Hi, I’m Ariel
I work at the intersection of intimacy, sexuality, trauma, and the body.
I work with pleasure and plants, guiding individuals and couples into deeper relationship with themselves, their partners, and their erotic aliveness.
This work is for people who sense there is more.
More depth in connection.
More truth in desire.
More capacity for intimacy than what they’ve been living.
Often, the people who come to me are already high-functioning. They’ve done therapy. They’ve read the books. They’ve built a successful life based on conventional standards.
And still, something isn’t fully landing.
Desire feels confusing.
Connection fades or plateaus.
Sex becomes patterned, pressured, or disconnected.
The body goes numb, or overwhelmed, or performative.
The body, when it feels safe enough, opens. Pleasure deepens. Intimacy transforms.
That is the work.
My Approach
My work weaves together somatic and nervous system-based trauma repair, sacred sexuality, relational intimacy work, and plant medicine.
I’ve spent years studying sexuality as well as western approaches to trauma and the nervous system, alongside continual studies in Peru. Learning from plant medicine and Indigenous wisdom keepers in the Shipibo tradition.
But this work is not something I learned only through training.
It was born through lived experience.
Lived Experience
I was sexually abused as a young child.
In my teens, I experienced further sexual abuse, alongside self-harm, disordered eating, and a deep sense of disconnection from my body.
Sexuality became a place of confusion. Something I both longed for and felt disconnected from. I didn’t have language for what I was feeling, only a sense that something was off.
In my early twenties, I began dancing in strip clubs. It was, in many ways, a form of reclamation.
I thought, if men were going to sexualize me, I would be the one who chose it.
I would set the terms. I would turn my sexuality, and their gaze, into something I controlled.
And there was real power in that.
But it was still performance.
A mask of seduction I had learned to perfect.
That work led into full-service sex work, and later, being sexually trafficked.
I thought control would keep me safe.
It didn’t.
I came to understand, from the inside, the extractive, performative, and objectifying patterns woven into our culture around sexuality.
The ways I was participating in it.
And the ways I saw the men around me participating in it too.
All of us, in different ways, reaching for connection and belonging.
I believed my value and desirability were measured by the cash in my hands.
I wielded my performative sexuality as a form of power.
I thought belonging could be bought.
I witnessed how often sex is used to reach for connection, without actually arriving there.
How the body learns to override, to perform, to disconnect from what is true.
The Turning Point
After leaving that chapter of my life, I built something that, on the outside, looked stable.
I became a luxury residential real estate agent. I was high-functioning. Earning. Successful on paper.
And during that time, I also began a deeper dive into my healing.
Then, in 2016, everything shifted.
I was diagnosed with a facial nerve tumor that paralyzed one side of my face.
It began suddenly, and then over the following few weeks, half my face went completely still. I could no longer close my eye, lift my eyebrow, or smile.
What unraveled in the following months was not just my body. It was my identity.
My sense of worth had been tethered, without my fully knowing it, to my desirability. To being seen as beautiful. Wanted.
And suddenly, that was gone. I felt ugly. Undesirable. Certain I had no value. I was grieving a version of myself I hadn’t even known I was clinging to.
Looking back, I can see what my body was revealing.
My face had gone still on the outside, in reflection of what was frozen within. I could not move my expression. And I could not speak my truth. I could no longer smile, and suddenly, all the smiles I had been performing became visible.
My body made something undeniable. It told the truth I had been avoiding.
That was the beginning of a deeper unraveling.
Reclamation
While I had built a successful life on paper, I was unfulfilled, self-soothing with money, sex, and materialism.
Living in a constant state of hyper-vigilance or numbness.
Always working. Always tied to my phone.
I couldn’t find my balance.
The ways I had learned to cope were no longer working. So I turned towards myself.
Plant medicine guided me through the grief of being trafficked and sexually abused as a child.
Ritual in the traditions of the Shipibo-Konibo people held me. Allowing the grief and rage to be witnessed broke through the layers of shame, allowing the pain to leave my body and heart.
I felt pleasure and energy coursing through my body. I felt the love, care, and protection I had been seeking all along.
Plant medicine and Indigenous traditions became an anchor. Through them I began repairing the wounds I had inherited and participated in.
And this was also one of my first initiations into sex magic: I learned that my life force energy, the same energy that animates my sexuality, can be used to release, transform, and create.
