Sacred Garden Mandala

Dr. Gretchen Blycker returns to The Sacred Garden Mandala podcast with The Yoga of Sex: A-MYSTERY Miniseries. This episode contains Modules Six and Seven. In module six, she explores trauma, disconnection, and the return to embodiment, examining how trauma can affect connection with the body, sexuality, relationships, and self. She emphasizes survival responses as intelligent adaptations and explores embodiment, compassion, safety, pacing, and small steps as pathways toward healing and reconnection. In module seven, she examines yoga, mindfulness, and the neuroscience of consciousness, exploring how contemplative practices can support self-awareness, emotional regulation, embodiment, relational well-being...

Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces The Sacred Garden Mandala podcast and is back with The Yoga of Sex: A-MYSTERY Miniseries. This episode contains Modules Four and Five.    In module four, she explores sexual media socialization in the digital age, explaining how online environments and sexually explicit media shape beliefs and “sexual scripts,” and emphasizing comprehensive sex education, media literacy, and embodiment practices to transform automatic consumption into conscious engagement.   In module five, she examines objectification culture, self-objectification, gender socialization, power dynamics, and how rigid cultural scripts can limit authenticity, advocating a shift toward...

Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces The Sacred Garden Mandala podcast and shares modules from her dissertation-based audio miniseries, The Yoga of Sex: A Mystery, focused on deep healing and authentic sexual wellbeing through compassion, curiosity, and embodied awareness.   Module two defines comprehensive, holistic sex education as multidimensional—physical, emotional, relational, social, cultural, ethical, psychological, spiritual—and emphasizes that information alone is insufficient without skills like consent, communication, empathy, self-reflection, values clarification, and embodiment practices such as mindfulness and yoga.   Module three explores young adulthood as a sacred developmental threshold involving identity formation, intima...

Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces The Sacred Garden Mandala podcast and an evidence-based miniseries adapted from her doctoral dissertation, The Yoga of Sex: A Mystery, a mindfulness-based, yoga-centered sexual wellness curriculum for young adults.   She frames sexual wellness as multidimensional—woven into body, mind, heart, culture, relationships, and spirit—and emphasizes that education must move beyond information to cultivate compassion, embodiment, consent awareness, communication skills, empathy, relational responsibility, trauma-informed healing, and media literacy amid influences like digital culture and pornography.   The series combines peer-reviewed research, curriculum connections, and reflective practices, includes a listen...

Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces The Sacred Garden Mandala podcast and releases the complete 17-chapter audiobook edition of Sacred Garden Mandala for Sexual Wellbeing, designed to be heard in sequence or revisited as a toolkit.   The guide offers a trauma-aware, spiritually honoring approach that blends polyvagal theory, somatic practices, Tibetan yoga/Nejang, the five elements, Buddha families, and a mindful model of sexual health to support safety, consent, boundaries, nervous system regulation, and sustainable pleasure without performance pressure.   Using garden and mandala metaphors, it frames sexual wellbeing as cultivation across seasons and integrates two growth lenses (developmental skill-building and discovery/remembering). It...

In this episode of The Sacred Garden Mandala, Dr. Gretchen Blycker welcomes Fernanda González-Vilchis, Director of SRI en Español (Sowa Rigpa Institute en Español), Nejang Yoga Instructor, Sowa Rigpa practitioner, editor, translator, and educator. Together they explore the wisdom of Sowa Rigpa, the traditional Tibetan science of healing, and the practice of Nejang Yoga—a profound system that integrates body, energy, breath, visualization, and awareness to restore balance and reconnect us with our innate wellbeing. Fernanda begins by guiding listeners through a beautiful meditation featuring the Five Dakinis, the Five Elements, and the l...

Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces Episode 2 of The Sacred Garden Mandala, framing sexual well-being as something cultivated with compassion, curiosity, and embodied awareness rather than fixed through performance.   She offers the mandala and garden as organizing metaphors and presents “two views of the mountain” (developmental skill-building and discovery/remembering) to avoid either endless self-improvement or bypassing wounds. Using four lenses—mindful sexual health, phenomenological/non-dual language, optimal intimacy research (Kleinplatz and Ménard), and Vajrayana mandala/five elements—she teaches a three-zone map: center (presence/authenticity), inner ring (protection, boundaries, nervous system safety), and outer ring (expression...

Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces The Sacred Garden Mandala podcast as an invitation to cultivate holistic sexual wellbeing through compassion, curiosity, and embodied awareness of body, energy, and mind, joined this season by co-producer Dee Daniels and a range of guests.   Drawing from Tibetan lineages and Sol Rigpa teachings, Blycker connects ancient practices with modern neurobiology, including polyvagal theory, emphasizing personal inquiry, inner wisdom, and non-hierarchical learning. She shares her background in sexual trauma advocacy, massage therapy, holistic counseling, and clinical work with sexual trauma, compulsive sexual behaviors, and problematic pornography use, and explains how trauma c...

The Sacred Garden Mandala: Planting Seeds for Healing and Sexual Wellbeing Dr. Gretchen Blycker introduces the Sacred Garden Mandala podcast, an invitation to cultivate the inner landscape through compassion, curiosity, and embodied awareness in support of deep healing and authentic sexual wellbeing. She explores sexuality as a source of vitality, meaning, and connection, welcoming listeners who are seeking healing, awakening, renewed intimacy, or a more grounded relationship with themselves. Using the metaphor of a sacred, even “quantum,” garden beyond space and time, she points toward an inherent sense of wholeness and the ever-present nature of inne...