Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale with Gwenm A. Carsley

We didn’t plan this conversation.We showed up. With Aaron Mandelbaum, we don’t map transformation ~ we sit inside it. In the pauses. In the places where language thins and the body starts telling the truth. We speak about presence not as mastery, but as devotion. The kind that asks you to stay when it would be easier to perform, explain, or disappear. We touch the places we usually rush past: discomfort, intimacy, the quiet violence of bypass, the ache of becoming without applause. There is philosophy here, yes — but it’s been chewed, lived, and softened by breath. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is promised.Only the intimacy of attention.Only the walk.Only what happens when you let yourself be here.

In this unflinching conversation, we sit with Keeper Catran-Whitney - author, survivor, brother, and truth-speaker - about his memoir Helplessness: What Happens to Brothers When We Learn Our Sisters Have Been Molested by Our Parents. This isn’t just another story about trauma - It’s a crucible of emotional truth where guilt, silence, familial betrayal, and the destruction of being left unseen.  Keeper opens the door on what most families never speak about. Helplessness is his forty-five-year journey through shock, shame, paralysis, and finally toward a fragile kind of hope - born not in denial but in the courage to face what was buried and forbidden. This memoir foregrounds what brothers experience when systems, culture, and love itself tell them to shut up, stay strong, and carry on, even as their world collapses.  In this episode, Keeper and I delve into the emotional architecture of silence,  how not talking becomes its own prison, how guilt morphs into a lifelong companion, and how reclaiming voice is an act of resistance and healing. We talk about men’s emotional health in the shadow of unspeakable pain, the absence of spaces that hold brotherly experience with tenderness and depth, and the grand societal myth that resilience means never breaking. 

What happens when you cast the most hidden, most judged parts of the body into permanence? In this unfiltered and unforgettable episode of Skin & Soul, I sit down with British sculptor Jamie McCartney—creator of The Great Wall of Vagina (now Vulva), The Spice of Life, and a growing body of work that dares to mold the raw truth of our erotic anatomy. From labia to penis, outer lips to internal vaginal walls, Jamie’s art captures what we’re taught to hide. This isn’t porn. It’s not provocation for its own sake. It’s documentation. Reclamation. Reverence. We talk about: The myth of the “perfect” pussy—and the quiet epidemic of aesthetic shame Why the most radical thing you can do is see (and show) your real body The art of internal vaginal casting (!), and the intimate trust it demands Genital diversity, censorship, and why real erotic bodies deserve museum walls Jamie’s sculptures aren’t just flesh frozen in time. They are resistance. Education. Sacred rebellion. They say: you are not wrong. You are not broken. You are not alone. Because Venus was never one shape.She was every curve. Every crease. Every variation.And each one of them is divine. Watch: https://youtu.be/UX7JZG1-Puw

Rill’s understanding of desire comes from proximity, not theory. Working within the sex industry as an erotic dancer, hosting swinger events, styling adult film sets, and writing erotic fiction, she witnessed how sex, money, and power actually move. When formal pathways failed her, she created Seductive Art—focusing on visual stimulation, erotic dialogue, and sensual movement. This conversation strips away the fairytale and looks at desire as currency: how power shapes attraction, why honesty about sex is rare, and what awareness really protects us from.

What if desire isn’t random — and intimacy isn’t accidental? In this episode of Skin & Soul, I’m joined by David Bederman, spiritual teacher, behavioral strategist, and creator of The Personality Code — a system rooted in Kabbalah that explores the hidden wiring shaping how we love, attract, create, and evolve. We talk about Kabbalah as an ancient energetic framework and how it illuminates desire, attraction patterns, masculine and feminine energies, soul growth, and erotic repetition. We explore why we’re drawn to who we’re drawn to, how intimacy reveals our deepest wiring, and why sex and eros may be among the most powerful forces for spiritual evolution.

In this episode, Brownell Landrum joins us to explore the pulse beneath her work A Love Story to the Universe - a conversation about soul mates, longing, synchronicity, and the quiet ways the cosmos answers the human heart. We also enter her newest project, The Art and Science of Wishing, rooted in peaceful, positivity, and purposeful, where desire becomes something sharper than hope and far more intimate than manifestation. Together we explore how wishing, when done from truth rather than fantasy, becomes a force that shapes reality. This is an episode about devotion, destiny, and the courage to want ~ fully, unapologetically, with the whole body.

