🎙️JUICY PERSONAL SHARE: When a Tantric Yoni Massage Did More Harm Than Good

✨ When a Tantric Yoni Massage Did More Harm Than Good ✨

Ever felt like you were doing all the right things—reading the books, buying the yoni egg, reclaiming your pleasure—only to find yourself confused, floating in a haze of oil and spiritual platitudes? This deeply personal and unflinchingly honest episode is for you.

Nicole takes you inside the story of the time she said yes to what was supposed to be a sacred, sensual, goddess-level experience… and ended up reenacting old wounds instead of healing them.

This is not an attack on tantra—it’s a love letter to your body’s wisdom and a call to stop overriding your own discomfort in the name of "healing."

🌿 In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why even "sacred" spaces can still replicate harm

How performance can sneak into our healing journeys

The difference between consent as a checkbox and consent as an ongoing, living dialogue

What true erotic sovereignty and agency look like

Why your body—not the velvet-draped temple—is the altar that matters most

💫 Key takeaway:
You don’t need a ritualized performance of surrender to heal—you need a container where your yes and no are equally welcome, moment by moment.

🔥 If you’ve ever been told to “just breathe through it,” this is your invitation to pause—and listen deeper.

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📲 Help This Podcast Thrive
If your body hummed, your brain lit up, or you whispered “WTF yes” during this episode…
💌 Don’t keep it to yourself.
✨ Download the episode
🌱 Leave a review (it’s podcast gold and helps us reach more pleasure-curious weirdos)
👯‍♀️ Send it to that one friend who totally vibes with eco-intimacy, sacred sex, or just needs a little erotic permission slip today.

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full transcript

Okay, so let's get one thing straight right out of the gate. This episode is not a takedown of tantra, but it is for the ones who've done the work, the ones who've read the books, burned the sage, bought the yoni egg, done all the self-reflection, radical honesty. The ones who've spent years trying to reclaim their body and who thought maybe just maybe the next step was a sacred sensual candlelit yoni massage.

Spoiler alert. For me, it wasn't. So today I'm telling the story of the time. I said yes to what was supposed to be a healing sensual goddess level experience . And ended up floating in a hot tub in a haze of confusion, oil and spiritual gaslighting. This episode is for anyone who's ever overridden their own discomfort in the name of healing.

For the seekers who've performed pleasure because they thought they should be ready for the ones who've walked out of sacred spaces, wondering why their body still feels like it's holding its breath. We are talking about the thin line between healing and reenactment. The way spiritual language can sometimes mask subtle harm and why your yes doesn't mean a damn thing if it's not ongoing.

I am gonna walk you through it, blow by blow what happened, what I missed, what I wish someone had told me before I signed up to be touched by a stranger in a gold drenched tumble in Barcelona, Spain. This isn't a horror story, it's a wake up call, a reclamation, and most of all, it's an invitation to build a kind of pleasure that's rooted in agency, not performance.

So if you've ever been told to just breathe through it, this one's for you. Let's go there.

rewind to a time in my life when I was deep in the thick of healing work. You know the phase when you've already done a lot of the inner excavation, your bookshelf looks like a who's who of embodiment gurus, and you're starting to feel like maybe just maybe you're ready to invite in some kinds of touch.

I was living in Barcelona at the time. I had the sun on my skin, the magic in my step, and a growing curiosity about what else was possible in my erotic life. And then I heard about it, a tantric yoni massage.

Now, if you've never heard of that before, let me break it down a little bit. It's a kind of sensual body work rooted in the neo tantric tradition. Often intended to open energetic channels, activate pleasure, and help people release stored emotional or physical tension from the pelvis. At least that's the pitch.

It is really quite different than sexological body work because a tantric yoni massage has a ritual and steps that you go through. Sexological body work, on the other hand, is completely client led, and at the time, this really intrigued me because I had already done so much work talking about my sexuality.

Processing my trauma and reclaiming my body, and this felt like maybe the next frontier. What if instead of just talking, I let someone hold my body with reverence. What if I open the gates and let the goddess in? What if this was the key? It felt edgy, it felt sacred. It felt like the kind of thing someone as spiritually evolved and embodied as me should be able to handle.

