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

Does desire really fizzle and fade in long-term relationships? 
Gwenm sits down with Caroline Hood, licensed clinical social worker, certified sex therapist, and author of Sex Begets Sex, who has spent more than 25 years challenging the cultural narratives around female desire. Fifteen years into her own marriage and, in her words, having some of the best sex of her life, Caroline unpacks why spontaneous sex was never actually spontaneous, why talking about sex is foreplay rather than a mood killer, and why so many women quietly abandon their sexual selves when they become mothers, wives, or "middle-aged." Together they explore permission as the first step back to agency, the erotic as a way of being alive in and out of the bedroom, and how intimacy can return you to yourself in the moments you feel furthest away. 
Find Caroline at desireinreallife.com and in her newsletter, Desire in Real Life.

What happens when you survive — but you don't come back as the same person?
Retired nurse Jenny White spent decades caring for others before a life-threatening brain tumour forced her to become the patient. When she awoke, everything had changed—not just her body, but her identity, her marriage, and the future she imagined.
Together we explore what it means to become someone new, whether intimacy can survive profound change, why scent can unlock forgotten memories, and what Jenny's remarkable journey reveals about love, resilience, and the hidden realities of modern healthcare. We also discuss how those experiences inspired her medical thriller series, The Triggering Scent.

Most of us leave our bodies long before we leave our lovers.
Kalindi Jordan and Pete Warnock met in India eighteen years ago and have been partners in every sense since ~ in life, in love, and in work. Together they run Living In Love and the Amrita Tantra programme, teaching couples the art of staying; separately, each walks their own path — Kalindi through her sexual healing work with women, Pete through Naturally Ecstatic, the school of breath he founded.
Their medicine meets in the body but arrives from different doors. Kalindi works the energetic depths ~ Kundalini woke in her at eighteen, and thirty years of de-armouring, touch, and energy work have made her fluent in what the body holds beneath its armour. Pete works the breath and the nervous system ~ his own body hurt from the age of five, and sixteen years of hands-on sexual healing taught him that nothing opens until the body feels safe. We talk about building pleasure capacity, repairing rupture somatically when words stop working, desire after eighteen years of being fully seen ~ and the initiations their own bodies delivered, including the two weeks in 2020 when Kalindi's hair let go of her entirely.
Breath as medicine. Energy as language. Union that lives beyond the skin.

The Hidden Life of Dreams
What if our dreams aren't random at all?
What if they're quietly guiding us toward the parts of ourselves we've forgotten, rejected, or left behind?
In this episode of Skin & Soul, I sit down with psychotherapist, poet, and author Valerie Johns to explore the hidden language of dreams and what they reveal about trauma, memory, creativity, and healing.
Drawing from her newest book, Night Flights: The Poetry of Soul Retrieval, Valerie shares how dreams can become a pathway to wholeness—not by erasing the past, but by helping us reclaim the lost parts of ourselves. Together, we explore why nightmares may carry medicine, why the ego isn't our enemy, what it means when trauma "can't tell time," and how cultivating inner safety allows us to meet ourselves with greater compassion.
This is a conversation about the unconscious, imagination, and the courage to turn toward what we've spent a lifetime avoiding.
If you've ever wondered why certain dreams stay with you—or what they might be asking of you—this episode is an invitation to listen more deeply.
In this episode:

• Why dreams may be invitations rather than interruptions
• The hidden relationship between trauma, memory, and the unconscious
• Why nightmares can become unexpected guides
• The difference between ego and soul
• Soul retrieval, creativity, and the journey toward wholeness

Guest: Valerie Johns, author of Ashes in the Milk: A Poetic Memoir and Night Flights: The Poetry of Soul Retrieval.

Nobody warned us the wanting could just go quiet.
One day you look up and realize your body stopped reaching. You stopped reaching. And you blame it on the years, the marriage, the exhaustion, the long list of everyone you've been holding up. Society even tells you it's natural to just give it up. You might call yourself ungrateful for wanting more.
In this episode of Skin & Soul, I sit down with Dr. Julie Merriman, the Nervous System Architect, who lived this silence before she found her way back through it. What she learned is the thing few of us are ever told: your body cannot protect you and open to pleasure at the same time. The wanting doesn't disappear. It goes into hiding. And through her Radiance Reset Model™, she shows how it comes back.
And we go there. The real stuff. Vaginal dryness. The positions that actually feel good now. What it takes to come home to the depth of your own pleasure.
If you've wondered where the wanting and the pleasure went, come sit with us.

