My biggest life initiation was navigating a miscarriage while being cheated on in my late twenties. I had no support network around me, no one to call, and I went into the depths of isolation and despair. I remember a pivotal moment when I stopped fighting it and...

When I'm down I tend to withdraw and yet there's such power and medicine in being transparent when we struggle, right? Letting go of the shame and blame, and of feeling that it's our personal shortcomings. Bringing awareness to how impacted we are by the larger...

      Recently I was told by a man that if I only stepped into my power, I could be such a powerful force.     Oh.     So you get to define power and then assess whether or not I am powerful!   Bwhahahaaaaha!    In my past, I have doubted my expressions and sense of...

        I think there is a certain flavour of angst, belonging only to women who are childfree or childless that invites witnessing and compassion ('childfree' is the term often used for women who have made an empowered choice not to have children).   It doesn't...

When do you feel most safe? Someone I worked with for a while, asked me to leave the team we were both on this past year, because they didn't feel safe with me, due to me triggering something in them. At first I felt like it was really lame to not want to unpack that...

'Drama' is such an ugly word. Often spat rather than spoken in contemptuous and critical tones, it is a shaming accusation to receive. What I don't think we realise is that the place where the need to describe something as 'drama' comes from the same wound that...

I have never spoken publicly about open relating and polyamory before..... Partially because I've been exploring my stance, and also because I was a little too overwhelmed by what I've experienced out in the world in people and communities and facilitators and...

I remember some years ago participating in a silent ritual at a sexuality-themed festival, where every few minutes I was facing another man and offering myself in service to his desires, without words (don't worry, I could say 'no' at any point!).   There is...

While anger is an appropriate and I believe needed response to the injustice of legislation that prevents rightful bodily autonomy, I'm reflecting on our self-responsibility, as women, in all things body-related.   I'm reflecting on a bigger picture, our long...

I've been reflecting on the need for surrendering to crisis both personally and globally, recently. The 'trying to survive' and 'get on with life as normal' does not serve us or life on this planet. My tendency in crisis when I'm operating from my trauma response is...

In this climate of fear and uncertainty, it is a strange time in the history of the world to even think about having children... or make any kind of long-term plan for that matter. As I approach my forties, and the timespan in which I am able to give birth to a child...

I don’t remember exactly when and how it shifted. How I changed from seeing my period as a monthly burden to bare - an uncomfortable consequence of having a female body that I found ways to manage, so that I could almost pretend it wasn’t happening - to something that...

First published by Ecohustler I used to think of ‘activists’ as being people ‘over there’, campaigning and fighting and….well, doing their activist thing, while I could gratefully admire them from the distance. I imagine many of us have felt this way. “At least...

We tend to think of trauma as having to do with people who've been to war or suffered terrible abuse in their past. What we don't collectively realise (but I believe are waking up to) is that our basic standard of reality in the current world is trauma-inducing....

I've witnessed a lot of people talking about the importance of love without attachment - especially in neo tantra and polyamory scenes - and this is creating what I believe is a lot of spiritual bypassing, shame and misunderstanding. Let's get things in perspective:...

Everything begins in my body... What would intimately connecting with others be like if we came from a place of being saturated with the simple yet profound pleasure of feeling at home in our body? What if through our own presence penetrating our cells, turning...

There is nothing quite like falling in love to show you where you are abandoning yourself... When we feel disconnected or hurt or resentful because we let our partner cross a boundary, or realise we are manipulating or controlling in order to get love, or ignore what...

Through the shaming I received around sex growing up, my strategy to feel a sense of ease around it led me to unconsciously battle shame through cultivating a sense that there was nothing I was fazed by. This journey came to a head when I found myself on a porn set in...

More and more in daily life, I have little moments of realising how much suffering it causes me and the world around me, to experience myself as an isolated little unit, striving for independence and success in the world. A moment of realising I am getting lost in the...

What if one reason we struggle in our intimate life, is because we're wanting to get all our needs met from that one place? Perhaps the reason we put so much value, and hence so much strain on romantic and sexual relationships is because we are disconnected from the...

While it can be touching to see social media used for intimate revelations, when it's connected to promoting a service or an offering, it’s still a marketing ploy, and smells of something quite twisted and manipulative, although I imagine it’s quite unconscious for...

On living in an intentional community and 'happiness' 'Community' taps so deeply into the zeitgeist of today, promising the possibilities of connection, collaboration, togetherness and belonging that so many of us are hungry for in this world. Someone asked the other...

Women... fact: if you suppress your own sexuality, you are very likely projecting this onto others, including men. If you are not allowing yourself to be comfortable as a sexual being, if you are not at ease with your own initiator and your inner...

Flirting, in its potential, is not some form of 'base' or 'lower' impulse, like it's often thought of, due to our sex-negative conditioning and history of gender wars.... Flirting is a form of nourishment: when we allow ourselves to be curious about each other and for...

