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

Sacha Hughes knows exactly what it costs to say "I'm fine" when you're anything but. Her twenties in London ran on recruitment, cocaine, pinot, and the kind of grief that doesn't knock — her mother, lost to cancer, and years of partying with the best of them while keeping the flat spotless, because as long as the kitchen sparkled she could tell herself she had it together. Then she picked up a pen. The result is Love, Grief & More Sex Than Pinot — a debut novel featured in Woman's Own, whose heroine, Soho Summers, carries Sacha's own messy past on every page.
In this conversation we go where the book only whispers: the full-moon December night on a beach when she finally handed her grief back to the sky, the chapter her friends insisted she keep — the one about violation, and how many women quietly blame themselves — and the three years she has spent choosing her own company over anyone else's arms. What once broke her is her medicine now. We taste it together — the grief, the pinot, and the coming back to life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.