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Open Wounds. The NSFW podcast where we explore trauma of every shape and form. Join us as we hear from everyday people about their lives and learn from each other to move from surviving to thriving.
Candice (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Open Wounds podcast. I'm your host, Candice. This podcast is about healing the wounds that you can't see and leading a revolution against oppressive systems that keep them open. We're going to talk about really practical tools for managing complex PTSD, as well as dive into relevant current day topics that make healing a daily practice. You can follow us at ig at open wounds podcast or
watch on YouTube at Open Wounds Podcast. Please rate, review, like, subscribe, all the things and enjoy this week's episode.
Candice (00:37)
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Open Moods podcast. I have with me today a guest. Her name is Darshana. She is a erotic wholeness guide, a sexual wellness expert. She's been featured on Goop and other publications regarding how we can reclaim our sexuality and feel whole and present in our bodies. So welcome to the podcast.
Darshana Avila (01:03)
Thank you for having me, Candace.
Candice (01:05)
Yeah, so if you want to tell our guests and our viewers and our listeners a little bit about how, because this isn't like, you're not just a CPA, like how did you end up becoming a erotic homeless guide That's kind of a unique role and unique thing to do in our society.
Darshana Avila (01:23)
Yeah, it is definitely that. I am not a CPA. I did have a corporate career before this was my life. And I'm probably the only erotic wholeness guide out there because that is my body of work. That is what I have evolved over my decade plus of being in private practice and having my life organized around this. Yeah, and I can back it up to once upon a time, I had a corporate career and I had a life that...
Candice (01:27)
you
Darshana Avila (01:51)
looked very much like the things we are taught to associate with success. So I got married to a handsome man, we both had our jobs that were growing, we bought a home, it looked great on the outside, and yet on the inside it did not feel great. And many people will relate to that, no doubt, because that is a really common experience, that we live in a culture that is far more concerned with the appearance and the status quo than
Am I actually alive here? Am I thriving here? Is this authentic and resonant for me? And what happened was I really began to explore my spirituality in a deep way first and foremost, and that drove a wedge into my marriage. And then when we separated, I was also exploring sexuality by default because I started dating again and having intimate encounters with the people I was dating and I'm realizing, ⁓ my God.
There's so much I don't know about myself sexually. There's so much that I don't know actually about my spirituality and I'm exploring both of these areas and feeling very lit up by them. It was a really exciting chapter in my life. Yet the piece that was intrinsically like off to me was why do sex and spirit have to be separated from one another? ⁓ Where is the place where they can merge and I can have.
Candice (03:13)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (03:17)
these two things that are lighting me up both be really integrated. And so that set me even further along my path and got me to the point where I, the marriage was already done. I parted ways with the corporate career. I really like made a massive shift and I was blessed with the gift of naivety at that point in time, ignorance. Like I didn't know what I was really signing on for and where my path would lead me. I simply knew that if I kept
Candice (03:37)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (03:47)
going with that status quo, keeping up of appearances type of life, it was gonna suck my soul. And I was not going to feel fulfilled. And so we can fast forward. ⁓ I dove deep into these personal explorations and then little by little, when I chose to leave the corporate life, I thought that I would be coaching people more on the spirituality side of my experience.
and probably turning around and helping other corporate types feel more spiritually fulfilled. But life had a different plan for me. And it's taken me across the globe multiple times over. It's put me on a Netflix show that has been seen around the world. It's put me on stages to speak to all manner of people. And most dear to me is it's had me in a thriving private practice for many years now where I get to support others, primarily women.
I work, the vast majority of my clients are women, whether they come individually or alongside their partner, to really explore for themselves these questions of beyond the status quo, what do I want? And in this case, the status quo for many of us is it can run the gamut of, and I understand this might be related to your background, people who grew up with a lot of...
religious conservatism get taught certain things about their sexuality, people who grow up simply in the culture that has girls and women recognize themselves as secondary to and they're there to fulfill another person's pleasure or another person's needs, sexually and non-sexually. The people pleasing and perfectionism that are so common for women is rooted in
Candice (05:23)
Yes.
Darshana Avila (05:39)
all of the conditioning we receive, whether it's implicit or explicit, from the time we're really little about who we are in relation to other people, what relationship we get to have with our bodies, does our pleasure even matter? And many of us never get the opportunity, or it comes far later in life, to really examine the conditioning that we've been shaped by and the norms that we've simply taken on.
And that's really what I help people do is start to not just ask these deep questions, but answer them from their bodies wisdom and to step into the power that our erotic energy is. And I want to just, I know I'm on a little bit of a monologue here. want to define eroticism because I know that. Yeah, it's.
Candice (06:27)
No, that's okay. Go ahead.
Yeah, that was going to be my next question. Yeah, if you could define that.
Darshana Avila (06:35)
It's a word that really trips a lot of people up. I often use the example of my oldest friend who I am in my mid-40s and we first met at 17. So we've got a lot of history here. We would probably not give each other the time of day right now, truth be told. But the reason she's such a great example is she is a active, practicing Catholic, mother of three, suburban life, raising her kids.
Candice (06:50)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (07:02)
corporate career, like her life and my life look incredibly different from one another. And there's a deep love and a deep bond. And she's been cheerleading for my work all along, even with those differences. But she reflected to me, she's like, you know, Darshana, this word erotic, I think you're alienating a lot of people. And she's like, I associate it with porn or with things that are like really like out there. it's like, it's so interesting to me to...
Candice (07:19)
Yeah
Right.
