Everything I owned, drying on the lawn after the first flood.

For a long stretch of my life I lived in community, first with five roommates in New York, then in a house in Colorado I co-owned with friends, where we hosted events from the start and, beginning in 2021, monthly cacao ceremonies and music jams. I used

to say it was my favorite place in the world. I poured myself into that house, and it flooded my bedroom. Then it flooded my bedroom again. Apparently I needed the lesson twice. Call me a glutton for punishment, or call it the universe really testing my devotion.

Water is where we all begin. We float in it before we ever take a breath, and it keeps shaping us the way a river shapes stone, patiently and on its own schedule. Traditions all over the world use it to baptize and to purify, to carry someone from one chapter into the next. That house baptized me twice. After the second flood I moved in with my partner and his kids. It felt like the house itself was pushing me out, kicking me toward a bigger expansion in my life, because left to my own devices I’d have stayed forever. The water carried me somewhere I was too attached to walk on my own.

That house was a labor of love from the very beginning. I’ve always oriented around making sure every owner, past and present, walks away feeling like they won, so we could all remain in harmony and keep the awkwardness out of our friendships. Being in business with friends is sticky territory most people avoid. For us it became an unexpectedly beautiful challenge: finding solutions that work for everyone, even when the right answer ripens slowly. When I sold my portion to people from our circle so the community could continue to thrive there, that answer took its sweet time. The sale dragged on like a dingleberry, clinging long after I’d moved on. Some goodbyes ask you to stay in relationship all the way through them.

This week I stopped by during a clothing swap to grab a few of the things I’d left behind. My friend looked at what remained and said, “It’s time you take it all.” So I did. At the bottom of it all were my old journals, years of entries about unrequited commitment, with a few cards from some of the men they were about tucked between the pages. Reading them felt like finding the receipts for my own shit.

Recently, someone I work with said something I keep turning over. They’re deeply practiced and beautifully integrated, someone who has done so much work on themselves. And in a new relationship, they keep meeting their edges, one after another. “I’ve done all this work,” they said. “Why is it still happening?”

I imagine a lot of you have asked yourselves the same thing. Relationships will reveal all your shit to you, no matter how much time or money you’ve spent digging through it. Every session, every workshop, every notebook filled cover to cover, and still a relationship will hold up the mirror and show you what’s left. The difference the work makes is speed. The person I work with can name their edges as they meet them, and that’s their practice paying off. Over time you get faster at recognizing that the shit in front of you is yours, and that it was yours long before this person walked in.

~

In the years before my celibacy, I dated a lot of unavailable men. Men in other countries. Men in other states. Men down the road with zero intention of letting things go anywhere. Out of fear of losing them, or some ridiculous illusion about what would make me lose them, I abandoned myself. I hid what I felt and handed them a quieter, easier version of me. Underneath, resentment was piling up toward them, and even higher toward myself. I believed my silence would keep them close. I lost them anyway, every time, because I was choosing people who would never have chosen me in the end. I gave my whole heart to doorways that kept closing, and called it love.

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I call what those years left behind Relational Residue. It’s the film every connection leaves on us: the hurts, the hopes, the protective habits we picked up to survive the people we loved. I’ve always said that knots tied in relationship are untied in relationship. We loosen them by choosing the patience to slowly unravel each strand, paying close attention so we avoid pulling the wrong thread and cinching the knot even tighter.

Relational Residue is the water we swim in. It’s the content we chose for this incarnation, the puzzle we signed up to put together. And when a relationship finally feels worth the effort of untying those knots, we find ourselves staring into our own eyes in life’s cosmic mirror, only to see our shit.

~

Our shit, and the way it gets in the way of compassion and empathy for another person’s experience. Our shit, in the way we revert back to children and stay deeply unaware of our shrinking as it happens. Our shit, where our pain is ironed all over us like military patches we’ve been collecting for as long as we can or cannot remember.

One of my patches sat right over my heart: swallowing my true feelings, out of fear that my truth would cause some kind of damage. I wore it so long I forgot it was there. I finally caught it when I started listening to my body. It had been telling me all along that something was off, that this felt far from the grounded, secure attachment I was longing for. Once I listened, I found the ability in myself to lovingly stop settling.

So when we stand in front of someone who feels worthy of seeing our full selves, camouflaged by the self-centered tiny soldiers inside us, the person across from us tenderly, sometimes with a crystalline sword, invites us to become naked again. To reveal the sides of ourselves our nervous system long ago deemed too dangerous to be seen.

~

Less than two weeks into dating my partner, I went to a ceremony in the Midwest. Somewhere in it, a message came through, clear as anything: he’s simply a good guy, no need to collect data on why he’s not.

I came home and poured it all out.

I’m scared of dating a dad.

I’m scared you’re still tangled up with your ex.

I’m scared of transitioning my whole life.

I’m scared of fully committing.

He laughed, completely himself, and said, “Ha! I like you too.”

The woman in those old journals would have kept every one of those fears to herself, folded small enough to keep a man from leaving, and he always left anyway. I said them all out loud, two weeks in, and he stayed. He still stays. When I feel messy, when life gets complicated, he’s solid as fuck. I’ve thrown every tantrum I have in me and told him the most honest truths I could find, and he’s still standing right there. That’s how I knew all my messiness was mine, and in that I found love in my mess.

Go on, be relentless about finding someone who inspires you to be the most you you can be. Someone who meets you layer by layer, until you look in the mirror stripped of decoration and find yourself loving what you see.

~

If you’re sorting through your own Relational Residue, whether you’re single and ready to date differently this time or you’re with someone worth untying the knots for, this is the work I do with clients. We start in the body, meet what’s in the way, and find the words for what you want and where your boundaries live. Individual and couples sessions are available in Boulder and online.

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Prefer to start gently? Try Understanding Your Desire Language, my free five-day series of short practices for finding words for what you want.

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Her, circa 2006, taken via Sidekick

There’s an event I’ve gone to off and on the last several years. It’s an experiential designer’s wet dream, the place that bends my mind in all the right delicious ways. The first time I went, it made every other event I’d ever produced or attended look less dimensional. I remember feeling inspired, turned on, and a little bit at a loss for words, like what the fuck just happened. I loved it.

This year a bunch of my friends who’d never been, and who I’ve been dying to take with me, decided this was their year. In the midst of the tantalizing wait in a randomized queue online, thousands of people refreshing at once, it felt like a miracle when I got through to grab the coveted golden ticket. Sometimes the universe has funny ways of luring me in while also testing my commitment, and this was one of those times.

Everyone was going, so I had to go, and besides, I had to show my partner this weird world I’d been a part of and cherished so deeply. What I overrode was the very obvious reality that I was already stretched thin, weeks of travel and celebration behind me, before I’d even get there. I had enough oura ring readings in the past couple years to know exactly what throwing myself into a weekend of being nocturnal on top of that would cost me.

So I sold my ticket to a friend instead. Telling the people who were counting on me felt worse than the actual decision, I braced for their disappointment, worried about how I’d be seen. What I got instead was people telling me they felt inspired, that watching me choose my own North Star gave them permission to think about theirs.

I find myself playing monkey in the middle with my maiden and my mother, turning my body back and forth as I toss the ball between them. In practice this looks like overcommitting myself, saying yes to lots of fun things despite how that impacts my body, and at the same time becoming a full-on prepper for it as I prepare to stroke my fingers along the doorway of the threshold.

It feels really fucking hard to say no to things I love, or have loved, for something much greater.

Shedding skin ain’t a comfy experience, even though I’ve heard the saying, saying no is saying yes to me, blah blah blah. Yes, I hear you. I’m doing it, and it’s not fucking easy.

And this isn’t about throwing away an old identity. It’s actually a story about someone I invited onto the bus that I’m driving into the abyss to pick up the future versions of me.

Being a teenager in South Florida in the early 2000s looked like taking the TriRail down to Miami to meet up with boys, smoking cigarettes on Clematis on my way to a show at Ray’s downtown where I tried to fit in with other people who didn’t want to fit in, and inevitably got shit for not being straight edge. It looked like showing my boss’s ID to the security at my Thursday watering hole, Respectable Street, where I once poured a beer on top of my high school boyfriend because he wouldn’t let me get my Spanish book from his house while Don’t Stop Believing played as the closing song for what felt like the hundredth ladies night. It looked like going to a guy’s house who said other people were coming over, and they never did. Giving the bouncer at Club Space twenty dollars to ignore that my boss didn’t look like me. Taking out my friend’s parents’ car before I had my license, only to scratch their other car on the way out, a real two for one special. Going to a pool hall with my best friend, convincing men to play us for a pitcher of beer if we won. Unassumingly, we always ended up with the pitcher.

I remember her. She was fifteen going on whatever the fuck the age was to get into wherever she wanted to go. Heavy side bangs, a sharp bob cut, hair straightened flat, a self-inflicted Monroe piercing, a little cleavage showing (before the arrival of the coveted side boob), and a snarky upturned side smile.

Over the last several years of my adulthood I’ve taken a very hard stance on her. She was a bad girl. She was mean to her mom. She lied, she manipulated, she got herself into “bad” situations. Underneath it was real anger, at what I experienced at home, at the boys who weren’t taught how to treat girls, and a fierce independence from my family that was really a form of rejection.

After years of telling my story like a comedy routine, all drama and no vulnerability, I took my medicine, literally and figuratively, and chose something other than anger. It led me down a trail of forgiveness, compassion, acceptance. Compassion for my mom, for the first time in a real way. Guilt too, for how I’d treated her, and for all the ways I let those boys treat me, like I should have known better, should have protected myself. Those teenage years weren’t easy. It was challenging to be around so much pain, and challenging to feel like I had to be the adult in the room, even at the club, when I was still just a kid. Forgiveness and compassion drove me to a softer place, and pulled me toward working in the realms of intimacy. It also eventually led me to swing the pendulum a bit too far, edging into bypassing my own experience. Those bypassing years taught me a lot too, including how to become the one people could rely on to have her shit together, even when the bar for that was sometimes hilariously low.

All this to say, when I came up against her face to face, the girl my dad left alone for thirty minutes in Camden Market and who came out with tattoos on her hips before she could drive, she asked me, why do you hate me so much? Why have you pushed me so far away from you? I’m just trying to live my life, can’t you see that?

