What if there are parts of your sexuality just waiting to be untapped? Can kink and spirituality coexist?
Answering these questions changed Darshana Avila’s life. Always precocious, Darshana explored her sexuality from early on. After a “very vanilla” marriage and a spiritual awakening, she delved into kink. As she sought more from sex, she learned a lot about her desires and her identities. Learn much more in the new Girl Boner Radio episode.
Stream it on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Spotify or below! Or read on for a lightly edited transcript.
“Discovering Her Kink Identities: Darshana Avila”
a Girl Boner podcast transcript
Darshana: There were ways where the intensity and the discomfort were calling me into such an exquisite degree of presence. Like my mind could be nowhere else. And there’s my breath and there’s my body…
I was absolutely accessing altered states of consciousness. My body was having this rigorous physical experience, and my mind and my spirit and my heart were just flying and soaring.
August/narration:
Darshana Avila told me that one of the “most formative imprints” that she got early on is something she was told about later. It involved her dad,
Darshana …who, it’s probably worth noting, was like a pretty mainstream hippie by the time I was born.
August/narration:
He described it like this. Two-week-old Darshana was lying on his chest in the bathtub…
Darshana: …and he got a download about who I would be and how I would be, and of the many things that might have been part of that, the only one that I actually have a clear memory of is that he said I was going to have a really strong connection to my sexuality.
You know, there’s been some things to unpack around that.
August/narration:
Largely because of when he described these things — she recalls conversations about it in her teens. Looking back, Darshana sees both a level of openness from her dad that felt fun and liberating, and “a fair amount of poor boundaries and a lack of discernment” on his part in terms of what was “truly age and relationship appropriate.” And when Darshana was in her 20s, he told her he’d cheated on her mom. Because of these things, Darshana held information that she felt she shouldn’t.
She did enjoy getting other information about sex, though – the kind she discovered on her own.
Darshana: I was precocious and curious and liked to experiment and explore, and so I have memories probably starting at around seven or eight years old of exploring my body and my friends’ bodies, beyond just the playing with the dolls and stuff like that. Really being with ourselves and each other and getting curious about our genitals and getting curious about how things felt.
It all felt very innocent. It wasn’t even like, oh, we’re trying to simulate sex. It was more, wow, my body and your body, and what’s this like? And there was just something precious and innocent about those explorations.
August/narration:
For a while, that innocence she experienced with bodies just being bodies stayed with her. But negative ideas seeped in, too.
Darshana: Even though my parents, in one regard, I could say they helped to foster that innocence, there started being comments about my weight and my eating when I began to hit double digits and it wasn’t cute anymore to have the baby fat.
And my mother was a recovered anorexic and had a lot of ideas around like vanity and appearance. And so it started from there for me, where I became self-conscious of the shape and size of my body.
Then once I hit puberty and I was like 13, I started to bleed and it all started to happen, I totally remember padded bras, because I felt self-conscious that my breasts, were too small. A lot of self-consciousness, that I needed my body to be shaped a certain way, to be sized a certain way, in order to be seen as attractive, in order to be desired.
August/narration:
She said that those ideas came from many different directions.
Darshana: It was my parents’ comments about my weight and my appearance. It was reading all the like teeny bopper magazines and just growing up in a suburban, middle class environment where there was a lot of attention and energy put on image.
August/narration:
But none of that kept her from sexual exploration.
Darshana: There was a lot of that going on. Um, so back to the, I was always precocious…
August/narration:
Without having a word for then, Darshana said she’s always been queer.
Darshana: I was sexually experimenting and exploring probably from about 12, 13 onward very consistently with both guys and girls.
August/narration:
During high school, she had a relationship with one of her best friends.
Darshana: I was the cat sitter for my next door neighbor who traveled on business a lot. And so she and I would steal porn videos out of my dad’s closet and go over to my neighbors where I was plausible to my ability. I’m not doing anything, I’m cat sitting.
And we would watch porn and mess around with each other and explore each other’s bodies and have full blown sexual experiences. You know, girl to girl, while also dating guys and progressively exploring more.
August/narration:
She liked how that felt — not just the actual exploring, but her confidence about it.
Darshana: I think I felt early on the power of it, the attention that I could command by being more open and more confident in my sexuality. And it was a bit of an interesting dichotomy because I was also really smart and a really good student.
August/narration:
Two things that, culturally, we don’t often pair together, especially for a girl. She’s smart or into sex, not both.
