Josephine Lauer work begins with a simple but increasingly uncommon invitation: to pay closer attention to the body as a place of wisdom rather than something to control, improve, or overcome. Drawing from an unusually varied path that has taken her through technology, food systems, hospitality, motherhood, and the study of sacred sexuality, she explores intimacy as something far broader than romance or sex.

Instead, she asks what becomes possible when we reconnect with our senses, our relationships, the natural world, and the deeper currents that shape how we experience being alive.

Viewing life’s many chapters as separate careers, Josephine sees them as expressions of the same underlying thread: a lifelong curiosity about connection. Her philosophy is rooted in the belief that intimacy extends beyond physical touch into emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and ecological relationships. Through Temple of Loha, she brings together embodiment, ritual, somatic practice, and feminine wisdom, encouraging people to move beyond inherited shame and rediscover a more expansive relationship with desire, creativity, and presence.

In a culture that often treats wellness as something to purchase and sexuality as something to perfect, her perspective offers a quieter challenge. She questions whether healing is enough without aliveness and whether true intimacy begins not with performance but with learning to inhabit ourselves more fully. Her work speaks to those seeking a deeper sense of belonging not only with another person but also with their own bodies and the living world around them.

In this conversation, Josephine reflects on shame, caregiving, the forgotten language of Eros, and the cultural stories that continue to shape our understanding of desire. Together, these reflections invite readers to reconsider intimacy not as a destination, but as a lifelong practice of remembering who we already are.

Listening to the Next Call

Your journey has taken you from coding and technology to food systems, hospitality, motherhood, and now sacred sexuality. Looking back, do you see a common thread connecting each chapter, or did the purpose only become clear in hindsight? 

Josephine: Yes, the common thread woven throughout my life has been a profound connection to Source, to the natural world, to erotic aliveness, and to stewarding others into a deeper relationship with themselves and this living planet.

I have always been deeply sensual and sensorial, tasting, seeing, hearing, smelling, and fully feeling my way through life. I am nourished by beauty, captivated by the intelligence of nature, and continually drawn toward what is wild, elemental, and true. The natural world has always felt like both my teacher and my home.

Much of my work today emerges from these roots. I support individuals in remembering themselves through their relationship with Source, with the Divine Feminine frequencies of Mother Earth, and with the interconnected web of life. This includes our relationship with our bodies, the food we eat, the sex we have, and the ways we care for one another.

The other enduring threads in my life are intimacy, lifelong learning, and relationships. I have always been drawn toward experiences that cultivate profound connection not only with people but also with ideas, practices, places, and ways of being. The intimacy I speak of is not primarily physical; it is metaphysical. It is emotional, intellectual, energetic, and spiritual. I follow the threads of desire with an insatiable curiosity, allowing wonder and delight to lead me into a deeper relationship with whatever I am studying, creating, witnessing, touching, or experiencing.

I am, at heart, an artistic visionary who has consistently found herself in the company of other visionaries. It has never mattered which industry they worked in or what title they held. If I resonated with the frequency of their vision and the integrity of their being, I was drawn into deep collaboration. Throughout my life, I have cultivated relationships with mentors that felt less transactional than transformational, more akin to teacher and student or master and apprentice. I have always been devoted to learning through proximity, immersion, and embodied practice, allowing wisdom to be transmitted not only through knowledge but also through relationship itself. I believe that the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives, and the best relationships are the intimate ones.

Psychology of Sexual Shame 

Shame is one of the strongest forces shaping our relationship with sexuality. Where do you think that shame begins, and what has to happen before someone can genuinely experience freedom in their body?

Josephine: Shame is stored in our pelvic floor, in the genitals, and what we call in Sanskrit, Svāhishthāna, or the sacral chakra. Shame is held in this energy centre as its shadow state. This energy centre comes online in the body during human development between the ages of 6 months and 18 months, when the child begins to move. It is the energy centre connected with movement, the element of water, with emotions as energy in motion; with desire, pleasure, sensuality, sexuality, and creativity; and with our capacity to generate and birth new ideas into reality. During this time in our lives, we begin to reach, crawl, stand, walk, and run towards that which we perceive will bring us pleasure. We are hard-wired for pleasure from birth.

We move with curiosity, delight, and wonder. And then our caretakers and society at large will tell us “no”. “No, don’t touch that, don’t do that, etc.” And this causes the sacral chakra, this energy centre of pleasure, to contract and shut down. It becomes cloaked in shame. We spend the majority of our lives with tight arseholes, tight hips, and tight pelvises because we have contracted the habit of suppressing the expression of our desires – all of our unmet, unexpressed, and unfulfilled desires become trapped in the soma (the physical, mental, and emotional body) as shame. So, yes, shame is one of the strongest forces that shapes our relationship with sensuality and sexuality from a very young age, and so it can take years to release this trapped energy from the Soma.

