Skin and Soul™: Beyond the Pale with Gwenm A. Carsley

In this unflinching conversation, we sit with Keeper Catran-Whitney - author, survivor, brother, and truth-speaker - about his memoir Helplessness: What Happens to Brothers When We Learn Our Sisters Have Been Molested by Our Parents. This isn’t just another story about trauma - It’s a crucible of emotional truth where guilt, silence, familial betrayal, and the destruction of being left unseen.  Ke...

What happens when you cast the most hidden, most judged parts of the body into permanence? In this unfiltered and unforgettable episode of Skin & Soul, I sit down with British sculptor Jamie McCartney—creator of The Great Wall of Vagina (now Vulva), The Spice of Life, and a growing body of work that dares to mold the raw truth of our erotic anatomy. From labia to penis, outer lips to internal...

Rill’s understanding of desire comes from proximity, not theory. Working within the sex industry as an erotic dancer, hosting swinger events, styling adult film sets, and writing erotic fiction, she witnessed how sex, money, and power actually move. When formal pathways failed her, she created Seductive Art—focusing on visual stimulation, erotic dialogue, and sensual movement. This conversation st...

What if desire isn’t random — and intimacy isn’t accidental? In this episode of Skin & Soul, I’m joined by David Bederman, spiritual teacher, behavioral strategist, and creator of The Personality Code — a system rooted in Kabbalah that explores the hidden wiring shaping how we love, attract, create, and evolve. We talk about Kabbalah as an ancient energetic framework and how it illuminates des...

In this episode, Brownell Landrum joins us to explore the pulse beneath her work A Love Story to the Universe - a conversation about soul mates, longing, synchronicity, and the quiet ways the cosmos answers the human heart. We also enter her newest project, The Art and Science of Wishing, rooted in peaceful, positivity, and purposeful, where desire becomes something sharper than hope and far more...

In this intimate conversation with depth psychology coach and author Deborah Lukovich, we dive into the lived story behind her memoir When Sex Meets God. We explore the midlife unraveling that cracks open desire, shadow, dreams, synchronicity, and the body’s long-silenced hunger. Deborah shares how Jungian psychology shaped her awakening, how younger lovers appeared as catalysts, and how projectio...

  In part 2 of our Embodying the Practice conversation, Andrew Marshall returns to talk about intimacy - with the medicine, and with the ones we love. We explore his experiences with Ayahuasca - the openings, the purges, the raw honesty of meeting himself and how that honesty now lives in his purpose and his relationships. What do we keep from our partners in the name of love? What truths sit unsa...

In this episode of Skin & Soul: Beyond the Pale, I sit with Mark Steven Porro — actor, designer, accidental entrepreneur, and the son who walked straight into the chaos, comedy, and heartbreak of caring for his mother in her final years. Mark’s award-winning memoir, A Cup of Tea on the Commode, captures the wild contradictions of eldercare: how a parent becomes a child again, how dignity hangs...

What happens when you mix a sex-positive grandma, a childhood spent figure-skating on frozen lakes, and a lifetime of dismantling religious shame… with modern parenting, porn, and kids with iPads? In this episode of Skin and Soul: Beyond the Pale, I sit with Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers — therapist, educator, and author of Sex, God & the Conservative Church and Shameless Parenting — for a wildly...

Poet, author, and sound artist Tawhida Tanya Evanson joins Gwenm to explore eros, death, mysticism, lucid dreaming, and the divine in Book of Wings.

What happens when becoming yourself collides with a world obsessed with identity — when truth, politics, and love all live in the same body? Teegan Toftley transitioned in her late forties — not to prove a point, but to stop living divided. Now in her fifties, she’s still married to the same woman, still “Dad” to her kids, and still disarmingly real about what it means to belong to your own skin....

What’s the difference between pleasure and purpose — between the quick hit of happiness and the quiet satisfaction of meaning? In this episode, Gwenm sits with Justin McSweeny, philosopher of mind and host of an interview series exploring sense-making and identity, to talk about the space where eros meets consciousness. Together they explore the longing that drives us — the hunger for depth in a w...

  In part 2 of our Embodying the Practice conversation, Andrew Marshall returns to talk about intimacy - with the medicine, and with the ones we love. We explore his experiences with Ayahuasca - the openings, the purges, the raw honesty of meeting himself and how that honesty now lives in his purpose and his relationships. What do we keep from our partners in the name of love? What truths sit unsa...

