Today we’d like to introduce you to Demetra Nyx.
Demetra, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in a pretty conservative area. When I was in my first semester of college, my younger brother was in a car accident, which turned my life upside-down. Four universities, three businesses, and countless places later, I’m now a writer and a sex coach living in LA.
I became really interested in sexuality because our society has such shame around sex, and I had my own breakthroughs when I learned through working with sexual energy that my pleasure and my body belongs to me. That was something I never learned as a teenage girl – I always thought that my pleasure was because of and for men. Once I really began to embody the fact that I was in control of how deeply I connected with my body and experienced pleasure, my entire life changed.
I enrolled in an intensive certification program to coach around sexuality. Through learning that type of work, I unexpectedly ended up re-wiring my entire nervous system – I had such bad anxiety and depression for six years after my brother’s accident, and I have so much more of an understanding of it now. My body doesn’t react in the same ways that it did before.
In addition to all of that – for the past year or so, I have been posting photos of my menstrual blood every month, to help people who bleed get more comfortable with their cycles. Those photos went viral earlier this year, and I received so much hate and violence from them – which I think shows how society still treats women.
I write often and in a lot of different formats. I most recently published my first book of poetry, called “how to live when the world is dying.” It’s available on Amazon.
I also recently switched the format of my business around to make my coaching more accessible to everyone. I have a small community on Patreon, where people can join at any tier to get live calls, guided practices, and more – that also enables me to focus more on writing, and I already have a second book of poetry in the works. But I do still open a limited amount of one-on-one coaching spots every month.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Ha! No, not at all. After my brother’s accident, I realized that nothing I had been taught to value in life actually mattered much at all. I dropped out of school and became the main emotional caretaker of my family, and I dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression. I also became orthorexic, which lasted for about a year until I started going to therapy for it. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with my life; nothing seemed significant enough.
I went through a yoga teacher training and opened my own studio at 21, and then I learned about cultural appropriation and left the yoga world altogether. I traveled around the world for a while, multiple times. I went back to school four times, finally quitting for the last time a semester before I would have graduated. It wasn’t until 2018 that I learned the tools that helped me deeply feel my emotions and integrate them in a way that is truly healing. We can often enter into that most usefully through the lenses of sex and relationships, but it ends up impacting our entire lives.
Currently, I’m feeling the stress of climate change and the anti-abortion bills that are being passed. My new book is really focused on grappling with this question – how do we live in a world that is dying? How do we manage to process all of that without either avoiding it or becoming overwhelmed by it, especially when the only people who can make a difference don’t care? I think my generation, in particular, is having a hard time – we’ve been left with this world and don’t even know if it’s worth it to have children.
So, while my business has been evolving, currently I’m really focused on providing people with the tools to be able to face all of this, feel it, and integrate it so that we can still experience pleasure and joy in our everyday lives – without that, I think we dissociate and distract ourselves and really become useless, in a way.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I think I’m most known for creating art (through my writing and my photos) that has a deep impact on other people and the way they see the world. I think all of society has lied to us, in a way – people go about their lives pretending everything is fine and never feeling any of their emotions, never dealing with or talking about issues that are truly important. We aren’t able to be vulnerable with one another. It’s killing us, and now it’s killing the world around us, too. I ultimately want people to be able to *feel* again and to find the deep connection with nature and with the world around us that we’ve totally lost.
Sexuality is such a great entrance point for that because we carry so much wounding around relationships and sex – but ultimately the true purpose of my work is to get people to engage with their bodies and their feelings and with nature again.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
That I wrote a book! I’ve been writing poetry my entire life, but I never shared it with people because it was so personal, and it didn’t seem possible to make a living from writing. But I eventually realized that in all my other creativity – my coaching, my podcast, my articles, my social media, etc. – I was very creatively avoiding putting out this thing that was the most important to me.
My poetry feels like such a raw and honest expression of me and the world, and this book has hit people so deeply in a way I’m really proud of. The entire book in itself is just a beautiful work of art, and I designed the entire thing.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.demetranyx.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @demetra_nyx
- Other: www.patreon.com/demetranyx
Image Credit:
Laurie Marie
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