My story - Full Length

I was born and raised 40 miles west of Chicago in a town called St. Charles.

I’m a midwest boy, through and through. Both sets of grandparents were farmers.

I was raised in a very catholic household. I went to church twice a week, I was an altar boy, I went to confession regularly, I was confirmed, my mother was my religious education teacher, and I spent summers at Jesus camp.

From a young age I had a lot of extreme emotions. Throughout elementary school, I threw what my parents described as “temper tantrums”. I would terrorize my brother, beating on him, and be incredibly destructive to the house. I was in therapy as a 5 year old.

Aside from the spiritual abuse from the Catholic Church - I endured physical and emotional abuse and neglect at home.

When I was in 7th grade, I experienced a traumatic injury—I fell from a second-story balcony onto an asphalt driveway, breaking both of my legs, including my femur, as well as my pelvis and a vertebra in my back. I spent a week in the hospital, completely dependent on others for even the most basic needs. With a catheter, a bedpan, and only a hospital gown for privacy, I was suddenly forced into a level of vulnerability I’d never known before.

Recovery was grueling. I had to relearn how to walk, first in a back brace, then gradually moving from a wheelchair to a walker, to crutches—all as a 14-year-old navigating the already overwhelming experience of adolescence.

I was also prescribed opioids for the pain. These planted the seed of addiction within me. I was getting high on Oxy as a teenager.

High School was painful. Depression, self injury, self-loathing and suicidal threats and ideation plagued my sophmore year. Sophomore year was my first psychiatric hospitalization for said self-harm and suicidal ideation. This was also about the time when I started taking psych meds to manage my mood.

My second psychiatric hospitalization was after my first manic episode Senior year. I was a 17 year old who lost his mind. I spent a few weeks in the psych ward where they pumped me full of meds, diagnosed me with Bi-Polar 1 - Manic Depressive disorder, and eventually sent me on my way.

I stabilized, graduated high-school. Took a semester off. Then I went to my then dream school of University of Illinois, for Engineering Physics

But I didn’t last more than two months in college. Addiction was burning bright inside me. I drank my way into an even deeper depression and was carried out of my dorm room by paramedics from another bout of  self injury - landing me in another psychiatric hospitalization

I moved back home and was thrust into More therapy, more psychiatrists, and more meds. 

For the next 3 years my life was hell. My mom left, my best friend died, I was violent and destructive towards myself and everyone around me.  All the while I was sipping on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs - desperately trying to numb the pain I was carrying. I was hospitalized more times that I could keep track of. Suicide attempts, manic episodes, and full blown psychosis.

Eventually, in the summer of 2018 I made it to a rehab facility in Georgia where I was able to end the cycle of hospitalizations. 

Rather than moving back home, I moved in with the man who later became my fiance, then husband, and now ex-husband.

In 2019 We moved to Wisconsin together to grow his acupuncture clinic. I ran the front desk for him. The clinic we worked in was full of astrology, essential oils, herbal medicine, and traditional chinese medicine. Another acupuncturist in the clinic suggested I learn Reiki. She said “you’d be so good at it!”.

I didn’t really know what it was. Just some sort of energy healing thing. But I dove in. I was eager to have “my thing” in the world where I was just support staff for the other practitioners. I also held a deep curiosity for the world of metaphysical healing around me.

I got set up with a Reiki Master Teacher - Erin Ryan.  I took the Reiki Level 1 class in 2019 and hit the ground running by offering Reiki sessions to clients in the clinic. This was exciting. I actually started seeing subtle energy. I could see clients' auras - and I could see the Reiki in the room flowing into them. This woke up a curiosity within me. It sparked a connection to something bigger. But at the time it was just a toy to play with. A toy that was shelved for most of the time as I was still very busy numbing myself from the pain that was still stored within me.

