A life devoted to freedom, embodiment, intimacy, and the sacred art of becoming.
I have spent my entire adult life exploring what it means to be free.
Free in the body. Free in love. Free in sexuality. Free in relationship. Free from shame, conditioning, convention, and all the inherited ideas about who we are supposed to be.
My life has been a continual process of shedding and becoming.
Some transformations I chose. Others arrived through love, heartbreak, motherhood, loss, spiritual initiation, sexuality, relationship, aging, and the inevitable dismantling of identities I had simply outgrown.
Snake magic is my superpower.
The snake has become one of the great metaphors of my life—the willingness to shed what has become too small, too tight, or no longer true, and emerge again more fully myself.
I am less interested these days in becoming better.
I am interested in becoming more honest. More embodied. More available to life.
And I have discovered that aging is its own exquisite initiation.
As the unnecessary falls away, intuition grows louder. Discernment sharpens. We become less willing to betray ourselves for belonging. And beneath all those discarded skins, something essential begins to emerge.
We become more ourselves.
Sexuality as Power, Medicine & a Gateway to the Divine
For most of my adult life, sexuality has been one of my great fields of inquiry.
I have explored eros not simply as sex or pleasure, but as life-force—creative power, medicine, spiritual practice, and a gateway to the Divine.
I am fascinated by the places where sexuality meets consciousness, where desire meets devotion, where the instinctual body meets the sacred.
This exploration eventually led me deeply into Tantra, Taoist sexual alchemy, feminine embodiment, sacred sexuality, intimacy, and relationship.
And again and again, it has brought me back to the same place: the body.
Not the body as something to perfect, perform, discipline, or transcend.
The body as an oracle.
The body as an instrument of perception.
The body as home.
A place where sensation, emotion, intuition, pleasure, vitality, eros, and spirit meet.
The Path That Brought Me Here
My work is rooted in decades of exploration of the somatic, relational, and esoteric arts.
In 2010, I completed my Qigong certification with Wudang Taoist priest Yun Xiang Tseng, beginning what would become a profound devotion to Qigong, Taoist cultivation, health, longevity, and sexual alchemy.
My studies have also included shamanic training with Alberto Villoldo and the Four Winds Society; sex, intimacy, and relationship coaching through the Somatica Institute; and extensive exploration of Tantra, sacred sexuality, feminine embodiment, polarity, and human potential.
I am an authorized facilitator of the Non-Linear Movement Method, Wild Woman’s Way, and The Intimacy and Attraction Workshop®. Early influences included Vin Marti’s Soul Motion and years of study with David Deida.
In 2022, I completed an intensive 250+ hour Tao Tantric Arts Sacred Femininity Facilitator certification with Minke de Vos and Shashi Solluna. This brought together many threads I had been following for decades: Taoist practice, feminine embodiment, energy cultivation, sexuality, ritual, intimacy, and sacred relationship.
But my deepest education has never come from certificates.
It has come from living.
From loving and losing.
From getting things gloriously right and spectacularly wrong.
From motherhood and grandmotherhood.
From heartbreak and repair.
From spiritual devotion and disillusionment.
From sexuality, creativity, aging, relationship, solitude, and the long apprenticeship of learning to listen to my own body.
The Sacred Feminine
I have a particular devotion to women who feel the call to reclaim the parts of themselves they have learned to silence, tame, abandon, or hide.
The sensual woman.
The sovereign woman.
The intuitive woman.
The wild woman.
The tender woman.
The erotic woman.
The woman who knows.
To me, feminine awakening isn’t about becoming a more perfected woman.
It’s about becoming a more available woman.
Available to sensation.
Available to truth.
Available to intuition.
Available to pleasure.
Available to love.
Available to life.
It is a return to inhabiting ourselves so completely that our lives begin to arise from the inside out.
Much of this work now has a physical home at Temple Shakti, my sanctuary in the mountains of southern Ecuador, where I teach Qigong, Tao Tantric arts, sacred feminine embodiment, intimacy, and relationship practices.
