The Healing Cocoon Podcast

In this week’s episode of the podcast, we chat with Lillian Love, a soul-purpose and feminine empowerment coach. She brings us through her soul-searching journey for healing after the death of her mother in her early twenties. 

Lillian is now the CEO of Embodied Feminine Guide, a trauma-informed facilitator training for women who are ready to embody and share the medicine of alchemizing their pain into purpose. She is also the co-creator of Cosmic Touch, a documentary film exploring the transformational healing power of self-pleasure. Lillian wholly believes our healing comes when we become the empowered creators and compassionate space holders for our own infinite human hearts.

reclaiming the inner child

The catalyst of Lillian’s search for healing came through the deep pain and unprocessed trauma of losing her mother in 2011 to a chronic illness and long battle with alcohol and depression. Because of her mom’s lengthy health struggles, Lillian had taken on the role of mothering her mother at a very young age, which meant she was never able to have a childhood of her own. 

After her mom’s passing, Lillian’s grief instigated her own battle with depression. She struggled to find purpose now that her role as caretaker had ended, and it took a great deal of inner strength to finally face the trauma she’d been forced to push aside to survive. 

She dove into multiple healing modalities, anything she felt would save her life, and eventually connected with a tantra teacher, who would become her main mentor. As she worked through her trauma, dormant memories of sexual abuse also surfaced, which sent her on an even deeper journey to recover her inner child. The philosophy and practice of tantra gave her the tools to do this profound work and was ultimately the key to reclaiming the beauty of sexual intimacy for her.

Tantra Beyond Sex

Tantra is most popularly aligned with sex—kama sutra and its variety of positions. But tantra is truly a life philosophy that, at its depths, means to weave together the dualities and polarities of this world—light and dark, pain and pleasure, fear and love, sun and moon, masculine and feminine, heaven and earth, human and divine. This is where spirituality and sexuality have their place in tantra. Tantra is about reclaiming not just god, the etheos, the angelic realms, as beautiful and sacred but also this physical, tangible earthly realm and the desire to create and procreate life (not only the pursuit of better orgasms).

And also remembering that sexual energy is creative energy. So creative, in fact, that it has the power to create life itself. What a miracle we as women hold that a soul can come into our womb space and be formed into a physical being and then birthed outside of our body into life—that is the power of sexuality. Unfortunately, through religion, patriarchy, and sexual violence, culturally we have become disconnected from our hearts and ability to feel safe in sexual expression. It is possible to reclaim this energy as beautiful and holy and sacred, and tantric teachings provide a means of doing that. 

A Tantric Worldview

Lillian has channeled this philosophy into every tiny cosmos of her life. “Everything is material for our liberation,” she teaches. “It is about life force energy. So my emotions that feel challenging, that is material for my liberation.” Our emotions are life force energy, so if we can make space to feel them in a conscious, compassionate way and understand they are carrying a wisdom and message for us, then we can alchemize that in our hearts and use the basic tools of tantra—breath, sound, and movement—to process our emotions into more love and compassion.

As a western culture, we’ve become so conditioned to clench up and freeze in life that we stop breathing and our energy can’t move. Emotion is energy in motion. If we clamp down and are afraid to open up and allow that energy to move through us, it gets stuck and stagnant and that’s where disease and negativity have opportunity. Tantra is the beautiful philosophy of learning to move our energy beyond and above these culturally embedded norms.

Leaning Into our own Tantric Expression

“It felt like things got worse before they got better,” she says of her journey into tantra. “And, yes, I do see this for my clients. It’s the stuff we have been repressing, and if we’ve been repressing it for a while, we have to develop the capacity to hold this stuff and be with it.” The only way to develop that skill is to practice. It’s scary to start to feel these things, but we can learn how to utilize our minds to support us, and not just be a place where anxious thoughts loop. It is the process of training our mind to talk to us like a loving friend or parent.

Learn more about Lillian at www.lillieclairelove.com and find her on social media at @lillieclairelove.

For the full interview with Lillian, listen via the link on this page, www.thehealingcocoon.co, or find us on Instagram @thehealingcocoonpodcast.