Ruby believes that when women feel disconnected from their sexuality, the problem is rarely that they are broken. More often, it is the result of stress, conditioning, trauma, unrealistic expectations, or simply the demands of everyday life. Through her work in somatic sexology, neo-tantra and counselling, she encourages women to replace self-judgement with self-understanding and to reconnect with their bodies through safety, trust and authenticity rather than performance.

Her perspective challenges many of the cultural narratives surrounding intimacy, reminding us that pleasure, desire and healthy relationships are not about perfection but about presence. From boundaries and embodiment to jealousy, healing and self-expression, Ruby’s work invites a more compassionate and honest way of understanding ourselves.

She believes that when people learn to honour their needs, communicate their limits, and embrace vulnerability, they create space for deeper intimacy with both themselves and others.

In this conversation, she reflects on what it means to return to your body, embrace your desires without shame, and build deeper connections rooted in authenticity. Her insights offer a refreshing alternative to performance-driven ideas of sex, encouraging a slower, more embodied approach to pleasure, healing, and relationships. It’s a thoughtful reminder that intimacy begins not with becoming someone else, but with coming home to yourself.

Where Desire Disappears to

Ruby, you’ve worked across somatic sexology, neo-tantra, and counselling. When someone first comes to you feeling disconnected from their sexuality, what is usually really going on beneath the surface?

Ruby: Regardless of the specifics of the presenting challenge or issue, one of the most common underlying beliefs that women tend to hold is, “I am sexually broken in some kind of way.”

I see this time and time again. There are women who have deeply valid reasons for feeling disconnected from their bodies, their erotic energy, their pleasure, and their sexuality. Yet, they still carry this underlying belief or fear that something is inherently and irreversibly wrong with them.

What they’re experiencing, though, is oftentimes a completely normal and reasonable response to the season of life that they’re in, previous life experiences and/or circumstances, conditioning, stress, relationships, trauma, cultural messaging, or simply the pace and demands of their modern life. Due to the unrealistic expectations and narratives that they’ve absorbed, both directly and indirectly over the course of their lives, women will often interpret that disconnection as evidence that they are deficient or defective in some way and that they are alone in this experience.

I can’t tell you how many times I have used the words in session, “You’re normal,, and you’re not alone in this.”

Things I see all the time are that many women have been taught that desire should always be readily available, that pleasure should come easily, that arousal should look a certain way, or that sexuality and sexual experiences “should” fit within a very narrow framework or narrative. When women’s lived experiences vary from these unrealistic expectations, they begin to question and criticise themselves rather than approach themselves with gentleness, understanding and grace.

Beneath the presenting issue, of course, it’s never a broken woman, but it’s someone who has become disconnected from herself for very understandable reasons.

The work I support women with is never about “fixing” something that’s broken. It’s about supporting women to come home to the truth of themselves, their body and their pleasure through re-learning, reconnection and building safety, self-understanding and self-trust. These are the things that cultivate authentic experiences of desire, erotic aliveness and pleasure and give women the spaciousness to emerge in their natural and authentic sexual essence and expression.

Breaking the Performance Script in Intimacy 

The cultural definition of “good sex” is often performance-based. How do you help clients unlearn that script and replace it with something more embodied and honest?

Ruby: The thing with performative sex is that while we’ve been told it is “good sex”, often it only appears that way from the outside. Performative sex may look “hot”, desirable, or passionate even on the surface, but oftentimes, underneath the contorted bodies, fake sounds, and metaphorical masks that people put on, there is an emptiness to it. This is because performative sex is focused on looking good rather than feeling good. Oftentimes it focuses on recreating something unrealistic or performative (like porn or sex scenes from films) that you’ve been shown, rather than fulfilling the authentic needs and desires of an individual.

Performative sex feels disconnected. It feels forced, scripted, and untrue. It asks people to play a role and pretend, rather than be fully present in their experience. This is a deeply depleting and unsustainable way to have sex, because ultimately, performance is the antithesis to embodiment.

It requires people to continually abandon themselves. To override their authentic expression and desires, dismiss their needs, suppress their boundaries, and shape themselves around who they think they need to be to be desired, accepted, or loved.

Intimacy at its core is dependent on authenticity, vulnerability, and truth.

The first step in unlearning this performance-oriented script is becoming aware of it. Identifying the parts of yourself that you believe need to perform. The parts you feel you need to hide. The needs, desires, fears, fantasies, emotions, sounds, pieces, or truths that feel too vulnerable to reveal.

From there, the work becomes one of curiosity rather than performance. Beginning to explore your authentic desires, your authentic boundaries, your authentic needs. Baby steps of authentic expression. Learning what actually feels good rather than what you’ve been taught “should” feel good or how you “should” behave in order to be desired.

As we reconnect with our authentic sexual expression, performance naturally begins to lose its grip. It becomes increasingly difficult to settle for experiences that require self-abandonment because you’ve started to experience what genuine connection to yourself and others feels like.

The best sex is usually deeply imperfect, raw, real, messy and human, because ultimately great sex isn’t about what it looks like; it’s about how extraordinary it feels.

About Communication… or Control, Trust, and Survival? 

Boundaries are often talked about as a communication skill. In your work, do you see boundaries more as a form of self-trust, self-protection, or something else entirely?