The mountain of guilt, the ocean of sadness. Breathless, I lost it. Sobbing, crushed by the weight of every year I’d spent as an adult avoiding her, making her wrong, fearing becoming her again. Fuck, I said. I’m so, so, so sorry.

My armor against her disintegrated. I looked at her, her piercings, the eyeliner like war paint, and I finally understood the message she’d been trying to send me all along. She wasn’t broken. She was gearing up for battle, testing every edge she could find, because that’s what it means to be human, to feel all of it. For the first time I wasn’t just grieving what she went through. I respected her. Her choices, her hunger to find out for herself what it means to be alive and leave no stone unturned.

I sat with her in that reverence. Everything I love most about how I move through the world now, the zest, the relentless appetite for experience, the refusal to stop being curious, none of it started with my adult self. It started with her. She’s the reason I’ve spent my whole life an astronaut of my own consciousness, still pushing into unknown territory, still ferociously asking questions knowing some will always be unanswered. She’s the one who took the first step into the mystery.

In my sideways attempt at exiling her to avoid losing my shit, I chose to wear a very uncomfortable collar with a short leash. I’ve done a lot of saying no in recent years out of fear, fear of not sleeping enough, fear of some cost I’d pay later, fear of causing harm to others, so busy managing the future that I missed the chance to hold life with more levity in the here and now.

This time, I’m choosing to keep her close instead, to hold her hand and jump the cliff with her, because I’m going to need that spunky lady to remind me and reteach me how to be comfortable in the mystery.

Burning Man is part of my maiden’s lifestyle, one of the rhythms she’s built her whole life around. This year I said no to it anyway, for the third time in a row. I’m saying no to other things that bring me awe and joy too, so I can say yes to awe and joy of a different kind, exploring my edges in the most scary, crazy, complex, wild way possible.

So I’m trying it out. Choosing the harder, quieter path over the easier yes. Going into the underworld of an old identity and coming back changed. And I know birth itself will ask this of me again. Its own descent, its own return.

What would your fifteen-year-old self say to you right now? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

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If you were taught not to want, I understand why. Not wanting feels safe. It keeps rejection at arm’s length. It keeps us from needing anyone. That sounds like freedom, until I remembered that we are all woven together. That the world quite literally hums on interbeing. But here is what my teacher Robyn Dalzen taught me: the suffering doesn’t live in the wanting. It lives in the expectation that every want must be met. Desire itself is innocent. Desire is just you, alive.

And yet so many of us were taught that our wants were dangerous. Too much. Unwelcome. Selfish.

This is a message the world delivers to all of us: wanting more is a luxury, be quiet, be grateful for what you have. It lands even louder for parents, caregivers, and people from marginalized backgrounds, for whom wanting has often been framed as selfishness, as ingratitude, as unrealistic. And I want to be clear: I believe we can hold both. We can be deeply, genuinely appreciative of what we have and still allow our wanting to exist. Gratitude and desire are not opposites. They can live in the same body at the same time. But when we use gratitude as a reason to silence our wanting entirely, we are not practicing humility. We are practicing self-abandonment. It doesn’t disappear when we grow up either. It just gets quieter, more sophisticated. It shapes itself into something that looks like flexibility, like generosity, like being easy to love.

And self-abandonment is costly.

Here is what I have watched happen, in myself and in the people I work with, when desires go unacknowledged for long enough: resentment builds. Frustration becomes a low-grade hum. We start projecting onto the people around us, making them wrong for not figuring it out, for not just knowing. There is a little girl inside me who, when I have abandoned her long enough, starts screaming at me to speak up for her. When I don’t, those unresolved wants find their way out anyway, in ways that can feel hideous, even shameful. The want doesn’t disappear just because we stopped listening to it. It goes underground, like a bad pimple that takes forever to surface, just aching beneath the skin until it finally does.

The longer we go without listening, the scarier it becomes to come back. Numbness develops. The muscle of wanting begins to atrophy. Which is why this is a practice, not a revelation. With patient and repeated attention to our desires, we can renew an ability we were all born with. One that got silenced by our conditioning, our environments, the people and systems that taught us it wasn’t safe to desire things.

This showed up for me in a major way when I was younger, in my physical intimacy. I had lost so much connection to my own life force, to my own wanting, that when someone asked me what I wanted, I genuinely had no idea what to say. And I can see now how unfair it was to expect someone else to guess. To figure it out. No one could have found me there, because I wasn’t there myself.

Coming back to my wants has been one of the most expansive things I have ever done. It has allowed me to dream without a ceiling, without the weight of whether or not I will get there. I have found real joy in the wanting itself. As we say in Wheel of Consent work: it’s good to desire.

When we don’t know what we want, or we know and we silence it, we start outsourcing our self-knowledge to the people around us. We rely on others to know us better than we know ourselves. No one can do that. Relying on others to meet us when we haven’t first met ourselves is fruitless.

What this creates in relationship is a very specific kind of friction. One person is walking on eggshells. The other is quietly collecting data to prove a story they’re already telling themselves: my partner doesn’t know me. Which is a slippery slope to my partner doesn’t love me.

When we can't be known from the inside, we start measuring love from the outside. Did he do the dishes? Did she plan the date? Did they remember? Those gestures become the only proof we have that we matter to them, because the deeper evidence, feeling truly seen, isn't available to us.

I used to do this with my partner.

I would share wants that I believed were palatable. Wants I was pretty sure he’d say yes to. Wants that I believed wouldn’t make him uncomfortable, insecure, or cause him to pull away. I was curating myself in real time, making sure only the acceptable parts made it through. And I told myself this was consideration. Kindness, even. But I want to pause here and ask the question I had to ask myself: where did I get the message that my partner’s feelings were in my domain? His feelings are not my responsibility to manage. And frankly, the belief that I could alter his emotional experience by carefully curating my wants is a little pompous in its own right. His feelings belong to him. Mine belong to me.

What I understand now is that it was fear. Fear of rejection, dressed up as thoughtfulness. And in doing it, I was denying him the chance to actually know me. Every filtered want was a small withdrawal from the intimacy account. A little way I stayed safe by staying hidden.

Here’s what I’ve learned about what happens when two people are both doing this, when both partners are only putting their socially acceptable, digestible, pre-approved wants on the table: you end up negotiating from two already-compromised starting points. You land somewhere you’re both only mildly satisfied with. You call it compromise. But it’s not really compromise. It’s two people who never showed up fully, meeting in the middle of nowhere. Similar to what happens when no one decides to drive the car. You never get to the destination.

Contrast that with what happens when both people share their actual wants, unfiltered, unapologetic, even the ones that feel outrageous. Now you have something real to work with. A true negotiation. Two full humans in the room. And whatever you land on together carries the weight of real intimacy, because it was built from truth.

In my work with the Wheel of Consent, I facilitate a practice where I invite people into pairs. Before they speak, I ask them to check in with their body. To drop out of their head and feel for what their authentic, intrinsic want actually is in that moment. Then they take turns naming it. Not making a request. Just naming a want.

This distinction matters enormously.

A want is not a request.

A want carries no expectation of being met. It requires nothing from anyone else. My want is how I understand where to plant my feet next. My want is my life force. My want is mine. That distinction changed everything for me.

What I watch happen in this practice, every single time, is that people discover how unfamiliar this muscle is. How long it’s been dormant. How much noise they have to get through before they can hear what they actually want. And then, when they start to name it, something softens. Because finally, someone is listening. Even if that someone is just themselves. And here is what I want you to hear: even though it feels unfamiliar, it does come back. With some level of ease, actually. Because desire is the most natural thing in the world. It was never foreign to you. It was just buried.

When we are out of relationship with the body we inhabit, fused with the noise of our minds, we lose our capacity for true connection with other people, with ourselves, with the world around us. These are the conversations, with ourselves and eventually with others, that allow the body’s safety perception to soften. When we let people know who we truly are beneath the masks we’ve layered over a lifetime of unmet needs, something shifts. The body exhales. The nervous system gets the message: I am known here.

Sharing our wants, and eventually, when it feels right, making them into requests, is a multi-step process. It starts with practicing the muscle of self-knowing.

We cannot share what we want until we get quiet enough to hear it within our bodies.

This is a muscle. One that most of us are not practiced in. One that has likely been shut down by the culture we inhabit, by the families we were raised in, by the relationships that taught us it wasn’t safe to need things.

So here is your invitation.

Take ten minutes. Somewhere quiet if you can find it. And either say out loud or write down all of your wants in this present moment. Let them have range, the small and the enormous, the practical and the wild. And notice, gently, where you might resist revealing yourself to yourself. Where you edit. Where you minimize. Where you go quiet.

That noticing is the work.

I commend your courage. And I would love to know how it goes.

Want to go deeper with this?

This is exactly the kind of practice we explore in my Wheel of Consent Weekend Immersion, a full weekend diving into body literacy, authentic desire, and the art of giving and receiving. If this essay stirred something in you, I’d love to have you in the room. You can find all the details and grab your spot here: Wheel of Consent Weekend Immersion.

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I bet you weren’t expecting a love letter.

You must know by now that modern culture has betrayed you, has turned us against you, us wild ones. I write to share that I have remembered. I have remembered your wisdom, how you play in concert with the rest of my body to create the symphony that is the miracle of life. How without you, life would not exist.

How my restless nights are just you shielding a potential embryo, progesterone running me hot. How my immune system activation exists to ensure I will not destroy that which I most want to create. How my exhaustion is progesterone rising, its whole purpose to draw me toward rest. How my anxiety is honing my threat perception, something essential in ancient times. Detecting danger with heightened sensitivity could be a matter of life and death for me and my entire future lineage.

This anxiety, born from a rise in cortisol, gives way to a progesterone surge. Two sisters from the same hormonal bloodline, where when one surges, the other pays the price. I used to be frustrated when PMS hit hard, living in an environment that rewards thrashing against a natural current, while all you were trying to do was protect me. Our societal pressure tells us to keep working, never stop exercising, be always on, always rhythmless. This, of course, runs in direct opposition to your function: sustaining the miracle of life.

I’ve been asking myself: what matters more, climbing a ladder I’ll never reach the top of, or tending an ecosystem where the future has a ladder at all?