Darshana Avila (07:31)
recognize the wide distinctions between how people understand the use of language. I mean, you know this on so many levels, I say a word, you say a word, it's the same word, but totally different meanings. So, Auraumicism, I take it to its root that it really is more like life force energy. It's our vitality, it's what animates us. And so, yes, it's present in our sexual expression.
Candice (07:43)
Right.
Darshana Avila (07:58)
But it's also present in our activism, in our artistry, in our creativity. It's present in the way we tend to our relationships, whether we're talking about how we parent our children, how we show up in community, intimate partnership, sure, but it is the animating force and we live in a culture that actively wants to suppress that. So.
Candice (08:22)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (08:23)
by creating this really narrow view of eroticism as like a tawdry expression of sexuality, that's a really effective way to cut us off from our power because life force is power. So we know that our sexuality is suppressed and shamed and stigmatized in so many ways. And how we understand eroticism for the vast majority of us is an example of that. And so when we don't recognize that our life force is about
Candice (08:34)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (08:52)
not just creating another human life, but all the ways that we live ours and where we channel our passion, we're a lot more compliant. When we awaken to the fact that, hey, this is my birthright, this is my true nature, to be erotic is what it means really to be human. And we get to celebrate that and channel that with intention, life looks very different.
feels very different, change happens on a different level. And that's what I'm really passionate about helping people connect to.
Candice (09:26)
Yeah. So when you're talking about the connection between spirituality and sensuality or eroticism or whatever we want to term it here, it reminded me of a book I'm currently listening to by Neil Donald Walsh where he he's having these conversations with source or God or what will you and they're talking about spirituality and sexuality are just totally intertwined but
Darshana Avila (09:43)
Mm-hmm.
Candice (09:51)
we with our religious programming and our cultural programming and the patriarchy and everything, we've kind of made them siloed, right? Like spirituality is over here and it's praying and it's being dutiful to whatever, you know, higher power you have. ⁓ And then sexuality is over here and we don't really talk about that. that's like, it's supposed to only be, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of like rules and restriction.
Darshana Avila (10:00)
⁓ huh.
What? Don't go there! Don't go there! ⁓
Candice (10:19)
that society and culture has put around eroticism and sexuality. And it's like, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. So I feel like, you know, that, is a common theme for people, especially once they have been in a relationship for a while and they start to go, is this it? Like, is this what this is? Is this what I'm going to experience for the rest of my life? And then they can sort of, you know, have like, you know, they might blame their partner.
Darshana Avila (10:23)
Mm-hmm.
Candice (10:47)
they might blame their religion, might blame whatever, their body, but I think there's a lot of things converging that we kind of don't understand because it is so taboo and it is so shameful and so demonized or whatever you will. So how, when people are coming to you and they're saying, I'm dissatisfied with my relationships or I'm dissatisfied with my sex life or I'm dissatisfied with how my body reacts when I'm having these interactions with people, where's like,
the foundation that you start with people.
Darshana Avila (11:19)
Yeah, well, the inroads is to recognize that that sense of dissatisfaction or disconnect is a signal more so than a problem. It's a signal that something is out of alignment here. Something is out of integrity here. And a lot of that is rooted in the cultural conditioning that we've spoken to. The reason why we're not interested in sex or don't feel satisfied is because we've never been having sex that is interesting or satisfying to us to begin with for many people.
Candice (11:47)
Mm,
Darshana Avila (11:48)
especially many women. ⁓
Candice (11:48)
yeah. Right.
Darshana Avila (11:51)
We get handed a script and regardless of whoever's listening to this, regardless of your religious background, your sexual orientation or what have you, our dominant culture's script tells us sex is penis in vagina intercourse. And that it basically begins with the penis having an erection and it ends with the penis ejaculating.
Candice (12:15)
It's all about the penis.
Darshana Avila (12:17)
Like,
let me take it down to the brass tacks. So even if there's a part of you that hears me say that, it's like, no, my sex has got all these other things going on. Okay, that's good for you. I'm proud of you. I'm happy for you. But this is the acculturation, right? That it is this very specific act that really clearly has an imbalance, even though it takes two, there's very little consideration given then for the woman or the female person in that equation there.
Candice (12:20)
Right.
Darshana Avila (12:46)
And like I said, regardless of your background, the culture that we live in here, our dominant culture, still upholds that as the norm. So the scripts that we follow regarding our sexuality derive from that. And if we never stop to question, wait a minute, hang on, hold up here, is this doing it for me? Am I enjoying this? Do I feel safe here? Do I feel centered here? What about my pleasure? What do I like?
what really invites me to feel open and connected with my partner. Because sex is not a purely physical mechanistic experience, no matter how much we might want to treat it as such. And I would argue it's really problematic when we're treating it that way.
Candice (13:29)
Right, I feel like
even to the male or the other person in this equation, when we aren't allowing an intimacy, an emotional connection during those things, that's also problematic. When it's so mechanical and transactional that two people are just there for the moment and then they're not talking, they're not engaging, they're not connecting, that also can create a situation where
even though the man may be getting off, so to speak, is he experiencing the full spectrum of what he could experience in this relationship.
Darshana Avila (14:05)
Totally.
Right. And intimacy and sex are not the same thing. Sex can be intimate. Intimacy can exist without sex. Let's bring spirituality into the equation here. Sex can be a deeply spiritual experience. The moment of orgasm, when you are in an altered state of consciousness, even for only a few seconds, when all of the strictures that bind and the sense of propriety, like you're out of control.