Darshana: I kind of felt like I was getting away with something by being both. could get the attention of the boys and, and, and be seen as like fun and cool, but that I was also like on the straight and narrow. And I thought that I was flying under the radar until I got suspended from high school because I got caught engaged in a sexual act on school grounds.
Darshana: And that was a really big deal because all of a sudden I wasn’t flying under the radar.
August/narration:
Everyone seemed to know about it.
Darshana: I remember my mother’s voice screaming through the telephone when the dean called her and she had to come pick me up. Every teacher, every student in my school of almost 4,000 people had heard the gossip.
This happened just before my 16th birthday.
August/narration:
Quite a time to learn firsthand about “slut” shaming.
Darshana:…and what it is to choose to say, Hey, like this was something I was doing out of pleasure. It felt good to me.
And so I might have felt remorse about my choice of where and when I was engaging like that, but I didn’t feel shame about what I was doing.
I was there because I wanted to be.
August/narration:
Her “activist-y self” felt emboldened by it, she said.
Some years later, at 22, Darshana married a man she had known for five months.
Darshana: And it was total puppy love and not the worst thing I’ve ever done as far as mistakes that one could make go, but also not necessarily shocking that it didn’t go the distance.
August/narration:
It did go for 6 years.
Darshana: Part of what ended the marriage was I was having a massive spiritual awakening, and it was really, really clear that the direction that my heart and soul wanted to follow in life just did not line up with what my ex-husband was up for. We just had, you know, they’re grown apart, truly.
August/narration:
Once the relationship ended, she started a new kind of exploration – very different from the “vanilla,” non-kinky sex she had with her ex.
Darshana: There was like a string of people that I connected with who were very kinky, assertive, creative lovers.
August/narration:
Some of the ways Darshana delved into kink were far from ideal. But they did shed light on desires that she hadn’t yet tapped into.
Darshana: I remember dating this one guy who [was into] the stuff that frankly you don’t have to be very skilled to do, and thus a lot of people do harm with: like the hair pulling and the throat gripping, and the ass smacking and just like that flavor started to come in without really negotiating it or talking about it.
August/narration:
Throat grabbing, in particular, can be dangerous without the right precautions. But still…
Darshana: I liked it. I’m like, oh, this is actually thrilling for me. I like the objectification, I like the power dynamics. I like the energy that this gives rise to.
August/narration:
That teed off more intentional exploration. That’s when the spiritual work she’d been doing in her life – most through a yogic framework — and the sex she was exploring came together.
Darshana: Something in me got really curious about like, here are these two things going on at the same time: sexual awakening, spiritual awakening. Why are most of the narratives that I’ve heard about them that these things have to be separate from each other?
I was initiated in a very classical yogic lineage that was so anti-sex. Like, yeah, you do all these crazy cool, fun postures with your body, but modesty and abstinence were the things that were preached basically. Obviously that wasn’t the life I was living, but that certainly was among the teachings that I was being exposed to.
August/narration:
Meanwhile, she felt like something was missing from sex.
Darshana: Some of that included like dating, you know, with a degree of intention, but also like one night stands and, you know, just like meeting somebody while out and, and having a vibe with them.
It didn’t feel like there was a whole lot of sacredness and depth, being brought to those encounters. But something in me wanted it, something in me wanted the beautiful sacredness of my spiritual life and the fabulous profanity of my sexual life to actually coexist.
It didn’t take too long for that curiosity of can these things coexist to lead me to tantra.
August/narration:
It was the kind known as neo tantra.
Darshana: …which is like a very westernized and sex focused version of Tantra, which is a phenomenal body of esoteric wisdom that in actuality has a very, very small portion of it that tends to sexual practices. But, you know, we in the West like to go for the sensational stuff.
August/narration:
Through that, she met someone.
Darshana: …who I was utterly smitten with, and it turned out that he was similarly smitten with me.
August/narration:
They had a 6-month whirlwind relationship.
Darshana: Where we were exploring all these tantric practices together. I was having sexual experiences of the sort that like this was the stuff that dreams were made of for me at that point in time, like the level of consciousness and intentionality and focus and care.
August/narration:
None of the quick, casual experiences she’d had before.
Darshana: This was the complete antithesis to that, of like these long lovemaking sessions and exploring slow sex, soft cock intercourse, lingham massage, yoni massage to bring all these turns in.
