Ilana's backdrop of Pagan and Earth-based spirituality found unexpected resonance with Annette's Pentecostal Christian upbringing when we met studying SkyDancing Tantra. In the Tantric temple, we discovered a shared devotion to a spiritual path that is ecstatic, embodied, collective, and deeply immanent—one that honors the sacred in the ordinary, and invites the Divine into everyday life.
As our spiritual connection deepened, so did our lives. Annette's two decades as a psychotherapist and Ilana's massage therapy practice began to weave together in rich and complementary ways. We trained in the Somatica® Method to gain practical, actionable tools for working with sex, intimacy, and relationship. We found ourselves leading ketamine-assisted ceremonies, teaching embodiment classes, and supporting clients who were ready to move beyond the limits of talk therapy alone.
Through this work, we witnessed a truth that had first drawn us together: that profound, co-created experiences stretch us in ways we wouldn’t have known to seek, and awaken aliveness we didn’t know was missing.
Today, we are married. Tasting Life Temple is not only our business—it is our home, our sacred space, and our shared devotional path. We live what we teach, and we welcome others into this living temple: a place where the body is honored, emotions are sacred, love is a practice, and the Divine is invited to dance in all its forms.
Tasting Life Temple is born of the desire to help others awaken to ecstatic aliveness through their own transformative encounters.
June 20, 2025: Our wedding and Tasting Life Temple inauguration
We believe each of us is a filament in the web that reflects the unity and connectedness of all of existence. We call this web the Divine. We encourage and support people having a personal and highly individual experience of the Divine, believing it is an essential and irreplaceable aspect of a human life.
Entering ecstatic non-ordinary states is the doorway to this experience of the Divine. It can allow us to experience ourselves in new and unimagined ways both internally and in relation to others, thus paving the way for change and growth, catalyzing emotional, spiritual and psychological change.
Tasting life is an assertion of humanity. It's an act of empowerment, freedom, communion, potentially even an act of resistance. It is our Yes to life. it's remembering the mysterious, intricate, singular beings we are, and reconnecting to the sacred flow of life that’s always been available to us all.
With a sense of deep reverence, we bring our expertise in Tantra, psychotherapy, breathwork, physical and energetic touch, ritual and ceremony, and sacred medicines to sculpt transformational journeys. We hope to evoke non-ordinary states of consciousness which may shake loose rigid ways of being.
We invite catharsis and its capacity to undo calcified patterns. Just as strongly, we facilitate integration, the work of metabolizing raw emotional experience into meaning, where newfound openness becomes freedom - earned, claimed, and carried forward, every day.
We hold with reverence practices of radical creativity, sacred mischief, and florid curiosity, as we create the space and offer some tools for you to find your singular encounter with the feast of life - your life, all life. We trust the Divine to kindle each person's internal flame when given sacred space and invitation to burn.
For the body, healing is the transition from dysfunction to function. Healing the psyche, however, is different. We define it as an expansion of one’s range of choices—especially in moments of activation. There is no single "right" way for the psyche to respond to life, but there are states of greater and lesser internal freedom. The more freedom we have, the more agency we possess.
Responsibility = the ability to respond. We see it as our responsibility to cultivate this ability—to expand our capacity to choose how we respond to life, rather than react without our own conscious participation. The broader our range, the more adaptable we become.
We envision a world in which people have the internal freedom and structure to responsibly engage with life in ways that fulfill them and serve the world.
Tasting Life Temple
Nevada City, California 95959, United States