I’m Taras Or TJ, if you’ve come across me online before. Both are me.
I’ve been working with people through touch, breath, and the body for about ten years. Somatic work, tantra closer to its roots, ritual, breathwork — and the quieter stuff underneath: the stories we’ve carried so long we stopped noticing them, the inner conversations that run on a loop, the felt sense of something that doesn’t have a name yet.
Rapéh — sacred tobacco medicine — is part of how I work too. Not as an escape but as a way in. It cuts through the noise and drops you back into your body. It breaks patterns that routine has made invisible.
I started this work because I needed it myself. I know the gap between understanding something in your head and actually feeling it settle in your body. That gap is where I work.
Along the way I’ve had to meet my own shadow — the part of me that never got a word in. The version of myself that was suppressed, pushed aside, unseen. Learning to let it come out without flinching from it. Sitting with the confused inner child who still shows up sometimes, wondering what the rules are.
One of the biggest steps forward in my own growth came through psilocybin — taken in a shamanic and ritualistic context, with intention and preparation. Not recreation. It opened something I didn’t have language for before — a dimension of experience that was always there but inaccessible. I went through initiation. That’s still with me.
I’m not offering this yet. But it’s part of where I’m heading — exploring how plant medicine, ritual, and somatic work can be held together responsibly. That conversation is opening slowly, and in the right time and context, it may become part of what I offer.
I’ve spent years inside modern gay subculture — present enough to see its dark corners up close. What I’ve come to believe, through all of it, is that kindness goes further than most people think. An honest word. And sometimes, when words can’t reach — a good hug gets there instead. Heart to heart, in a group, in a family, wherever we’re trying to find the right distance and the right words to reach each other.
When I hold space for someone I’m fully there. Not half-present, not working through my own unfinished business. There’s a difference between being with someone and being there for them.
I’m not a therapist and I don’t diagnose or treat. Some of my clients have worked with a psychologist and with me at the same time — and found the two approaches reached different things in them. Sometimes the body holds what the mind hasn’t caught up with yet.
You’re welcome here whatever brought you. Just curiosity and a basic willingness to treat each other like human beings — that’s all I ask. Drop me a message if something resonates.
I don’t bite. Well — not without being asked.
Talk soon, Taras
Everything shared here comes from lived experience and personal observation, not clinical diagnosis or medical treatment.
Written in conversation with Claude (AI) — the words are mine, the process was shared.
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