So I booked it. No big deal, just a yoni massage from a stranger in a candle lit temple in a foreign country as one does. And let me tell you something, the space was gorgeous. You'd never know from the outside what was tucked behind the ordinary storefront. A full on opulent incense drenched temple, giant cushions on the floor, soothing music, hot tub for post session integration and oil like gallons of oil.

Tanika really know how to create a luxurious space. And the practitioner also really lovely, soft spoken, skilled, clearly well-meaning, but something happened during that session. Something I didn't have language for at the time. Something I shrugged off at first because I wanted to have a good experience.

I wanted to be the kind of person who came out of a tantric massage, glowing and unbothered, and fully healed. But what I actually walked away with was. A whole lot of confusion. So in today's episode, I'm gonna tell you what happened, not to scare you away from every sensual healing practice on the planet, not to shame a modality that truly has helped people, but to show you why even the most beautiful spaces can.

Still sometimes miss the mark. Why consent is more than just signing up and why sometimes your body knows what it needs, even when the spiritual branding is gorgeous and the practitioner is holding your hand with care. Let's talk about what happened when I said yes to Ioni Massage and realize halfway through that I was performing my own pleasure again.

Okay, let's go back to Barcelona. So I walk into this space off a totally normal Barcelona Street, and I swear to you it's like I stepped into a portal, velvet curtains, gold leaf, the smell of something between rosewater and patchouli. And in the center of an all this massive plush floor cushion, like the kind of thing you'd imagine

a Persian queen reclining on while telling stories that could save her life. The practitioner greets me. She's calm and grounded, speaks softly with an accent I can't quite place. She gives me a warm smile and hands me a robe, and I feel myself doing that. Little nervous, excited dance you do when you're not quite sure if you're about to be healed or haunted.

She walks me through a basic outline of the session, some breath work, some energy movement, a lot of touch. I ask about consent boundaries and what to do if I want to speak, and then that's when she says, there's no need to talk unless you wanna moan or scream, but if something like fear comes up, just breathe through it.

Let yourself melt into the experience and y'all, I clock it. My little spidey senses do a ping, but I override them because in that moment I thought, this is a sacred practice. She knows what she's doing, and maybe the part of me that wants to pause or question things is just scared of expansion. Yeah.

That's how the deep performance of healing can go. So I undress. Lie down on the cushion and close my eyes, and the session begins. At first, it's gentle, some guided breathing, a warm hand on my belly, slow, deliberate touch, and oil. So much oil, and I can feel it slipping across my skin, coating every inch of me in this strange combination of devotion and detachment.

I keep checking in with myself. Am I here? Yes. Am I safe physically? Yes. Do I want this? I think so. I'm not saying no. But I'm also not saying anything because I was told not to, even when a flicker of fear started to rise in my chest, when I felt the beginning of that old familiar sensation of being touched with good intentions, but without full presence, I didn't speak.

I just breathed like a good little healer in training, and I remember thinking, this is fine. This is beautiful. My body's receiving. I should let it happen. I should let it happen. And that right there is the part that gets me now because should has no business being in a space like that. Not when your genitals are involved, not when your nervous system is already whispering Something's off.

📍

Eventually the session ends. See, she places a hand on my heart. Thanks me smiles, and I go sit in the hot tub alone in this dreamy, opulent, gold drenched temple, and I feel like hazy, floaty, not wrecked, not devastated, but not integrated either. And that's the thing. Sometimes the wound isn't dramatic.

Sometimes it's just the echo of all the other times you didn't speak up. All the other times your body said, wait, and you said, okay

to the hot tub. I dried off, got dressed, step out onto the sunlit Street, like some kind of like freshly anointed oil slicked goddess. We didn't quite know what had just happened. Barcelona was still doing its thing, motorbikes, zipping pass, old couples walking arm in arm, the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke in the air, but I wasn't really in it.