When I’ve felt low during your visits, I shouldn’t have been blaming you, but rather my own overactivity. My stress reduces my dopamine levels, which are further diminished by you, only with the intention of slowing me down: to protect new life from danger, to conserve my energy, to reduce infection risk, to preserve my reserves. You draw me inward. I now know that rest isn’t indulgence. It’s a biological imperative.

Luteal can feel like holding back rushing water, like my insides are bigger than my outsides. It can feel like irritability with nowhere to go, breast tenderness, lower back ache, cramps that demand to be heard. I used to treat all of these as malfunctions. Now I understand them as a precise and personalized dashboard, each sensation pointing toward something in my system calling for restoration. And now that I know how to read them, how to support myself back toward balance, the freedom that comes with finally moving with the current instead of against it is immense.

You make me keenly aware of any dysfunction in my lifestyle, my relationship, my experience. Thank you, serotonin decrease, for illuminating the unseen. You drive me to tidy, organize, and prepare for the arrival of new beginnings, ensuring a safe landing for new life or new chapters.

And you always send a messenger. I thank you, and my bleed, my fifth vital sign, for giving me a loud and poignant reminder when something is off. Different shades of crimson, different consistencies, different symptom expressions, each pointing toward an imbalance in my hormonal geography. This diagnostic tool has been invaluable. And it’s one I had no access to while on birth control.

To understand why I’m writing this, you need to know where I’ve been.

I am not a stranger to birth control. I started the pill at 15 and had two IUDs back-to-back beginning at 18, inserted with fervor at my university medical center. My second one caused immense disruption, which I knew at my core, despite three OBGYNs gaslighting me. Two painful attempts to remove it without proper medication. Three doctors dismissing six-plus months of chronic yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis, insisting my IUD wasn’t the cause, despite every diet change and every medication failing. That was fucked.

When the fourth gynecologist told me, in my mid-twenties, that the IUD had embedded and I might be infertile, I was rocked. It was as if the whole house of cards had come down at once.

Upon removal, almost every symptom disappeared. Immediately.

The verdict is still out on how that experience has shaped my ability to create life. I haven’t tried yet, and I’ll share that journey when I do. What I know is that I am grateful to no longer be living in perpetual luteal mode, which is essentially what hormonal birth control creates. Because every phase of the cycle is a vital part of female rhythm. Not a phase to be muted.

And here’s what I never knew: in luteal, I optimize for partners who invoke stability and safety. In ovulation, research suggests I may be drawn through scent toward genetic difference, toward partners whose immune landscape complements mine, creating conditions for a more resilient embryo. Without this self-claimed unshackling, I might have chosen a partner I would slowly, quietly, find I no longer pine for.

Shout out to my partner, who celebrates my womanhood and asks me to share more about what it means to be a woman so he can better understand me and the other half of the population. He has told me many times how grateful he is to understand female cycles, so he can hold space for me more fully and temper his own expectations of my capacity at any given moment. Dearest luteal, he thanks you too.

Dearest luteal, I write this to apologize. For all the frustration I pointed your way when I should have been pointing it at a much less wholesome systemic issue. For the hours I spent judging my body’s shape and aggressively releasing that judgment at the gym during your sacred call to slow down. For not knowing, and then knowing, and still not listening. By forcing intensity during your arrival, I only created a chain reaction, fulfilling the exact thing I was trying to avoid: mounting stress, and by domino effect, weight gain. A funhouse mirror of societal pressure, biology, and stories I’d been fed for decades.

I write this not to convince anyone to reproduce. Only to encourage a return to respecting the cycles we were built to move through. Cycles are everywhere in life, the seasons, the tides, the breath itself. Nothing in nature moves in a straight line. To treat our own rhythms as inconveniences is to place ourselves outside of nature entirely, when we have never been anything but of it.

If you are on hormonal birth control and this lands as criticism, please know it isn’t. This is not a case against contraception. It is a case for curiosity. Whatever your relationship with your cycle, the invitation is the same: to listen to your body as an ally rather than a liability.

I’m not a doctor. This is not medical advice. It’s a beckoning, to listen a little closer to your body, to do your own research, and to resist blindly following someone who has no lived experience in your body before you’ve spent time exploring it with curiosity yourself. Before ostracizing a perfectly natural part of being a bleeding woman, take a moment to appreciate that you exist at all. Thank luteal for that, at the very least. And remember where you should really be pointing the finger.

Loving every messy part of being a woman is a radical act. It takes courage. But if you choose it, you are not alone.

And if that feels too big right now, start here: stop using negative language for how your emotional expression changes throughout your cycle. That is the first step toward liberation. Words are powerful, let’s use them to invoke compassion rather than separation from others like us.

Yours, in every phase.

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There’s a moment I’ll never forget.

I had just come back from ceremony with Grandmother, a full night of her pushing me away every time I tried to bring my budding relationship into the space with me. The energy was unmistakable:

not now.

So I waited. I sat with all of it; the questions, the hope, the fear, and let her do what she does.

When she finally spoke, she gave me one thing: He’s a good guy.

That’s it. My mind went: that’s it? And then, almost instantly, something soft moved through me; a wave of serenity, innocence, peace. Oh. That’s really it. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

A few days later my partner came over. We’d been apart for a bit and were excited to reunite. We sat down together, his hand warm on my left thigh. And before I could think about it, two weeks into dating, by the way, the fears I’d been quietly carrying just walked right out of my mouth:

“So I have some fears I want to share with you. What if you and your ex-wife aren’t really finished? What about the fact that you have two kids?”

At the time he was still living with his ex…different bedrooms, different schedules, trading weeks with the kids. My mind had been spinning a whole story: what if they get back together? What if I ruin a family? If it’s really done, why are they still under the same roof?

I felt it all in my body before I said a word. My chest was hot. My heart was loud. There was a constriction in my throat so unmistakable I couldn’t ignore it. A teacher once told me: if something needs to be said out loud, you’ll know it in your throat. That night, I knew.

When I finally said it… the levity, damn, the levity. Like I’d set something down I didn’t realize I’d been carrying.

He responded with that sweet, easy humor I’ve come to adore: “Uh... I like you too?”

And then he shared his fear. That I would eventually leave him for someone with more flexibility, someone who could travel year-round with me, someone without two pretty cute pairs of little hands and small suitcases.

Time stopped. I felt my nervous system find somewhere to land. And then, this tender, quiet shyness moved through me. The shyness that comes after genuine exposure. After being completely yourself and being seen for it.

I had felt that before. In another relationship that didn’t last but was worth every ounce of what I gave it. That shyness, that innocence, it doesn’t come from things going perfectly. It comes from being real.

The one who never knew

For a long time I had a lover I’d see two or three times a year. He lived far away. When we met, it was in potent environments, we’d go all in for days at a time. And for portions of those years, I quietly hoped he’d make more of an effort. Come visit me. Reach across the distance.

He never did.

And every time we were together I would fully override myself, because I wanted more and he wasn’t giving it to me, but I never asked. I just held on, telling myself things would change. The distance made the longing easier to maintain. I gave away enormous amounts of my energy and my power to something he had no control over, because he never knew.

I would resent him without him knowing. I’d put on a sweet face because I would have done anything for his presence when we were finally together. I don’t regret those years. But I am so grateful I’ve learned to be a fearless leader for my heart rather than a curmudgeon bouncer for her.

He couldn’t meet what he didn’t know existed.

The sword

I spent a long time terrified of saying I like you first. My conditioning ran deep: the man speaks first, the woman waits. My fear of rejection felt like trudging up a snow-covered mountain in bare feet, a hard no before I even took the first step.

Here’s what I’ve learned, over and over again, the slow and sometimes painful way:

If I don’t risk my own ego by laying it all on the table, there is zero chance I will be met.

If I contort myself out of fear of losing someone, they will constantly meet someone who isn’t me. And I am messy. I am real. I am not holding my shit back anymore, which has taken more practice than I can tell you. Practice trusting my own truth. Practice accepting that if I end up alone, I will still never be truly alone.

The most common thing I hear from people sitting across from me in sessions or in workshops:

“What if I lose her?”

“What if I lose the cuddles, the intimacy, the great sex?”

“What if I’m wrong? What if I make a horrible mistake?”

It’s always a scarcity story. Or a self-trust story. Always.

But here’s the thing; it’s insane to expect someone to meet your needs if you’ve never shared them. He can’t read your mind. And if you ever want him to have even a chance of getting it right, you have to speak for yourself so he can actually get to know you.

I’m not pretending this is easy. Sharing what’s alive in us requires a kind of emotional nakedness that most of us were never taught to offer. I call it laying down the sword, releasing the weapon we carry to protect our hearts in case someone tries to break them.

This is how resilience is actually cultivated. Not by staying guarded. By laying the sword down, using our words to show what’s inside, and living to tell the tale.

And here’s the real gift: if someone can’t meet you in your most honest self, aren’t you relieved you found out before you were buried under shared leases and mutual obligations?

I’m done with the ‘leave something to the imagination’ advice. Done with ‘don’t reveal all your cards at once.’

Strip down. Show yourself. So you finally have the chance to be seen, in your gorgeous, self-responsible, authentic truth.

Where this practice lives in the body

The throat knows. The chest knows. The constriction before the words come out, that’s not anxiety to be managed away, that’s information. Your body is telling you something needs to move through here.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what we feel. Most of us know. The problem is that these patterns; the overriding, the shrinking, the sweet face over the silent resentment, don’t live in our minds. They live in our nervous systems. That’s why knowing better doesn’t always mean doing better.

This is exactly why I’m so excited about the Wheel of Consent® Weekend Immersion happening April 3–5 at NowHaus in Boulder.

This three-day in-person workshop is where you get to feel, not just understand, the difference between giving from generosity versus obligation. Between receiving with ease and receiving while bracing. Between saying yes because you want to and saying yes because you’re afraid.

Through partnered (fully clothed, non-sexual) exercises, solo reflection, and group integration, you’ll build the nervous system capacity to actually do the thing most relationship advice just tells you to do: communicate.

You’ll practice making clean requests without apology. You’ll notice your yes and your no in real time. You’ll begin to recognize the subtle ways you override yourself, and learn what it feels like to stop.

