Amelia-Love, Grief, and the Body That Knows

Shalom has held me through some of the biggest thresholds of my life.

It is where I came home to my body.
It is where I had a ceremony to become a woman.
It is where I met my husband.
It is where I mourned him.
And it is where I eventually stepped into leadership.

I came to Shalom when I was around thirty-two. I’m fifty-one now. That’s nearly twenty years.

When I think back to how I first found Shalom, I realize it was quite a magical little thing.

I had an astrology reading, and the astrologer said, “You’re here for a kind of spiritual practice and teaching, but not in the way we tend to imagine it. Your path has to do with embodiment and imagination.”

I remember thinking, What does that even mean? Where would I begin to find something like that?

The very next day, I went to my one and only Harvard reunion. I’ve never gone to another one. I ended up talking with a man and telling him about the reading — that I wanted to find a place that felt both spiritual and embodied. Somewhere I could actually practice these things, not just think about them.

He smiled and said, I know a place.

And he told me about Shalom.

It felt synchronistic. As if life had quietly answered a question I had just begun asking.

I signed up for a Shalom retreat in Michigan without really knowing what I was walking into. And it was life-changing.

I remember feeling my own capacity in a way I never had before. In my first mat trip, I visited the realm of the gods, negotiated with them, yelled at my father, and became my mother. It was the craziest mat trip of my life.

But what stayed with me most was the feeling that I was a deeply embodied being.

I had spent years studying religion, divinity, spirituality, and the body. And all of a sudden, I wasn’t just studying it. I was actually having an experience of what it is to incarnate the divine in my own body.

And I just felt like I was home. I loved the dancing. I loved the wildness of the process. I remember thinking, Oh yeah, this is the world I’ve been waiting for.

At the time, I was working with religious leaders in Chicago, and life had a certain formality to it. At Shalom, I realized: Oh, I am a wild human. There is something alive in me that needs a place to express and explore.

So I kept returning.

***

One of the next thresholds Shalom held for me was becoming a woman.

At one early retreat, I realized I had been in what felt like maiden mode forever. Lawrence Stibbards said, Well, let’s have a ceremony and make you a woman.

And we did.

I can’t remember every detail now, but I remember standing in the middle of a circle of women, and a circle of men around them, and all this energy moving through my body.

Something shifted. I crossed into myself differently. I claimed adulthood in a deeper, embodied way.

***

Shalom is also where I was introduced to Tantra, which has been a huge part of my path. It has shaped almost every aspect of my life: how I love, how I grieve, how I create.

I attended two Sexuality and Spirituality Retreats about ten years apart. The second one was where I met Erik, who became my husband.

Honestly, my first impression of him wasn’t great. I heard him talking loudly on the porch surrounded by a group of women and immediately thought, Ugh… no thank you.

And then, within about twenty-four hours, something changed.

I could energetically feel wherever he was.

What I felt with him was new for me. He both soothed and excited my nervous system at the same time.

I loved that.

We had these little secret meetups during the retreat. There was humor and attraction and intensity, and something deeply grounding between us. 

Our relationship grew from there, and so much of what we built together was shaped by Tantra. By conscious experimentation. By learning how to meet shame, tenderness, power, aggression, and love with honesty and play.

***

And then, years later, Shalom became the place where I mourned him.

After Erik died, I returned carrying grief that felt enormous.

What I learned very quickly was that I was not a verbal griever. Talking was not what would heal me. But I suspected embodiment might.

Shalom taught me that I could enter more deeply into the body, into feeling, into experience — and let something in me find its own way.

And Tantra taught me how to stay. To befriend reality. To find the eros even in what is difficult.

I don’t know what I would have done without those teachings.

There was one traumatic image that haunted me — the experience of finding Erik’s body. For months, I secretly worked with that image through Tantra. I kept entering it consciously, staying sweetly present to it rather than trying to outrun it.

That was one of the deepest gifts of both Tantra and Shalom for me. Experimenting with difficult experiences. Trusting my own healing process.

Over time, something softened. The image stopped holding only horror. Eventually, I could feel peace there. Even love. Even tenderness.

That changed me.

I began to understand that grief and pleasure are not opposites. Pain and love can live side by side. Healing is not always about getting away from suffering. Sometimes it is about learning to love reality as it is.

***

My relationship with Shalom kept deepening. And about three years ago, I stepped into leading. 

I had actually joined a leadership training soon after discovering Shalom. I remember that everyone — including me — thought I would naturally be good at leading mat trips.

Except I wasn’t. I was terrible. Famously terrible. People were literally surprised by how terrible I was.

At that point, I was so feminine, so chaotic, so emotional that I didn’t have enough masculine energy to hold the process. I cried through mat trips. I fumbled. I learned. I was humbled.

But that feedback became important. It pushed me into deeper personal growth work and into learning how to build more inner structure. A stronger masculine container that could hold my own life force. And eventually, others’ too.

I returned and did the leadership training again less than a year after Erik died. It was a strange thing to do during deep grief. But it was also beautiful. I was different. I could hold more.

I started leading Eros Retreats not long after. I remember the first time I led The Wild Soul of Eros — my humor returned. I felt lit up. Like my body knew what to do.

Fifteen years after that first leadership training, I had finally found my groove.

***

Looking back now, I feel awe and gratitude that Shalom has been with me through so many different phases of my life.

My wildness and joy and becoming.

My grief and devastation and heartbreak.

My learning that embodiment can hold grief, pleasure, spirit, love, and truth all at once.

And maybe most of all, Shalom taught me this:

The only way is through.

Through the body. Through feeling. Through the things I would rather avoid.

And if I stay — something in me knows how to move.

How to heal.

How to love what is here.