“Stretching Her Wings” Isis in Florida

Private Sessions at Sacred Haven, Orlando, FL. Feb 2-10, Feb 16-28.

MidWinter Naturist Festival @ Sunsport Gardens. Loxahatchee, FL Feb 11-14  – workshops ~ Pelvic Heart Integration, Nude Partner Yoga, Naked Church.

Pelvic Heart Integration Workshop @ Sacred Haven, Orlando, FL Feb 25 7-10pm.

Email Isis: sensualshaman@gmail.com or call 646-460-9397.

 

 

Naked Church at Goodland in New Jersey July 6th!

Naked Church at Goodland in New Jersey July 6th!.

Sacred Haven: A Sensual Monastic Life

Orlando deserves it’s own blog post. I’ve been here since February 1^st and the processes and deep soul conversations unfolding around me are ones that have left me truly transformed and in a state of tremendous gratitude. I am staying in the beautiful sanctuary of Sacred Haven which is set up as a church here in Orlando, Florida.

The Bishop here is EveLynn Maurine, a long time friend and colleague over my years in sacred sexual healing work.  EveLynn was the previous president of ASEP (Association of Sexual Energy Professionals) and has earned her title as the Pope-ess of sacred sexuality among her community.  Her soul energy holds the polarities of deep spiritual reverence like that of Mary Magdalene with the bawdiness and irreverence of the vamp Mae West. She is the spiritual grandmother to many sexual healers nationally and in the local community and it has been an absolute blessing to be in residence at her temple space in Florida.

I am living here in Orlando what at times feels like a sensual monastic life. I awake and have a glass of herbal infusion with lemon and apple cider vinegar and begin my morning Taoist and yogic practices and meditation. Roman, EveLynn’s beloved makes us coffee and I then cook us breakfast and set up my schedule for the day managing clients and noting errands that need running. There are simple things to do here that require tending that lead to a deeper contemplative life, composting, tending to the livestock – two terriers and a beagle, housekeeping and gardening, session work, taking calls from fellow practitioners seeking mentoring and counsel, writing in the evening and soul conversations over good home cooked food, watching a film on history or practice of sexual education evening Taoist jade egg practices followed with a dip in the pool or hot tub and following up with beloveds before bed. Rise, Rinse, Repeat.

Flora and Fauna of Florida

As I am here, there has been a quiet settling in my bones. Florida moves much slower than New York and my mind, body and spirit seem to be going through a deep and profound healing here because there is time and space to do so. The sanctuary of Sacred Haven has a deep healing energy and as I was reading over EveLynn’s mission statement for it, I was struck – that exactly what she has said in her statement, she has created. Sacred Haven is a sanctuary for the senses and sacred space where people can visit and find ‘peace and reverence, teach and learn, write and read, play and pray, heal and be healed.’ When sessions are slow, EveLynn and I sit and talk for hours. Roman, her beloved, listens and holds space. She is a fount of information and wisdom in regards to sacred sexuality, tantra, sexological bodywork and sex and disabilities as well as transformational ceremonies. For women and select men seeking mentoring in the area of stepping into erotic education work professionally, I HIGHLY recommend her mentoring program.

I had the extraordinary gift of receiving a session from EveLynn and her beloved Roman while I was here. I realized this is the first time I’ve received a session from a couple. I’ve had women, men and multiple women facilitate session work for me, but have never received it from a pair-bonded couple. I must say it was extraordinary. We lay on the bed and I was spooned on both sides and held in a loving embrace before we began so that I felt like I was enfolded in a cocoon of unconditional love. EveLynn took me through energetic breathing practices to stir my sexual energy and raise it up through my body for healing and release. She then led me over to the table and I laughed and cried and trembled for an hour under their touch. So much released from my body and my being that I didn’t even know I was holding onto. Tears over my transitioning relationship with my beloved husband, the anger I felt at myself over staying in New York long past my soul’s expiration date there, the conflict of feeling at the same time grief about leaving New York, all of this stuck energy that had caused me massive almost debilitating backpain for months moved up my spine and out through tears, laughter and the release of primal energy. In closing ceremony, both EveLynn and Roman laid a hand over my heart chakra and womb center in perfect balance at the end of the session and smiled lovingly at me. My entire being was washed clean after this experience, like a great dam had opened and everything pent up inside had flooded out. It was a truly profound intiation and healing and opened my eyes to the power of a couple offering this work together.

