.

All of them is what our womb warrior (as in protector or guardian) work is all in devotion to, and why I believe it’s so potent. We have deep lineage…from the woman who passed me these womb rituals and rites of passage Deborah Sundahl and gave me (ecstatic) permission to share these practices, to the ancients ones stirring our dreams and showing up for us when we slow down enough to listen.

And then there is Sara la Kali, whom I visited this year in her crypt in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Her name, often translated as “Sara the Black,” connects her to the Black Madonnas of Europe. She is venerated by the Romani people, and each year she is brought from her underground crypt to the sea, immersed in water in a ritual that feels far older than the church that houses her. They say she came from Rajasthan. In that space of her crypt, you can feel it—the density, the heat, the devotion to something that cannot be contained.

These are not separate threads. They are currents of the same remembering. The Marys are the mermaids. And we are the mermaids too. We remember how shakti awakens in relationship. We anoint, we don’t think about our spirituality…we get our hands and feet involved. We tune in tot he womb in the heart and we take action.

This is why our next womb warrior training will have sessions where we meet on zoom and do womb walks, and we’ll even have a kick boxing temper tantrum session regularly. We need the body’s intelligence more than ever.

We are the ones who dive deep, who find the glimmers on the ocean floor, who learn how to work with the waters of the body and the soul—not against them. The waters of grief. Of pleasure. Of memory. Of blood. How to go into the soupy unknown waters of the subconscious and also how to spring back up and out for air when we need it too.

We rage yes, and we also rest in the eternally soft embrace of the Rose. We are offering a ritual theater class in Ojai May 11th (and retreat in July!) and an interactive Rage and Rose Initation prayer-formance in Santa Fe June 5th for you if you live nearby email us. Other wise we’re online May 14th and have two mentorships one 6 months and one 3 for you to join if you’re called reach out with questions.

To keep creating, we have to understand the fluid body. The energetics of clean and dirty pain, the birth process as an ongoing love affair with life and living.
We have to know how to move with it.

Because when our oracular knowing has been dismissed, suppressed, or abused out of us, we become easier to control. But when we remember—when we reconnect with the ancestors, the plants, the planets, the ecology of life and death—we step back into something far more powerful, far more alive.

And on May 14th, we gather as Dark Goddess Doulas who are here in service to the Great Mystery, the Mother and those in the process of birth, death and rebirth. It’s an Underworld Party and you are invited!

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To listen to the blood.
To listen to the womb.

Through ritual theater focused on grief, rage, and eros—we get off our asses and move what’s been waiting to move. And we don’t just do it for ourselves. We feed the collective web with our bodies, with our blessings, with our sensitivity, with our oracular nature.

We are the body of the Divine and we are also here to serve her, let’s go. Let’s gather.

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Come take a look at Dark Goddess Doula—our newest 6-month cohort in the Body Temple femme mystery school, opening this May. It’s an online journey into the sacred feminine mysteries of the womb, the power our sexuality carries, and how to hold space for the grief and rage this world draws out of us, with an optional in-person gathering at the end—because this work lives in the body, and in relationship.

PS. If you are looking for diving deeper into the somatics of sex and love in a small intimate group… if you’re already a coach, therapist or healer and want to receive coaching in tantra, womb mysteries and magdalene madness send me an email we are gathering a large group and small group too.

My first encounter with Lakshmi happened when I was 28, in a meditation Sally was leading at a workshop in Brooklyn, at the yoga studio where I was teaching. Lakshmi came in as this watery gold presence—not abstract, not imagined, but something that moved through me. A felt sense of recognition. It infiltrated my whole body like a luminous current, and I remember thinking: I have never felt this before.

It wasn’t just love. It was a flavor of love that had no edge, no condition, no demand. Unbound and alive.

Over the last eleven years (after I studied in India and worked with her for six years before sharing these practices,) I’ve been holding space for women to encounter and worship Lakshmi—alongside many other goddesses: Durga, Kali, Saraswati, Matangi, the Black Madonna, Mary Magdalene, her formless living sacred feminine power in the mystical yoga traditions called Kundalini Shakti, and those that arise from their own blood lineages like Oshun. What I’ve witnessed again and again is that when we are drawn to a particular goddess, she often becomes a bridge—helping repair the disconnection we carry from our ancestry, from the spirituality that lives in our bones. Not always, but often enough to trust the intelligence of that pull.

Through years of practice—mantra, somatic meditation and sex education, womb and pelvic health practices, movement, earth-based ritual—I’ve gathered insight from thousands of women working directly with Lakshmi not just as an idea, but as a field of consciousness, as Sally taught. This places the goddesses in a different realm than archetypes. They are not contained within the human psyche alone. They are living fields of reality that we enter into relationship with. Because of this, they don’t hold the same charge or limitation in our bodies that human relationships do, and yet they open us—profoundly—into the sustaining force of life itself: the intelligence that moves through our bodies, our relationships, our creativity, and the world.

Traditionally, Lakshmi represents abundance, beauty, love, worth, and benevolence. And yes—many people, when they first encounter her, experience exactly that. They feel beauty inside and around them. They feel held in a kind of unconditional love they may have never known. They experience their worth directly, not as a concept but as a sensation.

But there is another layer that emerges with devotion.

And that layer is grief.

How is it that connecting to the energy that sustains everything in the universe so often brings us into contact with grief? Because when that kind of love touches the body, it illuminates everything that is not aligned with it.

All the places shaped by scarcity.
Unworthiness.
Lack.
Greed.
The ways we have learned to survive without being nourished.

On the tantric path, this is not a mistake—it is the work. Everything that is not aligned must come to the surface in order to be felt, freed and related to differently.

We see this in somatics and nervous system work as well. Our systems become conditioned around certain “states”—patterns of thought, feeling, and beliefs that repeat, even when we don’t want them to. So when we enter a field like Lakshmi’s—one of abundance and love—it disrupts those patterns. It creates friction.

And that friction often feels like grief. Because something is dying.

Every time we deepen in this work, there is a kind of ego death—a shedding of identities and protections that once kept us safe but no longer serve. This is why, in our trainings, we speak of becoming dark goddess doulas—initiating people into the art of being with death and rebirth, not only literally, but emotionally, relationally, spiritually. We learn to midwife both the endings and the openings. The grief and the eros. We hold the unknown together and create with what we find.

In my experience, every encounter with a love that truly transforms us has brought me into closer contact with something that had not yet felt safe to experience consciously.

This is why goddess work is alchemy.

It is the process of transforming the unconscious into the conscious. Of bringing what is hidden into relationship. Of allowing what is held in the body to move, to speak, to be seen.

And it is a lifelong process.

We don’t arrive.
We deepen.

And we do it together.

Because alongside this deeply personal work, there is also something profoundly collective. We gather in community, in ritual theater, in shared devotional practices. We root into traditions and lineages that have survived conquest, colonization, and cultural erasure. We remember that this path is not new—it has always been here, carried through bodies, through song, through earth-based practices, through women and mystics who refused to forget.

I didn’t even know until five years ago that my ancestors in Italy that are still doing spiritual practices and pilgrimages to the Black Madonna in worship of her as the Earth. They are queer farmers. They are wild, dancers and singers and drummers.

Lakshmi, like all the goddesses, is not something we possess.

She is something we relate to.

A field we enter. A current we allow to move us. A lover. A wisdom holder. She is us and she also teaches us. She creates through us.

In relationship, we are slowly, continually, brought back into contact with the truth of what sustains everything:

A love that is vast enough
to hold our beauty,
our grief,
and our becoming
all at once.

About five years after my first encounter with Lakshmi with Sally Kempton, I had my second encounter with Lakshmi—and it did not come in gold.

It came through rupture and intense emotional pain.

I was in the aftermath of an intense breakup, living alone in a canyon in Southern California, in a place that felt both foreign and fated. Something in me had opened too fast, too wide. What I now understand as a mild form of psychosis was moving through me—ancestral voices, intrusive, not kind, not gentle. There were moments of suicidal ideation, moments where reality felt thin and unstable.