If your chest gets hot when someone asks what you want. If you’ve ever given away years of energy to someone who never knew. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to say the thing that’s sitting in your throat…

This weekend is for you.

Only 8 spots remaining.

→ Grab your spot here

If you’re sitting with a scary share right now, something that’s been living in your throat, drop it in the comments. I’m here to listen.

I had a staring contest with a slice of carrot the other day. Eye to eye, we sat there, and something clicked.

A prepared dish is like a symphony. Each vegetable a different instrument: some loud, some quiet, some surprising, some uncomfortable, awkward, dazzling. Each one has its own beauty, and when played together, it creates this masterful thing that hits every sense at once. The rainbow of colors and textures. The potent perfume-like smells. The crackling in the pot. The sound of the perfect crunch. And of course, those delectable, tantalizing bites.

Food, like music, has this impeccable way of bringing us together. Community is formed on a dance floor and at a dinner table. Genres are cuisines. We may not love every piece of music in a genre, but we can likely find one song in each that feels “right” in our system, just like the star dish of a cuisine.

A teacher once told me about the doctrine of signatures, this ancient concept that vegetables have visual signatures indicating how they can support our bodies. Carrots look like eyes and are rich in vitamin A for vision. Walnuts resemble the brain and contain omega-3 fatty acids for cognitive function. Our ancestors knew something we’ve forgotten: the body speaks a language older than words.

Just like music and vibrations inevitably impact us (our bodies made of mostly water, just try playing a loud speaker near a glass), sound travels out through vibrations from our vocal cords. When we hum, sing, chant, or moan, these vibrations stimulate our vagus nerve, activating our parasympathetic nervous system and helping us shift into a calmer state. Similarly, we can mindfully, slowly eat to engage this same relaxation response.

Sex, like eating, like music, is synesthesia. It’s every sense firing at once: sound layered over touch, scent mingling with taste, sight blurring into sensation. When one sense awakens, it pulls the others with it. This is why a certain song can make your skin ache, why the right lighting changes everything, why taste and smell can transport you instantly back to desire you’d forgotten you had.

Whether we’re eating, listening to music, or experiencing sexual pleasure, our bodies respond to the same principle, we have to get out of our heads and into sensation. We have to be present enough to actually feel.

So why am I talking about all of this?

Because the senses are a crucial component when talking about sex.

If you aren’t considering this as a real thing, you’re definitely missing out on the potential for a symphony in the bedroom.

If you’re having a hard time letting go, surrendering, being present, being in your body, making space for pleasure, here is a key: we can’t force pleasure or enjoyment, we can only create the space for it. We have to slow down enough to hear the quiet symphony. We have to clear the stage so the instruments can play. Clear the table of all the to-dos of the day so a stunning culinary work of art can be presented.

And here’s what makes sex different from every other sensory experience: our genitals are exquisitely designed for this. To be clear this is hardly an afterthought or a reproductive necessity with pleasure as a bonus, but rather they are pleasure-generating instruments in their own right.

Our bodies are literally designed for pleasure. The clitoris is the only organ in the human body that exists solely for pleasure, with over 10,000 nerve endings concentrated in this small area. The penis, particularly the glans (head) and frenulum, is densely innervated with thousands of nerve endings that make it a primary source of sexual pleasure and sensation. These structures can be activated without any reproductive function at all, they exist to feel good.

But here’s the thing: we have to learn what makes us tick. What’s a sensual easy win versus one that makes us want to crawl out of our skin?

Understanding our relationship to our senses is an essential piece of understanding how to be in our bodies, and eventually, how to have the best sex we’ve ever had.

Announcing: Pleasure Mapping

I’ve been working on something for months, and I’m finally ready to share it with you.

Pleasure Mapping is a 5-week virtual sensory series that starts March 24th: intentionally timed with the spring equinox, a time of planting seeds for new beginnings. This is the work I wish someone had given me years ago, before I spent so much time overriding what my body was trying to tell me, before I learned the hard way that great sex isn’t about technique, it’s about presence.

Here’s what we’re doing differently: we’re not starting in the bedroom. We’re starting with understanding how your desire actually works, what accelerates you, what shuts you down, and how to listen to your body without pressure or performance.

Over five weeks, meeting online, we’ll map your unique pleasure landscape. Not what you think you should like. Not what worked for your last partner. What actually makes your nervous system sing.

You’re welcome to attend solo or with a partner. If you choose, you’ll be paired with a buddy for deeper exploration and accountability between sessions. Participation is always invitational, listening is a valid form of engagement.

The Curriculum:

Week 1 — Foundations: Self-Attunement & Choice
You learn how your desire actually works and how to listen without pressure.

Week 2 — Sight & Sound: Designing Your Dream “Sex Room”
You explore what your body responds to visually and aurally, and how environment shapes desire.

Week 3 — Taste & Smell: Memory, Emotion & the Body
You access pleasure through memory, association, and the senses that bypass logic.

Week 4 — Touch: Communication, Attunement & Curiosity
You practice asking for what you want, receiving touch with choice, and exploring curiosity together.

Week 5 — Integration: From Knowing to Saying
You translate insight into real conversations using tools like RBDSM, a practical framework for self-advocacy and clarity in intimacy.

By the end of this series, you’ll:

• Recognize what genuinely opens you and what quietly shuts you down

• Understand your pleasure preferences across the senses

• Develop language for needs, desires, and limits

• Communicate with partners without collapsing, over-explaining, or bracing

• Feel confident asking for exactly what you want in the bedroom (and everywhere else)

This isn’t just about having better sex, though that’s definitely on the table. This is about reclaiming your relationship with pleasure as a birthright, not a luxury. It’s about learning to trust what your body has been trying to tell you all along.

What’s Included:

• 5 live weekly sessions with teaching and embodiment practices

• All lectures recorded (yours to revisit)

• Optional breakout spaces for reflection and conversation

• Pleasure Mapping digital workbook

• Private WhatsApp group for connection and shared resources

• Optional buddy pairing for deeper exploration between sessions

The Details:

• Starts March 24th, 2026

• Virtual

• Open to individuals and couples

Pricing:

• Early Registration (through February 15th): $90

• Standard Registration: $111

• Late Registration: $130

• Paid subscribers of Letters from the Body receive 15% off

Series + Integration ($290) includes everything above plus:

• One 90-minute private 1:1 integration session

• Personalized reflection on your Pleasure Map

• Custom practices tailored to your nervous system, patterns, and desires

Learn more and register here

If you’ve been waiting for permission to prioritize your pleasure, to stop performing and start feeling, this is it.

The carrot and I finished our staring contest. I blinked first. But I learned something: my body has always known what it wants. I just needed to slow down enough to listen.

I hope you’ll join me in learning to listen to yours.

I’ve worked with couples through some incredibly sticky terrain: betrayals, years of built-up resentment, patterns that once felt impossible to break. What I’ve learned is that most ruptures are recoverable when both people truly want to make it work and concrete dealbreakers aren’t misaligned (wanting children vs. not, for instance).

Here’s where it gets tricky: when people reach out and someone already has one foot out the door, it’s often too late. Not because the situation is beyond repair, but because forcing someone into a zoom room (or therapy office) they don’t want to be in is fruitless. To me, this signals that someone has been overriding themselves out of fear for so long they’ve lost their way back to their truth.

Just a heads up: this is not the moment to come to me as a couple. Come to me as soon as something feels slightly off. Come when there’s curiosity. Come when you sense there might be more.

Fear can be louder than our truth, especially when we’ve practiced listening to it. The more airtime fear gets, the more seasons get rolled out on Fear TV. And while fear is completely valid, it is an alarm bell, an indicator, an invitation to growth, it’s also essential to cultivate a deep connection with what’s most true.

As someone who has stayed too long and left too early during different seasons of my life: relationships, jobs, habits, I know how costly it can be to ignore the core of who I am. The truth my body has been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) asking me to hear.

I remember being with a partner who claimed to be all-in while their actions said something entirely different. My body knew. It tensed. Anxiety flooded in whenever we were apart, like my nervous system was screaming what my mind refused to acknowledge.

And then there was another, someone I tried so hard with, but no matter what I did, I found myself recoiling. One foot perpetually out the door instead of moving headfirst toward them. My body knew that too.

My practice now is simple, but not easy: I stay curious about where yes, no, and maybe originate in my body. Where I feel them arrive. And just as importantly, I meet myself with compassion when I notice I’ve overridden myself again.

Sometimes listening looks like noticing my chest tighten when I say yes to plans I don’t actually want. Sometimes it’s the way my whole body softens around someone who can truly attune to me. It’s the difference between holding my breath and breathing fully.

If you’re still reading, consider this a reminder to make space to hear yourself. Slow down, just enough, to reorient. Check in before you find yourself in a situation you feel as though you didn’t choose. Remember that not choosing is a choice, too.

A bit of a mindfuck. And honestly? I’ve found it deeply empowering. Realizing I can listen. That I can redirect. That I have agency in responding to what I uncover.

This practice can also become a form of reassurance. Self-validation. That holy fuck, I’m here. I did that. I chose things. And now I’m standing on something solid, more like a pile of gold than a pile of shit. How wild is that?

So if you’ve found yourself in a too-long or too-short situation, start by meeting yourself with love and compassion. You did your best with what you had. There’s a perfectly reasonable reason you’re here.

Then get quiet. Journal. Go outside. Feel yourself. Notice the moments where you have listened, whether that’s choosing to put down or pick up the Reese’s (whichever is more true for you). Begin getting acquainted with the part of you that already knows how to listen.

When I remembered how to let this part of me be heard, my romantic connections tidied themselves up, making space for partnership built on brutally loving honesty. It gave the people around me the chance to know the real me. Not the version preoccupied with how I’d be received, whether I’d be rejected, whether I was too much or asking for too much. Just the me who does her best to be herself in as many situations as possible, with the hope, but not held breath, that it will be mirrored back to me in return.

Only when I allow myself to be the most me I can be can I ever begin to expect others to meet me there.

Your body already knows. It always has. This practice isn’t about learning something new, it’s about remembering what you’ve always had access to.

