Why I'm building The Courtesan Collective

We're tired. So bloody tired.

On a macro level: patriarchal world leaders, the vile manosphere, too often reports of hideous violence against women and girls, the steady drumbeat of news that asks us to absorb more than any nervous system was built for.

We want better - for us, for our daughters, for our sons.

On a micro level: we're running the home, managing teenagers and / or elderly parents and (sometimes) a man-child of a partner. We're running our arse off busy with work, or inhabiting a relationship where we don't feel heard, or doing the third shift of remembering everyone else's appointments.

There’s very little time for fun.

Even less for pleasure.

Somewhere along the way, the cultural script became: you can have those things, but only after everything else is done.

The trouble is: it's never done. Is it??

So women like me - and possibly women like you - have been quietly asking the same question. What if the rest is never coming? What if I stop waiting and just claim it now?

That question is what The Courtesan Collective is for.

Why "courtesan"

If you’re familiar with the concept, I know the word might do a lot of work in people's heads, most of it inaccurate. So let me be crystal clear about why it’s been a north star for me for so long.

The historical courtesan was unapologetic in herself and her place in the world. She knew her value and took delight in it. She was confident, graceful, elegant, and not easily intimidated. She trained younger women in her art. She lived in a culture that had countless ways to diminish her.

And she walked through it like a woman who knew she was the room, not the wallpaper.

Modern women, by and large, have been denied that. We've been raised on a script that says we earn our pleasure after we've served - the cooking, the caring, the soothing, the smoothing - and the service is never finished.

We've been encouraged to jump for breadcrumbs and call it abundance.

I don't accept that script.

I think a woman can be strong and feminine without emasculating anyone. I think queen energy doesn't require diminishing king energy. Women who lift other women up - rather than gossip about them or compete with them - are the ones quietly changing the culture from inside.

I've been telling my children for years, there are 8.5 billion people in the world - you’re not going to like all of them. They’re not all going to like you. And that's fine. We can each play in our own corner of the playground without throwing sand.

The courtesan, to me, holds all of that. Self-possession. Grace under pressure. Pleasure as a discipline, not an afterthought. The willingness to teach the next woman what you've learned.

It's a lineage worth claiming.

A woman I think about often

During a difficult period of my own life, I often thought about my Aunty Anne.

Matriarchal. Drawing herself up to her full height of less than five foot tall. Puffing out her chest, jutting her chin - “because I can”.

The memory of her reminded me I knew my own mind. I stayed in my grace and poise even when I perhaps didn’t feel like that internally. Remembering that no response is, itself, a response. Refusing to be drawn into the drama. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Aunty Anne didn't use words like "embodiment" or "nervous system regulation." She didn't need to. She was it.

That period of my life is also when I came home to my body in a different way.

Dark yoga, I like to call it - loud rhythmic music, candles, incense, free movement in a room where no one was watching. Moon rituals in the garden. Journaling. Dancing joyously when it felt right. Running in all weathers and seasons, getting filthy, feeling the field. Launching myself into academic study for no other reason than it nourished me and made me feel alive.

None of it was strategic. All of it was reclamation.

The Collective is built on what I learned during that season. That pleasure isn't an indulgence - it's a form of integrity. That tending to your own aliveness isn't selfish - it's the engine that powers everything else. That women need other women in this work, because doing it alone is twice as hard and half as fun.

What I believe (that the wellness world won't quite say)

A few convictions I'm going to put down quite plainly, because The Collective is built on them:

Every emotion is valid. Rumi's Guest House is one of my touchstones - the idea that grief, joy, anger, longing all arrive as visitors and we welcome each. So are the goddesses Durga and Kali, who hold the truth that fierce, dark, fanged feminine energy is not a deviation from sacred - it is sacred. You cannot expect a woman to be sunshine and rainbows all the time. Dolly Parton said it best: if you want the rainbows, you gotta put up with a little rain.

A woman's pleasure is not optional infrastructure. When a woman is well-pleasured - by which I mean: in her body, in her life, in her relationships, in her work - the ripple reaches her children, her partner, her friendships, her career, the way she moves through every room she enters. Her pleasure is the world's good news. We have been sold the opposite.

There is real power in a group of like-minded women. It takes a village. It always has. The lone-wolf model of self-improvement is a relatively recent invention and, I suspect, not coincidentally one that keeps women isolated and easier to sell to.

A note on energy

I've been doing this work long enough now to notice a pattern. Women in my Women's Circles, clients, students, strangers I've met on training courses on the other side of the world - they tell me, over and over, the same kinds of things;

Your energy is effervescent.

Your presence is captivating.

I just feel better being around you.

I'm not telling you this to flatter myself - quite frankly, it took me years to take the comments seriously rather than deflect them. I'm telling you because it taught me something about what this work actually is.

I'm a certified sex coach. I'm a yoga teacher. I'm a burlesque performer. But what people are responding to isn't the certifications or the techniques.

It's energy.

The kind that's released when a woman is genuinely connected to her body, her pleasure, her voice, and her life.

Some people call this charisma. Others call it presence. I tend to call it sexual energy - and before anyone clutches their pearls, I don't mean it in the pervy sense. I mean it in the original sense:

sexual energy as creative energy,

the life-force itself, the same current that makes a woman magnetic at a dinner party, persuasive in a meeting, alive in her own skin, prolific in her work, a delight to be near.

It's the most undervalued resource a woman has.

The culture has spent centuries teaching us to be ashamed of it, suspicious of it, or to channel it only through the narrow lens of pleasing someone else.

The Courtesan Collective is, in part, a place to remember what it feels like when that energy is yours again. Not performed, not earned, not given grudgingly - yours.

When women gather around that, the ripple is extraordinary.

What I think The Collective will do, if we get it right

A woman six months into this work, I imagine, will notice some things.

💫 She walks taller. She smiles more freely. She finds she's become more magnetic - the right people are drawing closer, and the draining ones are falling away. That second part can feel hard, but she's okay with it, because she trusts it's for her greater good and because she now has the support of women who get it.

💫 She makes bolder decisions, because she has more resources and more allies than she used to. She feels no guilt about rest, or pleasure, or the small joys her body asks for. She's noticing glimmers - those tiny moments of aliveness - and she shares them, because joy multiplies when it's named.

💫 She trusts her intuition more. She is not judgmental of other women's choices. When someone is struggling, she doesn't try to fix them - because she trusts they can do their own work.

💫 She knows she can't sit in the mud for another person. She also knows that holding their hand in the mud changes everything.

💫 She has expanded, intellectually and otherwise, in directions that surprise her.

And she stays in the Collective not because she has to, but because she wants to - and because she wants other women to have what she's having.

That's my dream. That's my why.

The doors open in September. If anything in this has stirred something in you, the waitlist is where to go.

with pleasure,

If you enjoyed this, you might also like to read

Reclaim Your Sensuality: How to Channel the Confidence of a Courtesan

The Ripple effect of pleasure; It's not all about you

Find the glimmers