And many of us, you know, like, what do you hear when someone's like in those states, the throws of ecstasy? my God, my God, right? Like, there's a reason for this though, because for that brief window of time, we open ourselves up to something that is beyond our ordinary state and our ordinary ways of being and relating. And there's a tremendous amount of surrender in that, and there's a tremendous depth of intimacy available, but often,
we really only orient to that as those couple of seconds. And we treat like the rest of sex as something purely mechanistic. And so the opportunity and the invitation here is really like getting in touch with all these facets of, again, our erotic nature. I'm going to emphasize that one again. To be human is to be erotic. There's no coincidence here. This is not an accident. We were not imbued with our sense fac-
and pleasure as, or rather, I'm sorry, sex as a pleasurable act. Like these things are not simply pure coincidence. It's by design, I would argue. Whatever your understanding of the creative force, divinity, spirit, source, what have you, like, it's just, we didn't get here by some pure, like, oops. And so we have the opportunity then to really consider, okay, I've been handed a particular script, shape,
by cultural norms. Now, let's name these for what they are. Capitalism, patriarchy, and religious conservatism, which all interlock with one another. You can add other things onto this. There are arguments to be made for whiteness and racism and other isms that get layered on top of why we do not, the vast majority of us,
Candice (16:02)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (16:21)
get to be free in our bodies and really curious about their capacity and their potential. And then I know like you're, you talk a lot about trauma here on this podcast, obviously. And so I want to bring this in, which is that trauma can, first of all, we've got different categories of trauma. So I'm for the moment, I'm going to talk about what we could call a little T trauma.
Candice (16:33)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (16:48)
Not a single incident or like a sustained abusive situation, but a little tea trauma of constantly, persistently living your life in a culture that actively wants to disconnect you from your body, that actively wants to shame you for the impulses that you have. And it really like degrades you over time, your morale, your spirit, your faith in yourself.
Candice (17:02)
Yes.
Darshana Avila (17:14)
And then what we end up with is the wounds that many people are tending, whether they would use this language or not, are wounds of self abandonment, of being so disconnected from their own selves, nevermind from other people, like that it feels really disorienting or outright scary. So we numb out.
We, you if we show up for sex, we're in our heads as opposed to our bodies, or we're like grit in our teeth saying, okay, I'll do this for my partner because they want it, but ⁓ whatever. And this, you and you spoke earlier about how even in like a heteronormative dynamic that the baseline sexual script isn't really satisfying for men either. And I agree. The problem, you know, even though it might be a different reason why.
Candice (17:46)
Right.
Darshana Avila (18:03)
it's not really doing it for anybody because men have been taught to totally disconnect from their bodies and to see sex as one of the only places that they have permission to be more in their softness, in their desires for connection. And again, a lot of guys wouldn't necessarily even use this language, but it's basically like you can play sports or you can have sex and those are the only places you get touched.
Candice (18:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (18:33)
is what our dominant culture teaches a lot of boys and men. And then for women, it's, well, don't really expect too much. Like your pleasure may not be centered, but as long as he's happy type of thing. And there are many of us who are not living inside of these norms, and yet these are still the pervasive norms for most people.
So we've got a long way to go, but also a tremendous amount of opportunity. And this is, you know, very, I feel very fortunate that this is the work that I get to do. And these are the conversations that I get to have to help people start to question, you know, what have I been tolerating? How have I been abandoning myself? Why is my like so kind of averse to this act that objectively speaking in many ways, most of us would agree, like at least as the potential to be.
beautiful and be satisfying to us. ⁓ Even inside of the paradox of religious conservatism, which is not my background personally, but as I understand it, and maybe you have something to say from your direct experience, it's like, for all the shame and suppression, there is also a way where it's like, and this is sacred. And it is. That doesn't have to be rare, but it is sacred.
Candice (19:42)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's it's like a
Yeah, it's weird
because you get a lot of mixed messages, I think, especially with religious programming is like, you know, the marriage bed is sacred or whatever the heteronormative like man woman married only then you may procreate because even some more extremist religions are like, the only reason you have sex is to make more babies. Otherwise, don't do it at all. ⁓ So yeah, there's like that. This is a sacred life.
Darshana Avila (20:05)
This is...
Right? Right?
Candice (20:17)
creating force, but also it's really bad. Don't think about it and don't don't do anything. Don't don't like it's so such like a walled off area. So it sounds like one of your first steps is to just start to get people asking those questions of like, why am I not fulfilled here? Why do I feel disconnected? Why do I have no interest or it could be hyper interest, right? Because it's been so taboo and it's been so blocked off that once you kind of
Darshana Avila (20:33)
Yes.
Candice (20:46)
peek behind the curtain, it's just like kind of a fixation or a fetishization or things like dysfunction can happen to the other extreme. But I think, you know, a couple of the things that you touched on that, you know, religion constantly demonizes is pornography. And I think because so much of the pornography that's out there is male focused, female degrading, it's male servicing, and we don't see
these experiences where there is intimacy, there is the full spectrum of what we could be experiencing, right? Like there's so many different things that our sexuality and our connection and our spirituality could bring forth, but even, you know, we don't have good examples of it is one thing too. So how do you, when you're trying to let your clients and work with people, because it's like, well, what could it be? We don't even know what it could be, right? Because
We have such a narrow view of it, right?
Darshana Avila (21:47)
Yeah, so there's so many things that you just said that I want to respond to. Because yeah, it's like the fact that for some people, there's a version. And for other people, there's compulsion and addiction. Think about that as a spectrum of what will happen when we're not given an opportunity to really get to know our erotic nature and our sexuality in healthy ways with all the mixed messaging and the stigma and suppression. There's that piece. ⁓
Candice (21:50)
Yeah.
Right.
