My Initiation into Grief and Pleasure

My biggest initiation into healing as medicine through grief started in December 2019, but I wasn’t torn apart until August 2020. I was living in Boston in 2019. I had finished Reiki 1 and 2 training, was drinking cacao regularly, intentionally using cannabis, and had just finished my first mentorship program on conscious menstruation. While my spiritual practice wasn’t always consistent, I was showing up more for myself than I ever had before.

I had tuned into Eros, had peak sexual experiences through pleasure, and in a sense…felt relief, nervous system regulation, and bliss from that.

What I had not experienced was deeper healing with pleasure. 

Those moments, maybe you’ve had them before, where a wound that is so deep, so painful, that you never thought you’d move through it or it’d even get a little better…somehow there’s healing that happens.

I was friends with a beautiful, tortured soul, named Daisy. Our friendship began quick, burned bright, and was filled with passion. 

I'll never forget the day she looked at me and said, “you know I'm going to kill myself one day right?”

A part of me believed her. 

She had BPD. I knew she'd had attempts. 

Another part longed that something would fix it. 

The part of me that was raised Evangelical still thought everyone could be saved. That if you just loved them enough, they’d be okay.

On a Wednesday night in the winter of 2019, I got a call from her while hanging out with another girlfriend of ours. She'd had a fight with her boyfriend. We invited her over to come smoke cannabis and have a girls night with us. She said she just wanted to go to bed.

Her boyfriend found her a couple hours later – she'd taken her life. Due to various circumstances of her boyfriend being on LSD when he found her, then arrested, I did not find out the news until Saturday night. 

The next day, on Sunday, was a temple arts immersion. A full 5 hour experience to tune to follow pleasure in my body. 

I called my mentor and said I couldn't come. The what-ifs still pouring through my mind. I talked to her that night. Shouldn’t I have known something?

I was overwhelmed with grief. I just wanted to stay at home and smoke weed, I wanted to disassociate all day. To simply leave my body and not have to feel anything. 

She told me to come anyway. Even if I just lay in a blanket on my mat. 

I'm infinitely grateful she said to come. To show up. To be there. 

To be honest, I don't remember what we did or talked about during the first couple hours. Every other immersion, I remember the theme. I remember some of the teachings. This one was different. And no, I didn’t smoke cannabis before coming. I came sober. 

The only thing I remember is the 60-75 minute pleasure practice. 

I remember coming home to my body. To me.

I followed what felt good, the tiniest bits of movement, the trailing of fingernails on my skin, the blanket holding me. I followed the wails that left my body, the shakes my shoulders let go of, the oil on my breasts as my heart shattered open, the gasps of breath. I followed the grief and met it with pleasure. I followed the pain and felt it until I found what was underneath. I wove the pleasure and realized…

Holy shit. I can hold more than this grief, than this pain. I can feel pleasure too. They can coexist. MY hands, MY energy, MY power is what’s healing me. MY breath, MY cries…ME.

THIS WAS LIFE CHANGING.The pleasure began to work with the grief. The two merged through my body until the crying felt almost orgasmic.

The most tender self-touch soothed the ego, soothed the mind, let go of the stories.

This was just the preparation for 2020, a seed planted that this COULD exist. This medicine was real. 7 months later after my friend took her life, my oldest brother was in a welding explosion accident that is a medical miracle he survived. He was in a coma for 3 months. He has a severe TBI + 27 other injuries.

This hit me significantly harder. My own brother. The one who'd enamored me, traumatized me, and been a center point in every plant medicine ceremony. The one that the night before, I'd called my mom and said…

“I've finally forgiven Dustin for everything…and I can't wait to see where our relationship grows."

I woke up that day, August 14, 2020 sobbing uncontrollably. 

The first few months I walked between worlds, stepping into the path of the priestess. In this time, I lived often in the energetic and spiritual realms, not so much in embodiment. 

The grief was immense. My friend was difficult, yet a part of me knew this was on her path. We’d been friends for less than a year. But my brother? The man who was 9 years older, the one who’d taught me so much, who I’d idolized, who traumatized me, who loved me…the one person who I’d had the MOST complex relationship…

As he came to his body and the reality set in that he wasn’t going to walk, talk, fish, and hunt again…that he had a SEVERE TBI + 27 injuries, and was now quadriplegic…

The realization that who he was, is never who he will be again. 

The grief ripped me apart. My heart broke in 1,000 pieces. And the only thing I knew to do was to see if I could just access ONE DROP of energy from that place in 2019 in my mentor’s apartment in Boston.

Just a drop of energy, the size of a mustard seed, to remember that it’s not all lost. 

So in my grief, I would scream and cry and listen to country music Dustin loved and Phoebe Bridgers until the tears couldn’t run anymore. 

And sometimes, I would remember I could dance.  I would remember I could self-touch. 

I would remember Mindful Erotic Practice.

I would spend 5 minutes accessing that one drop of energy

And sometimes I would spend 3 hours lost in the ocean of it.

These moments moved the grief through the body until it became bliss. Until I laughed, until I breathed a little deeper, until all the stories of grief disappeared and I fully arrived in my natural blissful state. 

In 2022, I showed up to Mindful Erotic Practice regularly. I still wondered WHY my heart shattered so much. When would the grief “be over”. How is it possible to love someone’s ego so much? To love someone’s personality, their form? Because Dustin no longer has that, and it’s only in that loss does one realize “ego death isn’t the permanent goal”.

It wasn’t a plant medicine healing me, although those are powerful. 

My entire consciousness was re-shaping. 

It didn't make the grief end permanently. It did widen the landscape of the view I had. 

I fell into a trance after hours on my mat one night and realized that one of my early LSD trips from 2016 — where Eric and I (in a telepathic vision) saw a parallel life of us losing a child — wasn’t shown to me because we were or weren’t meant to have kids.

Instead, I was shown this vision to break my heart open to the pain of losing a child, so that my heart could be prepared for the day my mom will likely lose hers. 

Each time I showed up to mat, it wasn’t a big revelation every time. Most of the time it was just a balm to my grief, a salve to soothe the deepest wound. 

This is the work that brought me back into knowing myself. To knowing my path as priestess. To UNDERSTANDING the POWER of this work.

This awareness brought to me gnosis of Dustin’s sovereignty. The deep respect for his soul’s choice to go on this journey. The power he gave me by teaching me that even in devastation, there is a gateway to deeper love, embodiment, and sovereignty.Even now, we are in a waiting game with Dustin. An endless void of ambiguous grief, knowing he’s suffering, knowing he’ll likely die before me. He is quadriplegic, spends almost all of his life in bed, and his cognition continues to decline. And still, it is his journey. It is his path. 

I still have grief. I still find pleasure. I still widen the landscape. 

This is the work that made me realize the pure magic of having a body that’s capable of feeling pleasure. 

This work is multidimensional, because our bodies are multidimensional. This work moves across timelines, across dimensions. 

This is where we find our power. This is where we change the narrative. It’s where we find our truth.

This is the medicine I now offer. This is the path I guide women through inside Your Bliss Is Your Birthright — a space to feel it all, transmute it, and reclaim the power and pleasure that is innately you.

Are you ready to touch your own bliss, even in the places you thought it was lost?