  He chased the highs - the fight, the women, the thrill that felt like freedom. But it wasn’t. It was escape dressed up as aliveness.   Andrew Marshall, Master Coach, Jiu Jitsu black belt, husband, father - lived the performance of freedom until his body, his spirit, and the woman who he finally called in, asked for something truer. We talk about what happens when the chase ends. When control no...

  Bedroom boredom isn’t about running out of positions or toys. It’s about the slow leak of presence — the touch that doesn’t land, the kiss that no longer opens, the silence that grows cold between bodies. In this episode, Gwenm drops raw into her own story — a marriage that ended in rupture, the ache of midlife awakening, the pull of numbness, and the courage to soften back into pleasure. She un...

Women are praised for being selfless — but the cost is often desire: starved, silenced, abandoned. The marriage that quietly goes cold. The body that goes numb. The fire that flickers out. Melissa Barnes knows this terrain. Outwardly successful, inwardly empty, she spent years performing the role of the “good woman” while starving herself of desire, intimacy, and fire — until she became a ghost in...

  What does it mean to love someone who cannot stay? To pour yourself into the silence of unanswered notes, unread poems, dangling carrots of “thinking of you,” and calls that exit before they land? In this episode, I step into the rawness of loving the avoidant — the man who hides behind polished confidence, the boy inside who is terrified of conflict, shame, and intimacy. But this is not only ab...

What if the way you love, long, and ache isn’t random — but the wiring of your soul? In this solo episode, Gwenm takes you into the body’s first imprints of love and eros, from the womb to the nervous system, through vows made in heartbreak and the Erotic Blueprints that shape our desires. With raw stories of survival, longing, and devotion, practices for rewiring through pleasure, and poetry that...

 We tied to each other in Berlin. Not for performance. Not for pretty pictures. For the ache of what happens when rope meets skin and silence stretches between two bodies. Shibari took us somewhere we couldn’t script. The knots held more than flesh — they held memory, hunger, release. We talk about what it felt like to surrender, to hang between trust and fear, to feel the rope carve its language...

Women are praised for being selfless — but the cost is often desire: starved, silenced, abandoned. The marriage that quietly goes cold. The body that goes numb. The fire that flickers out. Melissa Barnes knows this terrain. Outwardly successful, inwardly empty, she spent years performing the role of the “good woman” while starving herself of desire, intimacy, and fire — until she became a ghost in...

  When Desire Outlives the Body I recorded this episode in Berlin — the city my mother once called home, and the place I brought her back to in hopes of finding some kind of peace, or beauty, or closure. Instead, what I found was diapers in hotel bathrooms, bureaucracy in cold German offices, hospital corridors, rage, tenderness, shame, laughter, and the kind of intimacy no one prepares you for. T...

Acting isn’t about pretending. It’s about presence. About listening. About coming back to what’s real. What if it was never about becoming someone else— but finally becoming yourself? In this episode, Gwenm speaks with Lori Triolo—actor, director, and master teacher of Meisner and Fitzmaurice Voicework®—about how the craft of acting can draw us into deeper contact with our truth, rather than pulli...

This conversation with Alyssa Hawn—Theta Healer, Human Design and Gene Keys enthusiast—dives into the places where love meets resistance. Alyssa carries the echo of a wound that has whispered through her bloodline for lifetimes, shaping the way she mothers her son in this one.   We explore the invisible fractures that can keep a mother from fully softening, the lineage patterns that live in the bo...

  What turns you on—deeply, irrationally, achingly? This isn’t just about sex. It’s about the soul’s memory of touch, tension, worship, and wildness. In this intimate and uncensored episode, Gwenm peels back the layers of the Erotic Blueprints—not just the textbook types, but the archetypes that live in the ache. The Spark. The Tender. The Flame. The Threshold. The Morph. And her own additions: Th...

What happens when you cast the most hidden, most judged parts of the body into permanence? In this unfiltered and unforgettable episode of Skin & Soul, I sit down with British sculptor Jamie McCartney—creator of The Great Wall of Vagina (now Vulva), The Spice of Life, and a growing body of work that dares to mold the raw truth of our erotic anatomy. From labia to penis, outer lips to internal...