And yet, something else was there too.

Every day, I went to the ocean. I would swim hard in the cold Pacific and float—just float—feeling for what still held me, what still sustained me. I hiked alone, breathing in eucalyptus, listening to owls and mourning doves, letting the land witness me as I unraveled. I was grieving in a way that was not linear, not polite. It was cellular. Ancient. I had fires in my yard and an herb garden. Far from Brooklyn I was growing up in my grief.

I lived in a small, womb-like studio in Topanga—painted maroon inside—for nine months to the day. A temporary space that no one thought I would be able to find, given how little money I had. But I knew I needed to be on that land, so I went anyway. And somehow, I was held there. Exactly nine months. A full gestation.

That was the time when Body Temple Dance was born—not as a concept, but as a necessity. I needed to move the pain. To bring it back to the earth. To let the body speak what the mind could not organize. To be witnessed—by the elements, by strangers in recovery rooms, by anyone who could sit with the truth of what was moving through me without trying to fix it.

And through all of it—through the grief, the disorientation, the loss—Lakshmi was there.

Not as sweetness.
Not as ease.

But as the force that sustains life even inside destruction.

Something shifted in me during that time. A kind of longing that didn’t just trigger unworthiness, but began to open a different doorway—one where I could feel that worth and value were not something given to me, but something I was in relationship with. Something I could choose.

When I left that studio, I packed everything I owned into my little white Prius. I didn’t have a clear place to go. I stood at a crossroads between an old world and a new one—between a man who represented a past version of my life, and a group of women—artists, astrologers, actors, poets—who reflected glimpses of who I was becoming.

That night, I chose the past.

And my car was stolen.
Everything I owned, gone.

A complete stripping.

In the days that followed, I stayed with a woman I barely knew. I listened to chants of Neem Karoli Baba, over and over—the mantra Shri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram looping in my ears as something inside me tried to hold steady.

When they finally found my car, I walked into the tow yard still listening to the mantra playing in one ear. I remember the moment so clearly—approaching the car, knowing before I even opened the door that it would be empty.

Everything was gone.

Except for a couple of phone chargers and a small photo of Neem Karoli Baba that had fallen from the glove box.

“Never without Grace,” a woman who I was on the path wi the that I had been texting these days sent me when I sent her the photo.

And somehow, that was enough.

This is the Mother that sustains us.

Not the one that protects us from all loss—but the one that remains when everything is gone.

She is beyond gender, and yet she moves powerfully through women’s bodies—and through anyone attuned to the currents of the feminine within them. Especially our queer and trans siblings that encounter and embody her beauty relentlessly.

She is the intelligence of life that refuses domination—internally and externally. The force that keeps breathing, even when we think we cannot.

This is the path of the feminine.

Not perfection.
Not safety.

But relatedness.

A willingness to stay in contact—with the body, with the earth, with grief, with love—even when it breaks us open.

This is the work of the dark goddess doula.

To walk with life and death at the same time.To midwife what is ending and what is emerging. To trust that even in devastation, something essential is being revealed.

Lakshmi did not leave me in that canyon.

She deepened.

She showed me that abundance is not the absence of loss—
but the presence of something that cannot be taken.

And that is where devotion becomes real. That is where I want to live.

PS. If you want to join us in person (France, Italy, Santa Fe NM, Ojai CA) or online, send me an email and we can support you in finding a way!

Being Yourself IS the Protection

We’ve been teaching this to somatic facilitators and artist, spiritual mentors for years.

The greatest energetic protection you could offer yourself is being your authentic self fully, which we know is a lifelong process but also means getting radically honest and taking responsibility we’ve never seen. Becoming the safest person in the room for you, everywhere you go

unpopular take: your womb doesn’t need more “clearing”

People in the womb worlds are always talking about “clearing the womb,” and although I kind of get it, I have been in this work for a long time and I can assure you the power in your p*ssy is the power of the universe. She doesn’t need you to heal her, she needs you to learn how to create with what you carry, speak up for your needs, desires, get honest and learn how to build the confidence and community you need to stand up for yourself. .

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In my lineages both blood and spiritual, there are plenty of energetic protection practices…

Mantras, fire ceremonies and working directly with Goddess has literally created miracles in my life. Not to mention the last five years I’ve been connecting with the elemental and Shameless Goddess that predates all religion, and therefore all formal practices.

My wounding has also taught me so much about how to re-member my true shameless self. I’m not saying that having an authentic relationship to a wider power and guardianship through spiritual and somatic practice isn’t also for many of us necessary, it is for me and all my friends for sure. But my training in energetic protection began much earlier. It began growing up with addiction in the house.

When you grow up around an addict, you develop extraordinary sensitivity. You learn how to read a room before anyone speaks. You learn how to anticipate moods, shifts in tone, the slight tightening in someone’s jaw that tells you a storm might be coming. Your nervous system becomes exquisitely attuned.

For me, that attunement showed up as fawning and the kind of co-dependency that could kill you.

Disappearing. Becoming agreeable, accommodating, soft enough not to provoke the explosion that might already be brewing in someone else’s body.

That response also saved me. It kept the waters calm enough for a young nervous system to survive. But like many survival strategies, it followed me into adulthood long after the original danger had passed. When you spend years disappearing to maintain peace, the rage doesn’t vanish. It goes underground.

And when it finally surfaces, it can come out all kinds of sideways.

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For many years I found myself reenacting that buried rage in relationships with men—and often with myself in subtle and also gross self harming behaviors. The part of me that had learned to collapse, to smooth things over, to stay quiet, would eventually snap. The body can only swallow so much truth before it erupts.

I would always find myself oscillating between two extremes: disappearing to survive, or exploding when the truth could no longer be contained. Neither of those states felt like freedom, felt like “me.”

What began to change things for me wasn’t more spiritual bypassing or more energetic “protection” techniques. It was the practice of radical honesty. Radical self accountability and learning the skill of speaking my needs and boundaries (always a WIP.)

Not brutal honesty that wounds people unnecessarily, but the kind that brings the body back into alignment. The kind where sensation, voice, and action start to match again. This is why I believe people receive so much from my facilitation in ritual as well. There’s congruency because I’ve learned to live alongside my shadow.

Through ritual, sacred theater, and somatic practice, I began learning how to speak from my body before the pressure built into eruption (imperfectly.) To say the thing earlier when possible. TO speak for, as opposed to constantly from my inner children. To stay present in the discomfort of truth instead of abandoning myself to keep the peace.

The rage softened into passion to pour into my art and cultivating the power to choose how I wanted to relate. To do what is authentic to me.

There’s also interesting research emerging about sensitivity and attention differences. Studies on people diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder suggest that many experience heightened sensitivity to emotional and environmental stimuli. Researchers like Elaine N. Aron—known for her work on highly sensitive people—have pointed to overlapping traits: strong emotional attunement, deep empathy, and a nervous system that processes stimuli more intensely than average.

In the wrong environments, that sensitivity can feel overwhelming or pathologized. In the right environments, it can become a profound relational intelligence.

Part of what helped me reclaim that intelligence was stepping outside the frameworks I was raised in and learning from other lineages of embodied practice.

My training in India opened me to devotional movement traditions where grief, ecstasy, and prayer are not separated from the body. And returning to my ancestral lands in Southern Italy brought me back into contact with older shamanic practices that live beneath the surface of village culture—rituals of spinning, lamentation, and dance where grief is not hidden but moved through the body in community.

These spinning grief rituals evoke something ancient.

They stir eros.

Not eros as sexuality alone, but eros as the natural polarity, the charge of life itself—the dynamic current that exists inside us, between us, and between the human body and the Earth.

Eros in this sense is the electricity of being alive.

The pulse between breath and gravity.
Between longing and belonging.
Between grief and joy.

In these traditions, spinning, dancing, and ritual lamentation allow the body to discharge what has been frozen. Grief moves. Rage moves. Love moves.

And through that movement something reorganizes inside us.

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In our work with somatic artists, grief walkers, and embodied practitioners, we’ve come to see something important about fawning and disappearing. While it can absolutely become a trauma response that fragments us, it also carries a gift.