It’s now 2020, and with my last hospitalization two years behind me - while my life is no longer spiraling downward, I’m still far from regulated. I’m smoking cigarettes and drinking 5+ white claws a night. I’m still on sleep meds, and the heavy hitter of Lithium as my main mood stabilizer. I still teetered on the edge of mania - god forbid my meds ran out. And what I wasn’t able to numb via the lithium, nicotine, or alcohol, I threw around in my relationship. Although we put up a fantastic front on the outside - my relationship was far from safe emotionally. So much fighting. So much resentment. So much mutual hurt. And so much escapism.

We did have a lot of love for eachother - don’t get me wrong. And I’m incredibly grateful for everything that this man provided me. He was the rock in my life that provided a place for me to land after rehab. He was someone who loved me deeply and did so much to help me. But at the end of the day we were both very wounded people playing out years of trauma in an incredibly toxic relationship. 

When he proposed, I said yes. We fought virtually non-stop leading up to our wedding. We fought the day after our wedding. Our sex life with him was filled with poppers, repressed shame, alcohol, and any molly we could get our hands on in small town Wisconsin. I was desperate to explore life sexually outside of the relationship. Codependency ran rampant. And I simply wasn’t happy.

My body and nervous system were still overflowing with 20 years of unresolved pain, shock, and complex trauma.

Along the way, I took Reiki Level 2, and Reiki Level 3 (Master Teacher) with my same Reiki Master. I was still seeing clients in the clinic - sucking down nicotine in the bathroom before sessions. I was playing the role of a “healer” - but again, Reiki and healing energy work was still just a toy I was playing with in the clinic.

Then I learned that my Reiki Master worked with clients in intensive mentorship containers. I remember she was posting all of this stuff on facebook that spoke to me. It was unfamiliar to everything I’d heard and learned about in therapy. It didn’t quite make sense to me but it spoke to me on an energetic level. It’s like she knew something. She had something figured out that I needed. Like she knew the way out of the patterns of misery I kept repeating.

So I hired her. We dove into our first 6 months together. And I learned - for the first time - what real healing looked like. I learned how to regulate my nervous system by clearing out all the emotional pain trapped in my body that I’d been running from, adding to, and suppressing for years.

I finally had another truly safe human to hold, witness, and guide me through the process of feeling the years and years of pain I had been repressing. I learned to actually release that pain from my system. That same pain that had been overheating my nervous system and causing such extreme dysregulation in my mood.

As Erin taught me, “you have to feel it, to free it, without feeding it” 

I finally was able to start filling my body with safety. The space where all that pain previously was stored began to be replaced by what I call internal safety.

And this new found sense of growing internal safety was an absolute game changer. Internal safety is power. Power to choose what was previously too unsafe. Power to rely less on the external, and more on yourself.

It started with drinking less. I went from 5 or 6 white claws a night to 2. The fighting decreased. I had less internal turmoil to project onto my relationship. I quit nicotine once and for all. I started finding peace. I remember it being a strange emotion to feel at first. It felt like something was wrong - almost like an emptiness. But it wasn’t an emptiness - it was a lack of painful intensity. This was new to me. Co-dependant restraints loosened. I was able to start prioritizing my needs more than ever - rather than doing things out of guilt or fear of someone else’s reaction - I could choose myself more and more. I could weather greater storms on my own. I didn’t need anyone else to prop me up.

I kept at it. I kept working with my mentor. Staying hooked into the safety, comfort, and guidance her nervous system and insight provided me. I kept leaning into my triggers and I kept feeling and freeing deeper and deeper levels of my pain that had been dying to vacate my system.

I reached the point where my nervous system became so regulated that I no longer needed my prescription meds. For the first time in 10 years, I was unmedicated.

To this day, this is one of the greatest achievements of my life. I was finally experiencing what it was like to be me. No numbing, no alterations, no fixing of my mood. Just me. I learned what it felt like to truly live and experience life in my body. My body was no longer a place of anxiety and fear to escape from. My body was a safe, joyous, and pleasurable space for me to embrace life with.

What was next? Leave my marriage. I knew I wanted something different for myself for a while. But the lack of internal safety required to actually leave prevented me from believing it was possible. And that’s how it goes. Your psyche won’t recognize what’s possible for you until it feels safe to your body and nervous system. Once you become safe for it - it becomes possible for you.

