The Missing Piece in Women’s Wellness: Erotic Intelligence

People sometimes think my work is “about orgasms.” They are not wrong, but they are also missing the point.

My work is about teaching women to have a relationship with their bodies that includes their pussy, not as a dirty secret but as a source of wisdom, power, and truth.

My work is about making sure your daughter never has to look you in the eyes and see silence when she needs language for her own pleasure, boundaries, and safety.

My work is about lineage.

When I told my mother I had been molested, she did not have the words. She also did not believe me. She was confused and chose to dismiss and deny what I had just told her. That response cut deep, not because she did not love me, but because no one had ever given her the tools, language, or support to face what was happening in her own lineage.

I grew up as a Filipina daughter in a culture where good girls stayed quiet about sex, endured what hurt them, and called it being strong.  Generations of women in my line had been taught to bear what hurt them quietly, to never name what they wanted, to survive by dissociating from their own bodies.

I refuse to pass that silence, that denial, down to my daughters.

With both my 16‑ and 22‑year‑old daughters, I get to have the conversations my mother could never have with me. We talk about dating. About safer sex practices. About agency, sovereignty, choice. About what a real yes feels like in the body, and what to do when your body is a no but your conditioning wants you to be polite.

Those conversations did not happen by accident. They were earned through years of reclaiming my body after trauma. Through learning to speak the words I was never given.

Through sitting in practice spaces, swamping on my living room floor with other women, raging and grieving and dancing through shame that never belonged to us in the first place.

They were earned the day my daughter came home at fifteen with a sex ed permission slip and I realized:

“If I do not have an empowering narrative about pleasure for myself as a woman, how the hell am I going to guide my daughters when they come to me?”

That moment changed my life.

From there, pleasure stopped being a cute side quest and became my devotion.

Some of you met me in my GOFITJO era. I built an entire wellness career around fitness. I was named one of Ariana Huffington’s top wellness coaches in 2018. I had the online presence, the brand deals, the green smoothies, the Bay Area fitness community, the whole thing.

From the outside, it looked like empowerment.

On the inside, my marriage, my sexuality, and my sense of worth as a woman were starving.

Fitness taught me discipline and strength, but it did not teach me how to inhabit my body as a sensual, erotic, feeling being. It did not teach me how to unfurl and surrender during an orgasm. It did not teach me how to say, “This is what I want” without shame or fear.

It also did not teach me why I kept choosing love that hurt, or why I stayed in dynamics that starved me. It did not touch the attachment patterns and trauma imprints that shaped what I believed I deserved in love, in sex, in life.

When I started speaking about sex, pussy, and pleasure, a lot of that original wellness audience evaporated. People were fine with me sculpting my glutes. They were less fine with me asking why they could not say the word “pussy” without flinching, or why they kept abandoning themselves in the name of love.

But the women who stayed, and the many who found me after, were hungry for exactly this.

Because here is what I know to be true:

You cannot be a fully empowered woman while pretending one whole part of your body does not exist.

You do not have to be having cosmic orgasms every night to claim your power. You do not need to be “healed” or “fully expressed” or “tantric as fuck” to belong here.

You do, however, deserve a real relationship with your own erotic self.

Even if that relationship begins with, “I feel totally disconnected and I am scared to even look there.”

That is still claiming it. That is still saying, “All of me is welcome. Even the part that does not know how to be here yet.”

This is what I mean when I talk about erotic intelligence.

We are finally building emotional intelligence. We are talking about somatic intelligence, nervous systems, trauma. Yet so many women are still cut off from one of the most honest forms of their body’s intelligence: their erotic truth.

Erotic intelligence lives where attachment, trauma, and desire meet.

It is the part of you that remembers what it felt like to reach for love and not be met, then quietly built strategies to survive that pain. It is the part that learned to perform, to please, to disappear, to harden, to chase, to shut down.

When we work with erotic intelligence, we are not just talking about better sex. We are getting to the core material and wounds that keep you disconnected, confused, and separate from love and from your life force.

In my client work, this looks like the high achieving woman whose nervous system goes into panic every time someone gets close enough to really see her. The people pleasing lover who confuses self abandonment for devotion. The shut down mother who has built a beautiful life and yet feels like a ghost inside her own body. The woman who keeps ending up in the same relationship with a different face, wondering what is wrong with her when it is really her attachment system trying to resolve an old story.

One of my teacher’s Mama Gena said, “Self esteem is in direct correlation with your pussy esteem.”

How you feel about your pussy is often how you feel about your life. When a woman tells me how she comes, I can often feel her entire story.

• If you rush your orgasm, where else in your life are you rushing?

• If you cannot surrender to pleasure, where else do you not trust anyone to meet you?

• If your body tightens just thinking about being your sexual expression, where else are you hiding your brilliance and voice because it feels unsafe to shine?

Orgasm is not just a climax. It is a mirror.

In my work, that mirror becomes a doorway.

A doorway into attachment patterns that keep you looping in the same love stories.

A doorway into trauma that lives in the body as numbness, tension, or panic around intimacy.

A doorway into new choices where your nervous system learns that love and aliveness can coexist.

When we bring erotic intelligence back into women’s wellness, we are not just improving sex. We are rewriting how women relate to their own bodies, their relationships, their culture, their lineages, and the daughters who will come after them.

This is why I do the work I do.

Because I am committed to a world where our daughters do not have to recover from the silences we survived, and where women and femmes get to experience wellness as a life that is strong, soft, loved, and fully turned on to being alive.