My local women’s circle is especially dear to me—a living laboratory of sisterhood, embodiment, sensuality, authentic expression, ritual, and the extraordinary medicine of women witnessing women.
Partnership as the Path
In this season of my life, I find myself increasingly devoted to another great practice:
Partnership as the Path.
I believe intimate relationship can become one of our most demanding—and exquisite—paths of awakening.
Love reveals us.
It illuminates our tenderness and our defenses, our deepest longings and oldest strategies, our generosity and our fear. It brings us face-to-face with all the places where we are still learning how to love.
Sacred partnership isn’t a relationship without rupture.
It is a relationship in which we become increasingly skillful at presence, truth, communication, repair, eroticism, sovereignty, and devotion.
Can I stay curious when I want to defend?
Can I speak what is true without using truth as a weapon?
Can I remain sovereign without closing my heart?
Can I repair when I have caused harm?
Can I keep choosing intimacy when hiding would be easier?
Can I see the beloved—and allow myself to be seen?
This is where devotion has become so meaningful to me.
Not devotion as obedience.
Not devotion as abandoning oneself for another.
Devotion as the conscious offering of our presence to what we love.
Devotion to truth.
Devotion to practice.
Devotion to the body.
Devotion to love.
Devotion to becoming more skillful in the ways we meet one another.
I don’t believe devotion is the opposite of freedom.
I believe devotion is what freedom looks like when we consciously choose what is worthy of our love.
Becoming Unshameable
Writing has been another form of alchemy in my life.
My memoir, Fetish Girl, emerged from a desire to own the chapters of my life that would have been much easier to keep hidden.
Writing it taught me something that now runs through everything I teach:
When we own our story, shame loses its power over us.
There is tremendous liberation in bringing what has been hidden into the light—not so that we remain defined by our past, but so that our experience can be metabolized into wisdom, beauty, compassion, and art.
We become unshameable.
Fetish Girl was part memoir, part spiritual pilgrimage, part erotic excavation, and part declaration of sovereignty.
And like so many chapters of my life, it wasn’t a destination.
It was another shedding.
And Now
Today, my work lives at the intersection of Qigong, Taoist arts, feminine embodiment, intimacy, sacred sexuality, relationship, creativity, and spiritual practice.
I teach because I love witnessing the moment someone remembers something their body already knew.
I teach because pleasure matters.
Because eros is sacred.
Because the body carries extraordinary wisdom.
Because relationship can become a path of awakening.
Because devotion can coexist with sovereignty.
Because our vitality is precious.
And because I believe we are never too old to reinvent ourselves, awaken our sensuality, change direction, tell the truth, fall wildly in love with life, begin again—or shed another skin.
Beneath all the identities we accumulate over a lifetime, there is something beautifully untamed waiting for us.
My work is an invitation to meet her.
To inhabit your body.
To awaken your life-force.
To deepen your capacity for intimacy.
To listen to what is true.
To love with greater courage.
To live more fully and freely.
And to become increasingly, unapologetically, exquisitely yourself.
Owning our story and our past feels vulnerable, but it’s brave and, ultimately, it’s the path to liberation. Fetish Girl became a spiritual journey to craft my story into art.Â
None of us should hide in the dark. There’s nothing more powerful than bringing one’s darkness into the light. We become unshameable.
There were many reasons that motivated me to write a memoir including the death of my best friend, turning 50, and a commitment to living a creative life, but ultimately it was the next step in my development.
Read More About Bella’s History >
Interview With MysticMag: Enhancing Your Sexuality
“Someone who owns their sexuality will have full sexual expression – they are open and vulnerable, know what they want and know how to turn themselves on.”   – Bella LaVey / Mystic Mag
This interview with Mystic Mag was published on May 26, 2022
Read More About Enhancing Your Sexuality on MysticMag.com >
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