Ruby: I see boundaries as an essential part of self-expression.

Ultimately, our boundaries determine how much access we allow people to have to us on a physical, mental, emotional, and energetic level. They help us communicate our needs, honour our limits, build self-trust, and create experiences that feel safe and aligned.

Boundaries absolutely play a role in protection, but I think something that is often overlooked is that boundaries also support our capacity to open.

Boundaries help create safety; they become the foundation upon which vulnerability, intimacy, connection, and trust can flourish. When we know where our limits are, and trust ourselves to honour them, we can relax into experiences much more fully. We no longer have to remain guarded or hypervigilant because we know we can advocate for ourselves if something doesn’t feel right.

This is the piece I find many people miss. Boundaries are often viewed purely as a mechanism for shutting people out, creating distance, or protecting ourselves from harm. And while there are certainly times when that is necessary, a deeper beauty of boundaries is that they allow us to open up in a way that feels safe and contained.

Healthy boundaries don’t just protect our holistic well-being, but they also allow us to expand our capacity for intimacy. They create the conditions for deeper, safer, more connected experiences and relationships because they support our physical, emotional, mental, and energetic opening.

Actually Look Like Real Life? 

There is a growing conversation around “pleasure as healing”, but it can sometimes feel vague or overused. What does embodied, real-world healing through pleasure actually look like in practice?

Ruby: Ultimately, healing through pleasure is going to look different for everybody.

I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all approach to sex, intimacy, embodiment, or healing. For some people, pleasure as healing may look deeply physical. For others, it may be emotional, energetic, relational, or even spiritual. There isn’t one right pathway.

What I do think is universal is that many people have become disconnected from pleasure and how to experience it both on the micro and in the macro.

We live in a culture that moves incredibly fast. People are constantly producing, achieving, striving, and moving on to the next thing. Very few people are taught how to slow down enough to truly feel. To feel pleasure, presence, sensation, emotion, and aliveness.

Over time, this disconnection can create a sense of numbness, emptiness, or a lack of vitality. People can find themselves existing in their lives rather than fully inhabiting and experiencing them.

For me, healing through pleasure is about allowing pleasure to become a doorway back into ourselves. A gateway into deeper feeling, deeper presence, deeper intimacy, and deeper connection – to our bodies, ourselves, and others.

When we slow down enough to be with pleasure, we often encounter the parts of ourselves that have been neglected, shut down, or disconnected. We notice what feels nourishing, what feels alive, what feels true.

In that sense, pleasure becomes deeply restorative. Not because it fixes us, but because it helps us reconnect with parts of ourselves that have been waiting to be touched, seen, and experienced again.

Is Jealousy Just Desire in Disguise? 

In your opinion, can jealousy ever be healthy in a relationship, or is it always a sign of insecurity or misalignment?

Ruby: Jealousy is a very normal and natural part of the human experience. I don’t believe its presence automatically means there is something wrong with the relationship, nor do I think it always points to insecurity or misalignment.

What matters most is how we relate to it.

Healthy expressions of jealousy involve curiosity, self-awareness, communication, and self-responsibility. Rather than immediately acting on the emotion, we become willing to explore what it may be revealing to us.

Sometimes jealousy highlights an unmet need. Sometimes it points towards a fear of loss, abandonment, rejection, or inadequacy. Sometimes it reveals a desire we have not yet acknowledged in ourselves. And sometimes it’s simply a very normal human emotional response to a situation or other people’s behaviour.

Where jealousy becomes problematic is when we use it to control, manipulate, punish, or place responsibility for our emotional experience entirely onto another person.

I think jealousy can be a powerful teacher when approached with honesty and self-responsibility. Rather than asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” or “Whose fault is this?”, we can ask, “What is this feeling trying to show me underneath?”

The emotion itself isn’t the problem. It’s what we do with it and how we behave and communicate surrounding it that determines whether it becomes destructive or transformative.

On Love, Sex, and Returning to Yourself

If you had to distil your work into one guiding truth about love, sex, and embodiment, what would you want every woman to remember when she forgets her own power?

Ruby: The strength of your connection to your pleasure, body, sensuality, sexuality, and erotic aliveness is deeply interconnected with how powerful and confident you feel in every area of your life, intimately and otherwise.

Understand it, nurture it, protect it, share it, and cultivate it however feels true for you. It is such a beautiful part of our womanhood.

Editor Note 

We are often taught to believe that confidence, desire, and intimacy should come naturally. When they don’t, it’s easy to assume something within us is missing. The quieter truth is that much of what we call disconnection is shaped by expectation, pressure, and the stories we’ve absorbed about who we should be.

Real intimacy rarely asks for perfection. It asks for attention. It grows in the space where we stop performing, become curious about our own experiences, and allow honesty to take the place of certainty. The conversations that matter most are often the ones that remind us to listen before we judge ourselves.

Ruby’s reflections invite us to consider intimacy as something far gentler than performance or achievement. They encourage a slower relationship with our bodies, our boundaries and our emotions, recognising that trust is built not through flawless moments but through small acts of self-respect and presence.

Perhaps the greatest act of closeness is not learning how to become someone else, but finding the courage to stay with who we already are.

If you no longer measured yourself by expectation, how differently might you experience love, desire and connection?