The Truth About How I Ended Up Here (Leaving Logic, Losing My Fiancé, and Finding My Vagina)
This is the origin story—the messy, mystical, magnetic truth of how Nicole went from a hyper-rational, high-achieving woman with a fiancé and a five-year plan… to a sexological bodyworker, somatic guide, and mouthpiece for embodied pleasure.
In this raw solo episode, Nicole shares the pivotal moment when her body said “no more,” and she finally listened. You’ll hear the heartbreak, the rage, the quiet knowing, and the trail of breadcrumbs that led her back to herself—not as an idea, but as a felt experience.
If you’ve ever found yourself living a life that looked good on paper but felt off in your bones, this episode is your permission slip to unravel.
🧨 In This Episode, Nicole Talks About:
Why doing everything “right” still left her numb, anxious, and sexually disconnected
The subtle and sneaky ways logic can betray your body
What happens when you stop abandoning your genitals (and start letting them lead)
The grief of leaving a relationship that "should have worked"
How pleasure became her compass—and how it can become yours, too
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transcript:
So today's episode is gonna be a little bit different. It's the story of how I got into this work, the work that no one knows how to pronounce sex. A what? Sexological body work. It's not gonna be the Polish story, the LinkedIn version, but the real one, the one with awkward sex and Google spreadsheets.
Too many feelings. And a body. I didn't know how to live inside until I really needed to. I'm telling it not because this is a particularly unusual or a jaw dropping story, but actually because I think so many of us end up where I was. Disconnected and hungry and confused, and we don't always know how we got there or how to begin again.
So this is me tracing the thread backwards through intellect, through heartbreak, through embodiment, and eventually through orgasm. Stick around, I promise. It's not just a personal story, it's a map, a mirror, maybe even a little medicine.
So how did I end up here talking to you on a podcast about sex embodiment and the poetry of our genitals?
It is not a straight line, and if I'm being honest, it's less inspirational heroine's journey and more. Oh, that's what happens when you pile 10 years of unprocessed sensation into a Google calendar and call it wellness. But I'll tell you anyway, not because my story is so special, because I think these questions that shaped it are the ones shaping so many of us right now.
What does it mean to feel safe in your body and what happens when pleasure is no longer performative? And how do you unlearn shame without losing your sense of self? So we'll start with the basics. I was a very gifted child, which. I'm using as code for anxious, overly observant, very good at adult conversations and low key, carrying a full nervous system crisis before the age of 10.
There were a lot of boundary crossings in my early life, and if you know, you know, that kind of upbringing makes you hyper attuned. You become like a tuning fork for other people's emotions. A little bloodhound for tension in the room. You know how to keep the peace, how to charm, how to disappear, and it gives you these superpowers and also a body that you have to leave in order to survive or feel even a scrap of safety in.
So I got really good at surviving. I read people like textbooks. I became a master of knowing what someone needed before they said it. And I was totally unable to relate to them in real time in connective ways. I could see what everyone was feeling clearly, their entire internal dialogue unfolding before me.
Kind of like a scroll to be read, but I didn't understand the social rules that would allow me to actually participate in the game. And so I went. Really hard into academia. I studied philosophy and urban studies social work because of course I did big questions, big systems, big ideas. It felt safer than my own inner world.
I was in my head 90% of the time, and honestly, I liked it there. It was tidy, predictable, controlled, unlike my body, which felt like a wild. Like overgrown, messy garden I had inherited from the previous house owners. Maybe beautiful in some places, but mostly just overwhelming. Too much a attend to, too tangled to trust.
So I stayed in places with clean lines and clear logic. Meanwhile, culturally, I was split because my mom is from Spain and so I grew up spending summers there eating tomatoes that actually tasted like something surrounded by a culture where bodies were a little less taboo and dinner didn't start until 10:00 PM and then I would come back to the US where everything was rushed and shammy and privatized and like emotionally constipated. And I didn't feel like I belonged in either place, but I learned to clunkily code switch between them. Never really reaching a frequency of connection, but I performed the best I could in Spain.
I was this like polite American girl who ate too early and in the states I was. The sensitive one who didn't understand why everyone wanted to drive alone and avoid eye contact, and no one seemed to really make true friends and connection. I felt really lonely. And then there was sex. And the first time I had sex, I was really young and it was with someone who miraculously was just as tender and culturally disoriented as I was.