The highlight of my time, there have really been so many, was EveLynn’s women’s naked church that fell this past Sunday. It was essentially a church for women who identify as working or being called to work in some capacity as a sexuality professional or erotic educator. We gathered on Sunday and shared our stories, laughed and swam naked in the Sacred Haven heated pool and hot tub. At 3pm, we gathered in the pool and EveLynn ordained me into the Madonna  Ministry, something she and I had spoken about for years but only now on this day did it feel right to take that step. I emailed my father about my ordination and received an email from him which I have pasted below.

Dad,

Tomorrow I will be ordained into the Madonna Ministry by Bishop EveLynn Maurine. Molly and I have been staying in her Sacred Haven Sanctuary here in Orlando, FL with her and her two dogs and her beloved Roman. While my ordination will not change how I’m doing things in my work now, it will give me something to rest my spine against where my work can feel more contained and supported. http://www.madonnaministry.net/

Orlando is an interesting place. It’s warm here and I’m glad to have missed the snow storm in NY. I’m having a good time and Molly is a poolside chillin’ dog. Miss you!

Love,

Missa

Missa,

So happy for you. I think that your work is very powerful and if this helps support your vision then I am very pleased. I believe that

you are already are in tune with the Cosmic Consciousness and will be directed the ways you need to go. Just remember if something

doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t and if you feel a ‘warm glow’ flowing from your heart out then it is.

Miss you too. Please keep me up to date.

Love you.

Dad

I think we found the warm glow feeling. Here is my ordination pic.

My father, despite the controversial nature and cutting edge of this work, particularly as it is viewed from the Bible belt, has been quietly supportive of my chosen path. It is more than I could have ever hoped for. My mother and I have had a different journey as I have stepped into my dharma and becoming.

I will continue to take sessions here at Sacred Haven with EveLynn through February 18th.  Then I fly back to New York for a few days and then sojourn again in New Orleans where I will celebrate my birthday and bask in the energy of Mardi Gras with dear friends.

I’m so incredibly grateful for the wonderful people I’ve met and the deeply nourishing journey since the beginning of the year.

In Deep Gratitude,

Isis

Isis Phoenix Sensual Shaman Tour “Stories from the Road”

Hail and Welcome to the New Year!

What a delicious first month it has been. The Isis Phoenix Sensual Shaman U.S. & Canada Tour is well under way. I touched down in New Orleans on January 6^th with my beloved beagle Molly Brown accompanying the travels. Our journey getting there, however, was a bit harried. We were waylaid with the aftermath of delayed flights circa the New Years winter storm that blew through a few days prior and inundated with security lines that snaked around all of LaGuardia. After a fashionably late arrival, we touched down in the Big Easy where we were picked up at the airport by our dear friend Audrey of Madison Holistic New Orleans and ushered to our flat where Molly and I set up our transformational temple through January 15^th. I arrived just late enough to miss the Joan of Arc parade but was grateful that this sacred feminine icon was honored just before I got there.

Molly and I got to know the city taking long walks through the French Quarter and the museum arts district grabbing some chicory coffee for our strolls and spending some time in the local art galleries.

We had a long line of enthusiastic people come in for naked yoga and sensual shamanic bodywork and we generally enjoyed everyone we met. Every client I saw in New Orleans was a man, which was unusual for me as my practice is generally fifty percent men fifty percent women these days. The masculine clearly longs for the divine feminine here.

I was blessed with meeting wonderful new friends and traveling the ins and outs of the city accompanied by my sweet beagle. There are good southern values in New Orleans  – a town of southern hospitality and sweet sounds of jazz.  I had a great chaperone, an old-fashioned southern gentleman named Greg who was introduced to me by my mutual friends Lisa Kazmer and Eric Finkelman. Greg is one of those charming old southern-ers that sport old-fashioned values and know how to show a traveling lady a good time. I lovingly called him the Mayor of Bourbon Street as he seemed to know EVERYONE. We dined at Galatoire’s and had a private balcony set up for us at a little champagne bar off Bourbon Street, I think called French 74. Greg got the flu the next day, I think my Shakti was too much for him 😉

On my day off, with new friends I enjoyed traditional coffee and beignets at Café DuMonde, took photos by the steam boats on the Mississippi and visited the famous tree of life right next to the New Orleans zoo. I watched the sunset over the river, did lots of impromptu yoga and had some incredible conversations on everything from  sound healing, metaphysics, relationships and spirituality.

