Spiritual Sexual Shamanic Podcast

What happens when we stop treating death as life’s great failure? In this conversation, Atilla Çidam explores what he calls an intimacy with death: a willingness to encounter aging, loss, heartbreak and impermanence rather than organizing our lives around their avoidance. His provocative idea of the “ecstasy of decay” asks whether the marks of time on the body might be approached with curiosity, tenderness and even celebration.

The conversation moves through three kinds of death: the death of the body, the death of what we love, and the death of identity. Attila argues that facing impermanence can change how we love, loosening the impulse to grasp, manage and control the people around us. Rather than making life less precious, the knowledge that everything passes can make our participation in it more immediate and wholehearted.

From tantric charnel-ground practices to contemporary transformational work, Simon Marvell and Atilla consider what it means to build the capacity to stay present with experiences we would rather escape. Their discussion ultimately expands beyond the personal: what might our communities, politics and economies look like if they were not built around a fear of death? For Attila, intimacy with death is fundamentally life-affirming: an invitation to recognise impermanence and commit more fully to being alive.

About Atilla Çidam
Atilla is an ISTA facilitator with a PhD in psychology whose earlier career involved designing programs with governments, the World Bank and UNICEF. He left that career to study dance, movement, Tantra and shamanism, shifting his work toward an integration of mind, body, emotion, soul and spirit. He is a co-founder of Dance Meets Tantra and Emergency Brotherhood, and his current work explores intimacy, transformation, embodiment and our relationship with death.
In this episode
Attila introduces three domains of intimacy with death: the impermanence of the body, the inevitable loss of what and whom we love, and the dissolution of the identities to which we cling.
He describes an “Ecstasy of Decay” practice in which participants show one another where time has changed their bodies and are invited to admire and bless those signs of aging rather than reject them.
Attila distinguishes pain from suffering, proposing that suffering emerges when we try to avoid painful realities rather than allowing ourselves to experience them.
Discussing transformational spaces, he argues that participants should be empowered to choose their own “burn rate”: deciding how deeply and intensely they enter an initiatory process rather than having that intensity dictated by a facilitator.
Speaking one day after the death of a close friend, Attila describes allowing grief, celebration, despair and gratitude to coexist, and how the loss strengthened his commitment to the life and work he feels called to.
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Imagine if sexuality wasn’t separate from spirituality, but woven into the sacred landscape itself?

In this episode, Simon speaks with ISTA faculty member Aya Kamānakai about her journey to reconnect with the ancient sexual and spiritual traditions of Japan. Born in Japan but raised largely abroad, Aya describes how returning to facilitate ISTA trainings in her homeland opened an unexpected path back to her ancestry. She rediscovered a culture in which sexuality, spirituality, nature, and ritual have long been intertwined.

Their conversation traverses Shinto animism, erotic shunga art, sacred phallic and vulvic shrines, sexual festivals, kami, ritual rope, queer and transgender expression, and Japanese understandings of sexuality as life force. Aya shares about traditions that remain alive today, from shrines dedicated to sexual deities to festivals where enormous phallic omikoshi are carried through the streets.

Aya and Simon also explore what happens when cultures become disconnected from these traditions. They consider the effects of religious suppression, Westernisation and modernity, and ask what it might mean to recover ancestral knowledge without romanticising or bypassing the more difficult parts of our histories.

Perhaps we’re living through a time of increased cultural remembering, Aya suggests. She invites you to become curious about your own ancestry, the land beneath your feet, and the forms of embodied and animist knowledge that may still exist beneath the surface of contemporary life.

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What if conflict wasn't something to dread, but a doorway to deeper intimacy? 
In this rich conversation, Usha Rose sits down with Dr. Hazel-Grace Yates, intimacy and relationship coach, somatic practitioner, and creator of The REPAIR Process™. 
With a PhD in Human Sexuality and over two decades of facilitation experience, Dr. Hazel-Grace blends nervous system regulation, kink-aware communication, and embodied practice to help people move from reactivity and shutdown into courageous, heart-open repair.
At the core of their work is a simple teaching: conflict is not a failure of intimacy, it is the initiation into it. Dr. Hazel-Grace walks us through why slowing down before any difficult conversation is essential, how to resource your nervous system, and why it's valuable to acknowledge any power dynamics present before entering the repair conversation. From empathy and permission all the way to restoring integrity, this is a framework for finding your way back to trust and connection after any rupture, big or small. 
Whether you're healing a deep breach of trust in your most intimate relationship or wanting to feel less activated when you run into someone in the world, this episode offers a compassionate, embodied map for finding your way back to each other, and to yourself.
Find Dr. Hazel-Grace at drhazelgrace.com
Or on Instagram: @drhazelgrace 

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In this episode, our host Luis Pinto speaks to Arion Light about how to create your life, relations, and livelihood from your Eros.

Arion's insights come from a lifetime of coaching clients and soul-searching. Most importantly, consistently letting go of any rigid identity and connecting with something deeper, what he calls our "Essence."

He speaks about how he discovered his greatest Love through his wife's passing from cancer. He was left to raise their 2-year old without her, an experience which cracked him open to feel just how precious our life-force really is. He now calls this Love his "Boss." 

The conversation also explores: 
how YOU can get embodied references to transform your reality, and actual stories from his clients and friends.
how he created the Embodied Business Institute and helps conscious entrepreneurs–or "Wisdom Business owners" as he calls them–build businesses from the ground up from the vibrating pulse in their core.
Tune in for this alive transmission, especially if you've been searching for practical ways to live your life aligned to your true purpose.

To get in touch with Arion, you can visit his website: www.arionlight.com
or Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/arion.light
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Komala Lyra has been teaching the art of realness for decades. That might sound strange. Isn’t everything real? But Komala helps people distinguish between what is truly authentic for them and what comes from external expectations. She guides people to become sensitive to their inner experience, to what life is calling them toward, and to what is happening in their hearts and bodies.

Following your impulses, she suggests, can lead you down the path of realness. In this episode, Komala speaks with Simon about how learning to trust those inner signals can open the door to a more liberated life.

Along the way, she shares three powerful insights. When we listen to our impulses and say “yes” to them, we invite transformation. Ayurveda offers a framework for understanding how we digest not only food but also energy and experience. And when someone disappoints us, it can be a valuable opportunity to reflect on why we did not see it coming.

These ideas may sound bold, even provocative, but Komala presents them with warmth, care, and deep humanity. She shares personal stories, including deciding to marry her partner after knowing him for just 24 hours, growing up in an environment where her body could move freely, and why she enjoys knitting, even in the height of summer.

Simon and Komala also discuss her latest book, Intimacy: Ayurveda & Sexuality, as well as the immersive community experiences she hosts on her land in southern Portugal.

Tune in for an intimate, thought-provoking, and joyful conversation.

To learn more about Komala and her work, visit her links: 
Website: https://www.komalalyra.com/
Land project, Monte California: https://www.montecalifornia.net/
Latest book: Intimacy: Ayurveda & Sexuality (2025)
Instagram: @komalalyra

And to learn more about ISTA, visit our website: 
https://ista.life/
Or follow us on Instagram: @ista.community

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