He was Brazilian and we were teenagers and I had a full philosophical vocabulary and a complete inability to articulate my own desires, but we found each other. And we fumbled and we explored and we had amazing sex actually. Not because we knew what we were doing, but because we didn't think we had to perform it.
It felt honest and free and like a breath of air that nobody had poisoned or polluted yet. And it also felt like the antidote to my father's anxiety about my body. His fear eventually turned into monitoring and control, and he meant well, but he was trying to protect me the only way he really knew how.
But what he really passed on was this deep distrust of the female body, especially when it was blooming and feeling. And so I was. Caught in this confusing matrix of my emotions and my body and my arousal and my culture. And I had been searching for something that made sense to me for a very long time.
And when I was in my youth, I looked for it in books and academics and in logic. And I. I didn't realize until so much later that what I was actually in such desperate need for was a sense of safety, but we'll get to that in a minute. So that early relationship with that beautiful Brazilian lasted too long as many first loves do, and it didn't end.
With a big explosion, but it did end with a confusing, blurry, not quite consensual sexual encounter that left both of us confused and he wasn't a monster. And I wasn't broken, but we didn't have any tools. We didn't have any language, we didn't have a map. And that made a really big imprint on me.
That moment stayed with me for a really long time, and the question that I was with was, where do we go after consent gets complicated
and how do I make sense of a relationship? That was actually my source of safety for a lot of my youth, and it turned into. The very place where I felt the least safe, and I didn't know it yet, but that experience opened up a door away for me and a path that I would be excavating for years and actually still am, but I buried it for a while, like most of us do.
I went back to logic and schedules and smart girl things, and I clung to. Wellness rituals. And by that I mean like eating as little as possible to keep the brain fog away and the migraines away and working out obsessively. And I continued to devote myself to work and my studies and I did it with this desperation of someone who didn't yet realize that they were just pouring caffeine on top of somatic neglect.
And. At that time, I was the kind of person that didn't believe in astrology. I made fun of acupuncture. I hated my menstrual cycle, and even silenced it for a good 15 years with continuous hormonal birth control. And I lived inside of Google Sheets and my paper written planner, and I scheduled everything in my life down to the hour, and then something cracked.
I. And it started with a single word, and that word was embodiment. And I had no idea what that meant at all. And I remember exactly where I heard it first. There was a yoga conference online about embodiment and somatics, and I had no idea what it entailed at all. But when I heard those words in the description.
Of working with the body, every cell in my being exhaled, it was like, wait, you mean I'm allowed to be in here in this body, not just manage it? And then I had this moment that completely changed my life, and it was this simple and weird. Thing that is hard to transmit through words how this felt. But I looked at my hands and I just stared at them, and I was in awe that I had life flowing through me, that I,
I just was suddenly present. To myself and to reality, and it wasn't some like curated woo woo moment because I hadn't even been exposed to the conscious community enough to have the background knowledge to perform something like that. It just felt like a clear sense of I am here, and it was the clearest I had felt or known anything in my life.
There was no performing. Fixing it wasn't an understanding. I was just being, and tears came to my eyes. It was so much relief After, 23, 25 years of being in my head for my entire life and feeling like most of my existence was. Just have, just tolerating being here to being in complete reverence to myself and my life, and my body and my academic mind tried to fight this, but even she had to admit that this was real and this knowledge.
Came from within, and that was such a different sensation than anything I exper had experienced before. And once I got that taste, I just wanted more and more, and I could sense. That I needed to get off of the hormonal birth control that I was taking. So I stopped taking it, and a lot of things changed after that.
I started to actually see color again and to enjoy my food and to not wake up with a dread every single morning. And my libido came back roaring like it had been waiting in a holding cell for a decade. And I also had this new lens of embodiment and I, so I didn't just want friction sex. I didn't just want get it over with sex.
I wanted soulful, curious cell, deep pleasure. And I also knew that I still had these old wounds. I had boundary crossings that needed updates. I had stories that needed rewriting in the language of my body, and that's what I was searching for when I found. Sexological body work,
and I wish I could tell you that I discovered it in some like radiant, serendipitous way. Like I was hiking through the Pyrenees and a mysterious woman handed me a scroll that said, touch yourself with reverence or something. But I was just in a deep Google spiral, like late night, too many tabs open searching phrases like, why can't I feel anything during sex, even though I love my partner?
