Women who have been sexually violated; been physically, sexually and/or emotionally abused too often suppress their ideas, desires, and leadership because they would rather deny their own power, than risk abusing it - risk harming others in the ways that we have been harmed.

Women suppress and internalize their intensity, be it emotional energy, intellectual brilliance, physical strength, sexual appetites, destructive and creative magnitudes. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes writes in Women Who Run with the Wolves, “When women are encouraged or forced to be silent in order to survive an impossible situation of corrupt or unjust power in the family, community or world then women are amputated from the wild nature and their silence is not serenity but an enormous defense against being harmed.”

In her book, Truth or Dare, Starhawk defines three types of power: power-over, power-from-within, and power-with.

“Power-over is linked to domination and control; power-from-within is linked to the mysteries that awaken our deepest abilities and potential. Power-with is social power, the influence we wield among equals.”

Sexual Memoir is a practice ground for women to move through their fear of themselves so that they can connect to the power of their instinctive nature and learn to trust both its force and its wisdom.

I am deeply committed to creating a psychologically and emotionally safe community for women to tap their personal power and experience how our personal empowerment inspires and empowers those around us.

As Starhawk writes, “We are accustomed to power-over, so steeped in its language and its implicit threats, that the insides of our minds resemble the battlefield and the jail.”

Though my own personal process of liberation is ongoing, my reflections on power are not abstract.

Between 2004 and 2015 I steeped myself in experiential study of the 7 core principles and values of the International Cooperative Alliance. I worked as a member-owner of a democratically managed and cooperatively run restaurant. For many years I also served as a co-chair of the coordinating committee for the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy (now integrated with the Western Conference as the Worker Co-op Conference). I spent time in more than ten intentional communities.

During these years I also trained as a certified mediator and spent 4 years going through and then staffing ALisa Starkweather’s programs including Women in Power, Daughters of the Earth, and the Priestess Path Apprenticeship.

I began in-person training with Dr. Estés in 2012 and in 2015 it became excruciatingly clear to me that my “showing up in my power” in leadership in public and community spaces was a thinly veiled compensation for a deeply dysfunctional personal life rooted in desperation for belonging, a deep hatred of my body, and an intense fear of exposure.

I resigned from positions, quit jobs and threw myself into my own self-healing, unknowingly playing out deeper layers of these same, problematic personal patterns as I sought empowerment and security within myself, but this time in hierarchical settings.

I integrate these years of experiential learning and self-study into the programs that I create as I strive to balance structure and flow. I do this by working to stay deeply attuned and responsive to my participants. 

I rest into my leadership confident that I am not interested in either power-over, control, extraction or manipulation. As Audre Lorde writes in her essay Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power: “Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.”

Establishing my own inner-security and peace has been an arduous journey, one that I am not willing to sacrifice or stray from for the illusory security of power-over. Sexual Memoir is a passion project, an apprenticeship, an offering. 

It is a practice, a willingness to surrender to the creative pulse that moves through my body, requiring ecstatic movement and uninhibited expression. A willingness to be powerful.

Sexual Memoir is a dedication, a devotion to the Earth, a tending to the sacredness of her body by awakening to the sacredness of my own & inviting other women into a deeper, more joyful embodiment of themselves.

Sexual Memoir is a prayer for the next generation, an expression of my hope that if we can move from the power of our instinctual knowing, we may have a chance at continuation as a species.

Sexual Memoir is an embodiment of my love for the deep feminine.