The Power Of Dance And The Importance of Wildness with Coach Chloe de Sousa
You can’t dance without exploring your sexuality. I think that depth of dance takes your right into everything that’s available inside of you, including your sexuality - so I had a lot of kundalini awakening experiences.
…Like my first orgasm on the dance floor without any partner.
It was beautiful and it was wild. I trusted it.
The dance floor was my home.
I first came across Chloe on Instagram. Upon coming across her page, I initially felt “Hey we have a very similar aesthetic going on.” As I took a closer look, we actually had A LOT more similarities - one of the main similarities being our philosophies toward sex and wildness…After all, her handle is @feral.grace
Chloe De Sousa is a certified sex, love, and relationship coach of The Tantric Institute of Integrated Sexuality (VITA). She integrates her coaching with her experience as a dance 5rhythms teacher, dance movement psychotherapist, and her studies on healing systems. She provides a holistic approach to enlivening your wild potential, which may include breathwork, meditation, energy work, and dance.
We shared a juicy and intellectually stimulating conversation on what felt like everything!
Dance, tantra, mindfulness, wildness, BDSM, relationships, and our life force.
If you’d like to work with Chloe, she is now open to appointments and you can book a free call to discuss how you’d like to transform your relationships. Visit her website www.feralgrace.net
Night & Day: Your “About” page really resonated with me that you are holistic and really trying to push forth this message that sex is the next revolution and that it’s really something people should consider more carefully. I really don’t think that throughout society people have given it the consideration it deserves.
I would love to get to know more about your background.
Chloe: I was in university and got a degree in social anthropology. Within that I studied healing systems all across the globe. I came out wanting to get more in-depth practice of what that meant, rather than just the cerebral understanding. That took me into quite a few healing modalities and funky places - like medicine journeys, which back then were more fringe. From University I took a second degree in dance-movement psychotherapy, which took the body as a potential to heal a lot of things. I worked in schools and psychiatric wards and from there I danced with Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rthyms.
You can’t dance without exploring your sexuality. I think that depth of dance takes your right into everything that’s available inside of you, including your sexuality - so I had a lot of kundalini awakening experiences.
Like my first orgasm on the dance floor without any partner. It was beautiful and it was wild. I trusted it.
The dance floor was my home.
N&D: I think that’s a whole other article I want to ask you about!
An orgasm on the dance floor!
Chloe: I realize I got really lucky with my relationship with my sexuality. Sexuality for me is something very shameless, very natural - I drop into it exceedingly easily and well. I have no trauma particularly around it, so it was all a green light. I was looking for something edgy and wild and actually this love, sex relationship coaching is where I wanted to go next.
N&D: When you say you got lucky with your sexuality, would you say it was innate or from the nature vs nurture argument, you were lucky that you were around people who nurtured healthier views of sexuality? Or a combination of both?
Chloe: I think it was a combination of both. As a child I could remember being very awake with my senses. You can’t sexualize children in any way, so I don’t mean that - I mean that I was out in nature and aware of good feelings in my body.
And my parents embraced nakedness and naturalness. I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing so I escaped a lot of the shadows that I see a lot of my peers struggling with.
N&D: You’re definitely lucky in that aspect. My parents are from a different country with a religious background and they had a conservative upbringing. There were cheeky jokes, but sex wasn’t a conversation.
Chloe: Well I had some positive challenges though, like when I was 17 my mom fell in love with a woman and so I had some good education around fluidity.
One of the reasons I’m passionate about my work is that there’s not enough sexual education. Teaching young women just not to get pregnant is not sex education. Certainly teaching young adult women the map of their body, that sex should feel good, and the power it has to take you into massively enlightening experiences is a good thing.
N&D: It seems as you transitioned into coaching, you expanded your holistic practices and integrated your studies from University.
Chloe: Breath can take you to such deep places. You can use what’s in your body to take you to such deep, ecstatic, connecting places. You start breathing deeply and you get deeply in touch with your body.
You understand maybe your heart is sad and you can breathe through that, your levels of sexual sensation can increase the deeper you breathe. It’s very easy to use breathwork and energy to expand our sexual repertoire.
I like people to be self-empowered and I’m very big on body ownership. So it’s a great place to start since you don’t need anything but yourself.
N&D: This topic of sexuality we are covering is under the macrocosmic topic of mindfulness right?
That’s my mission - to integrate sexual wellness under the overall definition of wellness. When you see sexuality as part of mindfulness, it becomes a kind of tool which tells you if something within different layers of you needs attention, healing, something. And breath work being a mindfulness technique is definitely a wonderful way to go about it.
Chloe: I love what you said just then. You can see it also in partnerships - if the sexuality starts to fall away there’s something that wants to be resolved and it's the same with one’s own body. If you’re struggling in some way with your sexuality, there’s something that wants to be resolved.
In coaching we see it less as someone who needs to be fixed, but rather a whole individual with layers on top of that experiences they’ve had that need digesting and integrating. Then you come back into your wholeness and get it expressed again.
N&D: I find it interesting how in society, sexuality is generally a taboo subject. But as someone who’s gone through therapy and couples therapy, you notice then the topic of sex becomes something that’s very vital. It’s definitely a barometer in relationships and relationship to yourself.
Chloe: I think at this time people are interested in wellness and mindfulness and that’s starting to broaden what sexuality is. It’s an opportunity into different states of being - ecstatic, blissful, connected states with themselves and others and that’s why on my website I wrote sex is the next revolution. I think it is revolutionary to question sexuality, what it can be a portal to, and what does sexual wellness mean.
When something is taboo, it means it’s got a lot more energy and a lot more shadow that’s going to dictate people’s behavior.
For me embracing sexual wellness and sexuality is empowering and kind of an anti-capitalist stance because my belief is right now we need a lot of powerful leaders in order to have planet wellness.
