The Privilege of Pleasure
When I was younger, I had no vision of helping others feel pleasure. I was so concerned with healing trauma that it didn't occur to me what might come after. I wanted the chronic pain to stop, and I wanted the daily tears that were a mainstay of my 30s to end.
Most of the time, all I could feel was numbness and pain. Pleasure was experienced in two contexts: when I ate sweet foods or when I engaged in sexual expression or intimacy. And with the latter, sensations were limited to the genital area and not my whole body.
I discovered Continuum Movement at the age of thirty-one. I dedicated myself to it, and though it was quite uncomfortable at first, I could tell something significant was happening. As more wounding left my body, my nervous system changed. Every workshop, every time I practiced, it was like taking my body to the river and letting the continuous stream clear another stain. Combining Continuum Movement with pre & perinatal somatic therapy and embryological healing via biodynamic craniosacral therapy led to lasting transformation.
I am the descendant of many who were tortured and killed in WWII. When I was in my 20s, I remember explaining to others, "It's not okay to feel pleasure. I have to honor those who suffered. I belong to the dead and those who had no safety to experience pleasure."
I was also deeply traumatized during my birth in a Soviet hospital. This anchored a terror of being alive that has taken decades to unravel.
When I spend time in sex-positive communities or attend dances filled with vibrant moving bodies, I perceive a lot of pleasure ableism. That is, bodies that have easy access to feeling aliveness and the ability to move it through their bodies.
We talk a lot about making space for those whose bodies are not "able" in some way, and I have never seen this discussed in regards to pleasure capacity.
I see our western bodies as so "unable" in this way. No judgment. It's a reflection of collective and ancestral traumas, of how we treat our bodies, especially when our bodies are small and developing. It's the level of fear the media puts out and keeps people in. It's the puritanical and old school Christian roots of the U.S. It's the perpetual lack of safety for women and their bodies. It is the oversexualization of bodies and the flow of life. It's the domestication of the inner animal and the inherited disconnection from Earth and ground.
It's also attachment wounding. I can go on and on.
Feeling amazing in your body, feeling connected to Source, and living in your sensuality is a privilege. Enjoying, playing with, and directing the flow of energy in your body, as well as experiencing easeful opening, are privileges and gifts that visit us from time to time. If we are lucky, prioritize them, and create the conditions for them, they visit us more and more.
When I hold space in my Continuum workshops (or any of them) that invites deeper embodiment or simply the act of slowing down, I know I am inviting everything. I know ancestral stories will arise, childhood memories, and sometimes none of these appear as we move towards more yum. Lots of shame, too.
What my heart wants to really be known here, is that my access to pleasure, my desire to support you to expand your capacity is hard-earned. It’s so close to my heart that I am regularly moved to tears when I see someone negotiate something in their nervous system and access something new. I am moved to tears when someone discovers a new way to open or experiences feeling held by God for the first time. This happens in every workshop and it never ceases to touch me.
I taught at Dance Camp in June, 23’ to 42 people. We had less than two hours. I could feel God in the room for the last hour. No one wanted to talk. No one wanted to leave. No one needed anything, but to sit together in silence feeling the depth of collective openness, safety, and connection. It was profound.
Every time this experience is felt, I am fed. This is what I live for. This is my medicine and my salvation. Time stops and the pregnant pause takes over.
My mission is to share this with the world, so I can keep on being fed, and keep on feeding the hunger I know Humans have for ease, God, pleasure, and connection.
What Happens When Men Receive Support…
Men desperately need safe spaces to be held.
With a world full of continuous atrocity mostly led by male bodies...
With newly mixed messages from culture to show up as just the right kind of man...
With the personal and ancestral histories that men are carrying that still haven't been given the chance to unwind...
Men are holding a lot.
I feel it. It's palpable.
Men need a place to find their organic, potent, embodied truth.
I have been celebrating how much I get to witness this in my personal and professional life and with my clients.
As of end of 2023 into 2024, I’ve been working mostly with men and I absolutely love it.
Here’s what I’ve found when I support men in my 1-on-1 coaching containers:
🔥 When a man knows he has a place to show up where he will be received unconditionally, he opens.
