The Body in between Grief and Pleasure...

When the air feels too thick to breathe and the simple act of showing up becomes a quiet act of survival. This past year has been one of those seasons for me.

Loss arrived with a blow so devastating it touched the tenderest parts of my heart. Loss without closure, as an intentionally violent act meant to cause pain, is an experience I do not wish upon anyone. It’s difficult to speak of it directly, not because I wish to hide it, but because grief is sacred in its own way. It reshapes us. It asks for reverence and stillness.

There were weeks when my voice went quiet, when my work - the space where I normally feel so alive, expressive, and connected - felt impossibly distant. I couldn’t find my way back to my own sensuality. My body that once felt like a home suddenly felt foreign, as if the spark that once lit every touch, every gaze, every encounter had dimmed to a faint glow.

In my line of work, presence is everything. My world revolves around connection, attunement to energy, emotion, and the language that lives beneath words. But grief changed that rhythm. It asked me to slow down, to listen differently. Some days, it meant simply breathing into the ache and allowing it to exist without trying to fix it. Other days, it was about coaxing my body gently back into movement - a warm bath, a walk in the morning light, embodied meditation. It meant sitting with my body, allowing rage and grief to surface, giving myself a container within which to feel, to express. I'm so grateful for the training I underwent in 2023 in Somatic Sexology - knowing my body on a deeply somatic level has provided a rich framework to move through this experience with honour for myself, as a whole being. It has allowed grief to become an expression of sensuality, because sensuality isn’t always fire and spark. Sometimes, it’s the quiet hum that remains even when everything else has fallen away. The body’s soft insistence that life still moves through us, even when we are breaking.

It’s taken time to trust that again. To show up not as someone “healed” or “ready,” but as someone honest, carrying both grief and grace in the same breath.

Now, as I return more fully to my work and being present online, I feel something awakening inside me. A slow and steady pulse that feels like laughter, like breath, like sunlight on bare skin. To be able to feel that, after such a deep hurt,

Pleasure has found its way back, not in the absence of sorrow, but beside it. Grief is still here, but now it sits at the same table as joy, laughter and desire. It no longer silences me. Rather, it harmonises with everything else I am.

As I move into this new chapter, I feel alive again. Open. Orgasmic. Not despite the grief, but because life, in all its tenderness and wildness, continues to move through me...and I am saying yes to all of it.

Thursday October 9th 2025 | Inara Darling