So. I sign up for a weekend workshop. This is already where the problem starts, because nothing good in my life has ever begun with the phrase “weekend workshop,” but at the time I was feeling optimistic in the way people do right before they make a decision that will later require decompression, snacks, and several apologies to themselves. The title alone should have stopped me. Awaken Your Erotic Potential. Subtitle: Unleash the Wild Woman Within. Which in hindsight should have come with a second subtitle reading No Refunds After the First Crying Circle, but I ignored that voice in my head because I wanted to believe I was the kind of person who could walk into something like this and come out glowing, empowered, and lightly moisturized. I thought it would be… fun. You know. A little flirtation. Some learning. Maybe a worksheet. Maybe finally understanding what a yoni egg actually does, or at least what it’s supposed to do without immediately rolling under furniture. I imagined laughter, gentle breakthroughs, the kind of safe chaos you can leave behind on a Sunday evening feeling wiser and faintly superior. Instead, I walk into a converted yoga studio. Everyone is barefoot, which feels aggressive this early in the day, and the floor is covered in woven mats arranged in a circle that already screams accountability. There’s a shrine in the corner made of river rocks, tea lights, and laminated consent forms, which feels both spiritual and administratively thorough. And then there’s the instructor. Celeste. With three E’s. No last name. She’s wearing harem pants and a tank top that has definitely seen things, and she has the gaze of someone who’s eaten nothing but raw almonds for the last seven years. She smiles in a way that feels kind but also like she can see my browser history, and she welcomes us by saying, “Welcome, divine vulvas,” which I admit is a strong opening line if you’re addressing a coven, or a coral reef, or a group of people who already know why they’re here. I laugh politely, a laugh designed to convey openness without commitment, while internally recalculating every decision that led me to this exact moment.

We’re told to sit in a circle, because of course we are, and to share our names, pronouns, and one word that describes our current state of erotic being, which is information I had not planned to disclose to strangers before coffee. People start going around the circle with an ease that suggests they have either done this before or have nothing left to lose. Words float through the room like scented smoke: “Tender.” “Cracked open.” “Effervescent.” Someone says “raw,” and no one asks follow-up questions, which feels ominous. When it’s my turn, my brain abandons me completely. There is a pause, the kind that stretches just long enough for everyone to notice, and in that pause I realize I have never once described my erotic being with a single word in my life. I open my mouth, panic slightly, and say, “Hungry?” with an upward inflection that suggests I am asking for permission rather than stating a fact. Celeste nods slowly, as if I’ve confirmed something she already knew. She says, “There is hunger in the sacral chakra. We will feed her.” I have no idea what that means, but now I can’t stop picturing my pelvis eating soup, and I’m fairly certain this is not what the brochure promised. And that’s when I know. This is going to be a long weekend.

After the sacred vulva circle—which is already a phrase I never wanted in my active vocabulary—Celeste announces that it’s time for an icebreaker, and she does it with that radiant calm of someone who has definitely stared into the void, found it affirming, and then put the experience on a tote bag. She smiles like this is a gift, like what we are about to do is generous and brave and possibly tax-deductible, and she says, very gently, “Let’s begin with the Mirror Exercise,” which is a sentence that immediately activates my fight-or-flight response, because anything involving mirrors and exercises usually ends with crying, injury, or both. I don’t even have to guess whether this will be bad. My body knows. Spoiler: it is worse. We are instructed to find a partner, which already feels like being told to choose who gets to witness your soul slipping on a banana peel, and then Celeste explains the rules: we are to stare into our partner’s eyes for three full minutes—no speaking, no blinking, no looking away—just presence, just connection, just whatever unspeakable psychic crime she believes will occur if we comply. Three minutes doesn’t sound long until you are told you must spend it locked in mutual eye contact with a stranger while sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I briefly consider faking a medical emergency, but it’s too late. My partner has already found me. Her name is Fern. Of course it is. She wears linen in a way that promises commitment, not irony, and she has the kind of face that looks like it has never once rushed through an airport. She takes my hands immediately—confident, warm, no hesitation—and begins breathing in a slow, deliberate rhythm, like she’s either meditating or trying to coax an orgasm out of the astral plane. I sit there, very upright, very aware of my spine, staring directly into her eyes while my brain begins to scream in increasingly elaborate ways. I start counting seconds, then lose count, then start counting my breaths, then abandon that too, because all I can think about is whether I’m supposed to cry, or climax, or achieve some sort of emotional breakthrough, or whether the goal is simply to faint quietly and be carried out like a Victorian child with weak constitution. After what feels like both an eternity and no time at all, Fern leans in just enough to break the silence—not fully, not loudly, but intimately, like she’s letting me in on a secret—and she whispers, “I see your shame.” Which, on one hand, feels devastatingly accurate, but on the other hand feels wildly presumptuous, like commenting on someone’s acne at a funeral. I don’t know what to do with that information, so I whisper back the only thing my dignity can salvage: “I see your judgment.” There is a pause. Someone across the room exhales deeply. Celeste nods as if we’ve just completed a ritual sacrifice, and announces that this is progress, which is how I learn that the bar for progress here is apparently underground.