My one downside to this incredible experience in New Orleans was that Molly had a really hard time when I would leave her alone to go out at night. The place where we were staying was quite haunted and Molly would lay her ears back and stare into the dark night for hours. Sometimes curtain rods would fall off the windows or we would wake to strange pools of water in places in the flat and in the session room. This past full moon is called the Wolf Moon which is just asking for a baying beagle to howl at it and howl she did with fear and anxiety when I would leave at night to explore the town. We got a noise complaint for a neighbor that gave us a bit of a scare. I’m open to hearing feedback around suggestions if anyone has tips and techniques for elevating dog anxiety that is triggered around abandonment. I won’t be taking Molly to Mardi Gras in February and March but she’ll be coming to Orlando to stay with our dear friend EveLynn who has two fabulous pups of her own.

We departed New Orleans on the evening of the 15^th and touched down late in New York City under heavy fog conditions. We had a day here and then left to go offer bodywork at women’s weekend held by the fabulous Dr. Tammy Nelson. I find it is always such a gift when women ask for and claim their right to receive nourishing, healing sensual touch. I offered yoni steams, shamanic clearings, uterine alignment ceremonies and sensual bodywork to a powerhouse of diverse Shakti-fied women. The Shakti was so powerful that weekend the phones and internet and hot tub all short circuited where we were staying at some point. On Saturday night, after completing session work, I joined the women for a glorious dinner and then loaded up my massage table and drove back to New York City to catch the final third of Dzieci’s 24 hour Maraton Intensive. They are a group I’ve worked intensely with for the past two years whose quality and commitment to their work is unparalleled. If you ever dare to take a true shamanic journey into the paratheatrical, this is the one to take. Dzieci does it once a year – look for it next January. I joined this beloved theatre company during the midnight drum circle and just before the peyote chant – (no actual peyote is used). We danced, drummed and until about 7am.

I then crashed for a few hours and rose refreshed and took Molly and drove to Leominster, Massachusetts to spend a few days with our dear friend Lloyd, a perfect retreat after much work and a tired body from facilitating so many pleasure filled rituals. The three of us had adventures in the snow. There were times where I would look around and think… I can’t believe this is my life… how glorious… what a wonderful creation. I am so blessed, so very, very blessed.

I’ll be in New York City until February 1^st and then off to Orlando through the 18^th. Look for Molly and I under the Florida sunshine. EveLynn and I will offer some double sessions while I am down there and have a clothing optional spiritual gathering at her abode, details to come!

Save the Dates Feb 25-March 6^th Isis in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and her Birthday!

March 15^th-19^th Isis in Phoenix / Tucson

April 1^st-7^th Isis in Toronto with Tricia

Guest Blogger for Young Naturists!

I had the priviledge of being asked to write for an article for the Young Naturists on Naked Yoga. The feedback from the blog over the simple span of 24 hours was humbling. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share my story and my practice. Please click below to read the entire bog post on Naked Yoga – A Story of Transformation.  http://nudistnaturistamerica.org/naked-yoga

Woman’s Body Nature’s Body ~ A Journey to Rock Lodge

Woman’s Body ~ Nature’s Body

Paradise. Absolute Paradise. Those were the only words when thinking back on my day at Rock Lodge that were adequate to describe my experience and all to brief visit to this magical sanctuary.

“Packing light?” my husband joked with me as I put my sarong, towel and hat in my canvas beach bag.  Conspicuously missing a swimsuit, I smiled. I had been wanting to visit Rock Lodge all summer – a naturist paradise. Beautiful lake, scenic hiking trails, wildlife and nature in abundance and the option to be absolutely clothing free. I had offered to teach a yoga class at 11:30am that day and after a few wrong turns on my adventure there, I arrived just in time for the class. I was joy-filled to see wonderful yogis in the class as old as 70 and as young as 7 each celebrating their body and the spirit of yoga sans clothes. In my yoga practice thus far, naked yoga had been about consciously removing clothes, the identities behind them, finding a new deeper layer of freedom that isn’t generally available in the rushed metropolis of New York life. Now I was faced with a group of people who already had that layer of freedom. There was no disrobing ceremony.These powerful group were already uncompartmentalized, in celebration of their body, loved yoga and wore whatever clothes at Rock Lodge that felt appropriate in the present moment.Sitting, meditating, Om-ing with this community, I thought – heaven is truly here on earth.This is what a world looks like without violence.