I started selling real estate and making my own money - and then I left. I broke his heart to save my own, and I moved out in September 2022. 

I grieved our relationship and I grieved it hard. It took a few months - but I finally got my feet squared underneath me, living on my own and providing for myself fully for the first time in my life.

Now I have the world in front of me. My sexuality was screaming from inside, begging to be explored. I got my first dildo. I started playing with my ass and exploring the pleasure of my prostate. I went online to sites like reddit and started sharing virtual sexual relations with other men online. It was absolutely riveting. Of course I was on grindr and some dating apps, but in Southern Wisconsin in a town of 7000 people - there wasn’t much action happening.

I was having so much fun sharing my sexuality online. I then started an onlyfans. I discovered my piss play kink and went absolutely wild exploring it, filming it, posting it online and getting paid for it. (See my “healing religious trauma with my piss play kink” & “My journey with onlyfans, From sexual liberation to exploitation” youtube videos for more insight)

I ended up vacating so much shame from my body by exploring this kink so publically online. Through this exploration and showcasing of my pleasure - I was reclaiming my sexuality like I could have never previously imagined.

I was also teaching Reiki during this time - on top of selling real estate. I really enjoy teaching Reiki. Slowly but surely I was taking this toy of healing energy work off the shelf, sharing it with others, and engaging with it with more of the reverence it deserved.

And all the while I was still working with my mentor. I was in an out of one on one mentorship container as I needed extra support to process and move through the deeper levels of pain and conditioning I was shedding. But I also started working with her in group settings for more spiritual based energy work. More of the core foundations to my current spiritual beliefs started to form here. I started a personal practice with energy work - using it as a practical tool for creation in my life - instead of just playing with it as a hobby. I started developing tangible connections to higher levels of consciousness that I was able to tap into for spiritual guidance,  nervous system support, and a deeply personal and tangible connection to my place in the cosmos. 

At this point, I shifted out of “catch-up” mode—where I was focused on clearing the emotional and energetic baggage weighing me down—and into a consciously creative mode, co-creating my life with the universe’s support. I became more intentional about where I was going and what I was building for myself. I was in the driver's seat more than ever.

With the potency I had discovered in my erotic energy and pleasure for clearing shame from my system - I was curious what else was possible with erotic energy. How could I share this with others? How else could these energies be used for healing? What would happen if I combined Reiki with pleasure work? 

I went on grindr and found some men to try this out with. I had them come in for Reiki sessions, with both of us naked. With our shared nudity, and with my Reiki hand placements not ignoring any part of their bodies, we were able to combine arousal energy with the healing energy of Reiki for a very activating and soothing experience. The feedback was fantastic. It really felt like I was onto something.

I also created some virtual spaces for men from my twitter feed to come forward and vocalize where they carried shame around their sexuality. Most of my following had some sort of piss play kink - and as it turns out, many of them had so much shame wrapped up in this kink. Through the work I was doing with my mentor, I had experienced first hand the incredible healing power of being safely witnessed in our pain. Having a space to share vulnerably the emotions that have otherwise been repressed or hidden from others immediately starts to vacate them from our system. I wanted to offer such a space to my following and give them the opportunity to start shifting and shedding some of the shame they had wrapped up in this aspect of their sexuality. And this was truly beautiful. The feedback was incredible - and all from something rather simple.

In the summer of 2023, a man reached out to me online, asking if he could use this space I had created to promote the retreats he had coming up that year on the west coast. Two of which were called “Sex Shaman, Sacred Prostitute” and “The Erotic Son”. I checked out his website. I had never seen anything like this before. This man is known as the orgasmic shaman. I was hypnotized, intrigued, and immediately said yes, allowed him to promote, and signed up for those retreats that were being hosted in Palm Springs December 2023.

December rolled around. I attended the retreats. And I was exposed to an entire network of men who view and approach their sexualities, bodies, and pleasure as expressions and vehicles for connecting with the divine, tools for healing themselves and others.

My world was cracked wide open

I heard the term Sacred Intimacy for the first time - and was told I was already practicing it with my “pleasure Reiki” clients. I learned about Joseph Kramer, the Body Electric School, and discovered a whole new perspective of sexual healing.

