My work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, somatic healing, and embodied sexuality.
But Vilates did not begin as a professional path.
It began as a personal search for answers about the body that I had never been taught.
About Peta
“The female body isn’t broken. Often it’s simply been operating without the conditions that allow sensation, connection, and desire to emerge naturally.”
Motherhood didn’t simply change my life.
It revealed something about the body that I had never fully understood.
Before becoming a mother, there were parts of my personal trauma history I believed I had already processed, #MeToo. At the time I did the work I knew how to do. Years of talk therapy, psychology, counselling, reflection, boundaries, and learning to move forward. And for many years that seemed enough.
Then I became pregnant with twins, and both pregnancy and birth have a way of rearranging the landscape of your body. My twin pregnancy was medically complex, high risk, and physically demanding, and when my daughters were born something unexpected surfaced.
Experiences I thought were resolved reappeared vividly, not simply as memories, but as sensations moving through my nervous system. It was like a full system alert began sounding.
At the same time, my life became the relentless daily rhythm of caring for two newborn babies. Feeding. Changing, Settling. Feeding again. The sleep deprivation was intense, moving beyond tiredness into a deeper level of nervous system exhaustion.
Within a year I was pregnant again.
Soon after, my third daughter arrived. I birthed three babies within eighteen months. Those early years were full of love and devotion. And they were also profoundly disorienting. My body had become the site of survival for three small humans. And somewhere inside that devotion, the woman I had been before motherhood was lost.
Intimacy with my partner felt distant. My relationship with my own body felt unfamiliar. Desire, sensation, and emotional connection had become complicated in ways I didn’t know how to navigate.
Because I have always searched for understanding through learning, I enrolled in postgraduate study in sexology. I believed that somewhere within the academic study of sexuality I would find language for what my body was experiencing. The study was fascinating, I learned about different sexual cultures, and how religion, politics, and society shape how we understand intimacy and our bodies. Sexual history, studies, research, and the legislation of the expression of the human body was captivating.
But something important was missing.
Academic frameworks could describe sexuality, yet they rarely addressed the deeper systems that shape how a woman actually experiences desire within her body.
The relationship between nervous system safety, emotional life, sensation, and pleasure was largely absent from the conversation.
Understanding sexuality intellectually was not the same as understanding it somatically.
The turning point came during my training in somatic and sacred sexuality methodologies.
For the first time I encountered an approach that integrated neuroscience, trauma-informed healing, female pleasure anatomy, and ancient traditions that treated sexuality as an embodied experience rather than a performance.
During one practice in particular, something deep shifted in my body and my nervous system. Undulating waves of sensation moved through my body in a way I had never experienced before.
It felt as though a deeper layer of the body’s intelligence had come online.
Emotion, sensation, sound, and tears released in wave after wave, as if years of long-held tensions were unwinding through my nervous system.
What struck me most was not just the intensity of sensation.
It was the recognition that the body had been carrying an intelligence I had never been taught to access.
Over the next several years I immersed myself in somatic practice, nervous system education, female pleasure anatomy research, and the lineage traditions of Tantra and Taoism.
Gradually my relationship with my body began to reorganise.
Sensation became easier to notice. Desire became a clarifying light.
Intimacy felt less like something to perform and more like something to inhabit.
The moment Vilates was born
At some point during this process, the framework that would eventually become Vilates began to take shape. The insight arrived in a quiet moment rather than a dramatic one.
I was walking with my three daughters in the morning sunlight, pushing a large double-decker pram as they drifted into sleep. Later that morning I sat in the park watching them explore the grass beneath the trees.
What I noticed was simple, but profound.
Because they felt safe, they explored.
Because they explored, they discovered sensation.
And because sensation was available, curiosity and joy naturally followed.
In that moment the pattern that had been emerging in my studies and personal healing became unmistakable;
Safety precedes sensation.
When the nervous system experiences safety, the body becomes capable of noticing sensation.
From sensation, desire and pleasure can emerge naturally.
This sequence became the foundation of my work.
Vilates was born from the recognition that sexuality cannot be separated from the nervous system, emotional life, or the deeper intelligence of the body itself.
Today Vilates integrates:
Somatic trauma healing.
Neuroscience and nervous system literacy.
Female pleasure anatomy.
Embodied sexuality traditions.
The purpose of this work is not to fix women, because women are not broken.
Instead, it restores the conditions that allow the body’s natural intelligence to re-emerge.
Vilates describes the outcome of this process as Erotic Sovereignty. Which is a woman’s ability to understand her body, communicate her boundaries, and experience sexuality in a way that feels authentic rather than performative.
What women say about the process
“I’m very particular about who I open up to, and I originally came to the sessions prepared to discontinue if I didn’t feel safe. Instead, I found an exceptional coach in Peta, whose calm presence allowed me to go much more deeper than I expected and I felt completely safe to be very vulnerable. Peta created an incredible sense of trust and this allowed me to access rich inner resources I didn’t even know I had and gave language to experiences I had never understood before. 10 out of 10.”
There are several ways women explore this work, depending on where they are in their journey.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ME
Private Mentorship
The Rebirth
The Rebirth is a 1:1 private four-month mentorship where women move through the Vilates™ Erotic Sovereignty Framework in a deeply personalised way.
Begin With the Guide
Download the guide:
How to Light Up Your Libido (Even If You Feel Like You Don’t Have One).
Live Group Immersion
The Anatomy of Pleasure
An immersive online program exploring the female sexual system through nervous system science, embodied practice, and sacred sexuality traditions.
This program runs once per year and brings women together in a guided exploration of sensation, desire, and pleasure.
Listen
The Ecology of Intimacy podcast explores the relationship between sexuality, emotional connection, and embodied intelligence.