🔥 When he understands how different parts of himself are showing up, he takes in a more accurate sense of self.
🔥 When the context of how he came to be this way is presenced and received, he can unwind.
🔥 When he knows that he will be lovingly tracked over time, week after week, month after month, Life catalyzes experiences and resources to support his evolution.
🔥 When the innate forces in him that drive him towards integration and greater alignment are supported, he can shed burdens and step into attuned self-leadership.
I know I feel great when I am in attuned self-leadership. I know women who feel great around men who embody this.
Men: seek out these spaces so you can move beyond your inherited limits and live your best life. 🔥
From Tech to Therapy
I've always supported people.
Whether it was running the computer lab in high school or designing interfaces for people.
I worked in IT for 18 years, fixing computer problems, but being much more interested in making my client's lives function optimally.
I've been on a trajectory that has been, well… destined.
As of this year, I am proud to announce that I am fully in! (more on this below)
One thing I struggled with in the IT industry was the lack of relationality. There I was fixing computers where I much preferred to be going deep with people. My coworkers and clients were kind in the day-to-day surface conversations, but it wasn’t the right environment for us to get to the depth that I knew I could offer and longed to experience.
I was grateful for the money I was earning, because it allowed me to get SO MUCH F***KING therapy.
I attended trainings, workshops, retreats, received weekly acupuncture, skilled bodywork, and multiple 1:1 therapy sessions in different modalities. If you’ve heard of it, I’ve probably tried it.
I had the incredible fortune to step into spaces multiple times a week where the depth, complexity, and pain of my inner experience was invited.
It was addictive in the healthiest way. Finally, hidden parts were getting seen. I was being felt by another. My body was touched in a caring way that every mammal deserves.
The pains I lived with my whole life that I didn't understand were changing. Tears were streaming. My body was softening.
My connection to the divine was becoming clearer and my desire to be alive was flourishing.
Fundamentally, I was growing. A LOT. FAST. On every level.
My corporate client would regularly remark that each time he saw me, I looked younger.
Yes, I was aging, and my radiant spirit was freer than ever.
But I was still living a double life. You could call it resisting, you could call it ripening. It just wasn’t time…
Until now.
I stopped doing IT work in 2022.
Now, I support humans with a lifetime-in-the-making body of work that has culminated in my Somatic Therapy Coaching practice.
That's right… it’s transformation, all the time. 🥳 🙌 🦋
The transition hasn’t been easy, AND, it has already brought me immense joy to support my clients to flourish, come alive, break out of patterns, step into inner leadership, and to transform their relationships and careers into their fullest potential.
I am blown away by the response to my practice that I’ve been met with. Now I'm helping others soften, feel met, cry and yes, even age in reverse, just like I was (and still am 👶).
Are you feeling called or know someone who is? Click the services button to learn more.
Why they’re called “Womb Surrounds”
It’s been common knowledge that our childhood shapes who we are as adults. That’s why they’re called the “formative years.”
What is far less commonly accepted is that our preconception, conception, and birth also has a huge impact on the formation of how we operate at each stage of development, including adulthood.
What if you could go back to each of these stages and receive what you didn’t get, repair what was fractured, and remember who you were before your soul began to descend into human form?
Well, you can’t literally go back… but your consciousness can, and it can work magic.
Womb Surround Process Workshops are a space designed to lovingly and spaciously uncover early life experiences we may not consciously remember as adults.
So why are they called “Womb Surrounds,” anyways?
I can’t speak for Ray Castellino, my beloved teacher and creator of Womb Surrounds, but I can tell you from experience why I think they have this name.
In a W.S., with 4-6 participants, 1 or 2 facilitators, and 1 or 2 assistants, we as a group provide each participant the opportunity to shine the light of awareness on their gestation in the Womb.
What was the lived and felt experience in there? Was it blissful? Stressful? Maybe you never wanted to leave. Maybe you were dying to get out.
Some of us endured challenges like our Mother’s diets being poor, or smoking during gestation, or potentially being an accidental, “unwanted” pregnancy, amongst countless other unique conception stories.