Many people who learned to dissolve themselves early in life develop profound psychic and relational sensitivity. The ability to feel subtle emotional and energetic shifts. The capacity to merge, to attune, to enter states of deep empathy and connection.

Shamanically speaking, the ability to dissolve temporarily into the field of love—to become porous enough to feel another’s experience—is not only a wound.

It is also a medicine. But like all medicine, it requires balance. The real initiation is learning how to move between the two axes of being human and also a soul that is infinite (as a direct experience not just an idea.)

Horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal is our capacity to merge. To feel. To soften. To belong with one another in the messy beauty of relationship. Vertical is the spine. The ability to stand upright inside our own truth. To speak. To hold boundaries. To remain present even when the room becomes uncomfortable.

The holy grail is not choosing one over the other.

It is learning how to hold both.

To dissolve into love when the moment calls for tenderness, and to stand tall in the spine when the moment calls for truth.

This is the deeper protection I’ve discovered.

Not an energetic shield that separates me from the world, but a nervous system that knows how to stay in relationship without abandoning itself.

A body that can feel deeply without collapsing. A voice that can speak honestly without exploding. And a community that remembers that our greatest wealth has never been perfection, branding, or performance.

It is our capacity to remain real with one another.

To belong.

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Adriana

PS. Join us for a 3 day Virtual Pilgrimage called ‘Resurrecting the Feminine" this Sunday. It’s free/by donation sign up here and join and I Tuesday April 7th 10 Central here live on Substack to speak all things ritual theater and Mother Worship.

“The Truth is Erotic.” - Ginny Muir

As much s we crave connection, I can assure you as a guide to the realms of intimacy it is awkward and full of tears and snots too.

Are you also wondering how to relate to men (forever) but now more than ever in ways that feel nurturing and soul enriching? Yeah, us too.

Across cultures, women’s and folks with vulvas bodies have been shaped by systems that regulate sexuality, emotional expression, and spiritual authority. But as devotees to the Shameless Goddess, we know we are here for something more.

Join Ginny Muir and I in this episode of Mother of the Sword to explore the themes of intimacy, right relationship and how to get what we fucking want and deserve, when it comes to loving. Ginny has a program for all lovers if your wanting support in partnership get over here.

Tomorrow Thursday April 2nd holds the full moon in the Indian mystical traditions called Hanuman Jayanti. Hanuman is the blessed lord of devotion, and my Dark Mother initiation is connected to his Mother and her temples on Anjaneri Hill in India. More on that some other time.

Today’s episode and writing is a big dose of devotion today, after a much needed break for me. Have a read and then listen to our interview on a walk to move some energy relationally.

Religious doctrine, colonial morality, and patriarchal medical frameworks have historically positioned female erotic intelligence as something to be controlled, silenced, or pathologized. One result of this long history is the pervasive presence of shame within the body, particularly within the pelvis, where sexuality, instinct, and creativity converge.

Intimacy, for some of us, was never meant to be casual terrain. It was always going to be an underworld journey. Especially those of us on the Rose path, reclaiming a God that has a vagina and a more embodied sense of Spirituality and a life devoted to being of service to feeling more, not less.

With a Libra stellium sitting in the 8th house, for me relationship is not small talk and polite agreements about who does the dishes. Relationship becomes a crucible. A place where beauty and shadow meet. Where attraction opens the door, but truth is what stays in the room.

Harmony is not achieved by avoiding conflict. It’s achieved by walking straight into the places where power, vulnerability, and desire are tangled together. But we all have children inside us that need not just attention, but the right kind. They’re closer to their shameless selves than we are but they are not the ones that can call the shots in our adult relationships or were screwed.

Right relationship, from this lens, is not about perfection. It’s about devotion to awareness, and tracking progress the way you would an animal in the wild.

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Intimacy practices become a kind of ritual technology — ways we slow down enough to feel what is actually happening in the body when we meet another person. Breath by breath. Eye to eye. Nervous system to nervous system. Because the truth of intimacy doesn’t live in the story we tell about connection; it lives in the micro-movements of the body: the tightening in the belly, the opening in the chest, the subtle recoil when an old wound gets bumped.

Relationships are cauldrons for transformation. But harmony must include the shadow. Desire, jealousy, grief, longing, erotic power, fear of loss. None of it can be exiled if the relationship is going to be real.

This is where intimacy practices in community matter.

Practices that invite people to stay present while emotions move. Practices that allow truth to be spoken without punishment. Ritual spaces where bodies can breathe together, touch with consent, and feel the difference between performance and authenticity. In these moments, relationship becomes less about managing each other’s behavior and more about witnessing each other’s humanity.

Intimacy is not just about love — it is about courage.

Courage to reveal what has been hidden. Courage to feel what has been numbed. Courage to allow transformation to happen when two nervous systems meet without armor.

Together we become the artist of relationship. The one who knows that true harmony is not fragile politeness but a living, breathing balance that can hold conflict, pleasure, grief, and devotion all at once.

In this sense, right relationship is a sacred practice.

A continual act of returning to presence, where intimacy becomes a form of shared awakening — two people willing to step into the mystery of the underworld together, and emerge more honest, more embodied, and more alive. ✨

Body Temple’s Effective Approach to Intimacy and Embodiment

Somatic ritual and intimacy practices in community such as Body Temple trance dance and yoni mapping offer us a counter-narrative to these inherited patterns of shame. Rather than approaching healing through cognitive understanding alone, these practices engage the body directly through movement, self touch, sound, and communal witnessing. In doing so, they create conditions in which participants can safely explore suppressed emotions, restore agency over their bodies, and integrate experiences that many describe as both psychological healing and spiritual awakening.

Body Temple Dance operates as a form of ritualized movement and trance that encourages participants to enter altered states of awareness through rhythm, breath, intimacy exercises, ritual theater play and somatic exploration. Within this environment, individuals are invited to access what depth psychology describes as shadow material—emotions and memories that have been repressed due to cultural conditioning or personal trauma. When supported by a structured container and community witnessing, trance movement allows these energies to move through the body rather than remaining frozen within it.

Community members frequently report that expressions of anger, grief, and erotic vitality emerge spontaneously through the dance, revealing emotions that had previously been inaccessible or suppressed.

Complementing this movement-based practice, we offer yoni cupping, consent, mirror and mapping, which provides a somatic method for restoring relationship with the pelvic body. Through slow, consent-based exploration of sensation and internal touch, participants begin to develop awareness of the emotional and energetic landscape of the vagina and surrounding tissues. Many women describe this process as learning the “terrain” or “voice” of their pelvis for the first time. In qualitative reflections collected from participants, several themes consistently emerge: the release of stored tension in the hips and lower back, a reduction in menstrual pain, increased sexual autonomy, and the capacity to access emotional memories held within the body.

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For some, this process also catalyzes profound shifts in identity and spiritual perception. One individual described realizing that she had never consciously given her body consent for sexual experiences in the past, while another reported that reconnecting with pelvic sensation allowed her to process childhood trauma that had previously felt inaccessible. Others described the experience in more mystical terms, explaining that the practice opened what they called an “erotic channel,” through which intuitive insight, dream activity, and creative inspiration began to flow more freely.

These experiences point toward an important dimension of somatic healing: the restoration of what might be called the pelvic voice. In many participants’ narratives, the body itself becomes a source of guidance, communicating boundaries, desires, and emotional truths that had been obscured by years of social conditioning.

Through conscious engagement with sensation, movement, and symbolic expression, individuals can begin to integrate aspects of the self that have been split off through shame or cultural repression. Practices such as Body Temple trance dance mirror this process, allowing participants to encounter shadow material through the intelligence of the body rather than through analysis alone.

With the rapid rise of digital technologies and virtual communication, unprecedented amounts of information about sexuality, trauma, and healing have become widely accessible. Yet while technology can expand knowledge, it cannot replace the fundamental human experiences through which the body learns safety: touch, presence, breath, and relational attunement. Many individuals now find themselves navigating a paradox in which they are intellectually informed about healing but remain physically disconnected from their bodies.