In this intimate conversation with depth psychology coach and author Deborah Lukovich, we dive into the lived story behind her memoir When Sex Meets God. We explore the midlife unraveling that cracks open desire, shadow, dreams, synchronicity, and the body’s long-silenced hunger. Deborah shares how Jungian psychology shaped her awakening, how younger lovers appeared as catalysts, and how projection, archetype, and kundalini pulled her into a transformation she couldn’t think her way out of. A conversation about becoming Forever Jung—alive, undone, curious, and willing to follow eros into the unknown.

In part 2 of our Embodying the Practice conversation, Andrew Marshall returns to talk about intimacy - with the medicine, and with the ones we love. We explore his experiences with Ayahuasca - the openings, the purges, the raw honesty of meeting himself and how that honesty now lives in his purpose and his relationships. What do we keep from our partners in the name of love?What truths sit unsaid in the body?And what does it take to speak from that place - unarmored, alive, fully present. This is a conversation about embodiment, truth, and the courage to see and face one's shadows when there’s nowhere left to hide.  

In this episode of Skin & Soul: Beyond the Pale, I sit with Mark Steven Porro — actor, designer, accidental entrepreneur, and the son who walked straight into the chaos, comedy, and heartbreak of caring for his mother in her final years. Mark’s award-winning memoir, A Cup of Tea on the Commode, captures the wild contradictions of eldercare:how a parent becomes a child again,how dignity hangs by a thread,how humor saves you when nothing else can,and how love gets louder as memory fades. We talk about the small rebellions, the forgotten names, the guilt, the tenderness, the absurdity, the devotion, and the surprising joy that arrives when you’re forced to show up in ways you never imagined you could. This is a conversation about the human comedy of decline — and the unexpected beauty in loving someone through their second childhood.

What happens when you mix a sex-positive grandma, a childhood spent figure-skating on frozen lakes, and a lifetime of dismantling religious shame… with modern parenting, porn, and kids with iPads? In this episode of Skin and Soul: Beyond the Pale, I sit with Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers — therapist, educator, and author of Sex, God & the Conservative Church and Shameless Parenting — for a wildly honest, surprisingly funny conversation about raising shame-free kids in an over-sexualized world. We talk about babies discovering their genitals in the bath, toddlers who just want to hug everyone, and why “hands in your pants at the dinner table” is not a crisis but an invitation to teach boundaries without shaming desire. Tina walks us through what real “family life education” looks like from 0–18, why one hundred tiny, awkward one-minute chats beat the one Big Talk, and how to start when you feel like you’re years too late. We go there with porn, phones and tablets, patriarchy, boys’ right to say no too, and how to help our kids recognize exploitation instead of becoming numb to it. We also talk about re-parenting ourselves, healing the little one inside who never got these conversations, and the strange grace that can show up with aging parents and dementia. This one is for the exhausted, tender, secretly terrified parents who still want their kids to know: your body is yours, your pleasure is good, and you never have to trade your soul to belong.

Poet, author, and sound artist Tawhida Tanya Evanson joins Gwenm to explore eros, death, mysticism, lucid dreaming, and the divine in Book of Wings.

What happens when becoming yourself collides with a world obsessed with identity — when truth, politics, and love all live in the same body? Teegan Toftley transitioned in her late forties — not to prove a point, but to stop living divided. Now in her fifties, she’s still married to the same woman, still “Dad” to her kids, and still disarmingly real about what it means to belong to your own skin. In this episode, we tackle conversations about gender, belonging, and authenticity. Teegan speaks openly about body dysmorphia, love that lasts through change, and the current cultural noise surrounding what it means to be trans. It’s about what happens when the stories we tell about identity meet the deeper story of being human.

What’s the difference between pleasure and purpose — between the quick hit of happiness and the quiet satisfaction of meaning? In this episode, Gwenm sits with Justin McSweeny, philosopher of mind and host of an interview series exploring sense-making and identity, to talk about the space where eros meets consciousness. Together they explore the longing that drives us — the hunger for depth in a world that keeps us on the surface. Justin brings insights from philosophy of mind and third-generation cognitive science — how we build meaning, construct self, and relate to our own becoming. Gwenm brings it back into the body — where desire, purpose, and soul all converge. They talk about hedonic versus eudaimonic happiness, the intelligence of desire, and what it means to live with presence instead of performance.