Or is it normal to cry when someone compliments your thighs or, honestly, if I'm being totally truthful about it, it was something where like, why does any hint of gender norms make me not only angry, but wanna burst out and cry and inexplicably scream and rage at the people I love and trust most? I was hunting for something that could hold this.
S seemingly impossible paradox. I was living, I had checked every box. I had read the book, scheduled the therapy, aced my exams. I impressed anyone I came in contact with. I had these big career goals and even centered on bettering the world. And I had sex that looked great on paper.
I had a life that was supposed to have meaning and still there was this hollow. Ache under my skin. Like my body was a house I lived in, but the lights were never turned on. Pleasure passed through me, but it never landed. I never actually felt joy or safety or inspiration or security Deep in my bones.
I want to share this little freebie with you if your body feels like a stranger or a task to manage instead of a place to live. This is where you start the three best at Home. Sexological Body Work Practices for more embodied Sex is my free video series for coming the hell back to your body. They are slow.
They are intimate. They're designed to wake you up without rushing you because your pleasure isn't gone. It's just been waiting for the right kind of attention. It's free, it's yours. Go get it.
Something was missing and I didn't know where to look for it. And when I read. The word sexological, body work. My brain immediately went, absolutely not. And my body whispered that one, and I ended up listening, and that was it. Sexological body work, the methodology I had never heard of with the name that sounded like something between a science experiment and a tantric massage parlor, but something in me like a deep body.
Knowing parts said yes, and before I could overthink it, I signed up for the certification. Actually I did overthink it for about two weeks. I had a lot of pieces in my life that I had to dismantle to make this possible. I was engaged to be married to a really well-intentioned man, and I knew somewhere in me that once I started down this path that I would leave him behind.
Which I also knew in my bones was for the best. We had been hurting each other for a very long time, but our breakup was compassionate and loving, and we cried together with the shared knowing that this really was for the best for both of us. And I was also on track to get a Master's in economics and my dream school was a London School of Economics and I'd been working for a year on getting the prerequisites that I needed to make it into the program.
And me and my then partner were planning a move to London and Visa's job apps, apartment hunting. And I remember the day when I placed replaced my econ books for title like. Women's anatomy of arousal and the erotic mind that had like big pictures of vulvas and labia on them. And one of the books I had proudly displayed, I bought directly from the London School of Economics Books bookstore on a trip the summer prior, and I could still feel the energy of the city like buzzing in its pages.
And I knew that wasn't alive for me anymore. And so I just started. Systematically dismantling my current life and past the physical dismantling. I had my entire like inner fortress of ones and zeros that were keeping me sane ish. My little like logical legacy. Going back to the day I was born, it was all my nervous system.
Knew not to feel but to think. But I eventually, after a few weeks signed up for the Sexological Body Work certification, and I actually hadn't even experienced a sex BOD session for myself before. I signed up to train to become a practitioner, but I just knew that it made sense and it was the first time anything had ever really made sense.
So I jumped and I didn't know what to expect, but. What I found actually wasn't a solution. It was a space, an alchemical pause where my body didn't have to be anything but here. And by the way, if my previous self heard me utter that sentence, there would've been some major eye rolling.
But I've learned that in order to describe the actual experience of being alive, the only real place. To turn to is imagery and metaphor and poetry. Because we are super complex beings. That turns out you actually can't sum up neatly with tidy language, funnily enough. So in my first experience of sexological body work, there was no pressure to perform, no spiritual bypassing.
No one kind of swooping into fix me. There's just someone there with me in sensation and you know how rare that is to be with another human in silence or breath or gentle touch and to feel seen like all the way down to your cells. And so I walked in very skeptical to this methodology and I left.
Incredibly changed. So if I were to paint a picture for you. What it looks like to move through this methodology. We weren't in like a naked pile stroking each other with feathers, despite what your imagination might be doing. It's actually quite different to any tantra ritual or, play party.
