I want to speak plainly today.
Not as a teacher or guide, but as a woman who has walked through an initiatory fire and is finally ready to tell the truth of it.

In the spring of 2024, my life cracked apart.

My home dissolved.
My central relationship ended.
My health was upside down.
My business pivoted.
My identity unraveled.

And beneath that, I was straddling two worlds that no longer — or perhaps never — could fully hold me:

I have a crush on someone.
The kind of soft, innocent crush that surprises you, not because it’s dramatic or overwhelming, but because it feels like warm light gathering in the chest.

I even approached them about having a cuddle date.
They gently declined.

What’s interesting is not the “no.”
What’s interesting is what didn’t happen inside me.

Most people think they understand pleasure.
They know what it feels like to enjoy a good meal, a warm embrace, a night of lovemaking, a moment of beauty.

But very few people are pleasure literate.

Pleasure is a language.

Your body is constantly speaking in the language of sensation—whispering, humming, pulsing messages about what brings you alive and what shuts you down.

A few weeks ago, I was at one of my favorite local Mexican restaurants—the kind where the bartender knows your name and the air smells like roasted peppers and slow-stewed magic.

I ordered a simple dish, something I hadn’t had before—a bean and cheese dip served in a cast iron skillet. When it arrived, I took a bite and noticed something… unusual. A faint bitterness. A trace of something burnt.

It wasn’t bad, exactly. Just unexpected.
The flavor carried an edge—acidic, smoky, strong.

Let’s be honest—most people are tired of shadow work.
We’ve sat in therapy, journaled our wounds, and faced our inner child again and again.

And yet, somehow, so many still feel stuck in the same loops of not-enoughness, shame, or self-doubt.

It’s as if shadow work has become another identity—one that promises freedom but often delivers perpetual excavation.

At a certain point, healing stops being liberation and starts being maintenance.

Humans don’t just live life — we story it.
Narratives are the invisible architecture through which we make sense of our lives, shape meaning, and decide what we believe is possible.

On a personal level, someone might live by the story:

“I’m broken, and my desire is dangerous.”

On a cultural level, we’ve inherited stories like:

“Spirituality is separate from the sensual body.”
“Pleasure is indulgent.”
“The erotic is sinful.”

Years ago, when I was leading discussions in the ethical non-monogamy community, we often talked about what it really means to love someone.
Not just the easy parts. Not the curated, date-ready version.

Sovereign love—the kind that deepens over time—asks us to love someone because of their little idiocies, not in spite of them.

Because those quirks, those triggered moments, those frustrating edges, are often the exact mirrors that show us where we still close, where we still withhold tenderness.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen a lot about Mary Magdalene and her lost gospel. In it, she says that to “sin” is to act contrary to one’s true spiritual nature.

Her writing wasn’t lost by accident. It was buried because it threatened the governing structures that relied on fear and shame to maintain control. Her teachings—that the divine could be known through love, through the body, through union—were too destabilizing for a world built on hierarchy.

Every time a story is silenced, a part of our collective truth goes underground.

I woke up today thinking about the innocence of pleasure, and when it is that we lose our connection to it.

When we’re babies, no one tells us that our pleasure is indulgent, or that it needs to be rationed or controlled. As long as it’s not harming us in some obvious way, we are invited to explore and experiment and play without judgement.

Then somewhere along the way, that freedom is conditioned out of us. We’re told to be smaller, quieter, to follow a set of societal and relational rules we never had agency over.

We’ve been taught to fear anything in ourselves that doesn’t look like love and light.

Anger. Hunger. Chaos. Power.
The part of you that wants to be taken. The part of you that wants to take.

We call these part of ourselves “dark.” But the truth is, they’re not dark at all. They’re just the parts of us the world has forbidden. The parts that don’t fit inside polite boxes.

What if I told you that your forbidden desire is the portal to Source, God, or full self-actualization?

We’ve been taught to keep our turn-ons in the dark. To separate spirit from sex, as though The Divine lives in prayer halls but not in the body. As though the sacred couldn’t possibly show up dripping, moaning, hungry, and raw with wanting.

But spirituality and sexuality were never meant to be separate.

Do you remember the movie Monsters Inc.?

At first, the monsters powered their entire world with screams. Fear was the currency. It was effective, but heavy, limited, and destructive.

And then came the revelation at the end of the film: laughter generated ten times the energy. Joy, not fear, was the real source of power.

This, to me, is the perfect metaphor for where we are in our collective spiritual path.