About Stacey

I could tell you the whole story in detail, but here’s what I want you to know. I was adopted at birth, and my relationship to my birth mother has had a profound impact on my life, which I am still unraveling. I spent most of my life swinging wildly between embodying the Good Girl (always on her best behavior and standing in line,) and hurtling out of my body through disordered eating, alcohol, and sex.

I found Yoga at a very early age, which is arguably what saved my life on countless occasions. But it wasn’t until I began to study Ayurveda in earnest that I started to see the fragments of myself as The Path. Ayurveda led me to study jyotish, or Vedic astrology, and I began to see myself as more than a lost, forgotten child. I sought out my birth mother. I reckoned with volcanic anger and unspoken needs and decades upon decades of addiction. I became a doula. After witnessing my first birth, I felt determined to practice Midwifery, though in my interviews with prospective families, I recognized a profound need for sex education. It seemed clear to me that sexuality - and the shame surrounding it - is a keystone to birth.

The path to understanding the relationship between sexuality, birth, and women’s health became clearer and clearer for me through my own experience of miscarriage. I lost a baby at eleven weeks, and turned toward Ayurveda for women’s health, postpartum care giving, and Somatic Sex Education. One of the most significant and transformational experiences of my life was being on retreat at an Intimacy Educator training. The curriculum was enriching and illuminating, but my turning point was when my whole body said, “No, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to participate.” I felt shame that I wasn’t comfortable with what seemed to be the easiest thing for everyone else in the group. I told my teacher that I had to leave, and I went home for the rest of the day.

I stayed home for the whole next day.

That night, she called me and asked to take me to dinner. She asked me if I thought I’d come back to the training, and I answered, “I’m not sure,” to which she replied, “well, please know you don’t need to come back for anyone else. I think it’s wonderful that you found your ‘no.’” With this phrase, my life unlocked and I began to see clearly how so much of my life’s experience (and colossal mistakes, self-sabotage, and shame) had been based on a belief that I was / am not allowed to say no. This unconscious belief had steered me into so many dark places, and suddenly, it had no power over me. In the wake of this internal shift, I changed everything. I set up shop in my house offering Pleasure Mapping, Ayurvedic Lifestyle Coaching, and Somatic Sessions (a combination of guided somatic awareness, bodywork, and ritual.) I became pregnant. I moved all the way back to my hometown (a place that hadn’t felt like home for years.)

In the years since this transformation, I have birthed at home, lived through a pandemic, birthed again at home, survived paralyzing postpartum depression, initiated graduate work in Clinical Psychology, and created the intimate partnership of my dreams. All of this has come at a cost: the sacrifice of perfectionism and the death of the Good Girl. I am here, in my work, in service of the transformational power of the Goddess, the life force energy that pulses through the female body, and the infinite wisdom of women’s driving desire. I am honored by your willingness to meet me here.

All images shot by Lance Thorn in Tucson, AZ