Somatic ritual spaces offer an antidote to this disembodiment. They invite participants to re-enter the sensory world through direct experience and relational contact. In doing so, they also provide opportunities to consciously unlearn the systems of oppression, silence, and abuse that have been inherited across generations. Healing in this context becomes not only personal but cultural: a process of re-humanizing bodies that have been shaped by histories of control and shame.

From a psychological perspective, the reduction of shame appears to be central to this process. Shame functions as a powerful regulator of behavior, often leading individuals to dissociate from parts of themselves that have been judged unacceptable.

By creating ritual environments where sexuality, rage, grief, and pleasure can be expressed without condemnation, we challenge the internalized narratives that sustain shame. The result is not simply emotional catharsis but a gradual reorganization of the nervous system, in which intensity and vulnerability can coexist with safety and connection.

Equally important is the communal nature of these practices. Healing does not occur solely within the individual body but within relational fields where experiences are witnessed and validated. When participants observe others expressing rage, grief, pleasure, or spiritual insight without punishment or rejection, new possibilities of embodiment become imaginable. The body learns through experience that authenticity does not inevitably lead to abandonment.

Taken together, these practices suggest that the healing of shame is not only a psychological task but a cultural and spiritual one. Reclaiming embodied sexuality and emotional expression challenges long-standing narratives that separate spirituality from the body or frame erotic energy as dangerous, thanks to Audre Lorde’s immense contribution on this subject. Our Body Temple community members and womb healers describe discovering a form of sacred intelligence within the womb itself—an intelligence that connects sexuality, creativity, intuition, and devotion to life.

Body Temple trance dance and yoni mapping are ritual practices for restoring relationship with the body as a site of wisdom. Through movement, sensation, and communal witnessing, participants rediscover what many describe as a fundamental truth: that the erotic body, far from being something to suppress, is one of the primary gateways through which healing, creativity, and spiritual awakening unfold.

I’m so grateful to have been gathering this research in person AND online the past sixteen years. It’s big and wild and it’s not always relatable, because neither are we. Our currency is rooted in the real.

Please share your thoughts and feelings below wed love to hear from you!

And a short essay on the confessions, what I am leaving behind, the Mother’s waters, and the ways her waves saved me.

Mother’s Waters Know Best

My first threesome was in middle school. John and Derek were my two best guy friends and one fine afternoon while listening to Jerky Boys, I had them both finger me. No one spoke. I used my hands to guide them. Very Venus in Pisces of me.

Water taught me how to love what misogyny trained me to hate. My body. My whole self as a girl, as a girl lover who also likes being with two men at once.

Today, I am officially putting down the past and all the people I have been up until now like too many bags of farmers market groceries with the handles cutting off my circulation. I feel the new vision and I release myself from the past.

I refuse the weight of her fragility and his defensiveness, my grandmother’s unprocessed sexual abuse, her un-adored fingers passing the rosary in prayer while to patriarchy ridiculed and abused the very body that gave them life. I have layed down, more like punched and kicked inside the moshpit of holy existence, my grandfather’s mentally ill, molesting hands. Not mine.Back through the bloodline. Back to a pre-christian time where the grief and eros rituals involved dancing barefoot on the land and taking care of the children, not doping bombs on them in God’s name.

There is a Spider Woman with a web the size of existence and she’s got you now, babe. Your pain, your unintegrated grief, your ignorance. She can handle it. The thread of her web runs through me, glistening up my sushumna like sunrise over a primordial womb lagoon — or like sun hitting a grease slick in a Jersey parking lot if we’re being honest. Still holy. Still shimmering. I’m free. I’m not taking a poll about it.

I am carrying my eight-year-old self — swimming in the cold, leaf-filled pool in September, when everyone else packed it in but I’m still out there like a raccoon in human form. Past Labor Day, past the hot Jersey shore days — boardwalk games, rigged claw machines, powdered sugar in my lungs, early morning beach rides with my mom while the seagulls stole French fries right out of my hands.

(We still have two spaces left for our writing and womb healing Magdalene Pilgrimage apply here let’s chat if you want to come!)

I need somewhere to submerge what I feel, what I grip, what I swallow without knowing — served with breakfast in bed. “Here’s your eggs over easy with a side of unprocessed sexual trauma, honey. Don’t forget to eat your toast.” Love you Mom.

In the cold chlorine slap of that water, my body remembers it’s a genius. A wet little oracle. I am recognized there — mermaid, menace, feral dolphin child. I dive to the dirty bottom for the coins my father threw in. I can swim across and back holding my breath — lungs on fire, seeing stars — pranayama before yoga got a trademark and a tote bag. Early 90s Jersey mysticism: hold your breath and don’t die.

This is the pool where I practiced being dead — floating face down during summer BBQs while all the loud Italians argued as a form of communication. Perfectly still. An oscar-worthy performance. Waiting to see if anyone would notice. They didn’t.

Same water I fell into before I could swim and my brother saved me. Same pool where my cousin Vincent and I shoved a Barbie doll head into the suction hole and almost took down the entire filtration system.

Goosebumps stippling my golden-brown skin. Skinny legs shaking. My protector dog fluffy chasing me around the yard. Fingers and toes wrinkled like old deli pickles. Sensation was my proof of life. The water felt me before I learned to feel myself. As preteens we would cast spells with cannonballs and chaos, making waves like tiny storm gods, screaming songs, splashing like our lives depend on making a pool that mirrored how we felt. Before the drugs. Before the addiction to boys and girls who I needed to love me. Before God got assigned a gender and a political party — there was the Goddess-damned water.

All that swelling unnamed potential inside me finally had something to push against — resistance, pressure, embrace. I learned how to float. How to sink. How to cut my arms through thickness and be answered back. The water said: mama I’ve got you.

Time alone in it welcomed every version of me — the weirdo, the one who knew too much, the quirky loud girl, the ghost child. My mother was not safe enough to be inside of and so neither was I until I found the waters. Rather they found me. Saved my life. Chlorine first. Then salt.

The Atlantic as a kid taught me — wild riptides and danger flirting with me directly. The Pacific as an adult in rock bottom — freezing, gorgeous, Goddess Lakshmi, Aphrodite awakening, Dark Goddess level rude — baptizing me without permission.

When everything else fell away, when I left the father’s house, when the myth cracked and the spell broke what remained was what had always been there:

The Mother’s waters.

Mouths watering.

Home.

As a 0 degrees Aquarius Rising, this is my Aquarian calling: to challenge who we have been conditioned to be. Baptism by fire and floods.

All human embryos begin with the same basic reproductive structures, and the early developmental pathway is what researchers call female-typical by default unless specific genetic and hormonal signals shift development toward male-typical anatomy. Based on the principles of embryology and developmental biology, specifically as described by authors such as Bruce M. Carlson in Human Embryology and Developmental Biology

According to NIH / National Library of Medicine embryology summaries, scientists often describe female development as the default pathway — it occurs without the additional gene-triggered hormone cascade required for male differentiation.

If female is the default, do men really exist?

(Full credit and blessings for this idea that (cis)men don’t actually exist to my good friend Marley follow her and our queer Aquarian-Piscean musings.)

If you identify as male or have a c*ck, don’t pull away, lean in. Consider what you’ve been told “male” means, and ask yourself: how much of your identity was a choice? How creative have you been in building it?

Most mainstream spirituality has been authored by men claiming to kill their egos, yet missing what it might mean to release the identity of being a “man” — even briefly, playfully, experimentally. Women, queer, and trans folks already know how necessary it is to bend, shift, and play with identity just to survive, thrive, and reclaim their power in this world.

If female is the default, do men even exist? Don’t pull away if you have a c*ck — lean in. What’s “male,” really? How much of it did you choose? Most spirituality taught by men misses what it could mean to play with, unmake, or abandon that identity — something women, queer, and trans folks already do to survive and thrive.

