04/09/2026
WHEN THE LANDSCAPE CARRIES OUR STORY
In my previous post, I wrote about our intimate anatomy as a landscape.
But landscapes also have a history.
Some places have been loved and visited often. Others have been abandoned. Some feel open and alive, while others have become places we avoid without really knowing why.
Our intimate landscape can be like that too.
We may understand our story very well with our mind. We may have talked about it, worked through it in therapy, forgiven, moved on. And still the body can have its own responses.
We pull away when someone comes too close.
We give more easily than we receive.
We struggle to feel or express our boundaries.
We disconnect during intimacy, or find it difficult to surrender.
Pleasure may feel unsafe, overwhelming or simply inaccessible.
We may carry shame around our body or sexuality. We may feel chronically depleted, armored or disconnected from the pelvis. Or perhaps we simply have the feeling that we are never completely at home there.
These responses can have many origins.
Sexual experiences, of course, but also relationships, rejection, betrayal, shame, childbirth, pregnancy loss, medical procedures, cultural and religious conditioning, difficult experiences around menstruation, boundaries that weren't respected, or years of learning to override what the body was saying.
Sometimes what once helped us protect ourselves continues long after the situation itself has passed.
This is another way in which I work with the Grail Gates.
Each Gate gives us a place to stop, feel, listen, witness.
Rather than asking only Where is this place anatomically?, we can begin asking:
What do I feel when I bring my awareness here?
What have I learned to protect here?
And what quality of myself might be waiting underneath all that protection?
Because the Gates are not only connected to wounds.
They also hold gifts.
A place associated with boundaries may teach us sovereignty. A place that has gone numb may slowly awaken sensation and aliveness. Where we have learned to overgive, we can explore receiving. Where there is armoring, we can discover softness without losing our strength. Where sexuality has become performance, we can return to presence.
And where parts of ourselves have felt scattered or disconnected, we can begin bringing them back into relationship with the whole.
This is why I find it so important to explore the Grail Gates beyond sexuality.
We are working with anatomy, but also with the nervous system, emotions, memories, relationships and the stories we have lived in our bodies. And within my own way of working, we can also explore the energetic and shamanic dimensions of these places.
Healing then doesn't necessarily mean erasing what happened. It can mean that the landscape begins to feel like ours again. That we can enter places we once avoided and stay present. That we can feel a boundary and trust it. That we can receive without immediately needing to give something back.
That pleasure can become safe enough to explore.
That the pelvis can reconnect with the heart, the body with the psyche, and the different parts of ourselves with each other.
Perhaps this is one of the deepest possibilities of exploring our intimate geography:
we don't only learn the map.
We slowly learn to inhabit our own land again.
If you feel curious about this work, there are two opportunities to enter the Grail Gates with me in the coming months.
On September 16, our online Womb Healing Circle – Entering the Grail Gates offers a first experiential journey into this landscape. We will approach the Gates as places in the body, but also as energetic and shamanic portals that can connect us with deeper layers of ourselves.
And from October 31 – November 6, during Journey Through the Grail Gates in the South of France, we will have seven days to travel much deeper. We will journey through the Gates in the womb and hara, working with body, energy, archetypes and inner experience, while the sacred landscape of the Cathar lands becomes part of the journey itself.
The circle can be a beautiful first doorway into this work. The retreat is for those who feel called to walk through the whole landscape.
Use the links in comments to join the journeys