Then comes round two, because of course there is a round two, and Celeste tells us we are now moving into “The Sound of Your Inner Pussy,” a phrase that lands in my ears and immediately files a restraining order against my sense of self. The instructions are simple, she says: close your eyes, drop into your body, and let your erotic core make whatever sound it wants to make when it is unapologetically vocal. Around me, people comply. Immediately. The room fills with moans and purrs and breathy sighs, someone actually howls like they’re either in heat or being gently exorcised, and I sit there frozen, eyes shut, desperately trying to locate my erotic core like it’s a missing set of keys. I panic. My mind goes blank. And when sound finally emerges from me, uninvited and unplanned, it is—“Mmmmwarrp.” That’s it. That’s the noise. A no-sound, neither pleasure nor power, but something nautical and mildly distressed, like a foghorn having second thoughts or a goose realizing too late that it has chosen the wrong migration path. I open one eye, hoping perhaps no one noticed, but Celeste is already beaming at me like I’ve just done something brave and important, and she says, “There it is,” with complete conviction. I have no idea what she thinks “it” is. I only know that if my inner erotic self sounds like that, she needs medical attention, or at the very least, a warning label.

After the moaning stops — and I say stops generously, because it doesn’t so much end as taper off into a collective whimper — Celeste claps once, softly, like she’s afraid of startling our inner animals, and announces that it’s time to “reclaim sensual nourishment,” which I already know is workshop-speak for something I would normally do alone, standing over the sink, without witnesses. What it actually means, it turns out, is that we are going to eat fruit. But not eat it. Experience it. Slowly. Mindfully. With erotic reverence. As if the fruit has feelings and a complicated past and might sue us later if we’re careless. Someone brings out a bowl. Celeste explains that the fruit is not just fruit, it is a mirror, a teacher, a portal, and possibly also your unresolved attachment to your father, and also — somehow — your clitoris. This is said very calmly, as if it’s the kind of thing people say all the time. Then the bowl makes its way around the circle and each of us is handed one grape. One. Singular. Solitary. Seedless. Smooth. Innocent-looking. And Celeste says, “Seduce it.” I’m sorry. I blink. I look at the grape. I look at Celeste. I look back at the grape. Seduce it. Celeste kneels next to me, lowering herself to my level like she’s about to deliver either wisdom or a diagnosis, and she says, very gently, “Bring the grape to your lips like it’s the lover who never saw your full goddess.” Which is a sentence I have never heard before and hope never to hear again. I nod, because everyone is nodding, and I don’t want to be the only person in the room who openly refuses to emotionally court produce. So I try. I really do. I hold the grape between my fingers. I breathe into it, because apparently that’s a thing you can do. I stroke it with my thumb in what I hope is a convincing gesture and not something that looks like I’m trying to check its ripeness. I am acutely aware of how quiet the room has become, how many eyes are closed, how many people are making faces that suggest they are having experiences, and I feel like I am failing an exam I did not know I had registered for. Eventually, I put the grape in my mouth. Which would have been fine. Perfectly fine. A reasonable end to an unreasonable exercise. Except I choke. Not symbolically. Not energetically. Not in the way Celeste would later insist it represented. I choke physically. The grape lodges itself in my throat like it has decided this is where it lives now, and suddenly I am coughing, spluttering, eyes watering, wheezing like a very sensual walrus. Someone gasps. Someone else says, “Stay with it.” Fern starts patting me on the back with the intensity of someone trying to exorcise a demon through encouragement alone. Another voice rings out from somewhere in the circle: “Let her release!” Celeste springs into action, fanning me with what I later realize is a consent zine, murmuring affirmations while I fight for oxygen, and for a brief, horrifying moment I am convinced that this is how I will die — not in an accident, not dramatically, but surrounded by strangers chanting about liberation while I am taken out by a grape. Eventually, mercifully, the grape dislodges. Air returns. The room exhales with me. I sit there, slightly traumatized, throat burning, mascara definitely ruined, but alive, which feels like a low bar for success yet somehow appropriate. Celeste takes my hands, looks deep into my eyes, and whispers, with absolute sincerity, “That grape carried old pain. You are free now.” I look back at her, voice hoarse, dignity in critical condition, and whisper, “I think I’m allergic to freedom.” And that’s when I realize I am never eating fruit in public again.

