Your body knows. Your skin hums with ancestral quickening, carrying the weight of predator-kings crowned by broken systems. For those of us who inhabit historically brutalized bodies—especially women, transgender folks, and femmes—this reality isn't…

Have you ever second-guessed your instincts, doubted your desires, or felt disconnected from what your body is trying to tell you? If so, you’re not alone. Trusting yourself- your body, your feelings, your sensations, your desires - feels like an uphill battle—one filled with self-doubt, shame, and the relentless need for external validation.

But why? Why is it so damn hard to trust yourself?

This struggle is not a personal failing.

It’s not because you are “too emotional,” “too sensitive,” or “indecisive.” These labels are distractions—designed to keep you questioning yourself rather than the system that taught you to doubt in the first place.

At the core of Pleasure Alchemy lies an essential act of agency: trusting yourself. Self-trust is the foundation that allows your transformation to stabilize, integrate, and flourish.

Self-trust is not a passive state—it's an active, essential exercise of your agency, the cornerstone upon which your transformation stabilizes, integrates, and flourishes.

Without self-trust, growth becomes fragile—like a house built on shifting sand, it feels uncertain, fleeting, or vulnerable to collapse under life’s pressures. But when self-trust is cultivated..

We’ve been conditioned to believe that spirituality is about rising above—transcending the messiness of human life, the limitations of the body, and the chaos of the material world. This is the path of transcendence: a striving for something "higher," a disembodied sense of the divine that exists somewhere "out there." It’s the path our patriarchal society and religious systems have glorified—a path that often disowns the body, the earth, and the cyclical rhythms of life in favor of linear progress, perfection, and ultimate escape. But what if there’s another way…

It’s the stuck energy. The heaviness in your chest. The numbness in your body that says, “Don’t feel too much—it’s not safe. Trauma leaves its mark, freezing emotions, disconnecting us from joy, and trapping us in patterns of survival. But what if this stuck energy isn’t the end of the story?

For those of us shaped by trauma, vigilance can feel like survival and even safety. But what if vigilance isn’t the only way to feel safe? What if safety is found not in tightening but in softening?

Outside of this cultural addiction to striving for measurable results, somatic self-love offers a way that is more nuanced and liminal, resisting the simplifications of binary definitions. Unlike the black-and-white ways…