I was drifting and hazy like someone had turned down the contrast on the whole world and still no tears, no panic, no dramatic rupture, just that low grade unease. You don't have words for yet. That feeling like your body filed something away in a locked drawer, you won't open for months. I told myself I had a powerful experience.

I journal journaled about it with all the right language open, surrendered, released, but there was this one entry I didn't write, the one that said, I think I just reenacted every time I stayed silent when someone touched me in a way I didn't ask for. A few days later, I met with my sexological body worker.

I hadn't told her I was going to do this session because some part of me knew that she might tell me not to, and I didn't wanna hear it. So I reported it after the fact casually, like someone describing a new yoga class. I said, yeah, it was really beautiful. The practitioner was kind. It was definitely intense.

I think some stuff moved. And I will never forget the way her face changed. Not dramatic, not panic. Just this quiet shift in her eyes that said, oh no, my girl reenacted something. She asked questions. Not invasive ones. Just simple loving ones. Were you encouraged to speak up if something didn't feel right?

Were there check-ins? Were you touched Genitally before any verbal consent was reaffirmed, and as I answered slowly, honestly, I saw the pieces start to click, why it felt so foggy afterward, why my body didn't fully land, why the words sacred and safe aren't interchangeable. At the time I thought she was overreacting.

I thought she didn't understand the tantric container. But now years later, with everything I've studied, practice and held in others, I see it so clearly. That session was beautiful and it was also a bypass. It was sensual, but it wasn't sovereign. It was tender, but it wasn't trauma informed. And no matter how many rose petals or breath cues you add to the mix, if a space doesn't make room for all of you, especially the parts that say, stop or wait, or, I'm not ready, then it is not a healing container.

It's reenactment wrapped in satin. So what could have happened instead? Let's imagine that practitioner had said, if fear comes up, tell me. We'll pause. Your words are welcome here. Let's imagine she'd said, you don't owe me a performance of surrender. We go at your body's pace. Let's imagine she had checked in, like really checked in, not just at the beginning, but throughout, and not just with a script, but with curiosity, with presence, with permission.

Let's imagine I'd been invited to speak, to be, even if what came up was mess, messy, resistant, confused, or contradictory, that would've changed everything. Because what I needed wasn't silence, it was collaboration. What I needed wasn't an altar, it was agency. And what I needed wasn't to be guided deeper.

It was to be reminded I could leave that, I could say no, not just once at the start, but a hundred times every time something shifted. And that's the thing no one tells you. Consent is not a checkbox at the beginning. It's an ongoing dialogue. It's dynamic. It breathes, it responds. So what could have happened a session where my whole self was welcome, I.

A space where pleasure and fear could coexist without pressure. Container that knew deeply reverently that erotic healing is not about overriding anything. It's about listening so well that even your smallest No, it feels like an invitation to stay close and that. That is why I became a sexological body worker because I wanted people, especially people like me, with the history of swallowing their no.

To have a space where their yes, didn't have to compete with it. So if you're listening to this and thinking about doing a session like the one I did, just, no, it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to want more structure. It's okay to not be ready, and it's okay if you are ready, but only on your terms. You don't need a velvet temple to find healing.

You need a space where your body is the altar and your voice is the prayer.

Before we go, I wanna offer you a little something, a self consent practice, because before we ever offer our body someone else's hands, we need to know what a yes and a no even sound like inside of ourselves. So if it's safe to do I invite you to close your eyes and take a breath and let your attention drop into your body, not your thoughts.

Not your performance, but your felt sense. Now, gently place a hand somewhere on your body that feels neutral, maybe your thigh, your belly, your collarbone, and ask out loud or in your mind, do you want this touch? Do I want this touch? Then wait. Not for what you think you should feel, not for what someone else would call healing.

But for your body's honest response, it might be a yes, a no, a maybe a not right now. Whatever comes up, believe it. No justification, no pushing, no override. That's consent. Now ask again in a different spot, different intention. Do you want more? Do I want more? And again, listen. This is how we practice. This is how we rebuild trust, not by going faster, but by going with.

So you can return to this anytime. Your body's not a problem to be fixed. She's a conversation waiting to be had. And the more you listen, the louder she speaks.