Somatic practices evoking breath, sound, movement and touch can help you to untangle the programming you may have received around your desires so that you can give yourself permission to claim your desires, follow your desires and fulfil your desires in a state of liberation and expansion in the body. Once you have let go of the programming of shame through working with a somatic intimacy coach, then they will guide you through pleasure practices to help you to re-code this part of the body with the permission to be in your erotic aliveness and fullness, celebrating your desires and releasing any and all attachment to the sensation of shame in the body.

The Great Forgetting of Eros

Temple of Loha was born from a remembrance rather than an invention. What does “remembering” mean in the context of intimacy, and why do you believe so many of us have forgotten our relationship with Eros?

Josephine: Our relationship with the erotic has been shamed, suppressed, and forgotten. For much of modern history, we have learned to fear the very life force that makes us most alive. From my perspective, this separation is living within cultures that have largely privileged patriarchal values over feminine ways of embodied knowing or gnosis. The erotic is not merely about sexuality; it is our innate capacity for sensuality, creativity, presence, reverence, and communion with life itself and with the natural world. It is the pulse of Source moving through us. Our erotic energy is this creative aliveness when we are cooking yummy foods, dancing slowly with a lover, touching the soft fur of a pet, or noticing the beauty of a sunset.

When I speak of awakening the sacred remembrance, I am speaking to a deep remembering that lives within the body – a longing to return to a more reciprocal relationship with the Earth, with one another, and with the rhythms that sustain life. Whether understood as ancestral memory, archetypal wisdom, or spiritual knowing, many of us feel called toward ways of living that honour nature’s cycles, community, ritual, nourishment, and our belonging within the greater web of life.

This remembrance also includes reclaiming feminine wisdom. Across many spiritual traditions, the feminine has been understood as deeply attuned to intuition, cyclicality, creation, and the unseen realms. The menstrual cycle, for example, has often been regarded as a sacred rhythm, a time for slowing down, listening inward, reflecting, and receiving insight. While these traditions have taken many forms throughout cultures and history, they point toward a common truth: there is wisdom in honouring the body’s natural cycles rather than overriding them.

Our modern world often rewards constant productivity, achievement, and perpetual motion – qualities frequently associated with Yang or Shiva consciousness. While these energies are essential, they become imbalanced when they exist without their complement. Reclaiming the erotic requires us to cultivate yin, or shakti: the capacity to soften, pause, receive, attune, and listen. We learn to regulate our nervous systems, deepen our presence with others, and reconnect with the rhythms of the Earth herself. This philosophy forms the foundation of Temple of Loha. My work is rooted in the Divine Feminine and inspired by the archetype of the priestess, the woman who serves as a bridge between the sacred and the everyday, guiding others through healing, initiation, embodiment, and remembrance. Across cultures and spiritual traditions, there have been women who devoted their lives to tending the mysteries of love, devotion, ritual, and the erotic as a sacred path, including the temples of Hathor and Isis and the lineages connected with Mary Magdalene.

For many femme-bodied individuals, awakening the sacred remembrance can feel like reconnecting with an ancient aspect of themselves, a profound sense of familiarity with the path of the priestess. Some experience this symbolically through archetypal work, while others understand it through the lens of soul remembrance or past lives. Whatever language resonates, I believe many women alive today are being called to reclaim the feminine as healer, creator, mystic, and lover of life.

I consider myself a priestess. My work is devoted to helping others remember that the erotic is not something to be transcended or feared; it is a sacred doorway back to ourselves, to one another, and to the living intelligence of the earth.

When Wellness Gets Sex Wrong

 So much of modern sexuality is driven by performance, consumption, and instant gratification. In your view, what has the wellness industry itself misunderstood about healing our relationship with sex and desire?

Josephine: Our wellness industry is an industry, a group of businesses that function based on profit margins rooted in consumerism, supply and demand, not on decisions that are for the betterment of humans and the planet. And so my answer to this is once again going to be that most companies have lost the point that in order to be connected to the erotic, we must connect to Source. We must heal our relationship with our bodies as temples and our relationship with Earth first before we can heal our relationship with sex and desire.

I feel if the wellness industry was truly here to help us, it would emphasise embodiment and empowerment instead of products, pills, and providers as the first before solutions to our health issues.

Specifically with intimacy, the wellness industry has become good at helping people feel safe thru trauma-informed containers, but the industry is not necessarily good at helping people feel more alive.

In many healing spaces, we’ve inadvertently equated healing with nervous system regulation, being peaceful, conscious, and emotionally available. Those are beautiful capacities, yet eroticism asks for stimulation, movement, uncertainty, imagination, mystery, chaos, and risk.