I was the first girl born into an Italian American family filled with boys and men. The pressure-filled identification and projection put on my little body as a girl was tremendous — thick, constant, in the air, spoken and unspoken. My mother used to tell me my father wanted a girl so bad after having such a hard time having my brother when he was just 17 that, eleven years later, while pregnant with me, he used to drive over the train tracks in Belleville, New Jersey on purpose to “shake the balls off” me in the womb.

It didn’t work.

Men, maleness, misogyny, the identity and construct of men — that was the undeniable and insidious atmosphere I grew up inside. My whole world revolved around the ideas and feelings of men — their preferences, opinions, approvals and disapprovals — contorting my body unconsciously to the the subtle weather of whether they were pleased or pissed off.

When I was three we moved with my grandmother to Old Bridge NJ, 40 minutes south of where I was born. It was a break in a long lineage of family living close together.

From a village called Verbicaro in Southern Italy — in the mountains of Calabria — to the shores of New Jersey via Ellis Island, our family had always lived as neighbors. Doors open. Kitchens shared. Children tended by many mothers. The apartment my parents rented when I was born was next door to my grandparents, down the street from my dad’s brother and his wife.

My uncle Mark and my father Pete both found heroin on those streets. Where did it come from? The 70s? My grandfather’s trauma as a D-Day vet passed down to his only two sons through physical violence and betrayal they couldn’t handle the pain of? Was it just what people did? Both my uncle Mark and my father Pete died because of addiction. My uncle shot himself in the head, and in that same house my father later collapsed with a brain aneurysm, overdose unknown and hidden from me until his deathbed confession.

Is it all connected to the intense identification with men and maleness — to the disconnect from the mother, I often wonder and a sense of already knowing the answer. The split where older pagan, land-based practices slowly became controlling over time, where earth ritual became church ritual but the body got quieter inside the walls.

Does the pain of leaving one place for a “better life” somewhere else haunt the blood like a void that keeps asking to be filled — by something, someone, anything?

My ancestral ties take me back to times that feel like a matriarchal miracle — the Black Madonna church in Southern Italy that once was an Isis temple showed me this in my body. As a local family played us traditional songs through instruments they made out of cherry wood and the sound filled the cathedral, my eyes shut and I fell into an abyss of ancestral remembrance — women and children barefoot on the land, singing and dancing, skirts and hair moving, dust rising.

This life — grief-soaked and pleasure-lit — is never lost. Only forgotten. Then remembered through ritual and right relationship. Long before Christianity, the south — especially regions like Calabria — kept earth-based rites: caves, night processions with drums, blood and milk offerings, women-led fertility and mourning rituals, seasonal initiations tied to soil, seed, and moon. Body first, doctrine later.

My good friend Marley often says men don’t exist — that we all begin and are birthed in the mother’s body physically and cosmically, formed from the same tissue, held. Maybe that’s why I teach others to listen to instead of only fear the power inside vaginas, their own or the ones closest to them, as oracles of truth and intelligence — wanting the earth and her children at the center again.

Grief and pleasure share a border so thin you have to hums to hear it. Anyone who has journeyed deep knows the pulse — weeping and ecstasy beneath the same sharp pain of longing.

Every year on Good Friday in one of my ancestral places, men beat their legs with glass until blood runs down their calves — for Jesus and for Mary, Mother of Grief. Pain and devotion made public. They pour it on every Ave Maria threshold in a trance moving from one station to the next for hours (I’ve been.)

I can’t help but get curious – if women’s menstrual blood were reverenced for its power and potency, welcomed at temples as sacred offering, the only blood that does not come from violence, wouldn’t the world be different?

If what cycles from the body were honored instead of hidden — if initiation replaced shame, if rhythm replaced domination — would we still believe violence is what wakes us to our worth, belonging, and beauty?

I think not. I think we need remembrance and ritual for our grief, rage and aliveness. And these aren’t just my thoughts, we’ve been holding space for them for years and there is evidence and thousands of humans backing this research. We came to reclaim reverence. To stop calling holy things dirty and then wondering why everyone feels starved and sick.

Money can’t buy you the belonging and un-inhibited joy and connection what you want, it’s in the unlearning of the colonial wounds, the witch trials, inner misogyny, racism and homophobia that we unlock the power we have always carried inside, to create. To give birth to new worlds.

In a world where Earth is honored as rich, bodies are loud, and ritual is visceral — how could the food and the fucking not be sacred?

How could we not do what we can to embody the eros of our ancestors and overflow with wisdom as a result? As a 0 degrees Aquarius Rising, this is my Aquarian calling.

Thank you for reading would love to hear your thots meow, I mean below, and if you’re inspired to be together apply for our Magdalene womb and writing pilgrimage open to all who live in devotion to the sacred, living power of the feminine. Registration closes in three weeks… don’t sleep.

Babe, we need more space to create…

On the last days of our India pilgrimage — after more blessings than I could ever properly name (we have to be together so you could feel the depth of my humility and love) — something extraordinary happened right in the middle of the ordinary.

We were staying with dear ones — old family, chosen family — my sister Varsha, her husband, and their two daughters. One morning, Mausi — which means “auntie” — the woman who comes each day to cook breakfast and help care for the home while Varsha works as a therapist and they care for the girls, invited us to her home for chai.

We walked the short distance — maybe three minutes — down the busy Pune street where the traffic feels like a living organism: a river of motorbikes, horns, voices, color, dust. Past the Ganesha shrine on the right, past the painted orange stone on the left that had clearly become recognized as the Goddess through devotion alone. Turn the corner. Five steps more…

And suddenly it felt — truly — like I had taken a hero’s dose of psychedelics.

Not in a dissociated way — in a hyper-alive way. The veil thinned. Everything was shimmering with presence. Like my nervous system had been turned toward God-volume.

There were as many buffalo and cows as people lined along the sides. My senses enliven immediately even against the pollution Pune is also known for. Metal bowls stacked high. Fires being fed with bundles of sticks. People bathing outside under the morning sky. Women and men washing clothes. Children weaving through it all getting ready to go to school in their uniforms. Alleys where the cooking happened over open fire. There may as well have been a woman giving birth in the middle of the alley and someone else dying in the next room across–there was that much real-ness imbued in the environment.

Smoke, cow dung, spice, dust, heat, color — every texture speaking at once. No separation between living and surviving and praying and feeding and tending. Life happening completely out in the open. Nothing hidden. Nothing staged. Creative force everywhere. Shakti not as concept — as atmosphere.

The kind of aliveness you feel in your body before you can explain it in your mind.

Mausi greeted us with her wide, unguarded smile adn uncontrollable laughter and welcomed us inside. We sat together and drank chai her daughter in law spoke while her son sat next to us with his stuffy — a simple, warm, life changing, unpretentious, unplanned ceremony of hearts gathering. The only common language the body, the heart, love.I wandered over to her altar — her puja space — and it stopped me. Small goddesses and deities arranged with care. Flowers fresh. Offerings recently given. You could feel it — it had just been tended. It was alive. Not curated, not aestheticized, not something you could purchase pre-made and place for display. It was human devotion. Used. Juicy. Loved. In relationship.

Outside, the community kept breathing — cooking, washing, tending, calling out to one another. It was a completely different world that the one that was there 20 feet away in the bustling streets of Pune. But a shared one at that. Community not as an idea, but as a shared nervous system. Out loud. Out doors. Interwoven. Alive and in love with living itself. I felt elated, touched and lifted by the soul in the Spirit of the place and the people.

It is hands down our hyper-individualism that is widening the gap between us — we are learning language for everything online without the lived space to practice being human in the heat and friction and tenderness of real relationship. We can name our wounds, our patterns, our attachment styles — but naming is not the same as being in the room with another nervous system and staying.

A recent national survey found that about 72% of Americans rarely or never spend time with the people they care about, and most do not participate in community groups, volunteering, or neighborhood action — which means isolation is no longer just emotional, it’s structural (source: American Survey Center / reported by WITF, “New national survey finds widespread social isolation across the U.S.”).

We are over-articulated and under-practiced in belonging — fluent in insight, starving for contact.