So that got me to recognize like that there is so much more even to genitally focused sex that could be happening that I had ever known.
August/narration:
Darshana spent the next several years learning with different tantric teachers, communities, lovers and partners around the world.
Darshana: And the first time that this then dovetailed with kink was on an island in Thailand. Um, yeah. This my life. [laughs]
August/narration:
Um, yeah. Feel free to join me in living vicariously.
Darshana and a bunch of other tantra and sexuality professionals all rented a property together, to dive deeply into practicing with themselves and each other.
Darshana: It’s a small community and there’s this guy on the island who is apparently really good with rope.
August/narration:
Something Darshana had been intrigued by.
Darshana: We finally meet and I am just chomping at the bit to have an experience — like everything in me, all my little toe dips into different iterations of kink in the years prior had been building and building and building.
And here’s this guy in this paradise island in a very like conscious sexuality community who also brings this kink element to it.
August/narration:
He offered multi-hour ritual sessions.
So Darshana had her first Shibari experience: a Japanese-style of rope bondage that involves artistic ways of tying someone up, and sometimes, suspension. [nature sounds: birds, breeze…]
Darshana: I was in a little bungalow in a jungle so there’s like fresh air coming through and the sounds of the jungle around me.
I remember having a little tea ceremony and, and, and just easing in this beautiful, gentle way, honoring what a sacred thing it is to to engage with our bodies, to engage with the rope.
August/narration:
The session started with the man binding parts of her body to restrict movement, and went on from there. Darshana said it was very meditative and sexual — and all based on desires she’d shared with him beforehand.
Darshana: There is this heightened sensation in the body. Rope doesn’t have to be intrinsically painful and can actually even be very pleasurable. You could have combinations of the two, and that was what I was experiencing.
There were ways where the intensity and the discomfort were calling me into such an exquisite degree of presence. [ambient, sensual music…]
It was like my mind could be nowhere else. And any kind of chatter or distraction, it’s just gone. And there’s my breath and there’s my body and there’s me and my rope top or my rigor.
I was absolutely accessing altered states of consciousness. you know, my, my body was having this rigorous physical experience and my mind and my spirit and my heart were just flying and soaring.
August/narration:
Then the session got intense in ways Darshana could not have imagined.
Darshana: I blacked out at the end of the session.
August/narration:
That definitely was not supposed to happen.
Darshana: A rope kind of came across my throat at an angle that that wasn’t such a safe thing.
And so here I am, first time ever in rope hours into this journey. It is absolutely one of the most exquisite things I’ve ever experienced in my life, transcendent.
And then I wake up on the floor, being cut out of my rope. And I am hysterical and he’s holding me and like doing all the right things on the other side of that. And my body is bruised. There is a lot of bruising because of the angle that I fell at.
August/narration:
It was a dangerous situation, she’d been in, and she had been hurt. Darshana doesn’t advocate for either of those things. But how she felt about parts of it surprised her.
Darshana: After getting over the initial shock, in the days that followed, I would like look at myself in the mirror and I would see these marks and feel proud, and feel excited. And then it was like, well, what does this even mean?
August/narration:
A couple of years later, in the U.S., another practitioner would answer that question.
Darshana: We had a rope session, and then he offered to give me an experience with a single tail whip, and I jumped at it. I was like, “Yes!” Like, I wanna know what this is like.
August/narration:
So we went at it, using the whip on her.
Darshana: And once again, here I am experiencing this incredibly intense sensation in my body. Things that many, many people would very understandably fear or absolutely say no to and I am being lit up.
August/narration:
The session ends,
Darshana: And we’re in the come down. He turns to me, he’s like, “Darshana, you are such a masochist. Do you know this about yourself?” and it was like a light bulb moment. I was like, “Oh! I guess I am!”
And it’s wild how something that, like, there’s so much evidence right in front of me, but because it’s an edgy thing, there’s a lot of taboo around this. Or for me, I would say at that point in time, not only taboo, it just, I was more newly forging connections with other kinksters. So I was getting to know my masochism and then I got to know my sadism!
August/narration:
Masochism meaning she derives of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain and can transmute pain into pleasure. Sadism meaning she gets off on inflicting pain on someone else during play. All safely and consensually.
