I was a purity church camp pastor and a docu-series producer-editor for networks like Discovery Channel, A&E, History Channel, Netflix, Facebook, MTV, and more until I divorced from my 15-year sexless marriage and from my faith indoctrinated with shame. To heal, I returned to my childhood love of filmmaking, a hack around my traumas. With my camera, I could finally confront sexuality and re-educate myself.
While living in Los Angeles, I took my camera to investigate my church roots, a five-year journey with my college buddy that resulted to TOUCH PODCAST: Conversations with Spirit and Body, purity culture story slams, Youtube video campaigns, and a docu-series in development. Being a curator of stories helped me heal and connect me to a community of brilliant authors and thinkers. Our podcast peaked at the cusp of the purity culture fallout. We were among other pioneers in the evolving church-space.
Early during this time, I experienced a fierce physiological awakening of my body and consciousness, as if the Holy Spirit spontaneously dropped on me. To understand this phenomenon, I spent time in New York starting a five-year apprenticeship to an anthropologist-healer-theologian who introduced me to the world of healing through the Mezo-American culture, a gateway to understand other indigenous cultures around the world. We became healing partners and conduct group-healing events to this day.
While doing podcasts and healing events, I was confronting other curiosities with my camera. I peaked into the world of pornography with one of my interview subjects. Into the world of pole dance with another. Shibari. Conscious play-spaces. Sex workers. They became my friends. I produced a handful of erotic short films, explorations into feminine erotic innocence, healing, and carnality. Following this curiosity led me to Hawaii where I completed my third erotic film.
Surprisingly, while experimenting with community living in Hawaii, my triangulated explorations of the mind-body-soul wove back together. I found deconstructed Christians, former ministers. Lots of them. All I learned regarding indigenous healing methods resurfaced in the medicine culture of the islands. On the erotic filmmaking front, there are muses in abundance drawn to the native stories of Pele. In Hawaii, I reconnected to my Filipino roots, an initiation that led me back to the Philippines where I discovered a forgotten story of my ancient people — an important ending to a story much larger than me.
I currently circulate between a community in Hawaii and my hometown in Arkansas with my widowed mother, a true homecoming back to family, to faith, and to filmmaking. I still travel domestically and internationally to speak, to create, and to explore.
