Healthy sex positivity does not yet exist in Kenya. The conversation has not been opened - not in clinics, not in schools, not in most religious or therapeutic communities. For most women here, sexuality is something to be managed by family, by faith, by social consequence. Individual erotic life - desire that has not already been arranged by someone else - is not an idea that has settled language yet.
Some women cross this anyway. They find breathwork. They find tantra. They find something inside their own nervous system that does not match the story they were handed. The journey is real, and the journey is rare. There are very few teachers. The communities that should hold this work either do not exist yet, or operate quietly.
For a lesbian couple, it is harder still. Levina and Gladys are open about their relationship and open about their work - and their work is gender-open: men, women, couples, all welcome. They are judged - for who they love, for who they teach, for what they hold in their rooms. They keep going.
What they are doing is, by any honest measure, avant-garde. They are bringing modern, evidence-aware, consent-based healing concepts into a country where this conversation has not yet started - and they are doing it in a form recognisable to anyone living in contemporary Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, or Paris.
For some time now, Levina and Gladys have collaborated with Forbidden Yoga on its Sensual Liberation Retreats in East Africa. They are now opening their doors to private clients from outside the continent - men, couples, women, from Europe, from America, from anywhere the conversation about conscious sexuality has begun and is not yet finished.
The retreat is not a workshop. It is a journey through five things at once:
It is not a yoga vacation. It is not a wellness package. It is a modern, carefully held investigation - held in a place where this conversation has not yet started, by two women who have made themselves the first chapter of it.
A lesbian couple bringing avant-garde sex-positive healing to a country where the conversation has not yet started.
Years with Michael Wogenburg in West Bengal Shakta Tantra - Nyasa, Kundalini, Pranayama, ritual.
Where the earth, the nature, and the work meet. Kenya and Tanzania.
The drives toward domination and submission, toward transgression and the dissolution of ordinary identity, toward intensity and altered states - these are not perversions to be eliminated. They are forces to be educated.
The difference between BDSM practiced with consciousness, communication, consent, and integration and the non-consensual content that fills mainstream pornography is not a difference of impulse. It is a difference of container.
It is the difference between fire in a hearth and fire in the living room.
A Sensual Liberation Retreat is the hearth.
Not abuse. A ritualised investigation of power, trust, surrender - held with consent and aftercare.
Symbolic language of the psyche. A doorway, when met consciously.
Rope as the language of the body. Restriction as surrender, not punishment.
Theater built from your own writing. Performed with breath, ritual, presence.
Pranayama and Kundalini practice - moving the unconscious into the body.
The forbidden zones of the psyche, brought into a field where they can transform.
The person who was shamed about desire, and now carries that shame into every room they enter.
These are not perversions. These are the fundamental poles of a psychic tension that every human being carries.
Levina and Gladys hold the rooms where these tensions can be investigated rather than carried. The work is for clients from Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Los Angeles - and for anyone who senses that classical therapy has not yet reached the deepest layer of their body. Who senses their sexuality carries trauma, intelligence, and power. Who wants to understand desire instead of being controlled by it.
Berlin. London. Amsterdam. Paris. New York. Los Angeles. Cities where the conversation is already open.
Not careless. The deeper the work goes, the more important the container becomes.
Private therapeutic journeys. We read every message. Compatibility is selected, not bought.
Berlin, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Paris. Therapists, dungeons, breathwork schools, sex-positive communities - coexisting in the same square mile, talking to each other, refining each other.
Kenya is not that. There is no infrastructure for this conversation here yet. Levina and Gladys are building part of it - not as outsiders importing a concept, but as women who live here, work here, and have made their own bodies the laboratory.
A retreat held in this geography is held against a different background. The work meets the land. The teachings of India, the lineage of Forbidden Yoga, and the daily lived polarity of Levina and Gladys’s relationship - all of it lands in a place where the conversation is just beginning. The seriousness of that lands too.
Transgressive does not mean unsafe. BDSM does not mean abuse. Tantra does not mean the absence of structure. The deeper the work goes, the more important the container becomes.
Every practice serves the transformation of the client, not the satisfaction of unconscious fantasy. The purpose is healing, not exploitation. Liberation, not confusion. Sexuality as a sacred and psychological force - never a weapon of harm.
A field - in which the animal and the divine can occupy the same room without either devouring the other; in which the shame can be investigated rather than carried; in which the breath can be a bridge between the nervous system that we are and the consciousness that we might become.
This is the practice. You are already inside it.
Levina and Gladys take one therapy client at a time, with no fixed group dates. Availability opens from August 2026 onward, scheduled around each accepted client’s preferred timing.
Pricing starts at USD 15,000 for a 10-day retreat and scales with the level of luxury accommodation and travel chosen. The format is bespoke - a private therapeutic journey, not a group programme.
Both. Levina and Gladys take one client or one couple at a time. The work is gender-open: men, women, and partners are welcome. Each retreat is structured around the client’s specific therapeutic process.
Tantric ritual, breathwork, BDSM-aware practice, Shibari, role-play theater, and structured writing drawn from Advaita Vedanta as taught by Michael Wogenburg - held inside the Shakta Tantra lineage of West Bengal. Pranayama and Kundalini practices are part of the daily rhythm.
Use the onboarding button in the footer to start the conversation, or write directly to love@forbidden-yoga.com. Every application is read personally. Compatibility is selected, not bought.