Our fragility needs to be transformed into fearlessness if we are to make it through this fraught time — but not the brittle fearlessness of armor, denial, or domination. Not the kind that leaves the body behind. I’m talking about the fearlessness that is born when the nervous system learns it can feel and not disappear. When the heart learns it can break and still belong to itself.

Join our school to practice this in:

BODY TEMPLE MEMBERSHIP

Sensitivity is not the enemy — unconscious fragility is because its entitlement trains us to feel like we can take wherever we are . The kind that collapses, lashes out, numbs, or performs strength while secretly starving for safety.

Sacred and ritual theater, grief and pleasure work, somatic dance and meditation, fire ceremony, creative and shamanic writing and embodied performance become training grounds for this transformation. They give us repeated, consensual exposure to intensity — rage, grief, devotion, eros, protest — inside a held frame. The witness learns to stay. The performer learns they will not die from being seen. The room learns how to metabolize truth together.

Fearlessness, then, is not hardness — it is capacity. Capacity to witness what patriarchy, misogyny, systemic oppression, and inherited silence trained us to avoid. Capacity to feel heat without always calling it danger. Capacity to let truth move through the body without shutting the gates.

This is how art becomes medicine and ritual becomes rehearsal for a more courageous culture. we practice staying present to what once overwhelmed us, until presence itself becomes our power.

This is the work we do inside Body Temple.

What’s inside the membership:

• Monthly Body Temple Dance class

• Fire Ceremony

• Monthly Flow Writing class

• Yoni Temple — this month we’re unraveling beauty standards and patriarchal perception, taking darshan (to see and be seen) with our own vulvas, plus consent-based mapping to build juiciness and energy in the womb

• Sacred Song Circle — where the voice becomes liberator

We move through the landscape of Money, Mother, Father, Rose, Receive, and Sword — each theme a doorway into what your body already knows but hasn’t been allowed to speak.

$44/month. 6-month commitment.

Doors are open now. They close on Wednesday, Feb 11th and don’t reopen until summer solstice.

This is your invitation to build capacity. To practice staying. To let presence become your power.

BODY TEMPLE MEMBERSHIP

Doors close Wednesday, February 11th.

X

Adriana

PS. Our Magdalene and Black Madonna France writing and womb pilgrimage is offering an early rate until Feb 15th so check it out and apply before then if you’re interested.

I’m not dead yet, and neither are you, and so I have no choice but to get passionate about death, dying and the process of transformation that requires, letting go. Easier said than done.

(RIP Catherine O’Hara and all those currently in transition from this world to the next, especially those killed at the hands of greedy, evil fascist regimes…)

I am currently in Kolkata, India after our Devi pilgrimage and went to a potent Kali temple plus Mother Teresa’s home for the dying. A place I’ve been longing to experience for many years.

I’m not actually passionate about dying, or death and definitely not loss—I’m passionate about talking about it and devotion may as well be my middle name (it is Marie)

Maybe it’s my Jupiter in Scorpio but I feel expansive thinking about death, feeling and holding space for grief, staying close to the heart that exists outsides the confines of sham (what’s more shameless and intimate than death besides birthing?)

I am passion-filled about learning and praying with the edge of the “end.” where all things begin again. I find this is one place intimacy thrives, as horrific, unbearable and painful as grief can be. And I’m a holy whore for intimacy.

Burying my dad on my 25th birthday, amongst other things that shattered my illusion of reality, made it impossible for me to just move on. And so I never did. It’s been more than eighteen years.

No place better to expand my capacity to be both humble and bold than the land of Kali Ma (and Rabindranath Tagore) Kolkata—where faith oozing in the thick air and power is not polite. Where emotion is. Naturally pulled out of places it learned to hide. Nothing more weird (Aquarius) and bold hearted (Leo) than a Kali Temple while on day 1 of your bleed.

This morning, I stood in Her temple with the floors slick from goat’s blood, witnessed a woman swirling in a possession go by black hair flying around eyes wide open, air strong with iron and incense, devotion pulsing through bodies pressed close together. It was fierce. Unapologetic. Alive. Kali does not ask me to be comfortable. She asked me to be true. And in that truth, something ancient in me both bows down low tears and heart close to the Earth and also stands upright in my spine ready to act.

Later, in a place that could not have looked more different, I felt the same transmission. At Mother Teresa’s home for the dying, a sweet sister with braces who was called to serve there when she was 20 shared with Harshada my partner and I with a tenderness so simple it undid me. The rooms were quiet. Clean. Devout in a completely different register. And yet—the Shakti was just as intense. Just as overwhelming. Just as strong and sacred and clear. Human and holy.

The devotion was devouring in an undeniable way. Power does not belong to one aesthetic and definitely not to an ideology.

Devotion does not require agreement or a perfect vessel. Love moves wherever it is welcomed.

In blood-soaked stone temples and in small rooms where the sick and dying are bathed and fed, the same force breathes. The same Mother. The same fierce mercy. Faith is not certainty—it is intimacy with the Mystery. It is the willingness to sing before proof arrives. To feel the light while it is still dark.

This is the transmission I’m receiving yet once again.

There is no place where God is not. And yet we need to reject the sacred to really get close sometimes. This is how She dances in us, and we in Her. She’s inescapable, like death and birthing.

There is no body beyond Her reach, I believe.

And love—real love—will often ask everything of us, and give even more.

As a massively femme oriented being, I get that discipline can not only be a turn off, but enraging. I am all about the primal, pre-dogma and religious authorities type of spirituality and embodiment. But being in spaces where there is so much devotion oriented to the unseen and to being of service to humanity, I find a simultaneous kink around being told what to do and when to do it. the Difference is in the consent I have created within myself. And a new view on discpline.

Discipline as being a disciple to Love.

Authority, as we were taught it, was a clenched jaw, a spine held so tight it forgot how to listen, a voice that barked orders instead of tracking sensation. I am no longer interested in authority as control.

I am interested in authority as collapse—the holy kind. The kind where you fall backward into the arms of the Divine and discover you were never meant to push your life forward at all. This is where my re-writing begins: not from effort, not from domination of self, but from listening so deeply the body becomes a tuning fork for truth.

Most of us carry what I call boundary ruptures—moments where our no was ignored, where we learned to override our instincts to belong, survive, or be loved. Authority entered our nervous systems not as safety, but as threat. So we learned to submit, rebel, or dissociate. Rarely did we learn how to receive guidance without collapse, or how to lead without violence.

Repairing boundary ruptures is not about harder edges or better performance. It is about restoring trust with the intelligence of the body. It is about letting the Divine speak through sensation instead of through shame, punishment, or spiritual striving.

I am writing this from the sacred portal of Mother India—another dimension entirely—where reverence looks like a million different things and is felt not as obedience, but as shared joy. Here, devotion is not abstract. It is touchable. Audible. In the air. It lives in the excess of color, the chaos, the song, the tears, the laughter. It is an ecstatic devotion to Love itself, recognizable only to those who feel it in their bones. For the ones who get it, no explanation is needed.

Devotion is felt.

This is the authority I met years ago inside pre-religious mystical ritual with the Dark Goddess in India and again in Italy—before doctrine, before temples with rules, before God was turned into a father with conditions. There, authority was rhythm, drum, breath, voice cracking open. No hierarchy, only initiation by listening. The ritual did not command us; it waited for us to soften enough to hear it. The Goddess did not ask for obedience. She asked for attunement. And when we listened—truly listened—our lives reorganized themselves without force.

To be a good leader, you must be a good servant—but I do not mean a servant to systems of oppression, productivity, or control, and I do not mean a servant to the dominant culture’s version of success. I mean a servant to something wider and more wild than yourself. A servant to eros, to truth, to the collective nervous system, to the living intelligence that moves through bodies, land, and time. Leadership, from this place, is not about directing others. It is about being so devoted to listening that others feel safe enough to hear themselves.

This Capricorn New Moon, I am not interested in climbing another mountain or mastering another structure. I am interested in leasing my life up from beneath me—from the deep ground of devotion. From the place where discipline becomes reverence, responsibility becomes responsiveness, and authority is no longer a weapon but a sanctuary. True authority does not push. It receives the next instruction from the dark, fertile silence where God is not an idea, but a pulse moving through bone. This is where I begin again.