So we witness, address, and create space for your unique Womb story to be told, through body and words if you choose, with a loving group to Surround you.
The Surround (our group) then becomes the new, reparative walls of the Womb. During your turn, the rest of the group, standing in as your safe womb space, might receive somatic information that is relevant to your history, that makes itself known in the field as soon as we enter into and throughout your “turn.”
We as facilitators use our expertise to guide the group to continuously connect with their center and co-regulate in the group field which naturally helps each turn participant digest what was too big to metabolize as a tiny embryo back then.
It’s all about engaging in repair. We as facilitators can embody what was needed back then so you can finally feel and register what your blueprint wiring knows could be.
This leaves you with access to choices you never had before in how you felt, how you experience and respond to life. You carry the experience of a healthy Womb and Surround with you in your body and nervous system.
Celebrating Client Endings
It was a moment you usually don't want to experience as a business owner: There is no more work to do.
He (my client) doesn't actually need anything more from me.
I felt it and was curious. Could that be true? Does that mean we're done?
The financial-side of my brain was, like "No, reject this experience."
And we kept having moments of just sitting there staring at each other. Then he would share something else about his life that was going great.
We ended early that day. The next session it happened again, so... as I am committed to doing... I spoke and told him what I am noticing.
He was feeling similarly and didn't want to say anything because he really appreciated our time and didn't want it to end.
That session he came in celebrating how differently he showed up with the women in his life, including his mother and sister. His intention for that session was Celebration.
So, I supported him fully in that.
When I start with my coaching clients, we always spend the right amount of time in the beginning getting really clear on the transformation they want. On the changes they want to see in themselves and how they live.
I was compelled during the session to read his original intentions back to him one at a time.
"You want to feel less pain in your system." Check
"You want to have more energy." Check
"You want to follow your creative impulses and give your gifts to the world." Check
"You want to experience deeper love." Check
"You want to feel more free in your life." Check
"You want to attract a very different partner." Check
"You want to be clear on your purpose and live it." Check
"You want to be free of getting hooked in unhealthy ways by women and family in your life." Check
There were a few more I will leave out for confidentiality. (Note, some of the above are modified.)
We sat there, again, for a while staring at each other. Smiling, laughing and feeling celebratory.
Both drawing the same conclusion.
“Wow, you got everything you wanted out of working with me.”
And I sat there, (and still as I write this) in awe of what precise, committed and attuned support can provide.
It's not me. It is an orchestration. It is co-creativity at its finest.
The multidimensional intelligence in me moving with the multidimensional intelligence in him.
Unwind history, with ease and grace... and the power within can surface.
I'm celebrating an ending here for ten+ really awesome reasons.
I love putting my energy on people with the intention to support them. To support their growth. Their ability to feel love. Supporting their best life.
Are you living at the pace of dissatisfaction?
All mammals are designed for pleasure. The sensations of pleasure are here to inform you that you are on the “right” track. It’s a reflection from your nervous system that your body likes the choices you are making.
I’m not talking about intimate pleasure. I mean being able to feel the satisfaction of eating just the right food, in the right amount, with the right people. The pregnant pause that comes when you find just the right moment of connection, where that experience of aloneness fully fades away. Being soft and present enough to the cool breeze making the hairs on your body stand up. Being slow and permissioned enough to relish in the beauty in front of you, and letting it fill you up without having to navigate feelings of shame or a pressure to be more productive.
If you solely live with the idea in your brain that the choices you are making are the right one, you are missing the multidimensionality of life.
Living in grayscale was okay 40+ years ago, but it’s not the thriving that is actually possible today.
Most of my clients show up with an upper threshold on goodness. For everyone I know, this threshold was set up for them. Set up by the limits of their mother’s body to experience wellness. Set up by what their father could allow to move through his body. Set up by the messages from culture about how much aliveness and wellness was safe and accepted.
If I lived with the thresholds handed down to me by my immigrant parents, school teachers, and the U.S. culture, I would be depressed as F**K. And I couldn’t do better until I looked at my limits and why they were there.
