embodiment, pleasure and self-love coach
sarah olivia
I hope you can breathe easy here. Whatever curiosity or pain brought you here, I invite you to notice how your body feels as you read my words. That’s how you’ll know if you’re in the right place.
My journey, like most multi-faceted women’s, has been far from linear.
I didn’t know how to listen to my body or how to nourish myself. I resented my body deeply as I had health issue after health issue: chronic migraines, eczema, bladder issues, gut issues, hormonal imbalances - endless cries for love and tenderness from my body which took me a long time to hear and to respond to.
Like many of us, I learned to feel shame for my sensuality and desire for pleasure at a young age. I was taught that pleasure is only to be shared with another person, never just for ourselves. Outside of the early lust-filled stages of a relationship, I didn’t know how to tend the unique garden of my own desire. Without that knowledge, for a long time I assumed I was broken and that I would always be missing the higher levels of joy that pleasure and sex can bring.
Before I became a holistic coach and healer for women, I was a girl who was taught to hate how I looked (because I wasn’t thin) and who wanted to simply disappear.
As a child, I had no confidence or self-worth.
As I grew older, when it would have been easier to just do what most of those around me were doing, I searched elsewhere and wanted more for myself. But I struggled with the incompatibility of who I should be and who I am. With every thread I added to the tapestry of my passions and skills, and every time I turned into a new direction, I felt like my life should be more coherent and easier to define. I felt like my journey and my purpose should fit neatly into a box or a prescribed narrative. For so long I rejected that part of myself, that explorer who won’t settle.
Even before I was shamed for being fat, I felt out of place in the west London private school world that cared only about doing well at school and having good manners. Maybe on some level, I felt how early I had been torn away from my essential wild self and stuffed into the outfit of the good girl. Maybe, while I struggled to swallow down the shame of not being the fastest in my class to learn my 10x tables, I was longing for the freedom and joy of play, emotional expression and innocent pleasure. For much of my childhood, I was depressed and numb.
But underneath all that, I have always been multi-passionate and rebellious, making it impossible to fit myself into the mould I was given.
Through my own journey and through watching the journeys of the hundreds of women I have coached or held space for over the past six years, I have seen the common threads in our stories that reemerge again and again: unworthiness, deep-internalised criticism of our bodies, being disconnected from our wild essential selves and out of sync with our sacred cycle and hormones, lacking pleasure, desire and creativity. We live in a masculine world, a world of thinking and doing with very little space for being and feeling.
Unlearning that it was unsafe or inconvenient to feel and to show all my big raw feelings.
Unlearning the beliefs that I was too much, but also not good enough, that I was a failure.
Unlearning the beliefs that told me my body was too big and soft, that told me self-love and confidence was arrogance and vanity, that told me I was meant to be desired as opposed to feel desire and pleasure.
I’ve done a lot of unlearning
Healing my relationship with myself and the most tender parts of me.
Healing my relationship to the feminine and with pleasure to regain access to the deepest creative force, intuition and power available to me and all women.
Healing my relationship with my body so I can not only stand to look at myself in the mirror, but look at myself with compassion and even deep appreciation.
Healing my relationship with food so I know how to intuitively respond to my body’s ever changing needs.
Thankfully, I’ve done a lot of healing
I am trained in holistic wellbeing coaching, women’s hormonal health and breathwork healing. I have focused my learning and practice on the relationship with the body (body image, intuitive eating) and how we can access and activate the womb’s wisdom and more expansive planes of pleasure and sensuality.
Returning home to our bodies...
Walking alongside you and holding space for you on this journey is my soul’s mission and purpose.
To deep self-acceptance, radical self-love and a capacity for so much more joy and pleasure on every level is, I believe, one of the most transformative and life-altering journeys we can embark on.