We don’t just speak and write about the Divine Feminine over here in Body Temple, We embody Her.

Come to France with us for a writing and womb healing embodied love and grief, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna retreat in April. Taurus season. Find info and apply here.

Here are a couple pieces for your pleasure: one I wrote after my first pilgrimage to India in 2011 (this is my 16th pilgrimage!) and one about my bisexual beginnings. Send over any prayer you have personal and collective, Goddess knows our country and world need them, and deserve them too.

The Temple That Made That Woman Bleed In India

The walls were covered

with butterflies & moths.

Wide, concrete stairway.

Left side to go up,

right side to come down.

On the way there are turtle statues

showing how to enter the temple

– intentionally slow.

The fog was so thick

through the bars on the right wall

the only thing to see

was heaven.

We offered a coconut

to the goddess at the top.

They crack it with this machine

& give you half, so I fed mine

to one of the monkeys

hanging out there. We sat

& meditated on the cold stone floor.

I prayed to be released

of all things but divine love,

to keep it coming upon me

& out, eternal

as a virgin.

Do It For The Attention

I’m only fifteen, but I pretended to be eighteen to get into Paradise, the gay club in Sayreville, NJ, that allowed minors in if they gave them a fake ID. My inner thighs are small and tense, as if I were protecting someone I was never taught how to love.

Sticky floors, smoke-filled, dank, dark rooms we pass through to get to the bathroom, where we can rip off the band they put on those of us under 21, and gather in the small stall to snort the Special K we got from Hoff, one of our guy friends from Laurence Harbor. The cute gay boy bartenders gave us our cranberry and vodkas with lots of ice and those little red straws that help you not drink them too fast.

Missy Elliott bumping: “I put my thang down, flip it and reverse it, I put my thang down, flip it and reverse it.” Cute, skinny Puerto Rican boys with tight fades are making out hard, as I grind on my other friends on the floor. A butchy dyke I liked the best witnessing us from the sidelines. I like the attention, I need it. Girls and gays not only need it, but Goddess damn it we deserve it. The patriarchy made attention, the only thing tha supports relationships “acknowledgement” into something wrong with us.

My mind is cloudy and confused, but my body is clear in its impulse — taking everything in without hesitation. No boundaries, no limits, no sense of loss yet. Just sensation. The known way is no longer applicable, nor is it permitted. What unfolds instead is an exploration of danger in love, a surrender to the untamed. Out of the cage and into the wild bliss of the erotic, where risk becomes a kind of freedom, and the body leads the way home.

PS. We have a writing and womb retreat happening in the South of France April 17th-21st read more here if you are interested apply!

Where you belong

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
fell from my lips weekly.
I stood on my knees,
my own father watching
out of the corner of his eye.

Our tickets to heaven.
Our pause in the battle of braving the late 80s.
Showing up late. Leaving early.
That was our lineage.

Eating the body of a long-dead prophet
while, in the background,
the lesser-known and often-weeping mother—
the one who carried the son
who also wept.
Her suffering ignored.

A mother who now types fast,
urgency born from abuse,
longing shaped by love.

I carry my father now
like he once carried me—
his death a loving release
from the biggest lies of my life,
gaslit by the most holy redeemer.

We hold grounded yet heightened sensitivities—
a lightning bolt opened us to receive.
This is me,
befriending the father in me.

Are you a safe home for yourself?
If not, know this: you are not alone.
The pain of disconnection
is the passageway
to becoming the primary caretaker of you.

How are the waters of forgiveness
flowing in you today?
Are rivers forming over mossy rocks?
An ocean—terrifying, vast,
yet capable of carrying you whole?

Or is it a meager trickle
into a sink full of dirty dishes?
A flood waiting behind
all you’ve been holding inside?

The wisdom of the body knows:
we heal a little at a time.
Can we look at the horror
of a forgotten home
and still call forth what is auspicious?

Can we ask for the strength to carry on—
a sacred no,
a secret you may never know,
an orgasmic yes
to all the life in you
that has yet to be revealed?

When the mother speaks,
you shut up and listen.

She is not afraid to mop up your mess
with her hair.
She knows the value
in the taste of despair.

She is not waiting for you to be ready.
She gives you what you need
to handle the harm
you were given to hold—
and to let go.

She helps you build a home inside:
a sanctuary of fresh forgiveness
instead of a shame circus.
She lets go because she trusts you.
Someone has to.

She knows that a home that heals
includes feeling what hurts.

We stay in relational patterns
that perpetuate pain
until we pause, press in,
and protect what was always a promise
for something new.

Without always making others wrong,
in your inner sanctum, your solitude,
you grow strong.

You have children in you
and parents too.
You are a home
full of all that you’ve grown.

Trust yourself, she whispers.
You know what you need to heal.

Hands to hold.
Bellies full.
Breath between each rib.
Breasts heavy with forgiveness.

Clear eyes.
Hearts snap closed–
because they know:

Everyone can be loved.
But not everyone or everything
is welcome
in the home
where you belong.

Blessings for this time and hope to see you January 1st for our Embodied Venus fire, dance and wild Shakti ritual and 11 days of writing from and for, your body.

Our 11 day ritual theater and writing Embodied Venus begins January 1st with a live workshop join us!

All living things, sentient. Everything. All-consuming darkness. Emptiness. The sky captures my heart-mind a hundred times a day. And still, I don’t know.

I have been slowly, imperfectly learning to offer my own body again as sacred, as you have. Not as something to be forgiven, but as something to be trusted.

Myself, perhaps.

They say Mary Magdalene was a whore, and then, to counter the insult, they insist she wasn’t. I have always been annoyed by both responses, as if womanhood must be defended by erasure, as if eros needs to be purified in order to be holy. The Gnostic gospels give voice to a whole other devotion between Magdalene and her beloved—one that does not split love from desire, spirit from flesh.

Many of my closest friends, colleagues, and clients are sex workers, and I have always admired the potency of the work they are doing—the intimacy, the boundaries, the fierce clarity it takes to meet desire without disappearing. I consider the work we do here at Body Temple “sex work” as educators: sharing information that brings forth an internal power that dismantles power-over.

I hold sex workers with the same intuitive reverence as mothers. Both know how to stand at thresholds. Both know how to touch what others are afraid to name. Both know how to protect innocence—not by denial, but by presence. And so the argument became irrelevant. I didn’t need Mary Magdalene to be innocent, or rehabilitated, or corrected by another intuitive. I needed to know her inside.

I needed a Magdalene who could meet me in the holy darkness—where desire and devotion are not opposites, where longing does not disqualify love but reveals it, where the body is not something to apologize for. I needed her when I was called to release the shame from my abortion. I knew the act was not wrong the way the church I grew up in told me it was, and yet I couldn’t shake the ways it tied my ankles tight together.

I knew in my bones I did what I needed to do, what I was called to do, even if I will always ache the loss. What lingered was not guilt—it was chaos. Unheld grief. Love without ritual. A child part of me left alone to make sense of something far too big. I couldn’t shake the effects it had on my sex life, on my nervous system, on the way pleasure began to feel distant, effortful, confusing.

This is where Magdalene found me. Not as a symbol to be corrected, but as a presence who understands what it means to be devoted and undone at the same time. She knows what it is to love God through the body, to carry longing without resolution, to refuse to confuse love with chaos. She knows what it means to stay close to innocence while walking straight through the dark.

There is very little said about her in the gospels that survived, except that she was possessed by seven devils. Can you not relate? What does it mean to be possessed? Is it pathology—or is it simply what happens when feeling moves faster than the culture’s capacity to hold it? Does our fear of possession—and our ignorance of its everyday, ordinary occurrences—make it harder to admit and tend the shame that rises in all of us?

