I grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s and was influenced by the social, political, cultural and spiritual changes taking place around me. Later, while working as a marketing executive, I realized that I was more interested in the personal dimensions of life than business and worldly success, and began a forty year journey down the road less traveled. Along the way, helping others explore the personal, relational and inner dimensions of life became my passion and life’s work.

In 1970, as a part of a training to teach in an experimental parent-run school in Chicago, I attended a Viola Spolin Theatre Games workshop at Second City. During an exercise, I experienced feeling present in my body for the first time that I could remember. I felt like I was awakening from a long deep sleep and wondered, “Where have I been all my life?” After a lifetime of doing what was expected of me, I was starting to feel a sense of self unfolding. Improvisation had been a vehicle for knowing myself. And I wanted more.

When I moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 1971, I was eager to experience the personal growth and human potential opportunities there. Yoga, meditation, dancing with Anna Halprin at Dancer’s Workshop, Continuum Movement with Emily Conrad, studying movement therapy, and Tibetan Buddhism opened me to my senses as a way of being present and embodied in my experience. Sometimes I felt like a snake shedding outgrown skin. Often I felt raw and vulnerable and very tender and exposed. As the old ways of approaching life began falling away, living life without as many filters began to feel good.

I met Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray who put me in a hot tub and guided me to breathe in a special way that brought up and helped release painful and traumatic memories of my birth and childhood. I began to practice as a Rebirthing Therapist. As a client and student of Bioenergetic, Reichian and Gestalt therapy, I explored anger and abandonment issues and began to experience self love and acceptance, real inner peace and happiness.

By 1980, I wanted to focus on learning as much as I could about the connection between the body and the psyche and began to study Reichian character analysis, breath, body and movement therapy with Wilhelm Reich’s protégés Al Bauman and Sylvia Tropp Goodman. Sylvia encouraged me to become a Reichian oriented therapist. This work became the basis for my masters degree in Somatic Psychology.

I had also begun to study Tantric Buddhism with Chogyam Trungpa and became a student of the controversial Indian mystic Osho. Osho presented me with a radical view of love and relationships, one that shook up my preconceptions and challenged me to look at new possibilities for the forms love can take.

I was already familiar with Tantra from Tibetan Buddhism and Osho when I met Charles Muir who invited me to teach breath work in his Tantra and the Art of Conscious Loving Workshops in 1985. I was presented with the erotic side of Tantra and the possibility of lovemaking as a meditative practice that could help people deepen intimacy and connection. I also saw the limitations of focusing on sexual pleasure in a way that overrides deeper emotional and psychological issues. I saw the possibility of bringing my emotional, embodiment, psychological and relationship skills together to create a way to access an authentic intimacy.

This led me to study the couples and sexuality approach of David Schnarch, the Imago couples therapy of Harville Hendrix, and the psycho-spiritual approach of John Welwood. This body of work was the focus of my doctoral dissertation on Relationship as a Spiritual Art. It was also the foundation of the modern Tantra that I began teaching in 1990, and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Kama Sutra, that I wrote in 2000.

Beginning in 1998, the Diamond Heart and Logos psycho-spiritual approach of Hameed Ali and Faisal Masqauddam became a strong influence in my personal life and has impacted my professional work. Nature, plant and energy medicine, and indigenous spirituality are a vital part of my personal inner exploration. Other significant influences in my work come from astrology and the Enneagram.

During the forty years of my professional practice, I have worked with people individually, in couples, families, and small and large groups using the integrative approach to healing and transformation that has emerged from my lifelong investigation into consciousness, relationships and sexuality. Over the years I have made presentations to the International Imago Therapy Conference, the Human Awareness Institute, the International Congress on Psychology and Spirituality, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Tantra: The Art of Conscious Loving, the Center for Passionate Living, and the New School of Relationship.

Johanina Wikoff, PhD maintains a private practice working with individuals, couples, families and groups of people who have a commitment to personal and spiritual growth in their life. For more information about Johanina, contact her by email: johanina@johaninawikoff.com or call 707/766-8502.