If you're ready to explore what your body has been trying to tell you, to map the landscape of your own pleasure and knowing, I'd love to support you. I’m offering a new 5 week virtual workshop called Pleasure Mapping starting on March 24th , where we’ll practice exactly this; tuning in, listening deeply, and following the breadcrumbs back to yourself.

Best wishes,

from my body to yours.

After racking my brain on this seeming incongruence, I decided to do a bit of research on the calendar we’ve all agreed to use here in the western world. Turns out, the ancient Egyptians were the first to create a 365-day calendar around 4,000 years ago. They divided the year into three seasons based on the Nile’s flooding cycle - each season had four months of 30 days, plus five extra days at the end of the year that were just for celebrating the birthdays of gods. No work, just rest and ritual. Then the Romans came along and fucked it all up with their superstitions about even numbers being unlucky, giving us this chaotic mix of 29, 30, and 31-day months. Julius Caesar tried to fix it in 46 BC by creating the Julian calendar, redistributing days to make most months either 30 or 31 days.

But here’s the thing, our current calendar has almost nothing to do with natural cycles anymore. The months don’t align with the moon’ths (which is where the word “month” even comes from), and the year resets in the dead of winter instead of at a solstice or equinox. We’re living by a system designed for Roman administrative convenience and Egyptian flood patterns, held together by Pope Gregory XIII’s 1582 tweak to keep Easter from drifting. It’s a perfect metaphor for how we live, constructing constructs around nature, trying to control and bend what was never meant to be controlled.

I've had resistance to creating goals or intentions for 2026 outside of my financial and business ones, the kind chained to the Gregorian calendar. Who is Gregory anyways? Why does his calendar get to dictate when we reset our year, right in the middle of a season meant for deep rest and self contemplation?

So instead, I’m going to offer a recollection of the last season, from autumnal equinox to winter solstice, in opposition to the recollection of a Gregorian calendar year. This resistance, I’m realizing, isn’t about the calendar at all. It’s about my resistance to surrender. To letting life move through me instead of trying to grip the steering wheel from the backseat.

When the body speaks

In September I really reached my limits with the way my body was processing stress. She spoke loudly through migraine headaches. My office manager part decided that there were too many papers on her desk to complete and so the office needed to shut down for a while. My nervous system was demanding for a time out.

For months I treated the migraines like an enemy. Another problem to solve, another thing to manage, another paper on the desk. I researched supplements, tracked triggers, adjusted my sleep schedule, eliminated foods. I was trying to control her, to fix her, to make her stop interrupting my life. The grip was exhausting.

In October I finally began to listen. No longer seeing the migraines as a problem but simply a loud alarm from my intelligent system, a true ominous letter from the body. The shift wasn’t in what I did but in how I related to what was happening. I stopped trying to silence her and started asking what she needed to say.

I started seeing a 5 elements acupuncturist and parts work coach weekly to give my nervous system and subconscious the opportunity to speak outside of my migraine blackout times. Working with Dr. Love (yes that’s his real name) for the first time in 6.5 years has been invaluable. I also upped my therapy routine, shifting from monthly to bi-weekly for a couple months. Laura Jaster, a Hakomi therapist who I’ve been working with for over 6 years, has been an essential mentor in the witnessing and reflecting of my journey.

I am aware of how privileged the above is and I want to acknowledge how insanely valuable community is when experiencing any sort of health crisis or challenging time in general. It takes a village, and mine showed up in multiple forms, paid practitioners yes, but also text threads with girlfriends sharing their migraine rituals, offering remedies passed down through their own journeys with pain. This time has reinforced the importance of receptivity for me. I can’t do it alone, whether it’s people I pay to support me or the incredible mirrors I have in my friends, family, and partner. I really believe that when we truly listen to the body’s calls and take them seriously, we can prevent a much more serious situation. But listening requires surrender. It requires putting down the need to control the outcome and instead becoming curious about what’s actually here.

When structures shift

In the beginning of October I was in Mexico City producing an event. I found out days after getting there that there were going to be some major changes to the organizational structure of my production team. They ended up letting go of people I adore and deeply value, both in work and personal contexts.

Naturally I took this hard. I not only had to lose some of my favorite people at work but also felt a lot of fear about operating with a slimmer workforce. I had been burned before by organizational shifts so the trust I was feeling was at an all time low. My grip tightened. I tried to control what I could control, braced for the worst, prepared myself for being buried under more work. Usually layoffs, historically from what I’ve heard from others, means the people who stay have way more work.

But here’s what I’m learning about surrender, sometimes the thing you’re gripping so hard is already gone. The structure I was trying to hold had already shifted. My white-knuckling wasn’t preventing anything, it was just keeping me from being present to what was actually happening. And what was actually happening, shockingly, was that I didn’t end up with more work, which is something I’m still settling into. I miss my team a lot, and they are incredibly talented women who I know will land on their feet stronger than ever and already have in a lot of ways. I feel proud of what we built together in the last 4+ years. But I can also feel the gift in letting go of trying to control a reality that was never mine to control in the first place.

When water decides

In November a home insurance claim from the flood in my house in May finally got settled. Six months of paperwork, phone calls, bureaucratic nightmares. We definitely got screwed a bit but being done with this was a massive weight lifted off my shoulders.

There’s something poetic about water forcing its way into the structure of my home, into the controlled space I’d built. Water doesn’t ask permission. It moves where it moves. And I spent months resisting what had already happened, trying to make it different, trying to get back what was lost. The settlement wasn’t what I wanted but the completion was everything I needed, not because I won, but because I finally stopped fighting.

When love asks for presence

This season also brought tenderness. My dad and brother met my partner’s parents, which was a big planted flag for our relationship. My partner and I went to our first retreat together and had a massively expansive experience which I’m still riding the highs of. My monthly in-person Introduction to the Wheel of Consent workshop filled way up. On Halloween, from the advice of a dear sister of mine, I had my bi-yearly bender which felt fucking freeing and just what I needed... we came home around 5am. My younger self chuckling to herself due to the amount of sunrises she used to see in a month.

After not having an in-person office since the flood in the house, I started renting an office in town to see clients part time. Reigniting in-person sessions has stoked my fire in a major way. I also started apprenticing with a long time friend and mentor which has shifted the way I see through my eyes. I’m spending more time in appreciation, more time outside, more time in love with life.

In December my partner and I deepened our body wisdom in a Cranial Somatics course with our dear friend and legendary body worker Kiefer Avi. And something shifted with the boys in our house. We’re establishing that they call me their “most fun adult” which is way cooler than step parent... to be clear they suggested it.

My mentor has been challenging me to explore what it means to be a parent. I’m realizing now that a parent is a guide, and the best guides are the ones that show up in an embodied and authentic way. I’m no longer afraid of vulnerable conversations with the little dudes because I know they deserve my authentic expression. This too is surrender, letting go of performing “good step-parent” and instead just being present, being real, being the messy human I actually am. The more I pour them with love the more they let me in and jeez, a hug from a child unprompted is one of the best feelings in the world. I know that they can feel when I’m gripping, trying to be something I’m not. They relax when I relax.

What surrender actually feels like

When I stop gripping, I start being present. And presence feels like experiencing tiny miracles throughout the day constantly. It feels like finding myself examining the contours of the clouds above and the tonality of the brushes of snow atop the mountains in the distance. It feels like inhabiting my body, listening for her cues rather than quickly researching how to change her.

I close with a deep sense of appreciation for the prior season of stretching me in ways I was very, very resistant to for a long time, offering me the opportunity to garner the courage to be present, sensuous, and allowing, reestablishing the remembering of agency and choice I’ve always had. Not the agency to control everything, but the agency to choose how I relate to what’s happening. The choice to let go. The choice to trust. The choice to stop scratching my fingernails on the side of the well and let myself drop to the bottom, where it turns out, the water is just fine.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the value of giving up.

The kind that asks: Is giving up sometimes just surrender, misunderstood?

This question arrived through sex. As many of my most clarifying questions do.

My partner and I were trying to have sex recently. My body wasn’t ready, and my mind had a surprisingly hard time accepting that truth.

Between sickness and my period, it had been about a week since we’d had sex, and suddenly that gap felt enormous. My mind rushed in to fill the space with stories; fast, convincing, catastrophic:

We’re not having sex →

Then we’ll have less and less sex →

Then we’ll lose intimacy →

Then we’ll feel disconnected →

Then our relationship will crumble →

Then I’ll be alone, drowning in regret.

Woof.

I suspect that the places where it feels hardest to tell the truth, especially in the bedroom, are also the places quietly training us for every other hard conversation in our lives.

I’ve learned that when my nervous system starts spinning like this, the most compassionate thing I can do is let the story go all the way to the end. Let it metastasize. Let it show me its worst-case fantasy.

Somewhere in that exaggeration, perspective arrives.

And usually a voice follows, tender but firm:

Okay, Jade. Back it up.

Because when I actually looked at what was happening, the truth was much simpler and kinder. Attraction, intimacy, love were not the issue.

Attunement was.

Once it was clear my body wasn’t a yes, we paused. We talked. And in that slowing down, something unexpected emerged: my partner wasn’t actually that down either. There were parts of both of us that had been subtly forcing it; out of habit, momentum, or a quiet sense of obligation.

Without a foundation of open, loving communication, we wouldn’t have known that. Instead, I had almost handed the wheel to my fears and made assumptions about him, rather than listening to myself.

He said something that landed deeply:

He’d rather we have less sex that’s incredible, like it usually is, than more sex that requires either of us to override ourselves.

Yes. That.

And in agreeing, I felt myself reaching back to a younger part of me; the one who, for a very long time, conflated intimacy with sex. The one who learned that closeness meant sexual availability, that being desired meant being intimate, and that a pause in sex might mean a rupture in love.

I reminded her, gently but clearly, that intimacy is not synonymous with intercourse. That connection doesn’t disappear just because bodies rest. And that listening to myself does not mean my partner will vanish from my life.

I know there’s nuance here. Sometimes I’m not initially that jazzed about diving in simply because I’m tired or lazy, and I can shift once we’re in it. I also know how valuable sex is in relationship, and in our relationship.

But there’s a fine line between

– not wanting to initiate because energy is low, and

– the body offering a clear no and asking us to explore what is a yes in the moment.

Living with a partner adds layers to that line.