It’s our survival strategies that keep us from living at the pace of satisfaction. Full Stop.
Your mother survived the threat from unconscious men by hiding her aliveness deep within (and it’s sadly still happening all around us). Your father learned to keep his joy hidden since he was a young boy because he would get shut down by HIS father and his peers for being bigger and better.
The reasons are specific, nuanced, and unique to your family… and this uniqueness is essential to uncover.
My freedom to be me and as alive as I am today came from being with people who sat with me to learn what my unique way of shutting down was. What was my unique way of staying fast and avoiding the feelings that came when I slowed down?
There are patterns to our survival strategies AND the you in there that is unconsciously holding a survival strategy in place needs attention.
Our social culture, our corporate culture, our media culture, our devices and screens and movies keep us entertained and distracted so we don’t have to be with what is underneath.
I’m sick of accepting this as the status quo. Pretending that this is okay. It’s not the world I want to create and be a part of.
The feelings you feel when you slow down MATTER. The feelings you feel when you are alone are IMPORTANT. The feelings you feel when you stop moving are a clue to calling you deeper...
They need ATTENTION. They need LOVE. They need a space to be felt.
They are there for a really good reason. But, most of us have forgotten or never consciously understood the context of why they are there.
Avoiding those feelings is running the show, and so are our inherited survival strategies are as well, and most of us don’t even know where they come from. why they are there.
Freedom comes from unburdening. Freedom comes from loving what wasn’t loved. Freedom comes from self-understanding and compassion for what your parents and ancestors did to survive. And freedom comes from getting that you are not them, and you are not living their lives and you no longer have to be like them to belong.
You get to be you. You, today, in the context of safety, get to thrive. And you get to feel pleasure.
And you get to move at the pace of life that fills you with the nourishing goodness that your body is capable of producing when it isn’t carrying the burden of the unintegrated past.
It’s your birthright to be free.
Everyone wants it, but most are scared to claim it and do the work it takes to get there.
The rewards of pleasure and peace are there waiting for you all along the way.
Claim your whole self and live at the pace of your satisfaction.
Consider working with me to unlock YOUR freedom and YOUR aliveness.
9 Things You Can Work On In a Womb Surround Besides Birth Trauma
"Womb Surround" is a multi-day workshop designed for adults to heal early life trauma. Our early experiences shape our nervous system, our perception of the world, and our habits of self-care or self-sabotage. In a Womb Surround, participants work to heal the undigested challenges of their parents and ancestors, and to transform the survival strategies they developed in response to childhood trauma. The workshop can help with issues like attachment styles, harmful parenting, family secrets, ancestral trauma, and chronic body or nervous system challenges. By including the body and nervous system in the healing journey, participants can transform their experiences and find freedom, ease, and support for their psychological and pain body challenges.
Most people have no idea what “Womb Surround” means. A Womb Surround is usually a multi-day workshop for 4-6 adult participants to heal early life trauma. I would like to share what is achievable in a Womb Surround. Over 17 years, I have personally participated in 28 of these workshops, and they have completely transformed my life. The truth is that being a human is difficult. The human experience is filled with various types of burdens and traumas. Most people desire more freedom, more ease, and support for their most personal psychological and pain body challenges. They also desire more choice in how they show up in their relationships and careers, how they react to life, and how they feel on a day-to-day basis.
What I have learned is that the way our life begins sets the tone for how our nervous system works, how our minds perceive the world and others, and establishes most habits of self-care or self-sabotage. And what happens at the beginning of our lives? For starters, when we grow inside of our mother, our nervous systems learn how to sleep, rest, process emotions, what is safe, what is unsafe, who is safe, and who is unsafe. We learn how to receive nourishment and the love of the world. We learn where we cannot receive love from life, and all these things shape who we are.
We absorb the undigested challenges of our parents and the unprocessed traumas of our ancestors. We take these on out of love and belonging and the non-optional need to survive in the family and culture we're born into. Then, when any major challenges in our childhood or later in our lives arise, we rely on these early survival strategies and imprints to respond to the challenge.
