S1E5: Ellie Wilde's Journey, former ISTA facilitator

Former ISTA facilitator Ellie Wilde joins Cara to share her 11-year journey through the organization—from participant to inner circle to speaking out. Ellie arrived at 40 seeking tools for better relationships and sexuality. She traces how she moved into facilitation and what it meant to be part of a world that seemed to offer healing and belonging.Ellie and Cara discuss power dynamics between teachers and students, the difference between genuine empowerment and pseudo-importance, and recovery after leaving. They explore finding your voice after years of silence, the spiral nature of healing, and holding both harm experienced and harm perpetuated.Content Note: Discussion of sexual relationships between teachers and students, power dynamics, and grooming. References to emotional collapse and recovery.Disclaimer: Views expressed represent individual opinions and experiences, not official positions of the podcast or producers.ABOUT ELLIE WILDE:Ellie Wilde is a somatic facilitator who brings lived experience and discernment to conversations about power, intimacy, and integrity. For over a decade, she was an ISTA facilitator, working internationally in immersive trainings. Her years inside gave her intimate understanding of both the potential and serious distortions when embodiment work, trauma, eros, and spiritual authority mix without sufficient accountability or nervous-system awareness.Today, Ellie works primarily with men in one-to-one settings, supporting emotional literacy, grounded masculinity, and ethical relational capacity—helping men move beyond performance-based spirituality into genuine presence and responsibility. In groups, she prioritizes safety, consent, and nervous-system coherence. She's passionate about dismantling charismatic power dynamics and helping people separate authentic growth from coercion and unintegrated trauma.Ellie speaks not as an outsider but as someone who loved these worlds deeply and is now committed to truth-telling.www.essentialtantra.org | [email protected]:Safer Sex-Positive and Spiritual Communities: 3SC.CommunityICSA: ICSA.orgCrisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741CONNECT: [email protected] Schedule with Cara: calendly.com/caracordonicoaching Substack: caracordoni.substack.com Instagram: @caracordoniSubscribe, share, and leave a review to help others find these conversations.CREDITS: Graphics: Paxton Scarberry | Music: "Midnight Rendezvous" by Sasha Ende (ende.app) Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0