Darshana Avila (22:16)
What's interesting is I actually just was reading a few articles that have been released about peer-reviewed, scientifically sound studies. So I can't give you the exact source material here. I could follow up with you. But there was a study that came out regarding porn use, because that gets so demonized. And I do agree with you that there is a lot of porn out there that the content is very problematic in that it doesn't really show
It's entertainment, right? or it's ⁓ fictional, it's not realistic, it's edited, it's got camera angles and oil being sprayed on skin. Here's what I can liken it to. If you happen to have seen or if you go and watch the Netflix show that I was a part of, Sex, Love and Goop, my segment appears across three different episodes for maybe a grand total of
Candice (22:47)
Yeah, it's fictional.
Darshana Avila (23:13)
40 minutes across those three episodes, let's say, that was days of work, days, deep diving, and they did a beautiful job. So I am not at all criticizing, like was actually beyond amazed how they could really create such a cohesive narrative. But what we see on a screen is there for entertainment, even if it has an educational component, right?
Candice (23:20)
Yeah, and it got boiler plated down.
Darshana Avila (23:41)
That's not what's going on in real life for most people. Now there is ethical porn. Not all porn is created equal. Very little is created equal. So there's wonderful, beautifully produced ethical porn out there. There is more women and female centric porn out there. There is a wider variety. And what's also true, okay, the study I was gonna reference is that all this talk about how porn is like horrible for our relationships, there's actually a study that is now coming out and saying that
Candice (23:48)
Right. Yes.
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (24:11)
Moderate porn use, emphasis on the word moderate. Moderate porn use in couples actually can foster better communication and lead to having better boundaries because it opens up a certain permissiveness to talk about what you're seeing, what you're liking. Wow!
Candice (24:14)
Moderate, yeah.
Darshana Avila (24:33)
I came across this thing and it kind of turned me on. I wonder if we could try this out or ooh, I saw something that really didn't turn me on. So if it can, if there can be a bridge between what we watch to how we are then showing up and communicating in our relationships and saying, yeah, this is teaching me something about my desires or my curiosities, or this is something that I noticed I felt like a really negative reaction to and I want to explore that further.
and we have the communication skills to be able to bring that into relationship with whoever we're choosing to share sexually with, that actually can be a gift. So I would say I'm a pretty middle of the road person with regard to porn, which is to say I really like porn, and I'm very, very clear about what it is and what it isn't. as with everything, there can be very compulsive...
Candice (25:06)
All right.
Darshana Avila (25:25)
use of porn and then there can be healthy moderate use of it and it's all you know and how everything has the potential to be a tool or a weapon. It's you know the way the internet is not intrinsically bad but how you use it right? Porn it's not intrinsically bad. Now do we see things that are do we see things that that might be non-consensual or abusive and people get like really hooked into that stuff?
Candice (25:27)
Right.
Right. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (25:52)
Sure, so bringing this back to like what we're talking about to not go completely on a tangent, porn is one way to learn more about yourself beyond the narrow scripts. If you are watching porn that depicts a wide array of sexual acts, a different, and we're talking about, it could be different positions, it can be different configurations of people, it can be playing with power dynamics.
Candice (25:58)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (26:18)
like different expressions of eroticism. And these are the very same things that I'm guiding my clients around. Arguably, you're going to get a better education working one-to-one with a professional than just walking corn. let's say that's what you have access to, and you actually do it with a really clear, benevolent intention to learn more about yourself.
Candice (26:30)
Good luck.
Darshana Avila (26:41)
That's gonna be a better thing than just taking whatever default conditioning you've been handed and saying, this is the only thing that sex gets to be.
Candice (26:48)
Right.
Well, I think too, there's two things that you hit upon that I want to kind of narrow in on. One is the study showed benefits for couples watching it together. As what we often see.
Darshana Avila (27:04)
or
couples where they both watch porn and not necessarily together.
Candice (27:08)
Right. Right. So it was
a dynamic where it was being used as a tool to spark conversation between the relationship, right? It's a much different dynamic than what is often happening where it's one person watching, then after they watch it, they feel shame and guilt or embarrassment. They hide it.
Darshana Avila (27:16)
Yes.
Candice (27:32)
There's a lot of secrecy and, you know, reinforcing that like I shouldn't be, but I am. ⁓ So that's a very different experience. And it also reminded me of almost like a journal prompt. Like when you're doing self-help books or you're going to a mastermind or some kind of class where you're trying to do self-improvement, there is a question that you kind of asked yourself. And that seemed like that's what was happening with those people in that study is they were using
Darshana Avila (27:41)
Bless.
Candice (28:02)
the pornography as like, huh, let me self reflect here. Let me use what I just watched. And I mean, lots of movies and videos can do this for us if we're not just passively consuming them. If we're doing a little bit of the self reflection and going, yeah, that was interesting. Why did I hate that? Why did I like that? Why was that like something that I was like, my God, like, you know what I mean? There's like, there's a self reflective element that's happening when they're not just passively
consuming, consuming, consuming, they're sitting and sitting with it and going, well, yeah, that's why have I never tried that? Why have we never discussed this? Why has it always been like, we just go in and the lights are off and everything's dark and it's 15 minutes, we're done, right? Like there's a whole window where the person is taking the information in and there's a pause and a beat before you're going straight to the act, right?
Darshana Avila (29:00)
I'm gonna segue from that one. It's so beautiful because I want to, I would like get up on a soap box right now if I could to talk about the power of the pause. What you just said, the power of the pause applies in so many situations. And you've just given us a beautiful example, right? Pause, actually notice what you are feeling. What is your experience? What is going on around you?