What I found is that I was more able to unwind and heal from later traumas in my life when I also worked on the earlier ones and the familial survival strategies. I am saying all of this to emphasize a few points:
All the things that happened to you and the things that you took on in your life from others can be transformed.
The human spirit and body are incredibly resilient, and underneath everything you think you are that you don't like about yourself or are suffering from is an untouchable, perfectly lovable essence of innocence and Godliness.
There are people in the world, containers, and communities that can hold you in that and help ease any suffering or pain you are experiencing.
The body keeps score, and you will have the most significant impact on transformation when you include your body and nervous system in your healing journey.
The Womb Surround format was created to support the healing of an infinite number of challenges. I am going to share some things that are outside the traditional box that people think of in Womb Surrounds, which can also be thought of as an Early Imprints or Complex Trauma Healing Workshop. The obvious things that Womb Surrounds can help with include birth trauma, embryological trauma, and ancestral trauma. And, there is so much more.
Womb Surrounds are a great place to work out the following issues:
Attachment style evolution: Transform anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles by working on the actual family and parent bond dynamics that created them.
Harmful and mis-attuned parenting: If one or both of your parents struggled with alcohol, mental health, or psychological disorders (such as bipolar, manic, depression, violence, abusiveness), were absent, or overly medicated, this would definitely affect your young inner parts and your adult life.
Family secrets: If there are disowned family members, shame-inducing or incestuous hidden events, and unspoken losses in your family history, they will impact your trust in and openness to life and relationships. They will also create internal fragmentation and self-secrecy.
Undigested ancestral trauma: If your parents, grandparents, or those further back survived or fought in a war, survived famine, immigration, genocide, etc., these experiences will impact your existential sense of safety.
Harmful and abusive siblings: If your siblings (biological, half, or step) were harmful or are a result of complex life situations, this will impact your intimate relationships, friendships and belonging in community.
Self-sabotage, self-hurt, and self-love challenges: When we aren't treated well or have experienced harm or neglect from others (even if we don't remember), we will re-enact our young experiences as adults upon ourselves.
Chronic body or nervous system challenges: Chronic pain or nervous system dysregulation patterns often begin inside the womb in a mother's body that is already challenged in similar ways. Plus, continuous family systemic stresses over the first 18+ years of life anchor these deeper.
Not wanting to be alive or thrive: Sometimes life begins in such a level of challenge or ancestral overwhelm that the core part of us gets imprinted with the strong desire to not be here. This existential trauma will impact how much we thrive and potentially leaves us feeling unexplainably numb or perpetually dissatisfied with life. Thoughts of suicide or actual attempts do not appear in a vacuum (ancestral and early history create the conditions for this).
Sexual dysfunction or challenges: When our inner baby nervous system experiences overwhelm or interventions, or there is childhood sexual abuse, it impacts our ability to experience pleasure and move life force through our bodies and our level of trust and safety.
Anything else, and I'll tell you why…
The actual secret of why Womb Surrounds are so versatile and powerful is that the form and structure model how incarnation works. That is, the steps we follow in a Womb Surround match how a Soul (or Spirit) enters a fertilized egg and forms it’s body and identity. Life creates itself over and over at every moment, and everything that happens is organized through intention. There are important developmental steps that happen one after the other. In a Womb Surround, facilitators invoke these natural processes and forces sequentially in a way that unlocks both what interrupted your development and the miraculous blueprint energies that created your particular identity and body. See, in the trauma is the life force that frees you. With attuned, skilled somatic facilitation, you are supported to evolve beyond the original imprints and land in the blueprint possibility of what you actually are. It may sound "woo-woo" to some, but it is also incredibly effective and practical.
In my first Womb Surround, I didn't work on anything that happened to me before three years old and didn't allow the facilitator to touch me. The facilitator, Ray Castellino—the creator of Womb Surround work—was totally awesome with it, and it created safety for me to be able to go at my pace.
The other special sauce of any good therapy and space-holding is to move at the pace of the nervous system.
I offer both group Womb Surrounds and personalized one-day experiences.
Ray Castellino and Elan Freydenson in 2015 during a Body In to Being training in Ojai, CA.
.