Sexological body work really isn't about performative sex sexuality. It's about relearning how to live inside your own body, not for someone else, not to get a gold start, but because you deserve to feel whole inside your own skin. The first time I was guided through an embodied self touch practice, I felt like I was being given back a language I'd forgotten that I ever spoke.
And it wasn't about pleasure as climax. It was about curiosity and presence and reverence. I touched my own body, not to seduce or soothe or fix it like we all do 99% of the time. Applying lotion, putting on our makeup, fixing our hair. That's all of our experience of touching our own bodies. I touch my own body.
In this practice to say, I see you and I'm listening, and something strange and really important happened during that first session. I wasn't doing it to prove anything, not to spark desire or relieve stress or get it over with. I was doing it with curiosity. And with reverence and with that gentle kind of what if kind of presence and I explored what was alive and what was numb and what had never been touched with kindness.
And for the first time, I wasn't just trying to feel more, I was trying to listen better. And that's what sexological body work gave me. It gave me a way to listen to my body that didn't rely on performance or pain or pathology. It was just present. And I know that sounds simple, but trust me, it really is It, for the first time, it was like no part of me was wrong.
Not the wetness, not the tension, not the desire. There was no giggle, no dismissal, and no shrink wrapped shame. It was just me and all the parts of me were intimately okay and held. So throughout that training, I saw so much beauty. I saw vulvas celebrated like they were wild flowers and penises honored, like instruments of sensation and power, not dominance or shame, and people of every body shape, gender background, gently meeting themselves, not in performance, but in presence.
And we talked about it. We talked about sexuality, we talked about eroticism, we talked about our bodies like adults, even like artists or explorers. What do you feel? What surprised you? What memory surface? When your fingertips grazed your own hip with intention and. It's massive. It changes your whole world and it doesn't just change your world.
It even spreads out into change that the people that you come in contact with. And it was just the most intellectually satisfying and erotically liberating experience because pleasure wasn't the goal, it was the byproduct of coming home to myself. And since then I've practiced in a hundred tiny ways coming back to my body, and I still practice this constantly mapping my own arousal and listening to what yes and no feel like under my skin.
Learning the difference between sensation and story and letting pleasure build instead of trying to chase it like a moving target. And slowly. Something shifted, my body began to write back. It was like, pleasure, return, not as a visitor, but as a resident. It wasn't a reward, it was a birthright. I was born to do this and to feel this and to even be the instrument to allow other people to feel this as well.
And I remember this one moment in particular. I was lying on a massage table during a guided breath and touch session, fully clothed, but it was somehow more exposed than I'd ever been. And the practitioner's hands weren't doing anything like quote sexual we would typically think of as sexual. Their hands were just listening to my body, and for the first time, I realized my body wasn't waiting for permission.
It was waiting for attention. And when I got that attention and intention, it was like my whole system lit up slow, gentle, inevitable. And it wasn't like this session was fixing me, it met me as the practitioner was asking me for exactly what I wanted when I wanted, and I would share exactly what came up for me.
And they would give me that touch without shame, and with celebration and with presence, it just changed everything about how I relate to my body and how I relate to my joy. And one of the most healing things I've ever experienced in sexological body work was something just being with me as I experienced my sensation.
Where there was no fixing and no performing and no agenda. And that's what I try to offer now, not just answers for people, but presence with them. And I continue my daily practices of self touch and breath work and sounding mapping, meeting the numbness, tracking what makes me close, and what makes me open.
And it's not for anyone else's gaze. It's not to be a better partner. It's just because my body is worth that kind of curiosity.
I have, I started to have this growing sense that there's this vast unexplored like force inside of me, and for the first time I had the tools. And the permission to walk through that forest barefoot and unafraid. It was like I could discover my own internal world for the first time being held in this counter-cultural container of body and erotic celebration and just a little like.
Reality check here. If you are wondering whether I'm just out here like vibing with crystals and affirmations, I wanna be really clear. I do love crystals and rocks and stones. Affirmations not so much if you've worked with me before. You've heard my sign signature rant on those. But the reality is I was the world's most reluctant convert to embodiment.
And I still have spreadsheets for my spreadsheets, and I still think critical thinking is sexy. Like really sexy, right? Baby. My partner's the one who edits this little pod for us, but I also think the intellect has limits and that your genitals might know something that your mouth has never dared to say.