If MM was possessed, then I recognize that possession (what woman and queer folk doesn’t?!) The way grief lives in the hips and range spews from the guts straight out the mouth. The way desire hesitates after loss and the vocal cords tighten when the heart of the womb is not honored. The way shame disguises itself as fatigue, hopelessness, and in-value. The way the body keeps asking questions long after the mind wants closure. The way the inner child keeps reaching—not for chaos, but for safety.

I am not interested in redeeming Magdalene by making her respectable. I am interested in the holiness of her hunger in you. The dignity of her desire. The way she separated eros from harm, love from disorder, devotion from self-abandonment. A whore for God is not a degradation. It is a devotion so total it risks everything except the soul of the child inside.

And maybe this is what I have been learning—slowly, imperfectly—to offer my own body again. Not as something to be forgiven, but as something trustworthy enough to protect what is innocent.

Myself, perhaps.

As women and folks with vulvas, we experience eros through our relationship to the unknown—through unraveling, through not knowing, through letting certainty die while still finding confidence inside vulnerability. No small feat in a world that demands composure, clarity, and control. What we are told about Magdalene is this: she was possessed.

But what if possession is simply what happens when love, grief, memory, and longing exceed the ego’s capacity to manage them? What if it is the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do when life overwhelms meaning? What if the work is not purification, but protection—of the child consciousness that still believes love should be safe?

Our fear of possession does not make us safer. It makes us lonelier. It keeps us dissociated from the forces asking to be met with devotion instead of exile. What if possession is not something to be cast out, but something to be related to—so that chaos no longer masquerades as love?

This is the terrain of the Dark Mother.

Traditionally, this was the season of listening to the sounds of death and love at the same time. The earth quiets. The light thins. The body remembers that life does not move in straight lines toward progress, but in cycles of descent and return. There is a particular ache that lives here—a cold-body ache. A longing for sun. A longing for soul. A longing for joy that does not require us to abandon grief or sacrifice innocence.

The poets have always known this. They are the ones who spoke to the soul I was always trying to inhabit. The ones who knew that being drawn toward darkness is not pathology—it is intelligence.

As Marie Howe writes, “the dead seemed more alive to me than the living.” This is how you know you are onto something. Not an alarm that everything must be gotten rid of. Not proof that you are broken. But a sign that your sensitivity is intact—that your inner child is still listening for life in places others were trained to abandon.

Mary Magdalene knew this.
The Dark Goddess knows this.
Your body knows this.

Perhaps possession—when met with devotion instead of fear—is not the loss of self, but the remembering of what we belong to, and what we are here to protect.

A whore and a virgin, a crone and a maiden, meet at a witchy herbal bar called Hekate in the East Village. They begin speaking. The timeless swirl of the Dark Mother consumes them. They enter into a devotion so total it risks everything—but not the soul of the child within. They are both and neither. Everything and nothing. And they are completely fine with that.

With devotion, Adriana ❤

PS. Join us in Embodied Venus - a ritual theater expressive alchemy writing course beginning January 1st with a fire ceremony and potent ritual in Body Temple with our ecstatic emotional community! Come laugh, cry and write your own damn gospel babe.

Over the course of these days we'll write, move, laugh, cry, breathe, perform, and channel: using somatic practices and embodied theatre to invite grief and ancestral longing into the body, then transforming those depths into raw, fierce, luminous writing.

This is a container for consistent daily practice, radical honesty, reclamation of voice, and the re-writing of our stories — individually, collectively, ancestrally. Embodying Venus isn't about perfect prose or polished poetry — it's about visceral truth, reclamation, emergence, and the fierce, tender reclamation of self, lineage, power and voice. edit this keep my word and weave in the need to separate love and chaos and the innocent children - our child consciousness needs us more than anyone else.

Start your new year in soul with us, not just scrolling! All practices, poems/prose and prompts in one course you can access anytime. All live classes recorded.

The hurricanes of unspeakable despair arrive alongside moss-covered rock and rivers of delight in my dense thighs, the kind that sweep you off your feet as if to say, I know what you need—don’t you worry about a thing. There are moments when the earth feels like a mother who knows your name, whispering, rest in my moss, rest in my mouth, and for a breath or two I believe her. I let myself soften. I let myself lean. I let myself imagine that this time the ground might stay.

Then the tornadoes of God’s will, not always the same as my hearty desires come through. They have ripped every home I start to feel safe inside clean off the ground, reminding me—again—that safety has always been conditional for a weary mystic like myself. Weather-dependent. I learn the value of constantly becoming–too wiry and too inflexible for permanence, not yet quite fit for forevers. No walls to contain the wild that is within me. No guarantees. Only exposure. Direct light. Portraits. Eyes soft. but open and the sun keeps setting, disappearing beneath a fuzzy horizon. Only devotion practiced in the open air, where a hole the size of God doubles as both wound and doorway.

The question lives here, in my body: how do you rewild your sacred masculine when all you feel is generations of harm? When the masculine arrives as an all consuming force before it arrives as protection. When it destroys before it knows how to tend. When what your nervous system remembers is not containment, but impact. Bracing beating as quickly as the heart. Not safety, but survival.

I became ecosexual before I ever had language for it—not as kink, but as survival and a gift given by the Mother Herself. The word itself was born from queer and feminist ecologies that named the Earth not as resource, but as lover, kin, and sacred partner. For me, it meant when I could barely eat, the land fed me generously. When grief shut down my appetite, the eucalyptus trees, the river, the Pacific, the air rising above dusty Los Angeles, the sun entering my skin daily, kept me alive. A grief-stricken body has no appetite, but it still knows where either belongs. How to turn on by something that can only exist in that space between words. In uncertainty, a new language awakens that only the body understands. The Earth, in my early 30s, became the only lover who did not require me to perform nourishment to deserve it. I did not have to give to receive, but in the feeling that I was unworthy of this love, I reclaimed the power of reciprocity. I realized who I was in this relationship to the Earth, was enough.

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My body recalls my Italian grandfather Aurelio who lived to be 101, papa I called him, feeding me fruit in a trailer park in Wildwood, New Jersey. Me in a diaper. Him in a suit. The sweetness of cantalope landed in my body as proof—not of fullness, but of existing. When did that became not enough? Unholy when it’s all we have to give is who we are. Each bite earned me the feeling that I existed, that I was good, that my hunger made sense. The satisfaction never quite arrived, though. It hovered. Deferred. As if even then I was learning how to live with a hole the size of God, fed but still reaching.

Later, when the floods gathered higher in my throat, it was not food that saved me. It was land. The sensation of bark under my palms. Cold water against my ankles. The way the wind entered my lungs without asking me to deserve it. The way the Earth did not flinch from my grief. This was ecosexuality as devotion—an erotic relationship with aliveness itself—where pleasure was not about consumption, but about communion. Where a hole the size of God became a place the world could touch me back.

Now the tightening returns when a man feels anything at all. Tenderness. Grief. Uncertainty. The reflection is blinding—every emotion I learned to manage, mute, or metabolize for others mirrored back to me in real time. Even as I hold space for bodies to feel safe enough to feel, even as I teach embodiment, devotion, permission, and truth-telling, something in me contracts. Especially because I made this my job. Especially because I am good at it. Especially because competence has been one of the ways I learned to survive a hole the size of God.

The thing I am worst at—staying present when intimacy breathes, when feeling moves toward me instead of away—offers me the prosperity to rewrite stories of lack, to give back in the places we collectively choose not to look. The places we ignore because they are inconvenient, unprofitable, too tender. The places where hunger lives. The places where grief lives. The places where a hole the size of God is not something to be filled, but something to be listened to.

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And still, beneath the storms and beneath the sweetness, beneath the harm and the longing, the moss remains. Quiet. Trusting. Waiting. Waiting for the masculine to remember how to kneel, how to tend, how to stay. Waiting for Goddess not as rescuer, but as presence—finally willing to rest inside the hole that I came to find is called, my feminine heart, sometimes full, others empty, as if she carries a need to release everything from time to time because generally she holds so much. But perhaps we have been carried all along.

The sun, my father. Reflects.

PS. Join and I Thursday for a ritual performance and writing workshop called Red Lipstick. For women on the Verge.