F*ck Like a Goddess: Heal Yourself. Reclaim Your Voice. Stand in Your Power.

INTRODUCTION

CONGRATULATIONS. WELCOME. You made it. I know it probably wasn’t easy to get here.

You may have grown up in a country where you were told that being you wasn’t enough or perhaps that sex was bad, either directly or indirectly. Where you had to hide your sexuality or wildness or magical practices and keep them all behind closed doors, to be spoken about in whispers.

You may have been taught about a masculine version of the divine, a god, but not about a goddess or about the divine spark within you.

You may have grown up with a strict religion.

You may find the word fuck triggering.

You may find the word god triggering.

Whatever you are feeling in this moment is perfect, and . . .

I am so, so glad that you’re here.

This means you are ready to experience a deeper layer of living and loving. Perhaps you are ready to be reunited with your sacred essence. Perhaps you are asking for more, because you know there is more to life than what you’ve been fed by the world. Perhaps you have shit you want to shake up.

We all have fears that keep us small. Traumas that we have endured, big and little, the imprints of which keep us afraid and stuck. Maybe you’re sick of feeling anxious. Or of secretly hating your body. Perhaps you’re feeling confused about what direction to take in life or how to share your voice with the world. Maybe you’ve sucked at romance. Or your experience of sex has been mainly not so great. Or your childhood wounds are annoyingly showing up in every relationship. I feel you. I know it’s not easy.

The tough news is that we have each inherited a ton of stuff from our parents, not to mention the culture at large, and guess what—if we don’t bring awareness to it, it ain’t going nowhere! But the good news is that we each have the innate power to change those old patterns and, in doing so, to reclaim our bodies, the way that we love, our relationship to sex and to the divine, and so much more.

Sadly, it’s not like we were given a how-to manual on how to get through it all (except that unspoken Keep calm and carry on contract you don’t exactly remember signing). But trust me, you already have in you all the tools you need to have a rich, deep, magical life. They’re inherent to your operating system. They’re laced into your DNA. It’s a matter of uncovering those hidden treasures using the arts that perhaps were not taught to you. The sacred arts of self-healing and of transformation. And this is what we are going to begin to do together.

Not that it will necessarily be easy or happen overnight. After all, uncovering your full essence is a radical act. It could take lifetimes. But why not begin to dive into the depths of your spirit now and transform anything inhibiting you from experiencing the depth of your love?

For transformation to occur, there must be a container, a substance to be transformed (a pattern, belief, fear, et cetera), and the energy or heat to make it happen. In this book I will lead you through the creation of your container, guide you to the awareness to see the patterns or fears dictating your life, and provide practices to help you create the energy for their transformation.

It is the act of taking your healing process into your own hands. It is standing up and saying:

I am willing to show up even when it’s uncomfortable,

to claim the freedom to become all that I want to be.

To shine brightly even amid the dark.

To love as big as I possibly can.

To make love to life.

To the present moment.

To myself.

To a lover.

To the sky.

To let myself be the ever evolving who-I-am and let that discovery be my life’s art.

To reclaim my body, my voice, my power,

And when it hurts

I will not give up!

Because I will be thinking of Mama Earth and how she needs me to shine

And I will be thinking of little boys and girls who are not free

And I will let my battle cry be:

I will find courage to face my fears.

I will love big even when it hurts.

I will not avoid the tough stuff, but take as many breaks as I need.

I will open to this life.

I will awaken.

For the sake of all beings everywhere.

And so it is.

Let this be your anthem. Or write your own. Read it aloud to yourself, under your breath. And any time you feel anxious or catch yourself going to say, Nah, I’m good. Life is fine, or you spiral into self-hate or shame or guilt or fear, or you numb out with TV or wine, or you bury yourself in being busy and forget about your heart, come back to this anthem. Make it your manifesto of awakening. Your statement of loving intent. For the earth, your family, your parents, your babies . . .

But most of all . . . for you.

Because the world needs your wholeness now. And don’t you want to feel a return to the infinite you in this life? A sweet reunion with your full, wild heart?

You are a vitally important piece of the ecosystem and well-being of this planet. Do not forget it. And when you heal yourself, reclaim your voice, stand in your power, and show up to the world more alive and vibrant and ecstatic as a result, you will inspire others to do the same. I’ve seen the ripple effect . . . in effect! And it is amazing. This is when you begin to wake other people the fuck up with your spirit. By simply being you.

