I used to admire the people standing on street corners with megaphones, warning strangers to repent before it's too late. I admired their conviction because if I actually believed what they believed, wouldn't I be out there too?

That question is where this episode starts. A shorter one this time. Unplanned, no proper mic, recorded because I couldn't wait to say it.

This is the theology behind the shame. Growing up in a conservative Christian home where sin was real and sexual sin was the realest of all. A pastor's offhand comment that cracked something open. A book by C.S. Lewis — not the Narnia ones — where hell isn't a sentence handed down, it's a choice made over and over, forever, by people who could leave anytime and don't. And then the harder question underneath all of it: is sin even real, the way I was taught it was real?

I don't think it is. I think it's a story we tell ourselves because we've never fully believed we're enough exactly as we are.

Once I actually believed that, not just understood it, believed it - my sexuality didn't change shape. The shame around it did.

This one's a door, not a full room. Because we're about to spend real time on tantra and neotantra, on practices that treat the erotic and the sacred as the same room instead of two rooms with a locked door between them — and I needed you to know what used to make that door impossible for me to walk through.

Hell did.