In this episode, Darshana is joined by two friends and colleagues, Z and Victor, for a deeply relational conversation about erotic expression that makes room for the full spectrum of human experience.

Together, they explore eroticism not only as pleasure or sexuality, but as aliveness that includes grief, loss, tenderness, rage, joy, and the importance of being witnessed in community. This conversation reflects the heart of Deeper with Darshana, moving slowly, honestly, and with care for what it means to feel deeply together.

Rather than separating pleasure from pain, the three of them explore how erotic aliveness can hold both, and how community becomes essential when navigating the harder edges of being human.

In this episode, we explore:

• Erotic expression as more than sex or pleasure
• Why grief and hard feelings belong in erotic and embodied spaces
• How aliveness includes joy, sorrow, and everything in between
• The role of community in supporting emotional and erotic expression
• Why isolating our pain limits our capacity for pleasure
• The importance of witnessing and being witnessed
• How shared presence can deepen intimacy and trust
• What it means to practice erotic wholeness in relationship
• Allowing complexity rather than striving for positivity
• Letting erotic energy move through grief rather than around it
  
  

About the Z and Victor

Z (aka Zahava Griss, they/them) is the founder of Embody More Love, a spiritual kinky dance community for personal & cultural liberation. Since 1999, Z has guided dance rituals to decolonize, heal, build intimacy, & make love out of what is not yet love. Z guides a 3 month immersion called Play with Power & Gender through Dance, dedicated to attachment & trauma informed kink. Z also created a Grief & Eros Film honoring the legacy of grief ritualist Sobonfu Somé.

Victor Warring is an Erotic ReWilder, Somatic (body-centered) Sexuality Educator, Mentor, Coach and also an Erotic Activist. He is passionate about supporting people in discovering the truth of their erotic sovereignty and removing any self-imposed, internalized or socially imposed blocks that interfere with the expression of their erotic brilliance.

Victor is also a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) educator and works with people in understanding the intersections where the body, sexuality, inclusion, oppression, racism, white supremacy and decolonization are interwoven. 

Connect with Z and Victor

• Find Z at www.EmbodyMoreLove.com
• Find Victor at https://www.rewilderos.com Instagram: @bonobo_man
• Join the 4 Day Grief Eros Ritual in June 2026: https://www.embodymorelove.com/villageritual

In this episode, Darshana is joined by Julia Feldman, founder of Giving the Talk, for a deeply grounded conversation about sex education, pleasure, consent, and what it really means to support people in having a healthy relationship with their bodies across the lifespan.

Julia brings decades of experience teaching compassionate, empowering, and scientifically accurate sex education to people of all ages, from young children and teens to parents, caregivers, and older adults. Together, Darshana and Julia explore how shame, silence, and fear around bodies are learned, and how different things might be if curiosity, consent, and pleasure were centered instead.

This conversation weaves together trauma awareness, sexuality, parenting and embodied agency, offering insights that are just as relevant for adults without children as they are for caregivers and educators.

In this episode, we explore:

• What “sex ed for this century” actually looks like in practice
• How Julia’s own chronic health journey shaped her work as an educator
• Why learning to talk about bodies without shame is a foundational life skill
• How parents’ unresolved body stories often shape how they talk to their children
• The importance of becoming an “askable adult” rather than a controlling one
• Why puberty is not a single event, but part of a lifelong body-change continuum
• How curiosity can replace fear when bodies change
• The role of pleasure in sex education at all ages
• Why pleasure is not inherently sexual and does not need to be moralized
• How early consent practices support embodied agency later in life
• Why empowering people to feel into yes and no is more protective than shame

About the Julia

Julia Feldman, founder of Giving The Talk, is a teacher who supports people of all ages with the compassionate, empowering, and scientifically accurate sex education we all deserve. She is passionate about creating educational experiences that center the needs of her students and encourages them to move through the world informed, confident, equipped to care for themselves and others, and free of shame.

Connect with Julia

• Website: https://givingthetalk.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/givingthetalk

In this episode, Darshana is joined by Isha Vela for a rich, layered conversation about abundance, sufficiency, and the body. 

Together, they explore how scarcity is encoded not only through personal experience, but through ancestral lineage, systems of oppression, and nervous system patterning, and what it means to consciously re-code the body for with the experience of enough-ness and overflow.