In these retreats, we practiced new ways of connecting with ourselves, with each other, with the source within us, and the earth beneath us. The spiritual concepts were very familiar to me. The practice of holding space for others to help facilitate healing was too. 

But combining it all with our desires and sexual expression was new. And I ate it all up.

My biggest take away: 

“Every act of sex is an attempt to return home to God”

It  took me some time to digest that. I’ve now anchored that into one of my core spiritual beliefs.

A month after my time in Palm Springs, I shared a Facetime call with a friend I made at the retreat. He told me about a website to solicit sacred intimacy sessions on. He said he had made a profile and started seeing a few clients and was providing them with his version of a sacred intimacy session. My body and sacral energy lit up like I had never felt before.

I made a profile that day. That weekend I had 6 clients on my table. 

Turns out I was really good at this. It all came so easy to me.

I continued to connect and collaborate with men from the  retreat, learning insights and new practices and techniques  to include in my sessions.

While there is no singular way to provide a physical sacred intimacy session - the premise of them, in my mind, is universal: These sessions are opportunities for men to be showered in love, connection, and pleasure, on the physical, emotional, and spiritual level. They are containers by which we can explore deeper levels of connection with ourselves, our bodies, and our sacral energy.

No matter a man’s size, shape, age, sexual experience or orientation - we all have a fundamental right, and need to be touched, held,  loved.

These sessions help fulfill those needs. They also are a beautiful space for new forms of intimacy to be explored. Touch is used as a vehicle for connection and a medium by which to explore the body’s vast ability to experience connection, sensation, and pleasure. I also recognize that the potent levels of energy that get activated and moved in these sessions can serve as tremendous catalysts for emotional healing.

I love this quote by Don Shewey, a sacred intimate, writer, and therapist who explores the transformative power of erotic energy.

“What does a sacred intimate do?

I like to say that sacred intimates combine the roles of priest, prostitute, and psychotherapist. In other words, they approach sexuality with the understanding that it’s related to soul work and to spirituality.

They use mindfulness and integrity to help people identify, embrace, and practice desire as holy, sexual embodiment as an expression of the soul.

They hold the body as sacred and view erotic energy as a crucial component of human life and spiritual health.

Their primary intention is that of healing - and by healing I mean not just addressing the wounds to the spirit and the flesh caused by sexual abuse, addiction, or disease but also acknowledging that the fun and the pleasure, the vitality and the divine mystery of sex have nourishing properties in and of themselves.

That’s a message that easily gets lost in a culture that is ambivalent or sex-negative as ours”

- Don Shewey, Daddy, Lover, God

Within just two months, providing these sessions for men in Southern Wisconsin quickly became my main source of income. And this felt so good to me. This felt so natural. There was an intuitive nature to what I was doing. So much of the time my body was just moving on its own. Guiding the touch between me and the client as if it already knew exactly what to do. As if I’ve been doing this for years.

And when I visited the friends I made in Palm Springs in the months following the retreat, I saw clients while traveling. For the first time, I had a source of income that not only felt organic to me—but one I could take anywhere. That’s when I knew I had my ticket out of the Midwest.

By May 2024, I had packed up my car and driven 32 hours from Wisconsin to Palm Springs in just two days, with my cat, Theodore, as my co-pilot. I headed west to the gay mecca of the West Coast and set up shop in a brand-new city.

At this point, the work I’d been doing with my Mentor had reached new depths.  What’s really beautiful is that all this time I had been spending clearing out my internal landscape of the pain and density that was in the way of anchoring and embodying deeper levels of love, clarity, and safety - my mentor had been doing the same and had been deepening into more powerful layers her medicine. What she was providing for me at this point was more potent than ever - catalyzing even greater shifts for me. Her body and nervous system held more safety than ever - and getting hooked into and being held by such exquisite energetic safety allowed for me to unravel aspects of myself that I never dared to acknowledge, let alone admit were present within me. 

