We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Z Griss. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Z below.
Z, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
What do I know about taking a risk? I know that most people don’t expect to meet someone like me. I’m a spiritual love coach, a kink educator for social liberation, a visionary filmmaker, a dancer, a grief ritualist. I live a deeply embodied life, caring for my body as I know it to be where my soul listens from. Being who I really am should not have to feel like “taking a risk.” However, in the U.S. in 2023, most of us are socialized away from our true nature and our true magic. I’m gender transcendent, my pronouns are they/them, and I’ve been polyamorous for 23 years. I know what it’s like to be something I didn’t know was possible as a kid. I know what it’s like to outgrow my relationships and identity and have the courage to expand them to accurately reflect what is true now. It’s my honor to support others to do the same. I know how to stay in loving relationship with my family and friends, even when who I am may be new or challenging to them. Where did this courage come from? I can trace it back to the first time I discovered that who I was told to be was not true. I was 14, visiting Nicaragua with 2 friends. It was my first time going to a “third world” country. I had never seen poverty like this before. Children came up to us holding their dead siblings in boxes asking for money to be able to bury them properly. While half the world earns less than $10 a day, I had no sense of my social location inside of a global human family. At age 19, this initiation continued when I went to dance in Senegal and visited the slave house at Goree Island. I saw up close where slaves had been imprisoned before being shipped across the Atlantic ocean. I saw the gravity of dehumanizing others through slavery and poverty. I saw things I could not unsee. While this seeing brought unspeakable grief, it also called forth my power to care. When I returned home I joined many political movements and education trainings around race and class. Internally I was learning how to make space for the truth when it’s not what I want to see. I was learning how to trust my senses and my heart in the presence of others who were not paying attention. I was experiencing the softening of my body, the access to gratitude, awe, and resilience that comes with orienting truthfully to my place inside a larger collective of human life. The veil of colonization was lifting and I started to focus on building friendships with people who were also seeing clearly… who were also generating permission to be who we really are. The deconstructing of whiteness was my gateway to deconstructing gender, sex, money, and so many other constraints to our true magic. While this may seem like a risk, my heart knows it’s more of a risk to stay small, to conform, to fit into American culture…to be silent when our taxes are funding a genocide in Palestine.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m the founder of Embody More Love which creates offerings that open our hearts to ourselves, each other, to the gift of being alive, and the beauty of collective life. These offerings include dance classes, intimacy workshops, visionary films, kink immersions, performance ritual, grief and eros rituals, facilitator training, books, a youtube channel, and an ongoing community membership.
These offerings welcome people into a culture of love and feeling truly alive. They invite our personal and collective life to touch our hearts, and to inspire our human nature to care. They welcome us home to our bodies through dance and erotic radiance. This is a culture that recognizes our bodies as sacred instruments, from which our soul senses, desires, and plays in a larger sacred world of seen and unseen forces.
My dad is a Jewish New Yorker, a disability advocate and activist for health care for all. My mom is an Appalachian from Kentucky, a social worker. I grew up between 2 very different cultures, classes, religions, and senses of possibility. I became fascinated by culture. How could my parents perceive and engage the world so differently? What was culture… how do we begin to the see the culture we think is “just the way it is?” How do we heal and transform our culture? Given that my parents focused their attention on such different things, I also grew up learning how to love at the political and personal level.
I love to dance. From age 2, I started dance classes and 41 years later I continue. Dance is my first language. While I have experienced many flavors of dance the 6 main forms that live in my body are modern, Middle Eastern, Sufi dancemeditation, West African, ballet, and yoga. I learned how differently cultures define dance, the body, sex, the soul, and our relationship with the Earth. Dance became how I experienced the values and possibilities a community created. If dance could be how we learned systems of oppression, it could also be how we learned love and liberation.
People come to me to open their hearts, to feel more alive, to grow the courage to be who they really are, and to want what they really want in intimacy.
I have 3 core offerings:
1. Play with Power & Gender through Dance, a 3 month kinky dance immersion in Sebastopol, CA to clarify what you really want through experiential learning, to explore trauma responsive and attachment informed kink, to be in community with spiritual kinky dancers, and to free yourself from gender conditioning!
2. Love Coaching, 6 months of personal support for individuals and couples who are interested in the spiritual growth of: secure attachment, polyamory, gender beyond the binary, conscious dominance and submission.
3. Love Rituals for Couples: online 6 week series of body rituals and communication skills to deepen partnership.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
In March of 2020, I had a brain injury. It was the week of shelter in place. It was the beginning of me resting in the dark for most of 10 months. It was a near death experience. I said goodbye to life, to everyone I loved. I now call it my year of dreams. I was dreaming 16 hours a day. I was more connected to my healing inner world than the world around me. All my dreams were dancing and making love in nature and community. I continued to take yoga class every morning with my community, in my imagination. That time prepared me for these times we are in now, 3 years later. The biggest thing is immense gratitude and awe for life. To have the energy to type these words right now for you… no matter what feels challenging these days it feels so much simpler relative to that time when the very foundation of perceiving senses, thinking, moving, or talking was not available. The second thing is my capacity to receive the energy and beauty of the life around me. I can feel the pulsing beauty of the trees around me. My body knows how to drink in nature and feel part of it. I feel the earth resourcing and loving me. I feel our ancestors and the unseen forces of love around us. There is a profound peace and love in my being that was gifted to me through my brain initiation.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
Relationships are everything. Over the last 24 years most people find me through friends and loved ones. Focus on growing relationships. Take the time to listen to what people want, to ask questions, to gather feedback, to show that you value their desires and feedback.
Vision moves people. Clarify your vision and share it from your heart. People get inspired about a new vision for their personal life AND a vision for a better world. They can feel who you are more than what you say. Connect with your vision each day as a ceremony. I listen to a voice memo of my vision every morning to root into my heart.
Consistency is important. Sometimes people are on my newsletter for 6 years before they say yes. People will feel your unwavering devotion to offer your gift.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.embodymorelove.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100068019044956
- Youtube: @EmbodyMoreLove
Image Credits
1. home headshot: photo by @altered.perspective 2. rebel gener: photo by Om Rupani 3. with book: photo by @altered.perspective 4. performing “waters of the soul” with Kamala Devi, photo by Robbie 5. E & Z flogger: photo of Z Griss & Ethan Lowry by @fourcubes.photography 6. dancing in front of window: photo by Theresa Vargo 7. dancing at barre: photo by Theresa Vargo