During my first professional sexuality training, I was explicitly encouraged to have no boundaries. If there was a man I didn't want to do an intimate exchange with, I was told I should work through my resistance, that my boundaries were due to my 'issues'. And so I...

Whenever I or others question anything about women and victimhood, there are often accusations of being misogynist, which - as someone who has devoted a good portion of my life to loving the Feminine and supporting women's empowerment - is so far from the truth I...

I often wish I had never been exposed to 'spiritual' literature and philosophies. Especially the maxim 'happiness is an inside job'. Sure, there is truth in that. But our 'spirituality' emanates from the paradigm we are embedded in... and we end up using spirituality...

When combined with our heart and our awareness we can use our sexuality for its highest purpose: embracing, feeling deeply connected to and riding the very crest of life's creative expression through us. Allowing our lust for and communion with life. But how to allow...

Women who say yes to themselves as sovereign, sexual beings are powerful creatures. And that is a scary thing for us in a world with a paradigm of scarcity and 'power over', in which someone having power, generally means it's both taken away from someone else and also...

The deeper I go into my menstrual cycle awareness, the more I sense that those last few days before bleeding are such an important and precious time for feeling. Whether it's emotions that I've managed to gloss over or suppress the month before, or whether it's...

What if you paused for a moment... and remembered the soft animal of your body as an extension of the earth. What if you took a breath and sensed your capacity for the exquisite: the simple, sensual communing with life. Is there a pleasure in belonging to her? Of...

  Why bother making friends with our sexuality? Why lift the lid on pandoras box when it can make us feel such discomfort or fear? Perhaps we feel like we'd rather keep the lid on: after all it's only sex. My extensive personal enquiry around sexuality has...

  One of our first experiences of being alive, of incarnating into the physical realm inside our mothers wombs is being held. I believe we still have this blueprint in our bodies: we hold the cellular memory of being held. Life is a matrix of multiple layers of...

You know that thing - where your neediness drives someone else away or vice versa? The more you feel someone's neediness, the more claustrophobic you feel - or the other way around: the more you feel someone's avoidance of intimacy with you, the more needy you feel....

So hungry have we been for permission to be wild and free after the shaming and miserable confines of conditioning around our sexuality, that a new industry of 'sex-positive' gatherings, festivals and workshops is booming... a plethora of options available to those...

I know it's a tremendously complex issue. And perhaps I'd do better to stay clear of it, rather than stirring up shit storms... I just know that the current narrative we have isn't working and it's time to create a new one. This is a conversation that needs to be had....

Goddess or Slut? Artist or Narcissist? Creatrix of life or big-mouthed bore? Worthy of shaming or of reverence? Passionate activism or poor taste? Take your first thought and turn it around: what does it reveal about you? I bleed to make human life possible. My womb...

Masturbation is a way of thanking the universe for having a body. A possible misfortune of the movement towards 'conscious' sexuality is that it polarises us even more into 'sacred' and 'non-sacred' forms of sexual expression. There is no such thing. There is only a...

On showing off... What is the difference between showing off, self-expression or art? What is ego-masturbation and what is pure, creative expression of spirit? Is it either or? And who gets to decide? To celebrate ourselves and allow our inner worlds to become...

I know that sexual shaming is rampant universally, but through my work I often come into contact with how women - feeling threatened by male desire - so often shame men, sometimes overtly, but often unconsciously. I know many of us have been victims to men’s desire...

There is nothing quite like suffering as a catalyst for climbing the ladder of perspective. Up and up, each rung a slightly more whole picture, a little more Truth. Each step, you realise you feel a little freer. Every time you pause and take a breath and realise you...

In this era of abundance of and easy access to intense experiences, there seems to be the tendency to try and cram in as much as possible. Entertainment, festivals, self-development workshops, plant medicine rituals, erotic encounters…we are intensity junkies, our...

If women are to be regarded equal in value in the world and our power and the medicine we bring, honoured, then I believe that part of what we must move towards is men learning to meet their feelings of inferiority and smallness, if or when they arise. Of course we...

To give and receive is one the most fundamental energetic movements of life. Every breath we take contains this wisdom. And like all the most profound things in life, there lies a paradox - that in its full beauty and potential, by deeply giving we can receive, and by...

What is strength? I am being spanked so hard by life right now, so magnificently confronted with what feels like every single limiting belief I have around what it is to be strong. Lovingly yet firmly guided, to see that anything other than truly walking my talk is no...

When I was younger, I used to think that the way we free ourselves from the repression of our sexuality was to reduce sex until it became meaningless, to have no boundaries, because boundaries meant shame and shame was bad. It took me hanging out at a porn shoot in...

How we unconsciously suppress the Feminine from Ruby May on Vimeo.