Candice (29:07)
Thank
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (29:28)
This is something that most of us really struggle to do. Not necessarily because it's so hard, although if you're navigating a lot of active trauma in your body, it can be hard. Slowing down can be hard. So I'm not being dismissive of that reality for some people, but I wanna talk more about the fact that our entire cultural imprint is rooted in a culture of disembodiment, severing our connection from our bodies.
Candice (29:39)
Yes.
Darshana Avila (29:55)
which is to say severing our connection from what makes us individuals and our uniqueness, our sensations and emotions, our thoughts, our perceptions all point us to what are my unique and particular preferences, boundaries, desires? What do I need in this moment? When we pause, we invite the possibility, kind of like what you said about like the journal prompts.
We invite a metaphorical journal prompt into the space to say, what's going on right now? What do I need? So sure, that could be applied to, do you think thoughtfully about the porn you just watched and allow it to inform your personal relating? It can apply to absolutely any and every situation. When we got on this conversation, we both were like, I need to just kind of regulate my nervous system. You know, like how often are we?
Candice (30:44)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (30:48)
transitioning from one thing to the next to the next to the next without the slightest bit of pause, which means we're not connected to ourselves. So weaving this kind of back in with where we began, if we are not connected to ourselves on this most fundamental level, and yet we're showing up and making our body available to another person in a sexual act, but we're not connected to ourselves to begin with, like, what can we really expect then?
Candice (31:14)
Right.
Darshana Avila (31:17)
And this is not about making anyone feel guilty or shame. This is not a personal failing. This is an invitation. This is an opportunity to recognize that most of us have a lot of lived experience to the extent that we're being sexually active of really not being very present for
Candice (31:36)
Right. Yeah. Especially with trauma, there's a very common disassociative element if you have complex trauma where your body, when things were happening to you in your early years, learned that I just need to check out. I'm going to go to La La Land. I'm going to just haze over, glaze over, whatever you want to call it. ⁓
Darshana Avila (31:38)
Thank
yeah.
Candice (31:59)
And so especially if there was sexual trauma or any type of child, like where you have physical body violations or things happening to you, it is very normal for your body to just kind of leave. right? You're here, but you're not really here. ⁓ So when you're talking to clients and you're seeing that pattern where they're like, I'm trying to do it, but every time I start to move towards something that I think I want,
Darshana Avila (32:14)
100 %
Candice (32:26)
I check out how do you get them to reintegrate and stay present because that can be really difficult for even if you don't have sexual trauma or childhood trauma just being able to stay present in your body and make sure you are okay like you know with what's happening.
Darshana Avila (32:43)
Totally, very valid points, fairly made and dissociating during sex, whether or not you have a complex trauma history, a minor trauma history, no trauma history. A lot of people identify as not being very in their bodies during sex. And the way that I work with my clients is first and foremost, we start by doing nervous system regulating work. We don't start with sex.
Candice (32:54)
Yeah. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (33:10)
We start with learning how to slow down and pause. We start with learning how to feel your sensations. We start with establishing an embodied sense of boundary, safety, knowing what a yes and a no feels like in your body. So we've got a lot of building blocks that have to get put together before we're diving into the deep end of the pool. And to speak a little bit more about the way that I work, what's very unique about my practice is,
Candice (33:12)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (33:36)
I am a somatic experiencing practitioner, which is a body based trauma modality, healing modality. And I am a sexological body worker, which is an erotic therapeutic modality where I do hands on and hands in work with my clients. So one directional touch from me to them. But what that means is that clients come to me to have a quality of experience that is pretty much not available anywhere else.
When do we have a chance to thoughtfully, slowly, intentionally explore our sexuality just for ourselves? I mean, it's a really, like think about that. Most of us from our earliest moments of being sexualized are worried more about the other person or at least in equal measure about the other person's experience.
Candice (34:05)
Right.
Darshana Avila (34:29)
these protective strategies that you named of dissociation, and they are that, they're protective strategies. They are very, very wise in their way, and especially when things happened to us when we were young, or when whatever the circumstances were, that the power dynamic was such that we did not have the ability to stop what was happening, to say no. Those protective strategies are the difference between being here and not, you know, it's survival.
Candice (34:35)
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
Darshana Avila (34:57)
So none of this is about making those strategies wrong. What it is about is training ourselves to recognize that we have a choice now. We didn't have a choice then, but we have a choice now. Protective strategies are reactive. They come unbidden, they jump out. This is here from back in the days when our ancestors had to worry about an apex predator coming around the corner. We need these things. Nowadays,
You might not have an apex predator or a perpetrator coming around the corner, but your nervous system is still reacting as if, right? So we wanna be able to shift from a reaction to a response. To become response-able is a beautiful play on the word responsible that I love here. And the responsibility, the self-responsibility is not about saying everything is on you. It's about saying you get.
to be responsible for yourself now. You get to have a choice in the matter now. So before I take my clients deeper toward the sexual end of what's available in our explorations, we spend as much time as we need to, which varies depending upon the individual and what they're working with and the pace that they go at. We spend a lot of time really tending to their nervous system's reactivity until response is possible. I take them through all manner of
experiential practices so that they begin to feel a sense of their personal power, their agency. They get to know the things they like and the things they don't like in very measured experiential doses so that we build little by little toward a more comprehensive experience. it's, you know, for, like I said, for some people it's slow work.
Trauma healing often is, and that's fine. Let it take the time that it takes. Our healing moves at its own pace and is generally a very nonlinear experience. So sometimes it's a few steps forward, sometimes it's a few steps back, and little by little the progress gets made. so yeah, mean, that's the unique thing about what I offer. It's not just talk therapy and it's not just the trauma.
Candice (36:44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (37:09)
or just the sex side of the spectrum, but it's those things in combination in a very body-based way that allows my clients to really understand themselves and open up to a completely new scope of what's possible in the realm of intimacy, in the realm of pleasure, in the realm of their sexual expression and personal power too.