From a somatic lens, I would say we’ve treated desire like a problem to solve. The wellness industry loves fixing “How do I get my libido back?” or “How do I make my erection last longer?” But desire isn’t something to fix, and arousal isn’t something that you can acquire. It’s a relationship that you cultivate. Sometimes low desire isn’t a dysfunction or something to solve; it’s wisdom, it’s a data point – it’s your body asking for more life, more aliveness – more music, more dancing, more singing, cooking, and playing. The wellness industry has been remarkably skilled at helping people heal their wounds but far less skilled at helping them to cultivate their wildness via erotic aliveness.

Your Body Count Says… or Doesn’t Say 

There’s a growing conversation around “body count”. Do you think someone’s sexual history actually matters, or does the debate reveal more about our cultural conditioning than our relationships? 

Josephine: I think this is a context-based conversation – it is dependent on where the individuals are at in their life journey. For individuals who are single, desiring partnership and marriage, with the intention of having children, there is relevant cultural conditioning surrounding this topic that has unique biases for women vs men. There are religions and cultures that still place high value upon virginity and the importance of a woman’s womb being in a certain condition before she conceives children. And there is still cultural conditioning that normalises and celebrates men to “spread their seed”.

For most of the individuals that I work with, we actually don’t talk about body count, but we do speak about data points and intimate experiences, referencing both quantity and quality.

Most people desiring epic romantic and/or erotic relationships are aware that they need experience, and it is helpful to have a plethora of data points in order to be a good lover. Mastery requires repetition: in Latin, repetitio est mater studiorum. I like to reference the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he popularised the “10,000-Hour Rule”, stating that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve true, world-class mastery in a complex field.

This timeframe is what separates the average from the elite. Sex and intimacy are a complex field, and if one desires to be a masterful lover, or elite, it takes 10,000 hours of practice, just like any other skill or area of interest.  I find that many people desire to become “masterful” lovers, and thus practice matters. Whether this is with one body or 10,000 bodies, I am not here to pass judgement on which is a better path towards mastery.

The Quiet Power of Caregiving

As someone who has cared for children, ageing parents, communities, and clients, you’ve experienced intimacy across many forms of love. How has caregiving transformed your understanding of sensuality, connection, and the body? 

Josephine: Wow, I love this question and the deep attunement to the cross-section of intimacy that ripples through the course of the human experience. As an intimacy professional, it is my honour to be with humans in and through some of the tenderest, most vulnerable, and peak moments of their lives, including navigating illnesses, losses, and transitions. In Tantra, we speak a lot about death and how death is just as much a part of life as birth and sex.

I view this continuum of caregiving of life-death-life, which is rooted in the feminine ways of the mother and grandmother, through the unconditional non-judgemental love and our capacity to hold space and witness another’s process without judgement as a cornerstone of my erotic work. Most men think they desire sex or sensual touch from and with a beautiful, vibrant woman, but deep down, they are also longing for the loving embrace of the Mother. I often find this to be true in my in-person sessions with clients, where they may be magnetised via a seductive allurement of the Sacred Slut, and yet they also are seeking the healing of the Medicine Woman, the guidance of the Oracle, the activation of the Huntress, the playfulness of the Wild Woman,  the wisdom of the Crone/Grandmother and the loving compassion and forgiveness of the Mother.

I embody all of these archetypes in my sessions with clients. I also feel that caregiving has helped me to understand the practice of non-attachment, which is central to Tantra and Buddhism, of not attaching oneself to an expectation and, likewise, not becoming too attached to the body as a physical entity. In releasing our attachment to the physical body via our connection with the soul, that is where we find true liberation.

If You Remember Nothing Else… 

If every reader of The Sin Edit walked away with one new understanding about intimacy, pleasure, and human connection after reading this interview, what would you hope they never forget? 

Josephine: That our connection to the Source matters. The quality of our lives is shaped by the quality of our relationships with ourselves, with the Earth, with one another, and with the sacred. Every intimate relationship we create begins with the relationship we have with ourselves.

If we desire intimate relationships that are erotically alive, vibrant, and liberated, we must start with cultivating the erotic aliveness, vibrancy, and liberation with our senses and our bodies. I invite people to taste, smell, touch, see and hear their way through life as a human being instead of a human doing.

Editor Note 

It is possible to move through life surrounded by people and still feel distant from ourselves. We become skilled at meeting expectations, fulfilling responsibilities and performing competently, yet the quieter parts of us often remain unheard. Not because they disappear, but because they speak in a language we have gradually forgotten to recognise.

Much of modern life encourages us to look outward for certainty. We search for answers in expertise, productivity and endless improvement, while overlooking the ordinary experiences that shape how we inhabit our own lives: breath, touch, stillness, delight, grief, and longing. These are not distractions from living. They are life itself.

If intimacy begins with the relationship we keep with ourselves, what have you stopped noticing that has been trying to speak to you all this time?