It’s 10 minutes before Rahi and I are hosting our first masterclass on extended lovemaking. I feel like I’m going to vomit. My breath is short, adrenaline surging. I’m not nervous about teaching. I know this material in my bones, in my body, in the thousands of hours I’ve spent in ceremony and on the table and in bed learning the geography of pleasure and altered states.
I’m nervous about being seen for who I am: a sexual being who knows a lot about sex. Who has earned this knowledge through every pathway available: trauma and healing, sex work, formal training and ecstatic discovery, shame and reclamation.
Long before I taught extended lovemaking… I was learning what happened to girls who were seen as sexual. Sexual visibility has never been neutral in my life. It has always come with consequence.
The girl in me remembers early childhood, being shamed for masturbating. Being violated by a caretaker, sexualized before I even had language for what sexuality was.
The girl in me remembers middle school, the summer I was anally raped, the town calling me “poop shoe” afterwards. I remember telling a friend we’d had anal sex, terrified I was pregnant or had AIDS. I didn’t even understand I’d been raped yet. I was just a scared kid trying to make sense of what happened. She called me a slut. At school, a gang of my male friends circled me, telling me to give them head after they found out I had performed oral sex the summer before.
I learned early what happened when you were visible as sexual. You got punished for it.
I remember the fear I carried when I was sexually trafficked in my early 20’s, the constant terror of being found out. The shame that coiled around my spine: I was a whore. I had sex with men for money. I protected my trafficker to protect my secret, because being discovered felt more dangerous than staying trapped.
I learned that hiding kept me safe. Being quiet kept me safe. Making myself small and unseen and invisible. That was survival.
And here I am now, announcing to everyone watching our masterclass: I have sex. Lots of it. I love it. And I’m teaching everything I’ve learned.
When I first opened my practice in Boston as a somatic sex educator, sexological bodyworker, and somatic psychedelic therapist, I marketed myself as a somatic therapist who works with sexuality. This was strategic. Better for online searches, more palatable to puritanical New England sensibilities. But it was also protective. I was still hiding.
Now in Los Angeles, I openly market myself as a hands-on practitioner. A sexological bodyworker. I released a course with my beloved Rahi, Divine Union For Lovers, with videos of me touching bodies and genitals. I’ve begun sharing my experiences here on The Erotic Frontier as a sex worker, as a trafficking survivor, and all the wisdom I’ve gathered about sexuality, power, and belonging along the way.
I’ve let myself be seen as sexual. Publicly sexual. I’ve claimed the title holy whore and all the gifts that come with it.
And something miraculous has happened in my own body.
Last year, my cervix awakened.
The cervix is deeply innervated and connected to the vagus nerve, the primary nerve of our rest and safety response. It’s exquisitely sensitive to whether the nervous system feels safe. When it doesn’t, the body protects by numbing, armoring, withdrawing sensation. But when safety and love are present, the cervix softens, opens, and actually descends to meet a finger, toy, or a penis. You cannot fake your way into this.
This awakening didn’t happen alone. It unfolded in the arms of a loving partner - in touch that was slow enough, safe enough, loving enough for my cervix to trust opening again - in the same season I was learning to be seen.
The pleasure is unlike anything else. Deep, full-bodied, cosmic. It’s opened an entirely new world of sensation and satisfaction in my sexual life.
Here’s what my cervix has taught me: I thought staying quiet would keep me safe. I thought hiding my sexuality, downplaying my knowledge, making myself palatable would protect me. But my cervix, which requires safety to regain sensation, to open, to come alive, has shown me the opposite is true.
I am safe when I allow myself to be seen.
The more visible I become, the more I claim my sexuality publicly, the more I own the fullness of who I am and what I know, the safer my body feels. And the safer my body feels, the more pleasure becomes available to me.
It’s not metaphorical. My cervix came back online as I stepped into more and more visibility. In my personal and public life. The same body that went numb to survive is blossoming now that I’ve stopped hiding. And as I continue to experience cervical pleasure, I feel more and more free in my voice. In my writing and speaking. And how I show up in my relationships and the world.
And I know I’m not alone in this.
Many women have never been touched in a way their cervix could trust. Many have never been taught how to touch themselves that way either - slow enough, reverent enough, loving enough for their own bodies to soften. Many have never been listened to in a way their voice could trust emerging.
We were never taught to value what we feel. To listen to ourselves. To honor the intelligence moving through our bodies.
How many women are muting their authentic sexuality to stay safe? How many are downplaying their desire, their hunger, their knowing, trying to be palatable, respectable, non-threatening? How many are cutting themselves off from their own life force in the process?
The same force that animates desire also animates purpose. Passion. Creativity. Voice. The capacity to take up space. The courage to bring gifts into the world.
When sexuality gets muted, it doesn’t stay contained to the bedroom. It ripples outward into art that never gets made, boundaries that never get spoken, leadership that never gets claimed, pleasure that never gets felt.
A silenced eros doesn’t just starve intimacy. It starves the world.
I see it in my clients every day. Brilliant, powerful women who have learned to fragment themselves to be loved. Women who feel safest when they are desired quietly, privately, invisibly. Whose bodies have gone numb in the very places that once held their aliveness.
And when they begin to be seen, really seen, sensation returns. Voice returns. Life returns.
Visibility isn’t the danger I was taught it was. Visibility, it turns out, is how my body knows it’s finally safe. Safe enough to feel. Safe enough to open. Safe enough to experience pleasure I didn’t know was possible.
The girl who was violated, shamed, publicly named and punished, who learned to protect her trafficker to keep her secret - she thought invisibility was survival.
The woman I am now knows differently.
I am safer seen than hidden. My pleasure proves it.
Thank you, for You <3