I reached levels of self awareness, ownership, and compassion that I never thought to be possible. I learned to hold myself through releasing more pain that I could ever fathom was waiting inside me. To this day I’m still amazed at what the body can store for us. And while it’s a beautiful thing that our bodies protect our psyche like that - it’s so crucial that we learn to start witnessing and releasing all of that. Not just for us, but for everyone around us. The safer we are for ourselves, the safer we are for our community. The less pain we carry, the less we unconsciously project it onto the world around us. This work is public service just as much as it serves our personal growth. 

I also started working with clients in the virtual setting. Clients who were ready to start exploring deeper levels of their sexuality - but who had shame, fear, guilt, or some other form of dense energy or trapped emotions getting in the way. The way I work with these clients is very similar to the way I work with my mentor. We connect over zoom and via text/voice notes and I hold and witness them through releasing what’s been trapped under the surface. I guide them towards deeper levels of awareness of themselves and what might be hiding in the shadows of their psyche. They get hooked into the safety of my body and my nervous system - free from judgement or shaming. They have a space to start exploring the murky waters of sexuality that have been polluted from shame and conditioning with the loving support and guidance of someone who’s navigated their way out of those waters themselves.

It’s truly beautiful work. It’s vulnerable, it’s raw, and it’s quite edgy for my clients. But it brings them home to themselves, their sexualities, and their desires.

What I realized through all of this was an expanded version of Sacred Intimacy. Yes, it encompasses everything Don Shewey describes—exploring, celebrating, and dismantling shame around sexuality and desire.

But every ounce of love and support I received from my mentor was just as much Sacred Intimacy as anything explicitly sexual. Being held and tenderly witnessed in our emotional pain is equally sacred.

Our society isn’t just sex-negative—it’s also pain-negative. We have an epidemic of unrecognized, unprocessed pain, compounded by a lack of truly safe spaces for it to be fully felt and freed.

We are interdependent social species. We are hardwired to co-regulate, process, and release our emotional pain together. We aren’t meant to do any of this alone. 

Sacred Intimacy recognizes this. Sacred Intimacy Honors this. Sacred Intimacy is a devotion to love, for ourselves, and for others. It’s a devotion to showing up safely for ourselves so that we can then show up safely for our community.

Sacred intimacy recognizes that our pain is sacred - and that it needs to be held and tended to as such. Sacred Intimacy is something we learn to have for ourselves just as much as it is something we can share with others. It encapsulates physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, sexual intimacy, and spiritual intimacy. 

My mentor and I rarely dove into the waters of sexuality together - but the spaces she holds for me are without a doubt spaces of Sacred Intimacy.
And now I’m incredibly honored to share and hold these spaces of intimacy with clients who are ready to become more deeply connected to their emotional, sexual, and spiritual selves.

So where am I now?

I’m continuing down my personal path of deepening my connection with myself, my body, and my spirituality. I continue to invest heavily in my mentorship—allowing myself to be held and guided into deeper layers of shadow integration and communion with the divine. My spiritual practice is devotional; each day, I integrate deeper levels of Reiki into my essence, expanding my connection to higher levels of consciousness. I’ve come home to my sense of God and I feel deeply held by mother earth. I actively work towards embodying deeper levels of love for myself and the world around me.

I continue to engage in trainings, workshops, and retreats in the world of Sacred Intimacy and sexual healing—exploring deeper ways to integrate my sexuality with my healing journey. And I’m building networks of spiritually conscious gay men who recognize the importance of this work.

Professionally, I offer the wisdom and experience I’ve gained through my own journey to those who are ready to embark on theirs.

Whether you call it emotional coaching, sexual healing, spiritual mentorship, or sacred intimacy—the semantics don’t matter to me. What matters is my devotion to love. My devotion to seeing, holding, and witnessing my clients fully. To providing the spaces and guidance they need to feel safe enough to move toward the life they truly want. To helping them develop a more conscious relationship with their emotions, their spirituality, and their sexuality—so that they can hold and sustain deeper levels of fulfillment, joy, and pleasure.

Thanks for reading this and thanks for being here

xoxo
Steve