The messy, wild, weird, nerdy, silly, deep, multifaceted, ever-changing you.

My wish is that you use this book as a manual for reclaiming anything and everything that you feel has been taken from you and that you commit to a spirit of magic and discovery, a life of deep and open living and loving.

That you use this to feel alive and in your body every day, to put down the heavy baggage you’ve inherited from your family, and to shine full-megawatt bright in the world, owning your wholeness and not dimming your light for anyone or anything.

Promise yourself that you won’t give up and that you’ll keep unraveling and unpeeling and deep diving into the gorgeous being that you are.

Every.

Mother.

Fucking.

Day.

My Story

Before we embark on this journey together, let me tell you why I am here. Why I care so much about love, healing, art, fucking, and awakening. And why I am so passionate about showing you that anything is possible and that there is a deeper level to living and loving that is accessible to us all.

I’ve overcome some things in my life. I’ve danced the good dance with my fears and woes, just like you. I’ve found magic in dark caverns of my being, turning wounds into allies, foes into friends.

My own karmic material in this life, which I have used as fuel for transformation, has included sexual traumas and the symptoms arising from those experiences; childhood imprinting due to separation from my parents; feelings of abandonment and of being unloved and unlovable, as well as the emotional patterns that emerged from those feelings, including anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and body dysmorphia; patterns of lack around money; codependency from growing up with traumatized and depressed parents . . . the list is seemingly endless. All this has been the material I have brought into my transformational work. I have graduated from these patterns and symptoms preventing me from loving, living, embodying truth, and I have reached a place where they do not dictate or shape my reality. Some of them I haven’t seen in years. Others echo here and there, yet I have changed my relationship to them, and I no longer fear them. This is the power of personal transformation. We have the capacity to change our deepest fears, patterns, and neuroses into sources of love and power.

Many people get lost in the deep, dark caverns of those experiences and symptoms. And I have done so at times, but ultimately I have chosen a life of doing the opposite. I have asked all the pains, traumas, and patterns to wake me up to exactly who I am today.

I think of it like the personal history degree (PhD) in Earth School chosen by my precise karmic makeup, creating the space for alchemy in my heart and soul, making me the exact walking, talking medicine I am now. And I would not trade any of it, as weird as that may sound.

I have also had 1,001 wild and fun adventures that have likewise woken me up and crafted me as life art from Earth School. I have experienced fun and laughter and big love. I have traveled the world. Swum naked in phosphorescent waters under a full moon. Meditated in caves in Nepal with Tibetan monks. Wrapped snakes around my body in a ceremony of ancient dance. Hitchhiked with truckers through the Southwest. Made documentaries in Cuba and New Mexico and Brazil.

There have been magazine interviews about my work and film premieres.

Dates with famous actors and dance parties into the night.

Sex where my body has turned into stars and I have been unable to speak for hours after, where I felt like I was on MDMA for five days straight, because the experience was so ecstatic.

People have written me poems, made me jewelry, sung me songs, and cried in my arms.

And I too have cried in the arms of many.

I’ve stood on stages in front of hundreds of women and watched them weep as I told my stories and they shared their fears with the room.

I’ve lived a good life, a big life. I am very blessed to have had the conditions and the courage to do so.

And it is all this life experience that’s led me to where I am now. At the time of writing this, it has been four years since I expanded from being an award-winning filmmaker and having a career of artistic expression to working full-time in the healing arts and writing, to help women find their voices, heal themselves, and come back to wholeness.

The women I work with have experienced many difficulties, from sexual assaults to uncontrollable anxiety to being afraid of being seen and the gamut of other obstacles that many modern women face simply in attempting to live a conscious, meaningful life. It has been my pleasure to lead other women in the art of healing and transformation, supporting them to step outside of the status quo and live from an open heart.

My work in this field started with a voice within that told me it was time to change my life and finally face some of my own wounding in a deeper way than I had. It was a voice I heard in an ayahuasca ceremony. Perhaps you’ve heard of this amazing, albeit somewhat terrifying, plant medicine. I like to call her one of my main teachers. She told me to wake the fuck up, stop caring about being famous, about being ambitious, about how I looked, and instead to go out and help people before I self-destructed. I did exactly as she said. And, funnily enough, it’s been smooth sailing since then (relatively speaking), and many things have fallen into place as I heeded the call to dive deeper into my soul’s calling and my own transformational journey.

