I spent years in the grip of opioid addiction. Not as a cautionary tale — as a real woman who lost herself completely and had to learn, slowly and without a map, what it felt like to come back into her own body. That cracked me open to questions I couldn't stop asking. About suffering. About pleasure. About what actually makes a human being feel alive.
I'd studied psychology long before any of this — I already understood the mind. But addiction asked questions the mind alone couldn't answer, and those questions took me places. Into psychedelic spaces, where I sat with people as they met themselves past the reach of their own defenses. Into somatic and psychosexual work — the body as teacher, the pelvis as archive, desire as a form of knowing. Into Qigong, Reiki, Hawaiian mysticism, shamanic lineages, the art of release. Into every tradition that said the same thing: the body is not the problem. The body is the way through.
I was building a life. A community — Soul Survivors Body Art, which I've co-led for over two decades. A marriage. A self I was proud of.
Then in December 2021, my husband Eric died by suicide.
Grief like that doesn't heal you. It destroys you first. It takes everything you thought you knew about love, about loss, about your own capacity to survive, and it burns it. What I found in the ashes wasn't peace. It was hunger — a ferocious, embodied, almost embarrassing hunger to be fully alive. To feel everything. To stop hovering at the edge of my own existence and climb all the way in.
That's when I understood what erotic really means. Not sex as performance. Not desire as something to manage. Eros as the life-force itself — the current running through grief and joy and rage and hunger and loss alike. The thing that makes us reach toward beauty, toward meaning, toward more.
Welcome. Let's get you back into your body. All the way back.