What happens when becoming yourself collides with a world obsessed with identity — when truth, politics, and love all live in the same body?
Teegan Toftley transitioned in her late forties — not to prove a point, but to stop living divided. Now in her fifties, she’s still married to the same woman, still “Dad” to her kids, and still disarmingly real about what it means to belong to your own skin.
In this episode, we tackle conversations about gender, belonging, and authenticity. Teegan speaks openly about body dysmorphia, love that lasts through change, and the current cultural noise surrounding what it means to be trans.
It’s about what happens when the stories we tell about identity meet the deeper story of being human.

What’s the difference between pleasure and purpose — between the quick hit of happiness and the quiet satisfaction of meaning?
In this episode, Gwenm sits with Justin McSweeny, philosopher of mind and host of an interview series exploring sense-making and identity, to talk about the space where eros meets consciousness. Together they explore the longing that drives us — the hunger for depth in a world that keeps us on the surface.
Justin brings insights from philosophy of mind and third-generation cognitive science — how we build meaning, construct self, and relate to our own becoming. Gwenm brings it back into the body — where desire, purpose, and soul all converge.
They talk about hedonic versus eudaimonic happiness, the intelligence of desire, and what it means to live with presence instead of performance.

 
In part 2 of our Embodying the Practice conversation, Andrew Marshall returns to talk about intimacy - with the medicine, and with the ones we love. We explore his experiences with Ayahuasca - the openings, the purges, the raw honesty of meeting himself and how that honesty now lives in his purpose and his relationships.
What do we keep from our partners in the name of love?
What truths sit unsaid in the body?
And what does it take to speak from that place - unarmored, alive, fully present.
This is a conversation about embodiment, truth, and the courage to see and face one's shadows when there’s nowhere left to hide.
 
 

 
He chased the highs - the fight, the women, the thrill that felt like freedom.
But it wasn’t. It was escape dressed up as aliveness.
 
Andrew Marshall, Master Coach, Jiu Jitsu black belt, husband, father - lived the performance of freedom until his body, his spirit, and the woman who he finally called in, asked for something truer. We talk about what happens when the chase ends. When control no longer feels powerful. When freedom isn’t about getting away - but being right here, in the body, fully awake.
 
This is a conversation about the myth of freedom,
the discipline it takes to stay,
and the quiet beauty of a man who’s learned to live inside his skin.

 
Bedroom boredom isn’t about running out of positions or toys. It’s about the slow leak of presence — the touch that doesn’t land, the kiss that no longer opens, the silence that grows cold between bodies. In this episode, Gwenm drops raw into her own story — a marriage that ended in rupture, the ache of midlife awakening, the pull of numbness, and the courage to soften back into pleasure.
She unpacks how boredom can become a deadening cycle — or an invitation. Through visceral stories and practical tools, she offers a path back into aliveness: breath that ignites desire, sound that cracks you open, touch that revives numb landscapes, polarity, mystery, adventure, repair, and the forgotten aphrodisiac of opening the heart.
This is not surface-level “spice.” This is eros as lifeblood — the difference between living half-asleep and being fully claimed by presence.

Women are praised for being selfless — but the cost is often desire: starved, silenced, abandoned. The marriage that quietly goes cold. The body that goes numb. The fire that flickers out.
Melissa Barnes knows this terrain. Outwardly successful, inwardly empty, she spent years performing the role of the “good woman” while starving herself of desire, intimacy, and fire — until she became a ghost in her own life. After two decades as a funeral director and end-of-life care worker, she witnessed the sharp truth of what’s lost when we bury our hunger. Out of that rupture, she created The RISE Method™, guiding women who appear to have it all but feel hollow inside.

 
What does it mean to love someone who cannot stay? To pour yourself into the silence of unanswered notes, unread poems, dangling carrots of “thinking of you,” and calls that exit before they land? In this episode, I step into the rawness of loving the avoidant — the man who hides behind polished confidence, the boy inside who is terrified of conflict, shame, and intimacy.
But this is not only about the other. This is about the avoidant within us... within me. Attachment styles reflect our own unhealed places. The skin-tightening recoil before visiting my mother, the restless feet of the next thrill, the ways I disappear when love gets too close. I tell stories of my own avoidance, my mother’s desperation, my wife’s piercing callouts, and the moments where acting, sex, and love all meet in the same vulnerability hangover.
We'll wander through attachment styles — wave, island, anchor — without clinical jargon, but through lived experience. And what it means to love anyway, to risk love as something that costs, something that undresses us down to bone, to shame, to fire, to Eros itself.

What if the way you love, long, and ache isn’t random — but the wiring of your soul? In this solo episode, Gwenm takes you into the body’s first imprints of love and eros, from the womb to the nervous system, through vows made in heartbreak and the Erotic Blueprints that shape our desires.
With raw stories of survival, longing, and devotion, practices for rewiring through pleasure, and poetry that lands in your bones, Wired for Love explores how ache becomes cathedral, how longing becomes erotic, and how love — in its mess, shadow, and mystery — becomes the most powerful force of aliveness we have.
 
