My Story

✧ Joy Mittens - Loving You Back to Yourself ✧

Guiding your journey home — through embodiment, emotion, and Eros.

I wasn’t always this woman.

I was a small-town girl from rural Cumbria, daughter of bakers, top of the class at school, bound for something sensible. I studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, where I searched for truth in logic—but truth, I learned, also lives in the shiver of skin, the howl of grief, the sacred pulse of Eros.

For years, something wild and ancient stirred in me. A longing to feel. To remember. To break the silence around sex, shame, and the parts of us hidden in the dark. That longing became a pilgrimage.

From Shame to Sovereignty

I’ve danced naked under stars, wept in winter tents, raged in Temple spaces, and studied the mysteries of sexuality and the soul. I’ve sat with my shadows. Stared into the mirror. Met the numbness, the grief, the wild joy.

My body became my teacher. My shadow, my compass. Eros, my medicine.

Through polyamory, psychedelics, heartbreak, and healing—I’ve walked the path of messy, luminous transformation. Not to escape the human experience, but to be fully in it.

And through all of this, I’ve become a guide.

I walk between worlds.

I bridge the mystical and the logical, the sacred and the silly. My work is rooted in emotional safety, clarity, and a deep respect for personal sovereignty. I’ve got spreadsheets and feathers on my altar (My alter ego is Jen Berry the Web Developer). I believe structure is sacred, laughter is medicine, and Eros isn’t just about sex—it’s the life-force that animates everything.

I hold spaces where grief can move, boundaries can be honoured, and pleasure can be reclaimed—not in performative ways, but in ways that feel real, nourishing, and fully alive.

This work is for those who are ready.

To feel again.

To open again.

To befriend their bodies.

To reclaim the wild, wise intelligence of their bodies, emotions and Eros.

You might be curious. Or blocked. Grieving. Longing. Or simply sensing there's more.

Whether you join me in a retreat, a workshop, or a private session—this is an invitation to come home to yourself. Not to be “fixed,” but to be witnessed. Not to become someone else, but to remember who you already are.

Offerings

I create spaces—retreats, workshops, and private sessions—for people of all genders who want to:

  • Reclaim connection to their body and emotions

  • Gently meet the parts of themselves they’ve shut down

  • Explore Eros in a way that’s honouring, empowering, and true

  • Befriend their “no” just as much as their “yes”

  • Be witnessed in their rawness, their joy, their becoming

All rooted in trauma-informed facilitation, sacred sexuality, shadow work, and fierce compassion.

You are not broken.

You are becoming.

If you're ready to meet yourself in the raw, sacred place where love and power dance—then perhaps I am your guide.

🌀 My Lineage and Training

The work I offer today is rooted in lived experience.
It wasn’t learned in a textbook — it was forged in ceremony, in heartbreak, in shadow work, in sacred play, and in the quiet, tender moments of remembering who I really am.

The Fire That Forged Me

My deepest foundations come through the Temple Arts, and in particular through the paths of ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) and Highden Temple. These schools have shaped me from the inside out — not just with tools or rituals, but by inviting me to die and be reborn again and again, in masterfully held, wild containers of deep transformation.

I’ve completed ISTA Level 1, 2, and Practitioner Training multiple times — as a participant and assistant. I’ve been part of four Temple Trainings, both at Highden and in Samothraki. I didn’t walk these paths for certificates. I walked them because they woke something ancient and true in me. Because they returned me to my body, my sovereignty, and the courage to meet life in all its complexity.

These are not perfect schools. No path is.

But they are part of my lineage — deeply, irrevocably — and I offer from the fire they lit in me.

When the “Sacred” Wasn’t Safe

My path is not a simple story of growth and expansion.

I also met unnecessary suffering and contraction in the Sacred Whore training. There, I learned the hard way the fine line between initiation and trauma, transcendence and bypass, devotion and coercion.

I learned that when the dragon is untethered from the heart, it destroys.

When the Sacred Whore is unrooted from love, she becomes a toxic caricature.

When Eros is divorced from the soul, it becomes just another tool of power.

Transformation needs a strong enough container of love to hold it — otherwise, it is just trauma.

I learned the more confusing trauma of atmosphere, not forceful impact — what happens when you subtly stop trusting yourself, little by little, until one day you realise you’ve abandoned your own truth. That kind of harm doesn’t leave a bruise. It leaves a fog. A silence. A knot in the body you can’t quite place. That takes years to loosen.

I learned what happens to the nervous system after such an event — how long it takes to realise what happened, to admit it to myself and to others, to find words to express it, how long it takes to open, to trust again, to witness myself in a trauma response making decisions from that place — and not be able to do anything about it.

Trauma-Informed Facilitation

This led me to The Field Facilitator Training with Rachel Rickards, Christian Pankhurst, and David Cates — a trauma-informed journey into holding group spaces with precision, safety, and emotional presence. I chose it to better understand trauma in group fields — not just to make sense of my own experience, but to ensure I never repeat those patterns in the spaces I hold.

It also expanded my capacity to work with somatic resonance, nervous system awareness, and the subtle, powerful dance of emotional process in collective space.

Beyond that, I’ve also studied advanced bodywork with Buddhi Dana, which builds on my learnings from the ISTA Practitioner Training — learning to listen with my hands and track energy in deep, subtle ways. This work supports my sessions and workshops with grounded, body-based presence and care.

Conscious Relating — The Biggest Teacher of Them All

My relationship with Shiva Sunya doesn’t fit in any box. We’ve moved between lovers, friends, facilitators, and everything in between. There’s been resistance, rupture, devotion — and something that continues to call us back. Not to comfort, but to truth.

We met just before the Sacred Whore training, and since then our dynamic has become a deep crucible for growth — sometimes excruciating, sometimes exquisite, always loving. We both have aversive tendencies, but instead of running, we stayed. Or we returned.

We’ve walked side by side through three years of deep friendship, emotional process, creative collaboration, and the kind of intimacy most people never speak of — one rooted not in desire or wild passion, but in devotion. In honesty. In witnessing each other in our shadowiest places.

There is no performance here. No timeline. Just two souls committed to truth, and to the medicine that becomes available when we share even the most confronting parts of ourselves.

It’s not fiery and dramatic — it’s slow and deep.

And somehow, it’s teaching us both what love actually is.

Weaving It All Together

All of these threads weave into the fabric of what I offer.

Not as dogma. Not as fixed systems. But as embodied wisdom — lived, questioned, broken open, and re-integrated through my own healing.

I don’t believe there is one right path.

I’ve wandered, questioned, come close and stepped away.

And still — I return, again and again, to the power of embodied Eros, honest connection, and the mystery of what it means to be fully human.

This is my path.

It’s not perfect.

But it’s mine.

And it has made me who I am.