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August/narration:
Since those experiences, Darshana has cultivated a career in sex work, as a Certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner & Sexological Bodyworker. She calls herself an erotic wholeness guide
And her work helped reveal another one of her kink identities, as a switch — meaning sometimes getting off on being the Dominant partner, and other times getting off on being submissive.
Darshana: If you are the one holding space and creating experiences for your clients of these kind of paid, transactional sexual kinds, you are at a minimum the top right, like you’re the doer and you are the one who’s like directing the container.
I also started stepping into dominance and directive-ness and being in positions where clients who I had built rapport with would start to ask for increasingly more, submissive experiences for themselves or bottoming experiences for themselves.
August/narration:
As part of exploring the full spectrum of her kinkyness/switchy-ness, Darshana shared from this powerful personal experience of embracing her dominance.
Darshana: I walk in to an incredibly well provisioned dungeon. My male submissive is in a cage, and he is blindfolded. And he is invited out of his cage with the blindfold on and made to crawl, and find and feel his way around the space without eyesight. And I’m silent. He doesn’t know where I am.
And there is a long table in the space, and at some point in time. I see him crawling toward one end of where he could fit himself between the table legs. And so I place myself at the other end.
The predator in me was like, oh, my prey is walking right into my trap. And it was so intoxicating, ’cause I caught him. And I pulled him out and then proceeded to like kick not, not all that hard, but like kinda like with my feet paw and kick at him and start saying all sorts of terrible things about how awful men can be. And I put him up on a St. Andrew’s cross and flogged him quite mercilessly.
And it was, you know, a beautiful, consensual experience. I keep feeling the need to emphasize that ’cause I don’t want anyone, you know, who is unfamiliar to, to think that this is an abusive dynamic. It was thrilling for the both of us.
It was so clear in his posture and his energy as he dropped into what is referred to as subspace, and really got into that psychic and energetic space of that a submissive can reach, altered states of consciousness.
And we got to really process something together. You know, he is a very conscious, awake and aware man who feels just as strongly as I do about the ills and the harms of the patriarchy. So we got to work this thing together in such a visceral, powerful way, and then do aftercare and curl up in bed and snuggle and, you know, come down together.
And this is someone who, he himself is also a switch. And then so we have had the opportunity to play across all these roles with each other in different roles, and there’s a lot of rapport there, and a lot of trust and safety.
[music]
August/narration:
If you’re curious about broadening your own sexual horizons, or discovering different aspects of your identity in kink or sex in general, Darshana offered this:
Darshana: The thing that I wanna say is all of us were a beginner. At one point in time, all of us were new and, and, and there was some spark of curiosity that, that led us to wanna explore. Right? And so I find that, and I’ve had this experience myself, like it can feel very intimidating and overwhelming when you are more newly exploring, whether there’s a fetish or a kink you wanna learn more about, or there’s a community that you would like to become a part of. And I say this as someone who’s also an introvert and doesn’t love being in spaces with tons of people. And so, you know, going to like events can feel a little daunting on my nervous system, like to have to make small talk and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
But what I want, anyone who, who is curious and wants to explore to know is, is, is to just remember that everybody had to start somewhere. There’s nothing wrong with being new. It’s a beautiful thing to come with beginner’s mind and an earnest desire to explore, and there are so many amazing resources that exist.
There are communities online, there’s educators who teach online, there’s books galore. Please don’t learn from just porn alone. I mean, there’s decent porn out there, but it’s porn, it’s entertainment. If what you seek is education and community, like, it’s there.
And take that little step, that toe dipping into the pool in, in whatever way feels accessible to you.
[music]
August/narration:
If you’d like to work with Darshana as you take those steps, you can.
Darshana: There are so many ways to heal and explore and grow in your capacity for pleasure and confidence in your erotic expression and in your sexual identity and in your relationship skills. All that. And my offerings, in particular, serve women and non-binary AFAB folks.
I have a free online community where you can come and get resources and connect with other like-minded souls and delve into what it is to explore your erotic nature in a really embodied trauma-informed, social justice oriented way.
That’s what I’m passionate about. That’s what I’m here for. So anybody who is into that, please come hang out with me.
[acoustic chord riff]
August/narration:
Learn more by visiting darshanaavila.com. Find Darshana on YouTube @darshana-avila.
If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, or this is your first time listening and you appreciated this episode, I would love it if you’d post a rating and review on Apple Podcasts – that’s the purple iPhone app – or Spotify. Or send a link to all of your friends. Okay, at least two. Thanks so much for listening.
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