Talking over a potluck supper that evening with my host Sandy, he mentioned of one young woman – 18 years old, a budding opera singer and regular at Rock Lodge since she was 11.‘She will never have an eating disorder’ Sandy said very frankly to me over our potluck. ‘When one grows up with body love and acceptance in all shapes and sizes and sees their parents embrace that, one never feels the need to alter who they are.’ I knew exactly what he spoke of. I envied this young woman who had been in paradise at 11 while I grew up struggling with body issues from pre-teen to adolescence. I stared at this young woman at all the women at Rock Lodge and was overwhelmed to tears with gratitude that a place like this existed on the planet. I recalled instantly, like moving through a memory box of pictures, the snapshots of shame I had felt in body from a young age – my rejection of wearing shorts in middle school because of my perceived ugly legs, walking out of a room backwards after making love with a college sweetheart so he couldn’t see my ass and thighs that I thought were unsightly, feeling the self-judgement and loathing of my body the first time I was naked in public as the young French boy I was dating stripped encouraged me to join he and his friends in the skyclad hottub as I tried to hide myself and my shame under the darkening night.

Now during my paradise day trip to Rock Lodge, after swimming across the lake twice, I pulled myself up onto a dock in the middle of the lake and sprawled flat on my stomach ass and thighs completely exposed to the sun, the elements, the community with not a twinge of shame in my body. No thought of hiding, concealing, judging what my body should and shouldn’t look like. Here was the quite ecstasy of one-nesss. I hiked. I swam. I talked with old and new friends. I bared myself to the world. I marveled at a young Israeli mother and her seven year old daughter who practiced side crow pose on the swim deck naked as a… crow ;)Accompanied with her mother, an accomplished yogi practicing next to her, I saw what my body would have been like if I had the muscle memory to both be in side crow and to be naked publicly free of shame at seven years old and wondered what my life would have looked like if that support had come from my mother and if I had grown up with a mother who loved her body instead of loathed it. I wondered for sometime what our world would look like if mothers taught and modeled for their daughters that their bodies were both sacred and shame free. It would be in blood. It wouldn’t be something we would have to search for, starve ourselves for, we would simply be in it, naked in nature, in side crow, in love of our bodies.

I recently re-read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body. Eve has created a world wide campaign to stop violence against women since 1998 with her play The Vagina Monologues. On her journeys interviewing women across the world for her later play, The Good Body, Eve conceded that when so many women were so dissatisfied with how they looked, they had very little time or energy left for the war in Iraq. Eve was one of these women, on a masochistic self loathing journey to banish the belly she acquired recently brought on by her aging body. Consumed with her own judgment and self-hate, Eve toured the world interviewing women about their relationship to their bodies. Among the women she interviewed across the planet 95% of women said if they could change one thing they would lose weight. For 13 years Eve has been bringing awareness with her V-Day campaign to stop violence against women, but what her most recent findings revealed after her revolutionary play The Vagina Monologues is that as much as women want sexual empowerment and self-love, what we really want even more is to be skinny, to shrink, to disappear. Her astonishing play focuses not on men being the abusers of women, but on women being our own abusers and targets of self inflicted violence creating our own self-hate and spreading that curse among our sisters and our children.

In moving through the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago, I spent sometime among the exquisite statues of Greek and Roman Goddess that show beautiful full figured woman, round, curves, softness and deep, powerful, unabashed femininity. I remember exactly what I was wearing that day, a long blue skirt that flowed like water and a brown and white cowl neck sleeveless shirt and sandals. The skirt was very long and I had picked up end of it and tucked it in the waistband to allow me more freedom to walk through the museum. As I was staring at a particularly beautiful statue, two women approached me and tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you one of them?” they asked me pointing at the statue. I had no idea what the women were referring to and I stood looking at them befuddled. “You look like them. You look like the statue. Are you Greek or Roman?” It took a second to sink in – these two women thought my body looked like the body of a Greek Goddess. I smiled and looked back at the statue “Maybe I am,” I said, with a twinkle in m eye.

Goddess knows it’s taken me years to come to love my body and to understand that my soul chose this body or my Earth walk. Even with a regular practice of yoga, self-pleasuring and conscious nudity, having grown up with both a childhood and a world that holds such a small idea of what beauty is, I find myself from time to time pulled down the vicious cycle of self criticism, until a moment happens on my yoga mat, or at Rock Lodge or in the Met that reminds me –hey – I’m a fucking Goddess.

To my sisters – the curse stops here. We have the option to step into our beautiful bodies and our Goddess-hood and teach this to our daughters. We are this next generation.