Candice (37:34)
Yeah, so it sounds like, like you said, this work can take time, especially if you are so disconnected from your body that you're like on autopilot 24 seven, taking the time slowing down, it is gonna take practice and work and touching in with.
Do I feel like I have a regulated nervous system right now? You know, and communicating that with whoever, if you're by yourself, I mean, obviously, you can always practice these things by yourself. But if you have a partner that you're, you're having sex with that you can be like, I need to regulate myself first, or getting into that practice of where you can feel safe in your body, you know,
Darshana Avila (37:57)
Wow.
Right,
and really what I love, I mean, the journey that I take people on is fundamentally one of relaxed arousal. And so what that means is that we build the foundation of relaxation so that arousal can come on in ways that feel safe and sustainable. And whether I'm working with someone individually or as a couple, if I'm working with someone individually, they might be partnered, but are still choosing this work for themselves. Like it is all about, so it's getting you to a...
where you feel sufficiently confident in your voice and in your body to show up in these dynamics and co-create in the ways that feel good to you. And it generally is going to then involve so much more intimacy, let's bring that piece back in, than the very like mechanistic, performative, PNV is the thing that we're doing. Like I show up for somebody else, like that really narrow script.
Candice (39:08)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (39:12)
gets tossed out the window, thank goodness. And instead what you have is room for a lot more creativity, a lot more enjoyment, sex becomes something playful. ⁓ know, it really is like, one of the things that makes me the saddest about how narrow that script can be is just how much people are missing out on the wonders of what healthy sexuality can encompass.
Candice (39:25)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (39:40)
and what true intimacy can be about, then we crave it. Whether or not we identify with that, it's such a human desire to crave real intimacy. And we live in a time where that is becoming more and more and more rare. The hyper individuality, the isolation, the technology, the political divisiveness, you know, like we are not necessarily getting our needs for connection.
Candice (39:55)
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (40:07)
And I'm not just, and I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about healthy, healthy, intimate. I see you, you see me, we're here together. We need this.
Candice (40:07)
No.
Just like human connection. Yeah. Yeah. Like, well.
Yeah, just like
we see with the chat GBT and the AI girlfriends and this whole weird thing that's become, you know, so prevalent in the last couple years is that it's, it's taking and monetizing and commodifying our desperate need for connection to other humans. Right. And it's really sad. ⁓
Darshana Avila (40:37)
It is. It is.
Candice (40:40)
And I feel like you said capitalism is preying on that because they've created the need for connection and now they're going to commodify it and they're going to make money off of us. ⁓ So I feel like, yes, it always goes back. But if there's a way for us in our act of revolutionary rebellion to take hold of this and say, no, I'm not going to outsource
Darshana Avila (40:52)
All of this stuff is political, whether we want to admit it or not. It ⁓ is.
Candice (41:07)
my need for connectivity, my need for intimacy, my need for emotional bonding or whatever it is you wanna term it and take that back to what it was created for us with other humans, right? Yeah, I think that's really beautiful that we kind of landed on that because we are seeing, and I have another interview that will be coming out with... ⁓
one of the leaders of the 4B movement coming out of Korea because we see so much of this like male focus, patriarchal, women are submissive, you do what I want and sex is all about me, me, me. And then it's creating now because we've had the backlash where women are like, fuck this, I'm not your servant, I'm not your sex slave, this isn't, you know, how it's been. But now we're creating hearing like the male loneliness epidemic, right? And so because women
historically are better at finding other women to have community with and connection with and that emotional intimacy with. Now the men are like, ⁓ well, who am I going to dump all my shit on when I get home? And who's going to listen to me? And who's going to take care of my needs? And it's turning into this really weird AI thing that, you know, I think is going to be super damaging if it continues at the way it's going for all of us collectively.
Darshana Avila (42:25)
Yeah.
I mean, and I don't disagree that there's a lot of potential for things to get way worse than they are. What I also see is that there's such an uprising of people who are saying, we cannot keep going like this. I want something different. And I mean, when I see it showing up in like right now with the political climate that we're inside of.
Candice (42:35)
Yeah.
Yes, yes, it's both and. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (42:54)
You know, even though it may not be that the common discourse is relating any of this to sex or romance or that form of intimacy, what I am seeing a lot of are people saying, you have to form groups. You have to be in community, get coalitions together, show up in the same physical space, get to know your neighbors, share resources. The underpinnings of that are not actually different.
Candice (43:08)
Yes.
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (43:23)
what we're speaking about here. It's all an invitation back to the deeply relational nature of what it is to be human. This erotic nature that I speak of, which is to be in a channel for and in the full expression of our vitality and our passion and our creativity with others. This is what we're made for. know, and when you talk about like the, the, the,
Candice (43:24)
No. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (43:48)
the men deal, like we talk about incels and men dealing with loneliness and increasingly like getting the cold shoulder from women who are just like done with this, but then it leaves them like, wait, what, where do I go? Like that right there is the testament to the fact that these systems of ⁓ oppression, let's call them what they are, patriarchy and capitalism aren't working for most of us.
Candice (44:01)
Yeah.
Yes.
They're not working for anybody except for the building
peers.
Darshana Avila (44:16)
There's a delusional
group of billionaires who believe it's working for them, but anybody else? It's not. And I would argue that a lot of the people in power here in America who we're seeing, you know, like MAGA and what have you, frankly, if they were truly, truly, truly getting well fucked, just saying. Like if they really had genuine intimacy in their lives.
