Sara Adolfsen

By my first profession I am a public health nurse and a registered nurse.

I worked in healthcare for ten years. Nursing taught me an enormous amount about how the human body works — anatomy, physiology, illness, and what happens when the body's balance is shaken. I also saw and lived through a great deal that ran deeply against my own values. Above all, that the kind of meeting every person deserves, which needs unhurried time — being seen and heard, being cared for as a whole person — is mostly not possible in healthcare.

What I learned nothing at all about was what it feels like to truly live in your own body.

To listen to it.
To feel it from the inside.
To recognise your own boundaries, needs, feelings and desires.

Only much later did I understand that you can know a great deal about the body and still not be connected to your own.

For a long time my relationship with my body was something quite other than connection. I hated my body. I felt deep shame. I was highly insecure.

As a young woman I had learned to see my body through the eyes of others.

In my fitness years it became a project.

Something to train, measure, shape and control. This outer control was a way to live with the chaos I felt inside.

At the same time, I carried a feeling that there had to be something more to life. I was looking for deeper meaning. That feeling led me, through fitness and burnout, into study, from which I built a new path for myself, and in 2017 I finally left nursing to become a full-time entrepreneur.

The journey held many different worlds: work as an eco-beautician, studies in functional medicine and nutrition coaching, and building my own clothing and jewellery brand, Bohemian Goddess.

Before I became an entrepreneur, though, my body stopped me many times.

Burnout was the first thing that changed something essential in my relationship with myself.

Little by little I began to ask:

What is my body trying to tell me?

Through this I healed myself, among other things, and changed the whole direction of my life. To me there is a life before burnout, and a life after.

For years Bali has been my home and an important part of this journey.

There my life found a new rhythm, and I began to explore my own relationship with womanhood and sexuality ever more deeply.

What does womanhood really mean to me?
What in me is truly my own — and what is learned?
What have I been allowed to be?
What have I learned to make smaller, control, feel ashamed of or hide?

Womanhood became less an idea of what a woman should be, and more a living exploration of what it feels like to be me, in this body.

Strength and sensitivity.
Desire and boundaries.
Control and surrender.
Being seen and hiding.
Pleasure.
Eros. Sexual energy as life force.
Being alive — aliveness.

And all of it, every contradiction too, that being human can hold.

Love, pregnancies, births and motherhood took my relationship with my body to an entirely new level once again.

The body was no longer just something to be looked at from the outside, judged, optimised or somehow improved.

It carried life.
Gave birth.
Nourished.

Our bodies are intuitive and deeply wise.

Motherhood also brought new sides of myself and of womanhood into view. Things only experience can make conscious.

How the greatest love in the world and boundless tenderness can live alongside need, loneliness, anger, fear, grief, strength, pleasure and a million contradictions. All of that is part of being human, yet we do not talk about it enough.

And right here, one of the questions at the heart of my work today began to come clear:

What happens to the parts of us that have had no room?

Through somatics, much of what I had understood before at the level of thought began to open in a completely different way.

Through the body.

I trained as a Trauma Informed Somatic Educator for Women and deepened my understanding of the nervous system, emotions, embodied experience, and how our past lives in us beyond words, too.

My journey did not stop at regulating the nervous system or building safety.

I became more and more interested in what happens to the parts of ourselves we have learned are too much, wrong, shameful or forbidden.

I trained as a Shadow Work Facilitator, and shadow work brought in a new layer, my great passion:

what we hide.
what we are ashamed of.
what we reject in ourselves.
and sometimes, too, what we secretly long for most of all.

The most fascinating thing in this work is that the shadow is not only the “negative” or “dark” sides. The shadow holds our greatest gifts, our voice, our potential, our self-expression, and ultimately our freedom.

Shadow work led me naturally to sexuality as well.

Sexuality is not a separate part of being human; on the contrary, it is an essential part of it. Sexual energy is the energy of life, life force. All of these:

Shame.
Desire.
Pleasure.
Anger.
Strength.
Sensitivity.
Need.
Motherhood.

are woven together with sexuality, too.

They live in the body, and often precisely in the shadow — in what we no longer dare to feel, want, express or even see in ourselves.

That is why somatics, shadow work and sexuality are not three separate worlds to me.

They meet in the same place:
the body, where all of our humanity lives.

The Forbidden Feminine was also born from this exploration.

A space for women to explore the shadows of womanhood — what we have learned to hide, feel ashamed of, control or deny in ourselves.

In my work, womanhood, the body, shadow work and sexuality meet, together with the many contradictions that belong to womanhood, motherhood and being human.

Desire and shame.
Strength and need.
Anger and tenderness.
Pleasure and control.
What we show — and what we have learned to hide.

The point is not to become something new, or to build yet another ideal of what a woman should be.

But to make room for a more whole humanity.
For what is already in us.

A place where you remember who you are.