— — —

She didn’t stop. She couldn’t.

She found the Self-Pleasure Modality — and in that work, something in her came home that hadn’t known it was waiting. Not just in her body. In her relationship with herself. A quality of presence, of inhabiting her own life, of fully inhabiting her body, of feeling — actually feeling — what was happening inside her rather than watching it from a careful distance.

It was through this work that she first encountered Victoria Bardovicc — the creator of the Self-Pleasure Modality, and the woman who would become her mentor and one of her closest friends. What began as a professional training became something far more personal. Rachel worked with Victoria both in her professional development and in deep personal process — and self-pleasure became a fundamental principle in her life from that point forward.

Not a technique. Not a practice she returned to occasionally. A way of navigating life itself. When moving through sensation, grief, uncertainty — needing to feel the direction her life was asking her to go — she has always returned to it.

She continued with processwork — the psychology of Arnold Mindell — which gave her a map for what she had been living. A framework for edges, for shadow, for the body’s signals, for the parts of us that are trying to become something we haven’t yet allowed ourselves to be. It allowed her to keep going into territory that she might otherwise have stopped at.

She became a sexologist. A processwork psychotherapist. A counsellor. Each training was not just a credential — it was another layer of the same work. Another depth. Another territory of self that she was finally willing to enter.

She trained. She travelled. She sat with teachers and in circles and in the quiet, unglamorous privacy of her own practice. She did what she now asks of others — not from a theoretical distance, but from inside the lived experience of it.

— — —

Then came the moment that started it all.

Through Eden Events — one of her combined ventures — Rachel facilitated a large group self-pleasure experience. What happened in that room stopped everyone. The grief that moved through people. The joy. The connection. The healing. The sheer, undeniable power of this practice held in a container that knew how to receive it. She was astonished — not because it surprised her intellectually, but because the room showed her something she hadn’t yet found language for: this work, at scale, in community, was something the world was desperately hungry for.

It happened again at a women’s transformational sexuality retreat shortly after.

And so she sent Victoria a voice note.

“I know it sounds crazy. But self-pleasure needs to be relaunched. And I need to do this.”

Victoria called her that same day.

She told Rachel that she was the one who was supposed to steward this modality. That she was the person to carry it forward.

A week later, the website was up. Enrolments were open.

— — —

What changed in Rachel is difficult to separate into parts, because it happened as a whole.

She came home to her body. Not as a peak experience — not a high that fades when the retreat ends — but as something anchored. Real. Hers. The body she had spent years managing and performing inside became something she actually inhabited.

The wildness she had always carried but never known how to hold — the creativity, the curiosity, the sheer aliveness of being a person in the world — stopped feeling like a problem to be managed and started feeling like the point.

The quality of intimacy available to her transformed. In love. In friendship. In the work itself. In the way she meets another person at the edge of what they can bear to look at. Something that had been held very tight for a very long time finally loosened — and what was underneath was not chaos. It was capacity.

She is not the same person who walked into that first tantra workshop searching for something she couldn’t name.

And she knows — from her own body, from years of this work — what becomes possible when you stop running from the parts of yourself that know.

— — —

That is why she built this school.

Not because she had the answers. Because she knows what it costs to stay numb, and she knows what becomes available when you don’t. Because there are people out there — searching, reaching, always feeling slightly out of place in a world that doesn’t quite hold all of what they are — and she knows that feeling from the inside.

She built Liminalis because this work changed her life in ways that nothing else touched. Because the sacred, the somatic, the sexual, and the scientific — fused together, held with rigour and reverence — is the most powerful container for human transformation she has ever encountered.

And because she is called to offer a transmission of what she has anchored in her own system. Not information. Not curriculum. A living, embodied transmission from someone who has actually been there.

I will stand for you, if you take a stand for yourself.

That is the promise she makes. That is the school she built.