Candice (44:20)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Darshana Avila (44:40)
thriving relationships, a sense of their own agency, the very same things that we've spoken about here. Do you think that they would be like the puppets on the string for like, no.
Candice (44:53)
Yeah, it goes back to
that lack. Like you said, when we're talking about, you know, forming communities, building relationships, healthy communication, expressing our needs, expressing, you know, what we we want and this give and take in this communal relationships, it's completely different. And I think, like you said, if these people felt
love, in my opinion, it all goes back to love because when there's not love and connection, you know, this is why we see these these people being with the violence. And that was something, too, that we didn't get to talk about is there. You know, when I'm talking to my friends and things, it's it is really difficult to be observing a genocide, to be observing all these things, wars, people being murdered. And you could it's in your face on your phone 24 seven. ⁓
And so, and then we're supposed to go in our bedroom and have sex with our partner or masturbate or whatever. And it's like, your brain's like, what? I can't just switch back and forth. So that's the other thing too, is we're witnessing this peak level of like, there's revolutions, buildings are being burned down in other countries and governments are being overthrown. And so there's a lot of instability, which also makes it hard for us to feel safe enough in our bodies.
to have these intimacy and it almost feels like how can I in this world we're living in right now.
Darshana Avila (46:22)
That's a really fair thing to mention and I get it. It's like the shifting between being completely adrenalized and in this hyper vigilant and hyper aware state of the endless atrocities. We are in the poly crisis extraordinaire, like climate collapse and genocide and fascism. mean, it's nonstop. It's nonstop. I'm not disagreeing.
Candice (46:45)
Yeah, it's all happening. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (46:50)
Here's the thing, I'm gonna just point y'all to a resource. I want you to do yourselves a favor, and if you don't already know who Adrienne Marie Brown is, if you don't already know the book Pleasure Activism, please go find it. Listen to a podcast of her, read this book, learn, as I have been doing for quite a while now, from the Black Intersectional Feminist Movement, who have long been...
dealing with what we now as two white women, we as two white women have had the privilege of shit's going on, but we don't actually have to see it until lately. Lately, nobody can really get away from it. It's in our faces. But what people like Adrienne Marie Brown and who she and I both draw a lot of our influence from is the incredible Audre Lorde, who is no longer living, but she's like a grandmama of that movement. And...
Candice (47:17)
Yes, since the dawn of time. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (47:46)
back to Eros as life force. We need to connect to our pleasure, to our creativity, to our life force energy in order to actually be responsive to what is going on right now. So I'm not saying that you should doom scroll on Instagram and see pictures of a genocide and then jump into the sack and want to ride your partner all night long. That is not what I'm saying.
Candice (48:14)
Yeah, yeah.
Darshana Avila (48:16)
What I am saying, however, is that we do have a responsibility and an opportunity to cultivate practices that connect us to our pleasure, to do our healing work, to be in our bodies, to dedicate sacred space, time, energy in our lives to fueling and filling ourselves up. Sex is one way, and it might be your way if you're having the sex you want to be having.
Candice (48:43)
Right.
Darshana Avila (48:44)
If
you're having performative sex for the sake of your partner and you're not really into it and you're disconnected from your body, of course you're not gonna wanna do that. But if sex for you is a place where you get to move some of the angst, the grief, the rage that you're feeling, which some people might hear me say that be like, wait, that has no place in my sex. And I can't tell you how many times I have had a client on my table.
who has just had the orgasm of a lifetime, and then on the other side of that, bursts into like a deep, deep sob from the depths of their soul because all of this grief gets to move. Why? It's erotic. It's life force energy. Our grief needs to move. Our rage needs to move. If we're constantly numbing ourselves out and pushing that down,
That is actually not going to do any us any favors. So you've got pleasure for pleasure's sake. You've also got embodiment and potentially sex as a way where you get to access some of what would otherwise be stagnated and suppressed in you. Now, of course, this are-
Candice (49:55)
⁓ Yeah, because our
brain is doing something different than neurochemicals when we have an orgasm change in our brain and if that's giving us a window where we're not blocking and freezing and locking everything down, whatever is in there that needs to come out is going to have the opportunity.
Darshana Avila (50:12)
And the container matters. So I wanna be fair in saying the reason why I probably get to see this all the time is because of who I am and the container I hold, which may or may not be right, which may or may not be how you feel with your partner. Now, that means either you really need to evaluate your partner or it means you need to evaluate how the two of you or the three or four of you out of here are a threeple or you know, like how.
Candice (50:15)
Yes.
that it's created so much safety.
That's true. Yeah.
There's some conversation.
Right, whatever it is.
Darshana Avila (50:41)
What are you actually signing on for with each other? What do you wanna create space for? Is there enough safety and capacity? Like I think a lot of women in particular, they might feel really distanced from the possibility of orgasm because they know there's all this other emotion in there. And I'm not talking about front of the cortex, like conscious knowing. It's a very like deeply unconscious, like I can't let go here because.
Candice (51:06)
deeply.
Darshana Avila (51:08)
I'm gonna, this dam's gonna break open and I don't think my partner can hold this. So we keep shoving it down further, further, further. And we deserve to find outlets and spaces where all of this energy can move. So the cultivation of pleasure is a radical act unto itself, claiming our rest, claiming our joy, claiming feeling alive in our bodies is unto itself radical.
Candice (51:19)
We, yeah.
Darshana Avila (51:38)
And also it's what helps us to metabolize a lot of the really challenging aspects is what we're going through right now. So again, I'm repeating myself, but it bears it. Like I'm not saying that sex is the only way to do that.
