Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale with Gwenm A. Carsley

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 

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 
 

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 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

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