We all carry something.
A heartbreak that still catches in the throat. A relationship we can't quite let go of. A loneliness that no amount of scrolling, busyness, or distraction seems to fill.
What if healing isn't about moving on? What if it's about finally turning toward the parts of ourselves we've spent years trying to outrun?
In this episode, Gwenm sits down with healer, teacher, and author Ben Oofana to explore heartbreak, loneliness, attachment, and the emotional lives we never fully digest. Together they dive into Ben's extraordinary path through Native American vision quests, Taoist practice, and more than thirty-five years of helping people navigate trauma, illness, grief, and relational pain.
This is a conversation about what happens when we stop abandoning ourselves. About why we cling to relationships that have already ended. About the loneliness that sits beneath so much of modern life. And about the quiet courage it takes to stay with what hurts long enough for something new to emerge.
If you've ever wondered why the same patterns keep repeating, why letting go can feel impossible, or what it really means to heal, this conversation offers another way of looking at the human heart.
Because perhaps healing isn't about becoming someone else.
Perhaps it's about becoming present enough to meet the person you've been avoiding all along.

What does it mean to step up as a man? In his actions? His intentions? His family? His blind spots? His impact on the people around him? The culture he participates in?
In this episode of Skin & Soul, Gwenm sits down with strategist, entrepreneur, coach, and Round 3 founder Reuben Butterfield for an open conversation about masculinity, accountability, fatherhood, consent, reinvention, and the ongoing practice of becoming.
Together, they explore the moments that shape a man: loss, heartbreak, mistakes, silence, courage, and the willingness to look honestly at where we've fallen short. Reuben shares insights from his own journey through personal transformation, the lessons learned from fatherhood and relationships, and why growth begins when we stop waiting for permission and start taking responsibility for the lives we're creating.
A conversation about awareness. Blind spots. Integrity. About what happens when a man decides to become someone he can respect.
From consent and culture to grief, purpose, leadership, and love, this episode asks a question that feels more urgent than ever:
What is a man responsible for?

What happens when the life you've spent years building no longer fits?
In this episode of Skin & Soul: Beyond the Pale, Gwenm sits down with attorney, mediator, divorce coach, and artist Sarah Rutledge Fischer to explore the rarely discussed journey of coming out later in life. After coming out as a lesbian at 43 following an 18-year marriage, Sarah found herself navigating not only the end of a relationship, but the unraveling and rebuilding of identity, family, desire, and belonging.
Together, they discuss the courage it takes to tell the truth, the fear of hurting those we love, the tension between authenticity and responsibility, the complexity of labels, and what happens when stability becomes a prison. This is a conversation about love, loss, self-betrayal, freedom, and the extraordinary act of becoming who you truly are.
Whether you're questioning your sexuality, your relationship, your purpose, or simply the life you've built, this episode is an invitation into a deeper conversation about what it means to live in alignment with yourself.

Most people don't tell the truth about what they want.
Not in bed.
Not in relationships.
Not even to themselves.
In this episode of Skin & Soul, Gwenm sits down with Amanda Dames, founder of The Kink Consultant, to talk about fantasy, kink, romance, desire, shame, and the strange things that happen when we spend years pretending we don't want what we want.
From fairy tales to fetishes, from secret turn-ons to hidden longings, this conversation explores what our desires might be trying to show us and why so many of us are terrified of finding out.
Because sometimes the hardest person to tell the truth to is ourselves.

What if the greatest source of suffering isn't love itself, but our belief that we can possess what was never ours to own?
In this episode of Skin & Soul, Gwenm sits down with author, entrepreneur, and creator of the viral EroticSleepOver events, Cidney G. Green, for a provocative conversation about freedom, attachment, desire, and the stories we inherit about love.
Drawing from her book All 3 in Me, Cidney shares how Nichiren Buddhism shaped her understanding of attraction, identity, and personal responsibility. Together, they explore the tension between intimacy and freedom, the challenge of unlearning control, and why so many of us confuse love with ownership.
This is not a conversation about whether non-monogamy is right or wrong. It's a deeper inquiry into what happens when we stop expecting other people to complete us, save us, choose us, or make us happy.
From relationships and jealousy to spirituality, self-sovereignty, and the many parts of ourselves we carry beneath the surface, this episode invites us to examine where we grip too tightly and what becomes possible when we finally loosen our hold.
Topics include:
• The myth of ownership in love and relationships
• Buddhism and personal responsibility
• Attraction, identity, and self-reflection
• Unlearning control and attachment
• Non-monogamy and freedom
• Jealousy, desire, and emotional honesty
• The many selves we carry within us
• What it means to live authentically on your own terms
• Self-sovereignty and the pursuit of happiness
A bold, honest, and thought-provoking conversation about love, freedom, and the parts of ourselves that are still learning how to let go.