I went back to school and learned to work with my own erotic and sexual energy through sexological bodywork and somatic sex education, modalities rooted in the lineage of sex work. This was the key to reclaiming my body, voice, and pleasure, and to stepping into sovereignty and integrity.
Learning to circulate and channel erotic energy within myself, with the plants and elements, and then with others, deepened my understanding of sex magic as an embodied path of reclamation.
Healing didn't happen in isolation. It happened in relationship.
In queer partnerships where we redefined what intimacy could be, where we spent hours in low arousal with no agenda, simply tending to one another. It happened through receiving touch from skilled practitioners who offered contact that was just for me, who let me feel what it was like to be around a safe body and begin to trust again.
These experiences unwound the link in my nervous system between sexual energy and danger. They rewired what I understood to be possible in connection and intimacy.
Art, music, and singing were part of that return too. They gave expression to what I didn't yet have words for.
And over time, something shifted.
By learning how to stay with myself.
To stay with sensation, desire, and truth, even when it was uncomfortable. And from that place, something else became possible.
A different kind of power.
Not power-over. But power that comes from being in relationship with my own body, my own desire, my own life force.
Power-with.
That was the beginning of the connection and belonging I had been seeking all along.
The Work Now
What I offer comes directly from this path.
From lived experience, alongside years of training in somatic work, sexuality, and plant medicine.
In our work together, we are not just talking about your patterns. We are working with what is actually happening in your body, in real time.
The ways you override yourself.
The ways you perform.
The places you disconnect from your truth.
They show up. And when they do, we can meet them differently.
This work is about developing the capacity to stay.
With sensation,
with desire,
and truth.
Especially in the moments where you would normally leave.
When the body feels safe enough to open, pleasure becomes the current that carries grief toward transformation.
Desire becomes clearer. Boundaries become cleaner. Your body becomes more available to receive pleasure and connection.
And your relationships, with yourself and with others, become more honest, more connected, and more alive.
This inner reclamation is not just personal. It is cultural.
The same patterns of suppression, disconnection, and performance that live in your body also live in the culture.
The collective body mirrors the individual one.
When you reclaim your erotic aliveness, you are participating in something larger.
Together we are reclaiming our bodies, rewriting our stories, and creating spaces where love is not a performance, but a practice.
Who This Is For
This work is for people who are ready to meet themselves more honestly.
This is for those who are ready to move beyond understanding
and into something lived, embodied, and real.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. But you do need to be willing to feel. To be curious about your desire. To stay. And to tell the truth when it arises.
This work isn’t for everyone.
But if you recognize yourself here,
and you’re ready to meet yourself more honestly,
I’m here. And I can meet you there.
Selected Training & Lineage
The Somatic Science of Trauma Recovery with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, 2025
Somatic Sex Educator & Sexological Bodyworker, Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, 2022
Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Therapist (PSI), 2021
Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, Polaris Insight Center, 2021
Plant Dietas with Maestra Matilda, 2004 – present
Plant Dietas and Shamanic Coaching with Kat Courtney, 2001 – present
BA in Studio Art, Mount Holyoke College, 2009
Lived Experience & Ongoing Study
Lived experience in the sex work industry, now integrated into my work as a sexological bodyworker and intimacy coach
Ayahuasca ceremonies and master plant dietas within the Shipibo tradition
Ritual work with psilocybin, San Pedro, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD
Psychedelic somatic psychotherapy, including cannabis-assisted sessions
Eros Labs with colleagues exploring the intersection of sacred intimacy and psychedelic medicine
Liberation Lounges with queer community exploring the intersections of touch and psychedelic medicine
Rosen Method bodywork with Jenny Ragan
Inner child and parts work with Nancy Swisher
Intuitive and psychic development with Kristin Bremidus, Ash Canty, and Susan Schueler
Spiritual development with Metsa Nihue
Healing Honestly coaching program for CSA survivors
15+ years of talk therapy
In my house
My spirit went to sleep.
Living a shadow of my former self.
I climbed mountains of darkness, all alone.
And with each mountain I climbed, I spun another layer of self-hatred around my skeleton.
I charged ahead, unaware of the other paths.
Determined to reach the moon, where I’d receive everything I needed.
And when I did reach the moon, she told me that the love I was looking for was already inside of me.
So I handed her the end of my thread and jumped.
Unraveling, all the way down, until I hit the earth and woke up.
-Ariel Szabo