Since that day, I have worked with hundreds of women around the world, supporting, mentoring, and leading them toward having the courage to come back to themselves and share their stories with the world.

The seeds of this path were there in my early career as an artist and filmmaker, when I set out, at the age of eighteen, to study life. But what I really wanted to discover was what it means to be a woman. I was curious about why women’s stories had been left out of most of the spiritual texts across the globe. Why no one was talking about how many women experienced sexual assaults. Why women were expected to diet and starve themselves or to change their appearance in other ways to be accepted. I was very confused about how this was all okay! Not to mention I was pissed. So I set out to make art that questioned why and how we got this way.

It was a path that led me to travel to Cuba and meet Fidel Castro’s family. That found me filming dead bodies in morgues. There was the time I went undercover in brothels in New York City and worked with women who’d been victims of sex trafficking. There was the project where I traveled to a truck-stop strip club in New Mexico and lived and worked with the dancers there. Where I danced for men in my Converse sneakers and cotton undies and shot machine guns in the desert. Another where I spent two weeks living with girls on the streets interviewing them about their choices to live their lives on the fringe.

As I moved through these worlds, naïve and wise at the same time, I learned that underneath, as women, we are very similar. We all hurt. We all love. And we all have been through a lot of shit! Rich and poor, brown and white, straight and queer. Not to say we are the same or to downplay one culture’s experiences of oppression or trauma, but indeed there is a thread that connects us.

I saw that many of us have been told our sexuality (however we identify) is too much for the world, that we need to be pretty in order to be lovable, and a whole slew of other things that seem designed to keep us separated from who we truly are. And I also saw that the act of sitting together and sharing stories was a way that we healed once before and that we needed to get back to. That when we cried together, ate together, sang together, and danced together, like the ancient people did, it worked.

What I found is that we already know the path back home to ourselves; there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Humans have been healing themselves for thousands of years. It’s simply a wisdom that had been taken and squashed but is ripe for reclaiming,

We are all seeking the same thing: to feel like it’s okay just to be us. We all have issues passed down to us, but most of the time, we don’t know how and where to begin to grapple with them. And since the process also seems scary as fuck, it is easier to keep on saying: I’m fine. And to just keep going. The people pleasing. The body hatred. The money fears. The not wanting to outshine others. A codependent need to help others. The list goes on . . . and it’s the matching baggage we are all carrying around. Showing up to dinner parties with three carry-ons. Going on first dates with a duffle bag of issues that would be marked heavy at airport check-in.

And so I have devoted myself to helping others like you, like me, with the unpacking and breaking-free process. And along the way, I have sought out many spiritual traditions, looking for refuge and spaces to do my own healing.

My spiritual path began with the Presbyterian Sunday school my mother sent me to from ages six to fifteen because she thought it would be good for me as an only child to be with other kids. Which it was, in some ways, but she must not have gotten the memo that no feelings are allowed in the Presbyterian church. Though I’m sure being cast as a Sin City Dancer from the bad city of Babylon in the church play when I was eight and wearing a red feather boa shaped my sexuality in ways I’ll always be grateful for!

Then there was my Catholic grandma in Brazil, who would pray the rosary over me when I was sick with diarrhea. She kept giving me Brazilian tap water and wondering why I was doubled over in pain, and I remember her and five other old ladies thumbing plastic beads, praying over me while I lay in the middle of the floor like a sacrificial gringa lamb with knotted intestines, Vatican programming blaring from the TV.

I was introduced to neohippie spirituality when, at eighteen, I went to a Rainbow Gathering with my best friend, Rebecca, and we accidentally camped by the medical tent. We were kept up all night by a guy on a bad trip shouting, I have the biggest motherfucking dick! We also had to poop in a communal trough next to other people pooping, which meant I did not poop for approximately seven whole days due to terror of public pooping. I still somehow managed to dance around a drum circle, where I picked up a guy whom I later visited in Philly. When, on our date, he sang Bob Marley songs while busking on the side of the street with his guitar and hemp necklace and encouraged me to dance along, I was slightly mortified we were singing for our supper. If only I had known I would still be drawn to this archetype of human, the wandering visionary mystical artist, even almost twenty years later, I would have probably relaxed and enjoyed that moment