If you get a lot of people connected to their sexuality in a really healthy way, you’ve got a really empowered person and right now this planet needs empowered people.
There’s a deep ecology in having a deeper relationship with your body and looking inward.
You’re going against ideas of having to look a certain way or have certain clothes to be a “sex goddess.” It’s all rubbish. It all comes from the inside. From an anthropological standpoint humans have been dressing themselves up since the beginning of time and personally I love clothes and self expression. However, there’s definitely a difference between knowing who you are and expressing yourself by wearing all red for example vs being told you’re not enough or a “sex goddess” unless you dress a certain way or have certain things.
N&D: We definitely need more people who are encouraging that. I also read your background in coaching is based on VITA?
How has that affected your style of coaching?
Chloe: VITA is the vital and integrated tantric approach. It’s based on converging neuroscience and tantra. So you bring those two together and you bring a very powerful sexual wellness and holistic tool to really go into the body. The understanding of your nervous system and how it interacts with your sexuality is key. It also takes your out of your head and drops you into your body.
N&D: I would love to hear more about your relationship with tantra and any experiences you’d like to share?
Chloe: I was fascinated with tantra since my late teens studying different spiritual practices. Tantra is so inclusive. There’s not the sense that this is “bad” or “good.” When an experience in the body arises, it has a place, an intelligence. All my years on the dance floor, there’s ample opportunity there for tantric experiences from eye-gazing, massive energetic work with other people on the dance floor, to my own engagement into getting deeper into my own body and share it with another person.
In my coaching we’re really trying to bring people home to moving the energy in their bodies and towards empowerment about their sexuality before they move it towards anybody else. I love dance for all this - it’s energy work and the use of your breath.
You’re going to die if you don’t breathe, and in breathing more you’re going to experience more aliveness.
If you experience more aliveness you experience more sensation, and you bring that to sexual wellness you’re going to have a good time and help uncover some blockages.
I think tantra tends to draw in people who already have a lot of sexual energy and it’s learning how to deal with it in a more controlled or uncontrolled way.
N&D: Your use of dance is very interesting as I haven’t come across too many people who have a background in dance psychotherapy.
What do you feel dance does for the body that benefits your modality of coaching?
Chloe: I’m looking to open people up. Moving the body opens people up. The dance floor held me - my trauma, tears, anger. When I’m including dance in some of my upcoming programs, it’s an opportunity for people to do some ecstatic dance at home and really shift the blockages, the ecstasies, and to circulate and clear their body. Orgasm in a way = mind-shift + pleasure expansion. When you add breath or dance to that you can teach people to get into the orgasmic state and it furthers expansion and mind-shift. I’m talking about dance when your mind disappears in movement with music - that’s another doorway for people who don’t know how to get out of the mind. It’s a great release. If you’re someone who’s had physical or sexual trauma, it can be especially scary to enter your body so dance is also a really playful way to do it and still be in control.
N&D: Yes, when you want to dance it’s an indicator of joy, freedom, sensuality that’s radiating - I realize if you can purposefully remember to dance you can shift your mindset. It definitely reminds me of the “wild-woman” archetype - just letting loose and having that sensual freedom and movement.
What would you say the value of “wild” is to you?
Chloe: There’s so much conditioning that takes us away from wild. My job as a parent is to make sure no one squashes my children’s wildness. No one managed to take my wild away. I see this world that wants to take away and control this wild and so many people thirsting to have this wildness quenched. And it goes undercover especially when sex is a taboo topic. So if you’re in touch with your wildness, then you’re confident, alive, and empowered.
I think there’s a deep ecology to being in touch with your wildness because it leaves you thirsting for less and you can access it when you need to or have fun in your relationships. For me it’s the basis for everything. Which socially could mean sometimes I don’t always say the right thing - ha!
Men and non-binary people also I think are scared of their wild - is it going to overpower, destroy me? Or will it give me everything I want and now what?
N&D: I assume with wildness, you mean that with some discernment - it’s the conscious wildness.
Chloe: Absolutely - it’s knowing your yes’s and no’s, having body ownership, and so then you’re in control of your wildness.
N&D: There’s healing in there too. Since sex is such a taboo subject, there’s a bit of rebelliousness when people discover sexual wellness. It’s not always simply a primal thing. You could be going against your previous beliefs about sex and it further nurtures this conscious wildness.
Chloe:
Yes and hopefully through exploring your wildness you come up against the things you need to learn - whether it’s your attachment patterns, your addictions, compulsions. Hopefully your wildness will bring you home.
Wildness can be very quiet, internal, but oh my gosh is it alive.
N&D: I think wildness lays on the beautiful line between dark and light. So does sex right? Sex is one of those topics that rarely does involve the dichotomy of dark and light and interplay of opposite aspects - like the interplay of pain and pleasure and other paradoxical themes. It would be beautiful for people to have more discernment about this because if they did it would bring forth a better consciousness in wellness.
Chloe: The mainstream for example makes harsh judgements about the BDSM scenes. There are unconscious BDSM scenes, but there are some very conscious BDSM scenes who have really embraced the darkness, shadow play and owned it and made it very safe. And those people definitely know about “yes” and “no.” They’re exploring power play which doesn’t involved hurting anyone else in their daily lives as such that perhaps someone who hasn’t owned their darkness and shadow would live it out on the street on some innocent bystander.
Relationships are also a great container for bringing out the dark and light. The container grows you because someone is willing to stay with you while you transform that piece of yourself and they love you for it - that is ultimately healing for the human psyche.
It’s an incredible journey to do alongside somebody else.
There’s a lot of sexual wellness in owning the dark and light and everything. It’s beautiful.
If you want to learn more about VITA™ method, please visit www.vitacoachingmethod.com/
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