A Return To Pleasure Part II: From Grief to Liberation—Healing the Past, Reclaiming the Future, and Disrupting Timelines of Generational Sexual Trauma. Paperback – May 8, 2025

A Return to Pleasure Part 2 is an opportunity for us to explore how our nervous system interprets the world around us and how sexual harm has often been a generational experience among Black women and femmes. This book invites us to reflect on how we begin having these crucial conversations with ourselves and how we can challenge and disrupt the experiences that continue to affect our lives, our families, and the world around us.I am a third-generation sexual trauma survivor. When I learned that this was the story woven through my body, my mother’s body, and my mother’s mother’s body, I knew I was being called to examine and address the ways we hold these stories and heal these memories—especially within the body. As a sensual movement practitioner for the last 15+ years, I have been dedicated to helping women and those across the feminine spectrum—regardless of gender, class, or geography—return to their bodies and reclaim the erotic as holy and integral to our aliveness, especially after trauma.In The Messy Movement Lab, my online sexual wellness studio, we focus on sensual movement and somatic embodiment. We encourage our students to embrace the framework that pleasure is our fuel, not a reward. When we allow ourselves to think of pleasure this way, we realize that reaching for pleasure is not a frivolous practice, but a lifesaving one. It reminds the body, nervous system, heart, and spirit that there is more to life than the pain and trauma we've experienced. Through this practice, we give the body the opportunity to witness pleasure for itself, instead of waiting for external circumstances to provide it.It’s about reclaiming our sexual selves as valuable, beyond someone else’s pleasure or gratification. If we’ve experienced a barrier to pleasure in our bodies due to unprocessed trauma, we must find ways to move through that. This book offers an understanding that Black women and femmes deserve relief, peace, joy, and healing in our sexual experiences. We deserve to inhabit our bodies in ways that allow us to show up fully and unapologetically in the world.A Return to Pleasure Part 2 also encourages us to create a path forward for those who come after us. It offers a new vision that transcends the harm we see in the culture around us. It provides a secret language for Black women and femmes to weave and mitigate some of the pain and challenges we face, both internally and externally, while fostering resilience and strength. Read more