So do the stories we carry about what love is supposed to look like, what intimacy should mean, and how relationships are “maintained.” Sometimes those stories quietly ask us to abandon ourselves just a little, in the name of harmony.

This letter is really about how to keep things fresh in relationship.

And here’s the truth that keeps revealing itself, again and again:

The most important thing we can do to maintain, deepen, and evolve intimacy is to develop attunement with ourselves.

Listening to the body is a muscle. Presence is a practice.

A crucial part of this work, one that often gets overlooked, is learning how yes and no actually show up in your body.

There is no universal signal.

No single sensation that means green light or full stop for everyone.

For some, yes feels expansive, warm, or buzzy.

For others, it’s quiet, steady, grounded.

No might feel tight, heavy, foggy, irritated, or it might feel neutral, like a simple absence of desire.

Without familiarity with our own internal language, it’s easy to confuse fear with no, obligation with yes, or numbness with consent.

This is why self-attunement matters. We can’t communicate clearly with others if we don’t yet recognize what’s happening inside ourselves. Learning our personal signals, especially in the body, turns consent from an idea into a lived experience.

Most of us were never taught how to do this.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

But when we begin to recognize our own yeses and nos, we stop outsourcing our truth, and intimacy becomes simpler, cleaner, and far more alive.

As The Art of Giving and Receiving reminds us:

“The practice is to notice what’s true now—not what should be true.”

There is so much distraction in modern life, and so much baggage we bring into every interaction. When we learn to hear our bodies, and to advocate for them clearly and kindly, we don’t just take care of ourselves. We invite our partners to develop their own capacity to attune to us.

I’m technically a consent educator, but what I’m really devoted to is teaching people the tools to listen, to themselves and to the people they love.

Sure, it would be convenient if everyone could read our minds. The closest thing we get to that kind of magic is self-listening. At first, it requires slowing way down. Over time, with practice, it becomes autonomic. Listening can become like breathing; effortless, alive.

And when we repeatedly advocate for ourselves, the people closest to us get the chance to become extraordinary friends, lovers, and family members.

Another line from Betty Martin keeps echoing for me:

“When I honor my own experience, I become more available—not less.”

This has been one of the great re-educations of my life.

A cornerstone of this work, what one of my teachers calls radical self-responsibility, has shown me just how many stories I carry in my body about sex, intimacy, boundaries, and relationship.

It’s endless.

And somehow, that’s the gift.

What a privilege it is to live a life where we get to try, fail, try again, succeed briefly, feel everything, love big, fall hard, fuck up, repair, and begin again.

Add cycles to the mix, hormonal, emotional, seasonal, and it gets even richer. Learning about my physical arousal through the lens of my menstrual cycle has been endlessly fascinating, humbling, and freeing.

There’s so much more to explore.

I’ve been sitting with a theory lately, one that keeps proving itself true in my body.

If we can learn to speak up for ourselves in the bedroom, one of the most charged, vulnerable, taboo, and socially awkward places to tell the truth, then speaking up everywhere else starts to get easier.

Not effortless. But possible.

The bedroom is advanced training.

It’s where stakes feel high, language gets slippery, and old conditioning shows up loud. It’s where many of us learned to be “easy,” “good,” “low-maintenance,” grateful for desire rather than honest about it. It’s where we override, perform, endure, or stay quiet because it feels safer than risking disconnection.

So when we practice naming a no there, articulating a yes with clarity, or pausing when something isn’t aligned, we’re not just learning about sex.

We’re learning self-advocacy.

And that skill travels.

Asking your boss for a raise.

Setting a boundary with a friend.

Naming a need without apologizing for it.

Letting yourself be seen without over-explaining.

Pleasure is not separate from the rest of life. It’s one of the most potent training grounds we have because it lives so close to vulnerability.

When we practice telling the truth with our bodies, our voices follow.

When we stop abandoning ourselves in intimacy, we stop doing it quite so reflexively everywhere else.

And this is exactly why I’m offering The Practice of Giving and Receiving Pleasure.

Not as a performance upgrade or a fix for something broken.

But as a place to slow down enough to hear what’s actually true.

This four-week series is an exploration of attunement:

to your body, your yeses and nos, your desires, your edges, your timing.

It’s about practicing presence instead of pushing, curiosity instead of collapse, honesty instead of endurance.

The series is offered in person in Denver, and the practice itself is one you can carry anywhere. Many of the people reading this are scattered across cities, countries, and time zones, and this work still applies. Attunement travels. Self-trust doesn’t require proximity.

We’ll work with:

• noticing what’s true now (not what should be true)

• separating obligation from desire

• learning how to give without self-erasure

• and learning how to receive without bracing

This is not about having more sex.

It’s about having truer experiences of pleasure, connection, and self-trust.

If you’ve ever overridden yourself in the name of intimacy,

if you’ve ever worried that listening to your body might cost you love,

if you’re curious what becomes possible when consent is not a rule but a relationship

this space is for you.

The Practice of Giving and Receiving Pleasure — a 4-Week Series (Denver, CO)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-practice-of-giving-receiving-pleasure-4-week-series-tickets-1976935328786?aff=oddtdtcreator

No forcing. No fixing. Just practice.

Listening before the body has to yell.

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Not in Denver? Let this be a starting point. Attunement is a portable skill, and I have an online 5 week series offering coming in February! Email me at hello@jadelevinson.com to be the first to hear about it.

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(photo of my first snow day when I moved to NY at 21 ^)

Winter showed up late this year, fashionably, flirtatiously late.

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In Boulder, she made us wait, leaving us wondering if she’d ditched us for another lover. We broke records for how little snow fell. It wasn’t until Thanksgiving weekend that the first flakes finally drifted down, tentative, delicate (only about an inch’s worth), as if winter were slipping back into the room whispering, “Did you miss me?”

And now? She’s here. Quiet as breath. Clear as truth.

This morning, I peeked out the bedroom window and felt that unmistakable shift. With the leaves gone, I can see the lake behind the house for the first time; silver, honest, unobstructed. Winter is weird like that: she takes things away and somehow leaves us with more.

She reveals what fullness hides.

She offers the clarity of contrast, the bones beneath the bloom.

The branches outside twist like thought-lines, curve like question marks, stretch like invitations. They tap the chimney next door, flirt with the jungle gym, and stand there fully unclothed, entirely themselves, without performance or polish. Just the calm, unapologetic presence of “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Pay attention.”

When I lived in New York, I tried to outrun her, escaping south as soon as temperatures dipped below 40ºF. But here in Colorado, she’s become a mentor, a slow, grounded one who doesn’t waste words.

Winter is a season of inventory.

A moment to ask:

What is finishing its cycle?

What can be allowed to rest?

What have I learned?

Who am I now?

And this year, against all odds, what rises most strongly in me is appreciation for the way the year unfolded, even the rough parts. Especially the rough parts.

Which is wild considering how I spent a majority of the year playing both Atlas and Sisyphus, carrying everything, pushing boulders I had no business pushing, insisting I could muscle my way to the summit of a mountain I didn’t even know I was climbing.

A teacher once shared the image of someone clawing at the walls of a well, scraping fingernails, desperate to stay near the surface, terrified of dropping. And honestly? Yeah. That tracks.

Trying to control life is exhausting and, in the strangest way, addictive. When the world feels unsteady, grip becomes reflex.

But as the days shortened, something softened.

This winter, I’m learning to let the waves lift me.

To stop digging my heels into the sand each time life changes its rhythm.

Because resisting the tide?

It’s a surprisingly efficient way to drown.

And somewhere in this slowing down, I’m remembering what David Abram writes so beautifully in The Spell of the Sensuous: how winter hushes the world just enough that our senses finally begin to listen again. How snow thickens silence into something alive, an intimate, breathing quiet that blurs the border between our bodies and the land itself. How the world, covered in white, becomes less visual noise and more invitation. More presence. More reciprocity.

And when the snow finally does arrive, late, shy, half-committed, it leaves behind these gorgeous little mysteries as it melts. The patterns feel almost Rorschach-like, as if the ground were holding up inkblots for us to interpret.

What do you see here?

A doorway?

An animal?

A truth surfacing?

Winter loves to make the world a mirror, offering back the parts of ourselves we forget to notice.

And then there are the leaves that refuse to fall, the stubborn little survivors clinging to branches long after their siblings have surrendered to the season. I find myself wondering about them. Are they the stories we insist on holding as tightly as possible, even when they’re ready to release us?

The old identities we keep trying to drag into a new chapter?

The narratives we’re scared to let the wind take?

Winter thins the veil between inner and outer.

She lets us feel the world feeling us.

And maybe that’s where trust begins, not in certainty, not in grit, but in deep listening.

In hearing the faint whispers:

Slow down.

Stay here.

It’s okay.

What’s coming might surprise you in the best way.

So thank you, winter…

for showing up late but arriving fully.

For revealing what I couldn’t see through all the leaves.

For reminding me not to rush, not to armor, not to pretend.

If you’re reading this, consider it your invitation:

Take stock. Notice what’s ending. Honor what needs rest.

And listen for the faint seeds of what wants to begin.

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Speaking of seeds…

On January 31st, I’ll be joining three women I adore for a FREE collective visioning experience, an early planting for the world we want to walk into in 2026.

Sign up here!

Full Agenda

And in January, I’m guiding a 4-week series on The Practice of Giving & Receiving Pleasure in Denver, a deep dive into desire, boundaries, communication, and the sensual intelligence of the body.

Series Link Here!

More Info

Here’s to late winters, early awakenings, and the kind of quiet that brings us back to ourselves.

My partner and I just came home from Sapience retreat, and my nervous system still feels a little like a snow globe someone gently shook and then set down to settle.

We spent days experiencing the sacred sequence of life, trusting the process and surrendering to our truths. I kept hearing the invitation:

Be succinct. Be honest. Say the thing.

So here it is:

This one’s about money.

And belonging.

And the way my body has braced against both.

The early imprints: cow-print skirts & claymation

When I was a little girl, I always felt a bit… out of place. I moved from the UK to South Florida with my little accent and my slightly off-kilter style.

My first real friend at school was Julie. She had this warmth, the kind that just lets your shoulders drop an inch. She grew up to become an incredibly creative claymation artist, and over dinner last year I found out she once made a claymation short film with a character who had my name.