We end the day with what Celeste calls the Sacred Cuddle Integration, which is announced with the same casual confidence you might use to announce tea, except instead of tea it’s everyone’s bodies, immediately, with no warning, no transition, no consent form that isn’t spiritual in nature. She claps her hands once, sharp and decisive, and says, “Bodies are medicine. Let them blend,” and I know, instantly, with a clarity that feels almost holy, that I have made a series of irreversible life choices. People start lying down like this is normal, like collapsing into a communal heap of limbs and breath and unresolved childhoods is the obvious next step after breathwork, and within seconds the room becomes a living mound of unprocessed emotion, patchouli, and body heat, pulsing gently like a very patient organism that feeds on vulnerability. I stay upright for exactly three seconds longer than everyone else, scanning for exits, crouching slightly, trying to project the energy of someone who is totally into this but might just need the bathroom real quick, except there is no bathroom real quick in a yurt, only destiny. I inch toward the door with the careful optimism of someone attempting a jailbreak during meditation, already rehearsing my excuse—hydration, dizziness, a spiritual emergency—but Fern sees me. Of course Fern sees me. Fern always sees me. She reaches out and grabs my wrist with the strength of a woman who has done a lot of trauma-informed Pilates and pulls me in like a guilt-powered undertow, murmuring something about trust and surrender, and suddenly I’m horizontal. Now I’m spooning a stranger named Sky, which I know because he told me, softly, like a secret, right before settling his spine against my chest. He has a man bun. This matters. He keeps whispering “mmm” under his breath, rhythmically, as if he’s trying to summon lavender out of my pores through sheer intention, and I don’t know what to do with my hands, which feel suddenly like weapons. I am wedged between Sky’s ribcage and someone else’s very spiritually awakened thigh, which is warm and confident and absolutely not mine. My foot goes numb. Medically. My soul is screaming, but my body is committed now, flattened into the cuddle pile like a pressed flower of regret. Someone breathes directly into my ear, close enough that I can feel their sincerity, and whispers, “I feel your boundaries softening,” and I consider several possible responses before settling on the truth, which is, “I feel a hamstring cramp.” This is not acknowledged. The lights dim. Celeste dims the lights like she’s lowering us gently into a womb, and she puts on a sound bath track called Womb Echoes, which I assume is symbolic, but which turns out to be forty-five uninterrupted minutes of dolphins crying in reverse. The sound vibrates through the floor, through my spine, through Sky’s back, and I stare at the ceiling thinking very clearly, If I die here, do they bury me in a yurt? Is there paperwork? Do they chant? Time loses all meaning. I become aware only of breath and heat and the growing certainty that my left leg will never forgive me. Eventually—how, I don’t know—I manage to roll free, peeling myself off the cuddle pile like a stunned marsupial, careful not to make eye contact or spiritual commitments. I grab my bag. I nod respectfully at the shrine, because I am not rude. And then I leave. I step out into the night air, sticky with intimacy, smelling faintly of betrayal and dried mango, my nervous system humming like it’s been lightly microwaved. In the Uber home, my phone buzzes. It’s a text from Fern. It says, “Your grape work changed me.” I do not reply. But when I get home, I open the fridge and eat a fistful of grapes, recklessly, standing over the sink, with zero intention and no healing goals whatsoever. Just joy.