And I used to scoff at all of this stuff. I was the most skeptical academic, logic bound person you can imagine, which is probably why I'm so good at bridging both worlds now, body and brain, sacred and practical. I don't do fluff. I do what works and this shit works. Sexological body work also gave me something else I didn't even know I needed.
It gave me community.
The people in this field are not just changing their clients' lives. They're changing how they live, how they love, how they touch the world, how they compost, shame, and grow something sacred in its place. And they're not just healed, they're honest, they're tender, curious, fierce in the most like grounded way possible.
And it's a privilege to be a part of this community, to walk alongside these people who ask better questions than how do I fix myself and instead ask what's already alive in me that I've been too scared or too busy to feel. And these people aren't just like sex positive and the cute, flirty, sparkly way.
They're people who. Had sat with their grief, their trauma, their edges, people who could hold space for pleasure and rage and laughter and silence all in the same breath. They ask questions like, where in your pelvis are you holding your no, and what sensation lets you know you're safe? World changing?
Absolutely world changing, and me finding this community was like finding a village that I didn't know I was exiled from, but. So incredibly thankful to find my way back. And since I have started on this path, I just have not. Stopped. I haven't run out of steam for this work. If anything, the longer I do it, the more in awe I am of what's possible in these bodies. Like I still get goosebumps when a client tells me they felt pleasure in a place they thought was numb forever.
And I've turned this practice into my purpose now because I wanna become a guru. But because I finally understood that your body isn't broken, it's just been ignored. And once you start listening. It speaks in the language of pleasure and wisdom and surprising clarity, and this is the work that I want to share, not to fix anyone, but to create more and more spaces where people can meet themselves.
Messy. Who? Curious. Alive, because I've learned it's not about learning how to be sexy. It's about learning how to be with yourself fully fiercely without apology. And what I've seen both in my body and in the clients I've had the honor of working with is this. One of the things I've learned from doing this work, work both in my body and in and with my clients, is that here healing rarely looks clean.
It's not a straight line. Sometimes it's an orgasm, sometimes it's crying on the bathroom floor. And it's all welcome. And this modality has the capacity to hold all of that complexity, the healing that isn't in a straight line. That's not a neat little arc that's messy. And sometimes it's boring and sometimes it's wildly erotic, and sometimes it's all of that in the same afternoon.
And this sexological body work holds all of it. The shift that happens when someone finally feels safe enough to listen to their body. That is what can change everything about your experience of your life. It's magic. It's the moment things start to really move. And so sexological body work didn't just give me access to pleasure.
It gave me access to trust, like full embodied feeling. Sensation based trust, and it helped me rewire the part of me that believed my body was too much or not enough, or simply not trustworthy at all. And now that's the kind of space that I get to hold for others. Not a place to be fixed or a place we watched or graded.
It's just a place to return to yourself and to meet the parts of you that have gone quiet. And to remember that you were never broken in the first place. So that's a little bit of how I got here. Not by knowing the answers, but by learning how to ask better questions with my body, with my breath, with my hands.
And if you're here listening, maybe you've been asking those questions. Too, maybe. Maybe you've been waiting for someone to say, you're not too much, you're not too late, and there's nothing wrong with the ba, the way that your body longs to feel. So if this story stirred something in you, a memory, hunger, you're not alone.
And this whole podcast is about that feeling. The moment you realize there's more aliveness. Waiting inside of you than you've been told, is reasonable and more healing available than when, than what you can Google at 2:00 AM If you're curious to keep going, there are plenty of places to start. There's a link in the show notes with some of my favorite free practices and resources, or you can check out upcoming workshops or offering if you're ready to go deeper.
But there's also no rush sometimes. Just hearing that something else is possible is its own kind of doorway. In fact, that's how it started for me. Not with a grand ritual or a dramatic AWAI awakening, but with a stranger's voice in my headphones. Gently speaking this quiet revolution that's underway.
One where we learn to center pleasure over performance, connection over control. I. A revolution that hums just beneath the noise of the world waiting for the body to remember. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening all the way through. I'll be back next time with more stories, more practices, and maybe a few uncomfortable questions that turn out to be the best kind.
So take care of your body and if you can let it take care of you too.