We’ve barely seen each other over the years, but when we had dinner, it was like slipping back into a favorite hoodie. The love was still there. Old friends feel like that, like continuity in a world that keeps rearranging itself.

She was with me when I got my first period, right before her dad dropped us off at Warped Tour in Fort Lauderdale. We were twelve. I remember awkwardly trying to put in a tampon for the first time with zero real instruction, just hope and complicated packaging, and thinking, surely this cannot be the right angle.

A few years earlier, around third or fourth grade, my mom would dress me in these unique pieces of clothing, like my cow-print skirt. I loved that skirt. The other girls did not.

I remember getting made fun of for it.

I remember the burn in my cheeks.

I remember the first quiet understanding:

Being different is dangerous.

South Florida, status, and the quiet deal I made

Growing up in South Florida, the currency was obvious:

What car do you drive?

What handbag is on your arm?

Where are you getting plastic surgery first?

I never really felt like I belonged in that world, but I also didn’t want to be exiled from it. My biology, my lineage, my animal body knew: fitting in is survival.

So I made this unconscious deal with myself:

Blend enough to not get eaten.

Around the same time, another story started weaving itself through my life:

Most of my friends’ parents were divorced. Eventually, mine were too.

The common denominator, at least from my vantage point:

Money made things complicated.

Money caused fights.

Money meant distance, endless tears, and long silences in the car.

I absorbed the message:

More money = less connection.

It felt like Biggie had it right all along. “Mo money mo problems” felt like a thesis statement for adulthood.

Elitism, the cool crowd & the allergy I can feel in my bones

In my early twenties I moved to New York, and the story sharpened.

I didn’t just see elitism from the outside; I got pulled into it. I found myself in rooms that read as “cool” from the outside; the right parties, the right people, the right skimpy outfits.

I wasn’t some It Girl, but I did get proximity to that world, and a part of me really wanted to stay there.

At the same time, I was never only that. I’ve always been someone who can float between worlds. I was in a lot of different groups, and you could take me almost anywhere and I’d find a way to belong. Probably a nod to my 10 schools before graduating high school adaptability.

Still, there were some elitist circles I ran in, and it felt like work to hold my place there. I learned the codes. I played the game. I went along with things that, honestly, didn’t always feel great in my body.

I started seeing how money and status could morph into “above-ness” — the unspoken hierarchy in the room, the subtle scan for who matters and who doesn’t.

Whatever I was becoming, I remember praying:

Please, let it not be that.

After years of being out of that world, I’ve grown almost allergic to elitism. My body knows it before my brain does, the tightening in my chest, the slight pull back, the inner eye-roll.

In contrast, humility is one of the most beautiful traits I know.

When I’m around real humility, my body relaxes. I feel this quiet reverence for whatever is beyond us. There’s a grounded presence, a respect for other people’s experiences, a sense that no one is above or below anyone else.

Humility is trustable as fuck.

And it’s something I’m constantly working to cultivate in myself.

The fear of becoming “one of them”

Here’s the part that feels edgy to name:

For a long time, I’ve been afraid to be open about my financial stability and success.

Terrified, actually.

Afraid that if people saw the whole picture, the income, the savings, the opportunities, I’d become “one of them.”

Afraid of disconnection.

Afraid people would project onto me the very elitism that makes my nervous system want to crawl out of my skin.

For a chunk of my early adulthood, I genuinely thought I might be broke forever, and there was a part of me that was… oddly okay with that. It felt safe to be the underdog. Relatable. Harmless.

But life had other ideas.

I’ve been fortunate in this life, to have people who championed my work, my art, my weird, my expression. People who took risks on me and pushed open doors I didn’t even realize were there.

And quietly, over time, my relationship with money changed.

But my stories about money didn’t.

Sapience, sacred sequence, and telling the truth

At Sapience, sitting with my partner, I finally shared what my yearly income actually is. Like, the real number. Not the rounded-down cute version. Not the “oh it’s been a good year” deflection.

Just: here’s the truth.

It sounds simple, but I felt like curling up into a ball. I could feel all those old fears waking up:

Will he see me differently?

Will this change our dynamic?

Does this make me less lovable, less safe, less… normal?

And then something unexpected happened.

Nothing bad.

We were just there. Two humans, telling the truth. Breathing.

It opened something in me:

It’s not the money that disconnects us.

It’s the hiding.

It’s the secrecy.

It’s the clenching around it, that tight little “mine” energy.

I realized I’d been “my precious’ing” my money in this subtle way, like if I didn’t hold it just right, I’d turn into the kind of person I never wanted to be.

But the truth is much simpler and much more inconvenient:

Money is currency.

It wants to move.

Money as a current, not a cage

Currency, at its root, is about flow. It’s a current, a river that moves between us; resourcing, nourishing, allowing things to grow.

Lynne Twist writes about how money becomes deeply nourishing when we let it move in the direction of what we truly care about, our real commitments, our values, our love. When we appreciate what we have and direct it toward what matters, it tends to expand. When we invite others into that flow, collaboration creates a different kind of prosperity.

That clicked in my body like a soft yes:

Oh. Right. It’s not meant to sit. It’s meant to circulate.

When money gets stuck; hoarded, clutched, used as a way to prop ourselves above others it stops being a current and becomes a dam. And dams, in the long run, don’t just hold things back; they warp the whole ecosystem.

On this retreat, I could feel how much my body actually wants to be in right relationship with money. Not in denial of it. Not worshiping it.

Just:

Letting it move.

Letting it support me, my partner, our home, our bodies.

Letting it support the people and projects I believe in.

Letting it be a tool for connection instead of a shield against it.

After all, rising tides rise all boats.

A new practice: putting my money where my mouth & heart are

So here’s what this insight is asking of me; not just as a nice idea, but as an actual practice:

I’m committing to making financial support a regular ritual, not a one-off feel-good moment.

Not just: “Oh, I happened to be generous that one time.”

But: “Every month, as a practice, I circulate some of this current.”

To the people whose work moves me.

To friends and peers whose art, services, and creations I want to see flourish.

To the spaces and communities that feel like home for the nervous system.

From the recognition that if I’m resourced, and my cup is full, hoarding the overflow is actually out of integrity with who I say I am (and boring!)

Life is too short, and honestly too weird, not to share abundance when we are fortunate enough to have it.

Belonging with money, not despite it

Underneath all of this is a very young part of me that still wonders:

Can I be different and still belong?

Can I have money and still be kind, humble, real?

Can I be resourced and still be trusted?

I’m slowly, gently, letting the answer be yes.

Yes, I can be the girl in the cow-print skirt who also has a robust savings account.

Yes, I can be allergic to elitism and still be deeply, unapologetically supported by the work I do.

Maybe belonging isn’t about sanding down the edges or staying small enough to not upset anyone.

Maybe belonging, real belonging, includes being honest about what we have, what we don’t, what we fear, and what we’re learning to flow.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion, just this:

Money is a current.

I’m learning, slowly, to stand in the river without armoring up. To let it move through my life without letting it decide my worth or my place in the pack.

To tell the truth about what’s here.

To stay humble.

To keep my heart open.

To support the people around me so we all rise together.

And to remember that somewhere out there, there’s still a claymation version of me, awkward, tender, a little strange, reminding me that being seen in my fullness has always been part of the story.

Upcoming Group Offering:

December 3rd → Desire Mapping @ Archipelago (Denver)

A 3-hour immersion into intimacy with yourself and/or a partner through the lens of the Dual Control Model and the five senses. We’ll explore what turns you on and what shuts you down, gently mapping accelerators and brakes in your erotic system while using scent, sound, touch, taste, and sight as anchors. Come to know your own body’s “yes,” “no,” and “not yet” with more clarity, safety, and play.

Learn More & Sign Up Here

1:1 Somatic Intimacy Coaching

For individuals or couples who are ready to get honest about what’s happening in their bodies and relationships. Together, we work with the nervous system, attachment patterns, and desire:

• tending to shame and old stories around sex, love, and worthiness

• practicing clear boundaries, requests, and repair (think: NVC, Wheel of Consent, and real-life conversations)

• reconnecting to pleasure as a source of power, not performance

Sessions are offered virtually and in person in Boulder, CO.

This is not “fix yourself so you can be lovable” work — it’s remember who you are and build relationships that can actually hold that.

Learn More

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Welcome back to Letters from the Body, my space for reflections on love, intimacy, and humanness, the tender edges of becoming, the places where we wrestle with the unknown, and the practices that help us return home to ourselves.

This month, I’ve been thinking about control, how tightly I grip it when life feels uncertain, and what happens when I finally let go.

It all started with a snake.

The Encounter

I was on the phone with my therapist when I saw it…a flash of motion at the edge of the patio.

A snake slithering from the concrete into the shed.

Initially I froze. My stomach clenched. Then curiosity crept in, the kind that makes you want to lean closer even though every instinct says don’t move.

I’ve been taking my therapy calls outside lately because Colorado’s been giving us the most gorgeous, drawn-out fall, longer than any I’ve experienced since moving to Boulder in 2019.

The snake appeared at the exact moment I had asked my therapist for practices to “tie a bow on autumn.”

Autumn, the luteal of the seasons. A time of completion. A time to tie up loose ends, slow down, and listen for what’s closing.

This week, a lot of the thorn-in-my-side things; the adulting, paperwork, bureaucratic, shitty side-of-capitalism things, finally came to completion.

On Control & The Black Hole

When life makes me feel out of control, I can’t always see why it’s happening, let alone find the beauty in it. The truth is, I’ve felt under-resourced for so long I forgot what being resourced even feels like.

And when I’m under-resourced, my M.O. is to do everything myself. I don’t “waste time” asking for help because I assume it’ll take longer to explain than to just do it. Classic control pattern.

But the dust is finally starting to settle, and I can feel myself coming back to presence.

Lately, I’ve also noticed this tendency, a persnickety little reflex, to try and make choices before they even need to be made. As if by staying one step ahead, I can outwit uncertainty.

My grandpa used to always say, “Sometimes I have to stop and remember I’m not the general manager of the universe.”

I think about that line a lot lately.

A dear sister recently told me I was being Dom’d by life, and that I was resisting it. That I needed to stop fighting and remember how to surrender.

