Darshana Avila Darshana Avila, a somatic sex and intimacy coach and educator with a tantric twist, joins Tatiana Berindei to share her insights and secrets into the complex world of sexuality and how to harness it for personal power. Darshana is a self-confessed intimacy junkie, tireless student of the infinite nuances of relationship and skillful facilitator and she delights in initiating others to the way of presence, pleasure and passion as the path to deep fulfillment. She works with individuals and couples offering both experiential coaching and erotic bodywork. Listen in as Darshana and Tatiana dive deeply into the depths of intimacy, sex and personal power.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and today, I have a very exciting guest with me, Darshana Avila. And we’re going to be talking about Accessing Personal Power Through Sexuality. Darshana shares her passion as a Somatic Sex and Intimacy Coach and Educator with a Tantric twist. With a signature blend of wisdom, compassion and groundedness, she guides people toward the awakening of their ecstatic potential. A self-confessed intimacy junkie, tireless student of the infinite nuances of relationship and skillful facilitator, Darshana delights in initiating others to the way of presence, pleasure and passion as a path to deep fulfillment.

Darshana, welcome to our show today. I’m really excited to have you.

Thank you Tatiana, I’m delighted to be here.

So, I’m going to start off with our signature question. I love to ask people this question, and I’m so curious to hear your answer. Darshana, what are your superpowers?

The exploration of sexuality and eroticism.

I’ve been giving some thought to that, knowing we were going to be speaking today. I know that a lot of people who know me, and who work with me would say, certainly one of my superpowers is touch. And I agree with that, but there’s more behind it that I think is kind of getting to the essence. And I think it’s embodied presence. It’s really like, the capacity that I’ve cultivated over time to stand fully in my own self when with another, and meet them from that place. Of like, here is my whole being, heart, mind, body, soul and it’s with you, and at your disposal, and that helps me do what I do professionally, and really makes for a lot of richness in my personal life. I think that’s a big superpower.

Totally, totally, I think that’s one of the biggest superpowers. So let’s talk a little bit about your professional work. How did you come into this line of work? This is not an everyday, run of the mill kind of career.

Not it is not, and I took a bit of a circuitous path to get here. There’s a thread of my origin story, really that has always been very tied into the exploration of sexuality and eroticism. It’s something that my father recognized in me as a tiny infant. He had a gestalt experience of kind of who I would be in the world. So I’ve known that there was a piece of me that orients around these realms from a very, very young age. And at the same time, I’m a product of the predominant cultural conditioning that many of us are living in, and I lived a fairly mainstream life. Insomuch as developing a corporate career, I married someone who I loved very much, but it wasn’t necessarily the most deeply satisfying sexual relationship of my life. That said, there was always the spark in me that had a lot of curiosity about and openness toward the realms of eroticism that are available for us to explore.

People used to always ask me questions about sex. My friends would confide in me, or ask for advice. I always felt really comfortable speaking of it. After my marriage ended, and I began dating again, and having different sexual encounters, that was running concurrent to a lot of big spiritual explorations for myself I just realized there was so much there to explore, and to embody.

So I set off on a path of doing exactly that. I didn’t know at the time that it was going to turn into my career. That was several years down the line. But it’s where I’ve ended up, and it’s been quite a fascinating and wild ride.

What would you say your favorite part of this journey is or has been continues to be for you?

What I’m really loving at this moment, when I kind of do the looking back at it all, and taking stock is the way that sexuality is simultaneously being demystified for me and for those that I’m relating with, but also as that’s happening it’s accessing more of the mystical and magical quality of it. So simultaneously like, making it more accessible is allowing me to access and to share with others just how potent and magical it is. So there’s kind of this, on the surface it seems like a dichotomy or a polarity, but in actuality like by stripping away all the kind of shiny, overtly esoteric or far out there ideas and notions that we have about sex, getting in touch with the essence of the potency that it really is.

Um-hmm (affirmative), yeah it’s like the deeper you go the deeper you go, right?

Um-hmm (affirmative), exactly. And then a lot of that ties in just again, like to speak to the cultural container that I grew up in and many of the people that I serve are a product of, it’s stripping away shame and navigating the trauma that blocks us from really fully embracing our eroticism. So cultivating more skill to do exactly that is my deep joy.

So let’s talk about that. Like who are your typical clients? How do people come to you and what kind of, like if we go into a little bit more detail, what’s more of the work that you do with them? I mean, our topic today is Accessing Personal Power Through Sexuality, how is there a relationship there?

I call myself a Somatic Sex and Intimacy Coach.

Sure, well I call myself a Somatic Sex and Intimacy Coach. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to also call me an Empowerment Coach. Because those two things go hand in hand in how I work. I work with individuals and I work with couples. I work with men and I work with women. I work with all sexual orientations. People come normally for one of two reasons. They’re in pain, and that pain may be physical, it may be emotional. But something isn’t going the way they want it to go, or they sense it can be going around their sexuality. So that can take forms of erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation in a man. It can be inability to orgasm, pain during sex for a woman. Relationally it could be wanting more passion, or connectedness, intimacy, you know something is missing, and they need to figure that missing piece out for themselves to feel really whole and satisfied. Very often people have tried other routes to getting there before they come to me. Traditional therapy, other kinds of body work, or energy work, and then they land at my doorstep.

The other category are people who are already awakened the path of pleasure in some way, and are wanting to deepen and understand the value of having somebody there to serve as a guide, a mentor, a muse to further that path along. So I work with people who aren’t necessarily coming at it from a place of something is wrong, but they are still on the awareness that things can be even better, and they want to be supported in that way.

Very cool. We are going to need to hop on to a quick break, before we dive deeper into this topic of Accessing Personal Power Through Sexuality. But before we do that, will you please tell everybody where they can find out more about you, and get in touch with you?

Yeah, I’m very accessible online. My website is my name, darshanaavila.com. There’s video content, and blogs, and easy contact forms so that you’re welcome to get ahold of me there. I offer free consultations for anyone who’s interested in exploring this work further.

Awesome, thank you so much. So stay tuned, because we’re going to get into some real juicy stuff after this break. So yeah, stick with us.