Awaken your power.

Awaken Your Power — The Integration of Sexuality, Soma, Soul, and Service (with Dr. Elizabeth Willis) In this episode of Awaken Your Power, host Keri Mangis is joined by Dr. Elizabeth Willis, visionary educator, author, and Director of the Institute of New Paradigm Intimacy, for a rich and expansive conversation about embodiment, power, and what it truly means to return to wholeness. Elizabeth introduces a deeply integrative framework—Sexuality, Soma, Soul, and Service—and invites us to reconsider where power actually lives. Not as dominance or control, but as presence, sensation, and the capacity to feel. At the heart of the conversation is Eros, which Elizabeth reframes not as sex alone, but as life force itself: the vitality that awakens the cells, animates the body, and reconnects us to our aliveness. Sexuality, she explains, is one doorway to Eros—but not the only one. When approached somatically and consciously, it becomes a portal for healing, creativity, and spiritual intelligence. Keri and Elizabeth explore how modern culture has fractured our experience—separating body from soul, spirituality from sexuality, and service from self—often beginning in childhood. Drawing on her 25+ years in Montessori education, Elizabeth describes how children arrive deeply connected to soul and sensation, only to slowly crystallize into identities built for performance and compliance. What we often call a “midlife crisis,” she suggests, is more accurately an initiatory return to the soul—one our culture rarely names or supports. The conversation moves fluidly between personal healing and collective transformation, addressing shame, trauma, religious conditioning, and porn-based scripts that shape our relationship to sexuality. Elizabeth speaks candidly about how sexuality has been used as a tool for power-over—and how slowing down, attuning to the nervous system, and listening to sensation opens the door to entirely new choices. In this episode, you’ll hear about: Eros as life force, not performance or pathology The soma as the sensate body—and sensation as a language beneath thought and emotion Why sacred sexuality is more about nervous system attunement than sexual technique Sexuality as a healing portal and a catalyst for psychological and spiritual growth The difference between self-pleasure and masturbation, and why new pleasure pathways matter How embodied boundaries arise from sensation rather than mental rules Questioning libido myths—especially around menopause Teaching and caregiving as spiritual service rather than burnout How individual healing ripples outward into families, institutions, and culture Elizabeth also shares how her work in sacred sexuality unexpectedly converged with her life as an educator, leading to her forthcoming book, The Initiated Teacher: Reawakening the Soul of the Montessori Educator in the New Paradigm. The book offers a next-level vision of teacher wellness—one that frames teaching as a path of initiation, transformation, and service, rather than endurance. The episode closes with a clear throughline: what we exile into the shadows—especially sexuality—will continue to distort power until it is met with awareness, education, and compassion. Integration is not optional; it is the work of our time. ...