She’s not wrong…

When I’m free-falling through a lack-of-control black hole, drowning in documents, instead of letting it take me, I grip harder to the pen I’m signing with, to the illusion of order, to the faint familiar smell of ease, like my life depends on it.

I can’t possibly find comfort in the unknown.

And in doing so, I’ve developed this terrible habit of being anywhere but where I am. Constantly trying to solve unsolvable problems, as if I’m back in chemistry class, banging my head against the table without ever raising my hand.

The Medicine of Shedding

Now, sitting here on what feels like the beginning of being on “the other side,” I keep thinking about the snake.

The snake, a symbol of rebirth. She sheds her skin only to emerge raw and vulnerable, new and alive, before her next layer of protection grows in.

Ted Andrews, in Animal Speak, calls the snake a “universal symbol of the exploration of the mysteries of life.”

Today, she reminds me to get deliciously intimate with that mystery.

To me, the mystery is all about letting go of control.

Letting myself be driven by life instead of trying to backseat-drive the universe. (How annoying for life!)

Andrews also says the snake is fire medicine, the medicine of transmutation. The symbol of transformation and healing.

She’s carved into the Caduceus, the symbol of modern medicine, reminding me that I’m changing and healing on a deeper level than I can see. That I have to allow the transformation if I want to heal.

When snakes don’t shed their skin properly, it’s called retained shed, a dangerous condition that can make them blind, infected, or even kill them. They have to release the old to stay alive.

So do we.

We can’t stay the same. It’s impossible. Our discomfort with change just delays the natural unfolding of transformation.

Instead of gripping the wheel, I have to unclench, breathe, and look around long enough to notice that life’s still happening, even when I’m not steering it. That’s where healing begins.

The Life / Death / Life Cycle

The snake must shed her skin to survive, death and rebirth, again and again.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in Women Who Run With the Wolves, calls this the life / death / life cycle, the wild, natural rhythm of all things that must die in order to keep living. The snake knows this. She doesn’t resist the decay; she leans into it.

Not only must I surrender control, I must be willing to let go of what once was. To release the expectations of what I thought things should look like.

Only when I let the past truly die can I be reborn, emerging into a world more beautiful than I ever thought possible.

It’s the hero’s journey: to let the story be interesting, messy, even catastrophic. To let old versions of reality decompose into fertile soil.

That’s the compost where rebirth grows.

For me, rebirth feels like the moment I finally take responsibility for my life. When I move out of victimhood and into that holy-fuck realization that every scar, every detour, every speed bump was perfectly placed. Every one built the scar tissue I needed to see the magic of life…

well fuck, at least they make a hell of a story!

Cosmic Consciousness

“The snake is cosmic consciousness — the ability to experience all things without resistance, and the knowledge that all things are equal in creation.”

Could it be any clearer?

Like the Borg said: Resistance is futile.

So here I am, trying to stop resisting my most cherished Dom, the mystery of life itself. Holding the snake in my awareness as my North Star of cosmic consciousness.

If all things are equal in creation, then everything becomes subjective. The part of me allergic to right and wrong, good and evil, loves that ethos. It’s innately tantric, divinity in everything.

The holiness of a subway rat is no less sacred than that of a church pastor.

A radical, gorgeous notion. A compass for unconditional love.

A Season of Transition

“It signals a great transition in life through new opportunities and changes.”

And so I sit back in the mystery-car of life, watching this turbulent season unfold:

A time when I unexpectedly moved in with my partner during a big transition for his kids, sparked by my house flood. A time that gifted us a low-stakes trial run of living together before finding a new home.

A time when uncomfortable shifts at work cracked open more space for my creativity to flow.

A time when chapters finally closed so new pages could begin.

What a fucking gift.

Thank you, snake, for your fire medicine, for reminding me that surrender is essential, that control is a myth, and that every skin I shed increases my ability to experience the magic of life.

Reflection Prompt

Where are you still gripping the wheel instead of letting life drive?

What skin is asking to be shed before winter?

Offerings & Invitations

As I write about surrender, I keep thinking about how we orient to cycles, personal, seasonal, lunar. The snake teaches us to shed what’s complete; the moon teaches us how to live that rhythm every month.

Align with the Rhythms of Nature

If you’re craving a way to slow down and reconnect with nature’s pulse, check out the 2026 Moon Calendar, a project I’m proud to support.

Lovingly created by a circle of women from around the world, the Moon Calendar helps you organize life around the moon’s cycles rather than the artificial pace of the Gregorian month. Each “moon-th” invites reflection through original art, journaling prompts, astrological insights, and space to track your own cycles and intentions.

The 2026 theme is Ancestry, and proceeds support an incredible project bringing the traditional Maya Calendar back to Yucatán schools, teaching children how to live in harmony with the Sun, Moon, and Stars.

Together, we’re remembering what it means to live in rhythm with sacred time.

Brave Boundaries: a Class for Teen Girls

This Sunday, I’ll be teaching my first ever class for teenagers with Hey Birdie: Brave Boundaries, an embodied consent workshop for 15- to 16-year-old girls.

It’s always been a dream of mine to bring this work to teens, to give young women language for their boundaries, tools for self-trust, and a felt sense of safety in their own bodies. I’m thrilled (and honestly a little emotional) to see this dream becoming real.

If you have kids, nieces, students, or other young humans in your life who could benefit from learning embodied consent, I’d love to hear how I can support them.

Closing

As we edge toward winter, may you find the courage to loosen your grip, the softness to let what’s dying fall away, and the trust to believe that every ending is just another beginning.

May we all keep shedding, together.

With love & truth,

Jade

www.jadelevinson.com

Welcome to Letters from the Body, a new space for monthly reflections on love, intimacy, and humanness.

Here, I’ll share the real-time edges of my own becoming: the tenderness, the beauty, the chaos, and the practices that bring me back home.

Each season, I’ll explore what it means to stay open; in our bodies, our relationships, and our truth, even when life feels impossibly full.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Fall is the season of letting go, a time for shedding and completion as we inch closer to winter, when the world turns inward and quiet.

It’s nature’s reminder that endings can be beautiful, and that decay makes room for deeper rooting.

I’ve been feeling this call toward completion and reflection lately, an invitation to slow down, to release what’s no longer needed, and to tend to what’s still alive inside.

This year has been one of immense change: six solo weeks in India, a second house flood, moving in with my partner and his two kids, and big shifts in my work landscape.

Each day I’m learning how to stay in my body, protect my temple, and keep my heart open, even as it breaks again and again.

Because when life feels overwhelming, our instinct is to close off, to numb, to turn away.

And yet, when we stay open, even tremblingly so, we make space for the full bandwidth of the human experience: heartbreak and joy, loss and love.

Only the willingness we have to dig deep into the ground will be matched equally by the height of the beautiful rose that grows above.

The Practice of Returning to Ourselves

Lately, I’ve been remembering the importance of coming back to ourselves through self-pleasure, not as a luxury, but as ritual self care.

To fill my own cup first.

To meet my partner from a place of wholeness, not hunger.

When we rely on others to fill our emptiness, connection becomes a transaction.

But when we are already full, connection becomes a bonus.

Self-pleasure, writing, stillness, movement, solitude, artist dates, friend time; these are the ways I remember myself.

These are the ways I return when the storm hits.

On Step-Parenthood and Devotion

Stepping into the beginnings of a step-parent role has been one of the deepest initiations of my life.

It’s learning to parent without the years that came before you.

It’s loving children who aren’t yours, even when that love isn’t always reflected back in words or actions.

It’s showing up, again and again, without expectation of recognition.

I think part of why this work runs so deep for me is because of my own experience as a child of divorce.

Over the years, I had a wide array of step-parents, each bringing their own textures of love, distance, and learning.

That history made me extra sensitive to how I show up with my partner’s boys.

I know firsthand how confusing it can be when adults orbit your family with a variety of intentions and uncertain roots.

So I tread with care, wanting to offer love without replacing, to be steady without overstepping.

And this process, of stepping into a step-parent role now, as an adult is having me re-explore parts of my own experience of my parents’ divorce.

It’s confronting as fuck.

Old feelings rise up. Tender ones. Protective ones. It’s like tending two timelines at once: the eleven-year-old in me and the woman I am now, both trying to figure out how to love in a house that wasn’t originally ours.

Recently while I was in a medicine ceremony with my dad (I know… big!), I realized that Mother Earth, in her endless generosity and constant presence, is the gold standard of motherhood. She gives without asking, loves without needing, and keeps showing up. That’s my north star now.

When I’m with the kids, my daily practice is regulation, noticing the first flickers of dysregulation before they spiral into overwhelm.

Using my tools before it’s triage.

Staying open and loving without collapsing into old triggers.

It’s not easy. It takes work, presence, and patience. But it happens.

Resourcing Through Entropy

There are moments that test everything I know

when it takes me 6 months to replace my driver’s license because of a system error,

when the toilet overflows and my bedroom is condemned (a literal shitstorm),

when I’m still battling with our home owner’s insurance company 5 months after,

when a family member gets sick,

when my partner’s son refuses to eat breakfast because his dad’s away.

when I wake up with a migraine that puts me out for 24 hours,

Each time, I return to what roots me.

What are your core truths that bring you back to center when you are surrounded by entropy?

From My Bookshelf

I’ve been reading Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman. It’s a hopeful and practical reimagining of how we can build a world rooted in trust, generosity, and collective care.

It’s a reminder that imagining better systems in our relationships, our communities, and our own inner worlds isn’t naïve, it’s necessary.

We need books like these right now. Desperately.

Upcoming Workshops

If you’re navigating your own season of transition: heartbreak, change, or expansion —these circles are spaces to come home to yourself.

🌿 The Wheel of Consent Workshop – November 25, Denver, CO

An evening of embodied exploration in boundaries, receiving, and honest communication.

🔥 Desire Mapping Workshop – December 3, Denver, CO

A guided journey into your authentic desires — what lights you up and brings you home.

Closing

As the leaves fall and the air cools, I’m reminded that endings can be soft, that letting go is its own kind of grace.

May this season bring you the courage to release what’s ready to die, and the tenderness to nurture what wants to live.

May you return, again and again, to your body’s quiet wisdom.

With love & truth,

Jade

www.jadelevinson.com

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