Drawing inspiration from their respective personal and professional experiences with somatics, trauma psychology, money, intimacy, spirituality, and erotic aliveness, you’re invited to redefine what it means to be wealthy and experience abundance in all aspects of your life.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What it means to “code the body with sufficiency”
• How scarcity is shaped by ancestry, oppression, and nervous system conditioning
• The difference between abundance and sufficiency
• Why our nervous systems often lag behind material reality
• How wealth includes far more than money
• Relational, environmental, and spiritual forms of wealth
• The parallels between money conditioning and intimacy conditioning
• How outsourcing power shows up in both finances and relationships
• Why diversification matters in relational and financial ecosystems
• Pleasure, erotic aliveness, and vitality as sources of wealth
• The distinction between needs and wants
• How money reflects relational patterns
• Stewardship versus hoarding
• Community-based approaches to wealth, including mutual aid models
• Why slowing down and noticing is a powerful first step toward sufficiency

About Isha
Isha Vela, Ph.D., CCEP (they/she) is a trauma psychologist, certified somatic practitioner, wealth activator and financial professional on a mission to help creative disruptors build generational wealth and co-create sustainable futures. Isha is a solo patent and activist currently worldschooling her children.

Connect with Isha

• Website: www.ishavela.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wakingup_wealthy/ 
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@wakingup_wealthy

Darshana is joined by Kai Cheng Thom for an intimate conversation that goes deep and wide about pleasure activism, embodied liberation, and the ways shame, identity, and power shape our relationship to desire.

Listen in as they move between personal story, somatic wisdom, cultural critique, and practical reflection, offering you a grounded and humane entry point into pleasure as both a personal and collective practice.

In this episode, we explore:

• What pleasure activism means as a lived, embodied practice rather than a concept
• Why many people internalize the belief that pleasure is “not for them”
• How race, gender, sexuality, trans identity, and colonial narratives shape erotic shame
• The body’s protective strategies, including freeze and somatic armoring
• Why honoring the body’s no is essential before opening to desire
• The importance of de-shaming the yes, not just strengthening boundaries
• How comfort can serve as a doorway to pleasure and healing
• The role of consent, pacing, and presence in embodied work
• Simple practices for naming needs and desires without pressure or performance
• Why reclaiming pleasure is deeply connected to collective liberation

About Kai:

Kai Cheng Thom, MSW, MSc, Qualified Mediator, and Somatic Sex Educator is an author, performer, and noted expert in the fields of trauma healing, professional coaching, somatics, dialogue facilitation, and conflict transformation.

As a theorist and practitioner, she has made significant contributions in the area of trauma-informed, social change-oriented approaches to pursuing individual and collective healing and transformation, particularly in her work on Transformative Justice and conflict resolution in activist communities

Connect with Kai:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaichengthom 
• Website: https://kaichengthom.com
• Arise Embodiment: https://ariseembodiment.org

Welcome, dear one!

This is the very first episode of Deeper with Darshana, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to share it with you. It's offered as an initiation. An emergent experiment. A threshold crossing into something unknown. A moment of leaning in together without needing everything to be polished or perfectly formed.

In this inaugural episode, Darshana Avila shares what has been calling this podcast into existence and what kind of space she hopes it becomes. She speaks about her life’s work in Erotic Wholeness, the ways embodiment, sexuality, spirituality, healing, creativity, and power intersect, and why these conversations feel so necessary and alive right now.

This is a podcast rooted in curiosity rather than certainty. In listening rather than performing. In the belief that the body holds wisdom we were never meant to override, and that healing and liberation often begin when we slow down enough to ask honest questions.

Darshana reflects on the many ways dominant culture pulls us away from ourselves. From desire. From truth. From pleasure. From our own knowing. She names Erotic Wholeness not as something narrow or sensational, but as life force itself. Vitality. Care. Aliveness. The energy we channel into intimacy, activism, creativity, boundaries, and belonging.

Throughout the episode, she shares pieces of her own story and identity, not as a biography to consume, but as a way of offering context and connection. She speaks openly about queerness, kink, relationship diversity, shame, repair, imperfection, and the ongoing practice of showing up more fully human. This is not about having it all figured out. It’s about being willing to be seen, to listen, and to grow.

You’ll hear Darshana name what you can expect from this podcast going forward. Conversations with people she loves and people she’s curious about. Dialogues that sometimes center sex and intimacy, and other times widen into culture, power, healing, resilience, creativity, and purpose. Stories forged in difficulty as well as delight. Wisdom that lives not only in expertise, but in lived experience.

This podcast is emergent by design. It will evolve. There will be room for tenderness, for edge, for rupture and repair. Darshana invites engagement, dialogue, and calling-in rather than calling-out. She names her commitment to learning alongside listeners and to holding difference with compassion.

This episode is also an invitation. To listen with your body, not just your mind. To notice what resonates. To notice what challenges you. To stay curious. To remember that you are not alone in wanting more aliveness, more truth, more intimacy with life itself.

If something here lands for you, you are welcome. If you don’t share Darshana’s identities and still feel resonance, you are welcome. If you’re unsure but curious, you are welcome.

This is a space being shaped breath by breath, conversation by conversation, together.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Welcome to Deeper with Darshana.

To learn more about my work, visit my website at: darshanaavila.com

To explore working together, go to: https://darshanaavila.com/immersion-experiences/