Hi, I’m Ariel
A space-holder of embodied healing, connection, and transformation
I guide you back to your soul and into the ancient wisdom of your body. Holding the light as you find the treasures in your own darkness. Supporting you in cultivating a sense of belonging no matter where you are, knowing that you are enough, and opening up to the love and magic that is you.
I weave together spiritual and western teachings. Integrating the wisdom I receive from the elements and consciousness of the plants I sit with and western knowledge on working with the nervous system and trauma.
I came into this work through my own rebirth and transformation.
I have walked the path of re-inhabiting my body, liberating my soul, and freeing my voice. Now I walk with others, holding the light, as they do the same.
I invite you to rediscover the home you hold within yourself.
My Formative Years
I grew up in Cambridge, MA with my older sister, mom, and dad. We were a family of extremely sensitive and conflict avoidant people. Both my parents suppressed their needs and walked through life with a lack of worthiness and sense of belonging.
I did not have models of valuing and loving myself, expressing my needs and desires, and setting healthy boundaries. Like so many of us, I was not taught how to take care of myself and tend to my inner garden.
I was sexually abused as a child by a caretaker - unknown by my parents. I experienced violation and betrayal and not being seen or held in it. Like so many CSA survivors - I became encapsulated in shame and self doubt. Trying my hardest to disappear so I wouldn’t be hurt again.
Disassociated from my body that carried these secrets until I was ready to listen. Walking through life fragmented, armored, and disconnected.
Touch and sexual energy became intertwined with danger at a young age in my body and mind. In response, growing up, I sexualized myself in extreme ways, searching for power.
In this process, I gave my power away.
In my teens, I experienced more sexual abuse and soothed myself with drugs, self-mutilation, and disordered eating.
Throughout my life, from the moment I could hold something in my hand - I have been an artist and musician. Art, music, and singing have always been a way that I’ve been able to express the unsayable.
Creative practice has kept me alive.
My Entry Into My Dharma As A Sacred Intimate
During college I indulged my inner curiosity in exploring sexuality by working at a strip club on weekends. I was too ashamed to own my desire to explore so I decided to make this new profession more palatable by tying it to my intellectual pursuits by writing a research paper entitled “Is it possible to be a feminist stripper?”
I also see now that by working in the strip club, I was fulfilling my destiny and dharma as a Sacred Intimate; a teacher of love, pleasure, grief, and intimacy.
At the time, I was deeply disempowered, walking through life with a bleeding wound. And that environment is dangerous for the disempowered. My work at the strip club led me to full service sex work. After I graduated college, I was sexually trafficked by my boyfriend.
Searching for survival, I exited the abusive relationship and began selling luxury residential real estate in Boston. This change allowed me to begin diligently unthawing my body from abuse with therapeutic support and through my creative practice. Unfulfilled and self-soothing with money, sex, and materialism, I lived in a constant state of hyper-vigilance or numbness, always working, and tied to my phone. I couldn’t find my balance.
I was still running from the secrets; the grief and pleasure that were waiting to be felt in my body.
Divine Intervention and Re-Direction On My Path
In 2016, I developed a facial nerve tumor that paralyzed one side of my face. It suddenly and drastically altered the way I look and forced me to slow down. I could no longer smile.
I was suddenly hyper aware of all the smiles I had faked.
The time off required for the surgeries and recovery gave me the space to begin to feel into my broken heart and the well of grief waiting to be held within me.
The sudden change to my appearance was a jarring strike to my ego. A big enough strike to help me begin to wake up to the fact that I was deeply disassociated and had no self-worth. My confidence laid in how desirable I was to others and how much money I was making. The universe was calling me towards something else and I had not been listening.
In real estate I was helping people find their physical homes when really I wanted to help myself and other people find home within themselves.
I stepped onto my spiritual path, divesting from my atheist family, and started to work intentionally with psychedelics, plant medicine, and somatic practices.
As I began my journey or re-inhabiting my body, finding my voice, reclaiming my power, and re-connecting to the earth - I began to re-define intimacy, sensuality, sexuality, and touch outside of the normative narratives.