Watch: https://youtu.be/seqqYjl3B-c 

 We tied to each other in Berlin. Not for performance. Not for pretty pictures. For the ache of what happens when rope meets skin and silence stretches between two bodies.
Shibari took us somewhere we couldn’t script. The knots held more than flesh — they held memory, hunger, release. We talk about what it felt like to surrender, to hang between trust and fear, to feel the rope carve its language into our skin. This isn’t a tutorial. It’s a conversation about the intimacy of being bound, the strange freedom inside suspension, and what was revealed when we let the rope have us. 
 
Watch: https://youtu.be/9Mj2ACmeyDw 

Women are praised for being selfless — but the cost is often desire: starved, silenced, abandoned. The marriage that quietly goes cold. The body that goes numb. The fire that flickers out.
Melissa Barnes knows this terrain. Outwardly successful, inwardly empty, she spent years performing the role of the “good woman” while starving herself of desire, intimacy, and fire — until she became a ghost in her own life. After two decades as a funeral director and end-of-life care worker, she witnessed the sharp truth of what’s lost when we bury our hunger. Out of that rupture, she created The RISE Method™, guiding women who appear to have it all but feel hollow inside.

 
When Desire Outlives the Body
I recorded this episode in Berlin — the city my mother once called home, and the place I brought her back to in hopes of finding some kind of peace, or beauty, or closure. Instead, what I found was diapers in hotel bathrooms, bureaucracy in cold German offices, hospital corridors, rage, tenderness, shame, laughter, and the kind of intimacy no one prepares you for.
This is not a clean story. It is messy and visceral and full of contradiction. My mother is eighty-four, with dementia, and still lights up like a schoolgirl when a handsome man walks by. She is storm and tragedy and beauty — part Judy Garland, part Marilyn Monroe, part my very own haunting. She lived for drama and eros, numbed herself with pills and drink, and still remains hungry for love, even now.
In this episode, I open my grief diaries and speak the truth: the rage, the shame, the exhaustion, the moments of bone-deep hatred, and also the tenderness that keeps cracking me open. Because eros is not just sex or romance. It is survival, it is presence, it is the ache that keeps us tethered to life even as memory dissolves.
This is an episode about what it means to live and to love when the body declines but desire refuses to die. About what it means to face your mother — and yourself — in the most raw and unfiltered ways.
Because eros doesn’t retire. Desire outlives the body. And the mess of being alive might just be enough.

Acting isn’t about pretending. It’s about presence. About listening. About coming back to what’s real.
What if it was never about becoming someone else—
but finally becoming yourself?
In this episode, Gwenm speaks with Lori Triolo—actor, director, and master teacher of Meisner and Fitzmaurice Voicework®—about how the craft of acting can draw us into deeper contact with our truth, rather than pulling us away from it.
They explore voice as a measure of emotion, breath as a doorway into the present moment, and how real performance isn’t about polish—it’s about contact. With the body. With sensation. With the parts of ourselves we’ve been trained to mute.
This isn’t just a conversation for actors.
It’s for anyone who has gone numb.
Anyone who’s tired of holding it together.
Anyone ready to feel again.
It’s about awareness—
and the quiet, steady return of aliveness
when we stop performing and start paying attention.
 
Watch: https://youtu.be/CQp7UGygHPM 

This conversation with Alyssa Hawn—Theta Healer, Human Design and Gene Keys enthusiast—dives into the places where love meets resistance. Alyssa carries the echo of a wound that has whispered through her bloodline for lifetimes, shaping the way she mothers her son in this one.
 
We explore the invisible fractures that can keep a mother from fully softening, the lineage patterns that live in the body, and the way old pain can shadow the love we long to give. What does it take to nurture when we’ve known betrayal and abandonment? To love without condition when every instinct tells us to close?
 
This is an episode about past-life echoes, inherited wounds, and the holy surrender it takes to rewrite the history we were born into.
 
Watch: https://youtu.be/lpt4fogH7PE 
 

 
What turns you on—deeply, irrationally, achingly?
This isn’t just about sex. It’s about the soul’s memory of touch, tension, worship, and wildness.
In this intimate and uncensored episode, Gwenm peels back the layers of the Erotic Blueprints—not just the textbook types, but the archetypes that live in the ache.
The Spark. The Tender. The Flame. The Threshold. The Morph.
And her own additions: The Devourer. The Deep. The Dyad.
We explore body language, walk, clothing, and gaze—what your erotic self says without a word.
And then… into the Dark Eros. Where shadow meets desire. Where grief lives in the moan.
This is a love letter to your body.
And an unflinching mirror for your unspeakable wants.
 
