Shanti is a somatic sexologist and orgasm specialist based in London, originally from Cork, Ireland. Her work is rooted in embodied pleasure, orgasmic literacy, and helping people rebuild a safe, shame-free relationship with sexuality. With a practice that integrates somatic awareness, nervous system education, and relational safety, she supports clients in reconnecting to their bodies in a way that goes beyond performance or technique.

Her focus is not just on sexual function but on emotional presence, psychological safety, and the capacity to actually feel.

She also challenges the modern idea of sexual “liberation”, suggesting that much of what is presented as freedom can still carry subtle layers of performance, validation-seeking, and disembodiment. Instead, she offers a different pathway, one that is slower, more internal, and deeply relational.

In this conversation, Shanti reflects on how early experiences, cultural conditioning, and silent shame shape our relationship with intimacy and desire. She explores the gap between what people say they want sexually and what their bodies feel safe enough to receive, highlighting how disconnection from the body often begins long before adulthood.

Early Messages That Shape Our Intimacy

Growing up in a culture where pleasure is often wrapped in shame or silence, what were the earliest messages about sex and intimacy that shaped your relationship with your body?

Shanti: When I tune into the felt sense of myself in my younger years and how I felt in my body, I am met with a lot of self-consciousness. I remember feeling what I know now to be shame and intense embarrassment whenever the topic of sex would arise in conversation or on TV. I think this was due to a time when I was around 5 years old, when my mum walked in on me innocently exploring my body and pleasure. I felt a huge amount of shame wash over me at how she responded.

That experience negatively shaped how I engaged with my body and pleasure once I hit puberty and took several years to unravel. I didn’t touch myself again until I moved out of my home at 18.

Who Are You Performing For in Bed?

A lot of sex advice focuses on performance. Your work seems to focus on safety, presence, and choice. Why is that shift so important, especially for women and marginalised genders?

Shanti: Such a great question! Sadly, performative sex is pretty much all we’re exposed to between scenes in films that portray unrealistic depictions of sex, like when the woman orgasms after three minutes of lovemaking or porn, which is almost entirely performance-based.

When we’re in performance mode, we step completely outside of our present moment experience to observe our performance. This term is called ‘spectatoring’ – coined by sex research pioneers Masters and Johnson in the ’70s. What’s happening here neurologically is that the prefrontal cortex is activated, which is the part of the brain we want to go offline so that we can fully surrender to the experience. This is where safety is key. When we feel safe not just physically but relationally and emotionally, we can let go fully into a sexual experience; the prefrontal cortex, or analytical part of our brain, can go quiet.

Feeling safe during sex is something that’s built between people. It grows when we feel genuinely free to say no just as much as we’re free to say yes, when our boundaries are checked in on and respected, and when the person we’re with shows up in a way that’s consistent and predictable so we’re not left wondering where we stand. When that kind of safety exists, we stop monitoring and can feel more, both more pleasure and presence in our bodies and with our partner. Relational and emotional safety is even more important for women and people in oestrogen-dominant bodies for sexual satisfaction because of oestrogen partners. significantly amplifies oxytocin receptor sensitivity. This means that the surge of oxytocin released during sex and orgasm produces stronger bonding and emotional connection.

When “Normal” Isn’t Healthy

What’s something society treats as “normal” in relationships that you actually think is deeply unhealthy?

Shanti: The falling away of a self-pleasure practice is something that’s very normalised in relationships. It can almost seem like an insult to the other person if they walk in on their partner engaged in solo sex. While I wouldn’t say it’s deeply unhealthy, I think it’s very important for each person to continue having erotic intimacy with themselves for a number of reasons. Firstly, it removes the expectation that our partner can meet our sexual needs all the time; they can’t, and when they are unavailable, that’s when we can meet that need ourselves.

Secondly, it means we don’t outsource all of our sexual pleasure to another person. Outsourcing all our sexual pleasure to another person can play out in negative ways when we know the relationship isn’t healthy or good for us, but the sex is amazing, so we stay far longer than we know is good for us. Thirdly, self-pleasuring is a radical and beautiful act of self-love. It’s important that we keep filling up our own cup because partners and lovers will come and go, but the relationship we have with ourselves lasts a lifetime.

What Your Body Can’t Say Yes To

In your sessions, do you notice a difference between what people say they want sexually and what their body actually feels safe enough to receive? How do you help close that gap?

Shanti: Yes, this is very common. I see it a lot. Most of us are pretty disembodied, meaning there is little connection between the thinking mind and the felt sense of the body. This is no one’s personal failing but rather an interplay between the education system, which conditions us to take up residence in our heads from a young age, and painful life experiences that make being in our bodies feel unsafe.

I support my clients to understand the nervous system, which is the body’s safety and threat detection system; how to then regulate their nervous system; and to develop healthy boundaries so that they can cultivate safety from the inside, feel increasingly at home in their bodies, and grow their capacity to receive more of what they want sexually.

Are We Actually More Free?

Social media has created a very curated and performative version of sexuality. Do you think people today are becoming more sexually liberated or more disconnected from authentic intimacy?

Shanti: I see both happening simultaneously. I want to answer this through the microcosm of my own lived experience: I set off in my mid-twenties seeking sexual liberation. I attended workshops, went to sex-positive events, and spent a lot of time in the nude, which all led me to feel pretty liberated. As time went on, however, and I continued to practise embodiment and feel increasingly secure in myself, I noticed how performative past experiences with other people had been as a way of seeking validation and approval. It’s been an ongoing journey to feel increasingly authentic in intimacy. It’s something that does take practice because we’ve grown up in a society that has a distorted view of sexuality.

On one hand, we’re constantly bombarded with sexual scenes, songs, and images, and on the other, it is shrouded in shame, silence, and repression. Thankfully, there is more access to information and support than ever before, but I think there is still a long way to go. I see it as an arc of a journey we need to go on – from feeling disconnected from our authentic sexual expression to going through a phase of feeling liberated that may actually be coming from a performative place to then coming into an increasingly authentic and embodied place. It takes time, but it’s such an empowering and fulfilling journey to embark upon, and I love being alongside my clients on that journey.

Intimacy Begins With You

If you could leave readers with one empowering truth about intimacy, orgasm, and erotic aliveness, what would you want them to carry with them long after this conversation ends?

Shanti: No matter where you are now or what you’ve been through, you can cultivate the erotic and orgasmic life of your dreams.

Editor Note

Intimacy does not begin with another person; it begins with the internal conditions we learn to create within ourselves. Across her reflections on shame, performance, nervous system safety, and the illusion of “sexual liberation”, a clear perspective emerges. Much of what we call desire is shaped long before it is expressed, filtered through early experiences, cultural conditioning, and the body’s learned sense of safety or threat.

We cannot perform our way into presence.