In part 2 of our Embodying the Practice conversation, Andrew Marshall returns to talk about intimacy - with the medicine, and with the ones we love. We explore his experiences with Ayahuasca - the openings, the purges, the raw honesty of meeting himself and how that honesty now lives in his purpose and his relationships. What do we keep from our partners in the name of love?What truths sit unsaid in the body?And what does it take to speak from that place - unarmored, alive, fully present. This is a conversation about embodiment, truth, and the courage to see and face one's shadows when there’s nowhere left to hide.  

He chased the highs - the fight, the women, the thrill that felt like freedom.But it wasn’t. It was escape dressed up as aliveness.   Andrew Marshall, Master Coach, Jiu Jitsu black belt, husband, father - lived the performance of freedom until his body, his spirit, and the woman who he finally called in, asked for something truer. We talk about what happens when the chase ends. When control no longer feels powerful. When freedom isn’t about getting away - but being right here, in the body, fully awake.   This is a conversation about the myth of freedom,the discipline it takes to stay,and the quiet beauty of a man who’s learned to live inside his skin.

Bedroom boredom isn’t about running out of positions or toys. It’s about the slow leak of presence — the touch that doesn’t land, the kiss that no longer opens, the silence that grows cold between bodies. In this episode, Gwenm drops raw into her own story — a marriage that ended in rupture, the ache of midlife awakening, the pull of numbness, and the courage to soften back into pleasure. She unpacks how boredom can become a deadening cycle — or an invitation. Through visceral stories and practical tools, she offers a path back into aliveness: breath that ignites desire, sound that cracks you open, touch that revives numb landscapes, polarity, mystery, adventure, repair, and the forgotten aphrodisiac of opening the heart. This is not surface-level “spice.” This is eros as lifeblood — the difference between living half-asleep and being fully claimed by presence.

Women are praised for being selfless — but the cost is often desire: starved, silenced, abandoned. The marriage that quietly goes cold. The body that goes numb. The fire that flickers out. Melissa Barnes knows this terrain. Outwardly successful, inwardly empty, she spent years performing the role of the “good woman” while starving herself of desire, intimacy, and fire — until she became a ghost in her own life. After two decades as a funeral director and end-of-life care worker, she witnessed the sharp truth of what’s lost when we bury our hunger. Out of that rupture, she created The RISE Method™, guiding women who appear to have it all but feel hollow inside.

What does it mean to love someone who cannot stay? To pour yourself into the silence of unanswered notes, unread poems, dangling carrots of “thinking of you,” and calls that exit before they land? In this episode, I step into the rawness of loving the avoidant — the man who hides behind polished confidence, the boy inside who is terrified of conflict, shame, and intimacy. But this is not only about the other. This is about the avoidant within us... within me. Attachment styles reflect our own unhealed places. The skin-tightening recoil before visiting my mother, the restless feet of the next thrill, the ways I disappear when love gets too close. I tell stories of my own avoidance, my mother’s desperation, my wife’s piercing callouts, and the moments where acting, sex, and love all meet in the same vulnerability hangover. We'll wander through attachment styles — wave, island, anchor — without clinical jargon, but through lived experience. And what it means to love anyway, to risk love as something that costs, something that undresses us down to bone, to shame, to fire, to Eros itself.

What if the way you love, long, and ache isn’t random — but the wiring of your soul? In this solo episode, Gwenm takes you into the body’s first imprints of love and eros, from the womb to the nervous system, through vows made in heartbreak and the Erotic Blueprints that shape our desires. With raw stories of survival, longing, and devotion, practices for rewiring through pleasure, and poetry that lands in your bones, Wired for Love explores how ache becomes cathedral, how longing becomes erotic, and how love — in its mess, shadow, and mystery — becomes the most powerful force of aliveness we have.   Watch: https://youtu.be/seqqYjl3B-c 

We tied to each other in Berlin. Not for performance. Not for pretty pictures. For the ache of what happens when rope meets skin and silence stretches between two bodies. Shibari took us somewhere we couldn’t script. The knots held more than flesh — they held memory, hunger, release. We talk about what it felt like to surrender, to hang between trust and fear, to feel the rope carve its language into our skin. This isn’t a tutorial. It’s a conversation about the intimacy of being bound, the strange freedom inside suspension, and what was revealed when we let the rope have us.    Watch: https://youtu.be/9Mj2ACmeyDw