We can’t solve burnout prevention in a system designed for our perpetual exhaustion without our capacity for ourselves, each other, our relationships, and communal care and pleasure.
You have to be present for the relationships you want, both with self and in community with others. This presence practice is not only the skill of holding space, but also the alchemy of your lovership and kinship for both your personal and professional relationships.
As a trauma-informed licensed social work and therapist, I often use the analogy that healing is the feeling one has when they are healing from a paper cut . It is
itchy, uncomfortable, and sometimes painful, however, instead of scratching and reopening the wound, you manage the uncomfortableness by soothing both yourself and that wound. This is what I
witness my clients achieve when they focus on the pleasure-affirming healing relationship with their mind, body energy, and spirit and not just on their therapy and coaching outcomes.
Our relationship to our mind, body, energy, and spirit is informed by our lived experience and our ability to access embodied safety and self-trust. Our lived experience also informs our perception of self. Your wounds make you feel chaotic. Being able to manage the distress and/or discomfort of our wounds by establishing embodied safety and developing self-trust, in ancestral medicine, this healing process is called shadow work; and in neuroscience, specifically neuroplasticity, this healing process is called the Polyvagal Theory, and integrative somatic understanding, this healing process is what I call “self-liberation.” Self-liberation is a practice, a skill, and an embodiment.
To liberate yourself in your personal healing and even your professional development. you will learn to intentionally disrupt. challenge. deconstruct. decenter. unpack. and unlearn societal and sexual assumptions and
expectations. This is the practice of decolonization.
To become present with embodied safety and self-trust that challenges “the defaults” of societal and sexual assumptions and expectations, have you considered decolonization as a care practice?
As a self-liberator and space holder, I can tell you decolonization is the healing practice, process, and framework of self and collective liberation.
However- You can’t only feel good, avoid, self-sacrifice, disassociate, or distract your way to liberation.
To liberate yourself, you can’t bypass shadow work.
Shadow work is how you heal.
The erotic will decolonize your healing.
Sexual shadow work is how you become self-liberated.
I look forward to you joining me on this part of your journey.
About Me
I am Lena Queen, LCSW, M.Ed. a clinical somatic sexologist, decolonial sexuality educator, TEDx speaker, author, creative, and self-liberator who is licensed in Delaware and New Jersey. I am the author of Healing The Erotic Self Coaching Program and sexual shadow work workbook (print); SHIFT, A Self-Liberation Healing Practice as a system of care and ebook; #InMyHealing Erotic Affirmations Journal (print-coming Feb 2025), in addition to, being the creator of Integrative Somatic Sex Therapy and Approach (I-SST), Sexuality & Somatics Professional Learning Series, SHIFT Somatic Healing Intensives, and The Other EQ: Erotic Intelligence Masterclass and tshirt. Additionally, I have a rich experience of facilitating trainings and lectures for small and large private practices, government agencies, counseling and social work organizations, college student unions, and college departments.
For over the last 23 years, I have support trauma survivors, social work and counseling interns, helping and healing professionals, and relationships reconnected to safety, trust, intimacy, pleasure, & wholeness. Using the erotic, my integrative somatic practice and erospiritual approach to therapy, teaching, healing, and holding space has evolved from individual healing to include curating and facilitating relationship and intimacy repair and healing. My practice is both/and not either/or as I fundamentally know and believe that relationship types of solo, intimate, healing, and kinship need each other to embodied pleasure and sustain the ability to thrive.
For me and my approach to healing, wellness, and liberation of our wholeness, the energy of our desires is the GPS to sexual healing, self-liberation, and the connections we want to manifest.
This Erotic Embodiment is Healing The Erotic Self.