But pleasure is essential to our thriving. what is, like if we stand for an end to the genocide and an end to authoritarianism and we stand for collective liberation, we've got to tend to our personal liberation. We've got to prioritize some measure of pleasure and wellbeing and healing and wholeness in our lives.
if we want that collectively. It's not selfish. It's actually very essential to serving the wider good. So that's what I have to say about that. ⁓
Candice (52:23)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think that that
kind of hits home on like self-care is it's not just like a nice thing we should do anymore. We're at a point where this is required to get through the the global experience we're all having right now. I think and I don't think most people think of sexuality and eroticism as self-care but
Darshana Avila (52:49)
Total.
Candice (52:57)
If it is in the way that you've talked about today, I think it absolutely is self care. It is absolutely creating that pathway for us to release, to feel safe, to feel like we have autonomy and we have authority and we are in control of the situation. You know what mean? It can be something really beautiful and really nurturing for us in the way that you've described today. ⁓ I think that's so great.
Darshana Avila (53:03)
100%.
Absolutely. Because it's more, it's
really far more about a getting in touch with, making space for and allowing as opposed to pure escapism. Now don't get me wrong, girl, I love my bubble baths. All that version of self care, I'm not knocking it, but that is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about...
Candice (53:32)
Yes.
Yeah.
Right.
No, that's not it. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (53:47)
a form of self-care that is really, let's call it emotional hygiene, energetic hygiene, doing what we need to do, spiritual hygiene, doing what we need to do to stay responsive in our bodies and in our minds and in our spirits to all that is going on. If I am paralyzed by the grief and the rage because I'm not allowing it to move, I cannot be an effective agent of change.
Candice (53:52)
Yeah, spiritual hygiene,
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Darshana Avila (54:15)
And that's
where a lot of us, especially a lot of white women have hung out. Now, some people really do have very real trauma to be healing from before that level of responsiveness is a possibility. I'm not painting everybody with a single brush. But for those of us who either have already done a lot of our healing or maybe are coming from a baseline that is a bit more resourced, we really have a responsibility then.
Candice (54:33)
Right, right.
Darshana Avila (54:43)
to look at how am I engaging in all these forms of that term, I just use hygiene, so that I'm available to what life needs from me, the change that is needed right now. And in that way, like I said, it's far from selfish. It's no different than eating a good diet or getting your exercise so that you're physically available to play with your kids, to do your job, to whatever it is. This is not different from that.
Candice (55:11)
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, like you, kind of goes back to what you were saying before, there is a foundation of somatic safety that you've got to lay first, right? Like, so if you're listening, and you're just like, I don't even know what she's talking about. And it's probably like, let's go back to how do you create safety in your nervous system? How do you regulate yourself? How do you feel calm, grounded, and okay being in your body at any given moment, right? And then
Darshana Avila (55:21)
Yes, absolutely.
Candice (55:40)
Then once you've figured out how to do that and it is a daily practice of going back to it going back to it You might get 80 % and then one day it might be 20 % and then it might be 30 You know, but we go back and read
Darshana Avila (55:51)
I'm first person
to agree. I mean, I do this for a living and I look, I've got my days where I'm checked out. I've got my days where I'm so activated that it's like, I can't show up for anything right now. But the beauty is I also know that I won't stay stuck there because of those foundational pieces that I've engaged in because of that, that I do know how to regulate my nervous system and create safety. And it's not because I'm special.
Candice (55:58)
Yeah.
Right.
Darshana Avila (56:19)
It's simply where I am on my journey. And you, dear listener, get to be exactly where you are. And the beauty of this being a collectivist approach is that I might have a day where I'm down and, Candice, you are up. And so you can then channel that life force energy and go do what needs to be done while I'm recuperating. And then we might switch and multiply that by millions and billions of people. So this is where erotic wholeness.
Candice (56:42)
Right. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (56:48)
A path of personal liberation really truly is a gift and a service to our collective liberation. Even though we do this work in a very individual personal way, it ties into what is going on in that wider field.
Candice (56:54)
Yeah, it really is.
Yeah, because you're going to show up if you are feeling validated, whole, loved, stable in your body, you're going to show up at your job. Yeah. Yeah. If you're feeling great, you're going to show up way differently than you will. You know what I mean? If you're feeling closed down and scared and in a fear and, you know, all those other things. So I know we're almost out of time. Can you share with everybody where they can find your work?
Darshana Avila (57:12)
I'm in your culture!
No!
Candice (57:31)
I will link in the show notes the goop ⁓ show and your website and all that but if you have a website or anything you want to promote go for it.
Darshana Avila (57:39)
Yeah,
yeah, you can find me on my website, which is my name, DarshanAvala.com. I'm on Instagram, I'm on YouTube. I have a podcast that I'm gonna be launching very soon. I don't know when this episode will come out, but so, you there's the opportunity to work privately with me. I'm based in Oakland, California, but I have clients who come from literally all over the world.
So there's in-person possibilities if you want a deep dive with me, but then there's lots of ways to learn from me. have online courses and stuff like that. So website is a great launching pad for connecting. And I genuinely love when people send a message through my website, like, Hey, I heard this podcast episode. So if you resonated with this, say hi.
I mean it, like I'm here for you. That's why we have these conversations. So let me know how this touched you and let me know how I can serve you.
Candice (58:32)
Thank
you so much for coming on and chatting with us. know you have a lot going on and your work is so valuable. I hope that a lot of people benefit from this episode and that the term erotic didn't scare too many people off. I know we might. Yeah.
Darshana Avila (58:47)
I hope not. I hope it expanded some perspectives.
Candice (58:51)
Yeah, exactly. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everybody for listening or watching on YouTube and we hope to see you back here next week at open wounds podcast.