Watch: https://youtu.be/dAioCiorfV4
 

What happens when you cast the most hidden, most judged parts of the body into permanence?
In this unfiltered and unforgettable episode of Skin & Soul, I sit down with British sculptor Jamie McCartney—creator of The Great Wall of Vagina (now Vulva), The Spice of Life, and a growing body of work that dares to mold the raw truth of our erotic anatomy.
From labia to penis, outer lips to internal vaginal walls, Jamie’s art captures what we’re taught to hide. This isn’t porn. It’s not provocation for its own sake. It’s documentation. Reclamation. Reverence.
We talk about:

• The myth of the “perfect” pussy—and the quiet epidemic of aesthetic shame
  
• Why the most radical thing you can do is see (and show) your real body
  
• The art of internal vaginal casting (!), and the intimate trust it demands
  
• Genital diversity, censorship, and why real erotic bodies deserve museum walls
  

Jamie’s sculptures aren’t just flesh frozen in time. They are resistance. Education. Sacred rebellion. They say: you are not wrong. You are not broken. You are not alone.
Because Venus was never one shape.
She was every curve. Every crease. Every variation.
And each one of them is divine.
Watch: https://youtu.be/UX7JZG1-Puw

 
Kissing and tango have a lot in common.
Both are about timing, presence, and the space between bodies.
A kiss—like a good tango—isn’t about how fast you get there.
It’s about how attuned you are to the other person’s rhythm.
In tango, you don’t rush. You feel. You pause. You let breath and weight guide the next move. That’s what makes it erotic. It’s not just steps—it’s listening.
A great kiss works the same way. It doesn’t push. It waits. It adjusts. It reacts. It leads. It follows.
A kiss can be sacred—or scandalous.
A firestarter. A farewell. A way home.
It can ruin you, rewire you, or leave you starving.
In this raw and intimate episode, I’m joined by Venezuelan-born illustrator, tattoo artist, and tango dancer Lis Salvatierrafor a conversation about kissing—not just the act, but the imprint, the memory, the myth, the missteps, and the magic.
Together, we explore the kiss as a tango: a dance of breath, tension, pause, and surrender. That moment before lips meet—the lean-in, the pull-back, the heat of proximity—can be more electric than the kiss itself.
We talk about bad kissers, ghost kisses, the ones that repelled, and the ones you still dream about.
We share stories of clumsy mouths, cosmic connections, cultural differences, and the way some people kiss to take—while others kiss to give something back. The how-to, and the how-not-to.
It’s about the kiss you still feel in your body—
And the one you have yet to experience.
Watch: https://youtu.be/lCA40A9MFB0

 What happens when a woman refuses to be framed by the world’s gaze—and chooses to see herself through the eyes of the divine?
In this episode of Skin and Soul, Gwenm sits down with embodiment coach, sacred photographer, and modern-day priestess Carol Beavers to explore what it means to reclaim the feminine body, the erotic pulse, and the power of pussy—not as performance, but as portal.
Carol shares her soul-led journey from a life that no longer fit to a global pilgrimage of remembrance. Her camera is more than a tool—it is a ritual, a resurrection, a reclamation. Together, we speak of dismantling the patriarchy, of what it means to be truly seen, and of the raw truth that gets captured when a woman drops the pose and lets her essence rise.
This isn’t about being photogenic.
It’s about being sovereign.
It’s about pussy as power. And the lens as holy witness.
carolbeavers.com
watch: https://youtu.be/bS41hUbrSGQ

This is a personal eulogy to my father who just passed away on Shavuot. 
Watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM9pTMwqpxM 

Kevin didn’t set out to become a sex and intimacy coach. For 25 years, he was devoted to one woman — his junior high school sweetheart, the only lover he’d ever known. They built a life together anchored in marriage and children. They shared a story rooted with loyalty and love. But then, the axis tilted. She came out as a lesbian.

They tried to hold on, but the marriage ended, and Kevin found himself standing in the ashes of everything he thought he knew.

What followed could’ve been collapse. But it wasn’t.

It was a reckoning.
A rewilding.
A return.
To sensation.
To truth.
To his body, not as a tool for performance, but as a place he could finally come home to.

After two decades with the only lover he’d ever known — who didn’t sexually desire him — Kevin was left asking:
What does my desire feel like?
What does it mean to be wanted and craved?

Through his own journey and awakening, Kevin is now a trauma-informed, somatic-based sex and intimacy coach. He helps people return to themselves.

This is an offering for those who are quietly unraveling. Who sense there’s something more, just beneath the surface. Who’s ready to feel again. To love differently. To remember the body as a place of truth.
 
Watch: https://youtu.be/HDGPPzfZqjs

We want the highs. We chase the peak experiences—bliss, orgasm, success, visibility. But few of us ask what we're willing to feel to get there. This episode is about the places we cap our pleasure, our truth, our voice. Gwenm speaks to the quiet corners of our permission—the ceilings we’ve built inside our nervous systems and the cages we inherited around desire. It’s about the difference between climax and connection, between sensation and performance. With raw storytelling, body-based wisdom, and deep personal reflection, this episode asks: How good do you allow it to get? What's you pleaure thermometer? 


Watch: https://youtu.be/APNj-BhtT6c