I went back to school to study Somatic Sex Education, Sexological Bodywork, and Psychedelic Therapy. I started traveling back and forth to Peru a couple times a year to sit and study with plants and the Shipibo people.
Receiving the medicine of indigenous traditions has and continues to be a guiding post as I resist the colonial capitalist patriarchal paradigm.
I have discovered the key to living a fulfilling, connected, aligned and purpose filled life lays in reconnecting with our bodies and reclaiming our life force energy.
In learning to listen. In building the capacity to be with our grief and our pleasure. In cultivating a felt sense of safety so that we may allow ourselves to be seen and heard and give and receive love. Coming back into connection with our inner knowing and the wisdom of the earth. Remembering our inherent belonging.
My Life Experiences As Training Ground To FulFill My Souls Purpose & Desire
I have first hand experience with the extreme distortions of sexuality in our culture and how it keeps people disconnected and unsatisfied. The deep shame and suppression most people walk through life with around their needs, desires, sexuality, and body. And how this suppression leads to disconnection, loneliness, grief, and violence.
I’ve had first hand experience with the lengths people will go to for money. Money over human life. Money over my own life. Buying the lie we are sold that we will find love and satisfaction outside of ourselves. That money can buy this thing we so desperately need - connection and belonging.
I have first hand experience with how reconnecting to nature, our own erotic energy, and loving present touch heals these wounds of separation, violation, betrayal, and de-humanization. Living in right relationship - in consensual and reciprocal relationship - with the earth, our own bodies, and each other are inextricably linked and a foundation of my practice.
My vision is overflowing with love.
We reclaim our power from those who abuse, dominate, conquest.
We know there is enough love, space, and resources for everyone’s needs to be met.
We allow the land to lead us.
In sync with the natural cycles.
Birthing, tending, listening, feeling, dying.
We create. We live. We learn. We grow.
Together.
A web of connection.
We center the land and the voices of the people who never left the land.
The people who have been listening this entire time.
Money returns to its original purpose.
As a means to facilitate the sharing of resources.
We don’t work to make money.
We utilize money to share our work.
Loving. Living. Stewards.
Stewards of the gifts bestowed upon us.
The land leads.
The moon and the sun lead.
The wind and the waters.
We listen. We listen.
We listen to our hearts.
We sing and celebrate in love and dance.
We grieve. We cry. We express.
We tend to one another’s bodies and hearts.
We know we are the land.
We repair the sever from the land.
We can rest here in connection.
All satiated in enoughness.
Full of life. Full of sensation. Full of emotion. Full of love. Full of purpose.
Sharing, tending, listening, loving, feeling.
We honor death.
We make way for birth.
Formal Education & Training
Plant Dietas with Maestra Matilda, student
Plant Dietas and Shamanic Coaching with Kat Courtney, student
3 Keys to Genital Dearmoring, Rahi Chun, 2023
Holding Sacred Space, Ash Canty, 2023
Perfect Touch Method Certification with Mehdi Darvish Yahya, 2023
Psychic Mentorship with Ash Canty, 2022
Somatic Sex Educator, Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, 2022
Sexological Bodyworker, Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, 2022
Embodied Ethics, The Institute for Erotic Intelligence, 2022
Touch Practice in the Psychedelic-Assisted Session with Rita Bozi, 2022
Reiki, Initiated by Metsa Nihue, 2022
Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, Modules 1-5, Polaris Insight Center, 2021
Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Therapist, PSI, 2021
Disassociation and the Body Workshop, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, 2021
Wheel of Consent Workshop, 2021
Attachment and Trauma, The Touching Cure, 2020
Certified Coach Training module 1, iPEC, 2017
BA in Studio Art, Mount Holyoke College, 2009
Informal Education & Lived Experiences
Ayahuasca ceremonies in the Shipibo tradition
Ceremonies with psilocybin, san pedro, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD
Psychedelic somatic interactive psychotherapy sessions assisted with cannabis
Rosen method bodywork with Jenny Ragan
Inner child dialoging and spiritual development with Nancy Swisher
Energy work and spiritual development with Kristin Bremidus
Spiritual development with Metsa Nihue
Healing honestly coaching program for CSA survivors
15+ years of talk therapy
4 years in the sex work industry
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