She studied medicine, worked in a strip club, guided men through their darkest moments and taught women how to desire themselves.
None of these sentences explains her.
Together, they come close.
A Man Walks Into a Strip Club
She had seen him a few times before. A big man from one of the Pacific islands, Australian by way of Vanuatu. He looked tough, the kind of man who carries the weight of the world quietly. He came with a friend and booked Cleo for a private table dance. When the music stopped and the dance was over, he looked at her and said something she has never forgotten.
“Thank you so much, Cleo. I had a really tough day. Today I was in the trial with the man who murdered my son. And for a minute, with you, I could think of something else.”
Cleo tells this story sitting across our table in Berlin, her voice steady and warm. She is not telling it to shock. She is telling it because it changed something in how she understood her work; and what it is that people are actually looking for when they walk through a door like that.
“What I saw there was not a strip club,” she says.
“What I saw was a modern-day temple. Men who come to these spaces just want to feel more present, more in their body. Sex is a portal — a beautiful portal, especially for men, into the heart.”
This is how Cleo speaks. With precision and without apology. She is a tantra teacher, somatic coach, performer, and the creator of what she calls the Tantric Muse. But before any of that, she was a free spirit who took a very long detour through everything the world told her she should be doing, and then quietly stopped listening.
A Blank Canvas Called Berlin
Cleo was born in Paris, grew up in France with Arabic and Polish roots, and spent a few years trying to follow the script that was handed to her. She studied medicine. She failed the entry concours once by a little bit, then again. In France, you only get two chances. She was devastated.
“I thought I had my way figured out. I would just be a doctor. And then suddenly, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.”
She transferred to biology and biomedical sciences, loved the subject, hated every career path it pointed toward. Research labs. PhD programs. None of it felt like her.
Then she came to Berlin for the first time.
At twenty. And something shifted.
“I remember walking through the streets and seeing people with completely freaky outfits or unusual behavior, and nobody cared. Nobody even looked twice. I felt like everything was welcome here. That reflected to me that you can be whoever you want.”
Cleo told everyone in Paris she was going for one sabbatical year. She never went back. She danced through weekends in the clubs, lost in the music, finding herself one bass note at a time. Every time she returned to Paris, she cried.
“There was a sense of ‘I can be anything’ here,” she says. “It was a blank canvas. Berlin really gave me a lot.”
All Pathways Lead to Rome
Cleo describes her inner life in terms of states of being, particular qualities of awareness and presence that, once encountered, become something you spend years learning to return to. For her, the pathways to those states were always the body: dance, breath, sexuality, and meditation.
“Dance was the beginning of my somatic journey, without me even knowing that’s what it was, I started to really be in my body, to understand how my body could move to the music.”
Over time, that practice deepened from surface movement into something more internal: letting the dance come from inner sensations, letting energy move outward rather than imposing shapes from the outside: “This is what I now teach in my Tantric Movement Ceremonies.”
Sexuality was another portal.
Not in the way our culture tends to frame it: goal-oriented, performance-driven, ending in orgasm and moving on. Cleo was always drawn to something slower and stranger: the depth that opens when you spend hours exploring the body without rushing anywhere.
She smiles: “I was always quite bored quickly by the standard sequence. I really love to explore the body, spend hours exploring pleasure and sensation, not necessarily leading to orgasm, but entering this transcendental space. That state of consciousness: when I found it through dance, through sex, through deep meditation in the middle of India, it was the same state. Different pathways, same destination.”
When tantra entered her life, it felt less like a discovery than a recognition. Here was a framework that named what she had always known: that full presence -in movement, in pleasure, in emotion- is not a side effect of life but its most essential dimension.
“Tantra is really about life. It’s bringing full awareness and consciousness to all aspects of ourselves — our emotions, our sex, our death, our everything. Once you start to be more present and meditative in something as intense as sex, you can take that into everything else,” Cleo explains, with this kind of bright eyes of people living their mission.
From the Stage to the Session Room
The path from dancer to tantra teacher was not a straight line. It passed through Australia, through construction work, through a strip club, through escort work, through a coaching certification with a specialization in men’s sexuality.
In Australia, she kept meeting women she connected with deeply, only to find out they were strippers. Eventually she joined them — and found something that surprised her.
“The first night I entered that club, I saw the women on stage, and I was just mesmerized. They were so beautiful. I saw power. I saw women really owning their body and their sensuality in a way I’d never seen before. And I wanted to do that.”
Working shortly as an escort brought another revelation. Most of the men who hired her didn’t actually want sex. They would pay her full rate and spend the night talking. Or they couldn’t get an erection at all, but stayed for hours anyway.
“That showed me again: what are these men really looking for? They want an experience, to feel more present, more in their body. They want to be seen.”
She had been interested in tantra since a trip to India at twenty-four. A bad experience with a fake healer pushed her away for years. When she came back to it in Australia, through teachers she felt safe with, everything clicked.
She was already living it, the framework just gave it a name.
She completed her tantric & somatic coaching certification, drawn specifically to the specialization in men’s sexuality, and began building what would become the Tantric Muse: a practice of one-on-one sessions, couple’s work, and group events that now takes place regularly in Berlin.
They Come for What They Want. They Get What They Need.
Cleo works with men, women, and couples. The entry point is almost always different from where the session actually goes.
“Some men come to me with a certain idea of what they want, And then they get what they need. That’s usually what it feels like.” She laughs, then goes deeper. “Maybe they saw me and felt something, and that’s the archetype of the muse: seducing the world into a greater good. They think they’re coming for a connection with me. And I bring them back to themselves. Back to their body, their sex, their heart.”
She is particularly drawn to working with men who want to become better lovers, but she is careful about the angle. Many men approach this from the outside, techniques, skills, things to give their partner. Cleo redirects.
“The bigger challenge is going back inside. How can I feel my emotions? How can I feel my heart? Because from that place, really being at ease in your body, in your pain as much as your joy, you can actually hold a woman. A feminine being needs someone who can hold space for all that beautifully chaotic, creative energy. That comes from presence, not technique.”
With women, she works differently.
She runs what she calls Cock Worship Workshops, but here too, the surface conceals the depth. “When I invite women into that space, I invite them back into themselves. Back into their heart, back into their pussy. If you want to give a profound experience, you need to be deeply connected to yourself first. Come as a priestess to your man.”
Couples come to her for what she describes as adding brushes to the toolkit.
“I see intimacy as an art form,” she says. “And with every art form, you need to explore different tools. Couples come to me to add to their art.” She has created rituals for birthdays, anniversaries, surprise gifts.
Her group events in Berlin, running regularly since mid-2024, follow a particular structure: ceremony, embodiment, teaching, demonstration, practice, open play. The formats vary: Goddess Worship nights designed for women to receive, Cock Worship evenings where men are held and honored.
And now her & Kay’s recurring Salon des Plaisirs; where selected men come to share their skills in service of women’s pleasure.
“What’s fascinating is how different the open play space is in each of these different contexts,” she says.
“The energy is completely different depending on who’s in the room and what’s been held before.”
What the Body Remembers
One of the things Cleo teaches that surprises people most is what she calls energy orgasms: waves of ecstatic experience moving through the body that have nothing to do with genital stimulation or ejaculation. She experienced this first by watching someone else have one on a documentary.
“I saw this man on Sex, Love & Goop having an energy orgasm on a table. He was dressed, barely being touched, and his whole body started to shake — this ecstatic experience, emotions moving through him, pulses. I had never seen this before. And I thought: whatever that is, I want it! I don’t know how. But I need to find someone to teach me.”
She never found a teacher. In the end, her body taught her. Through dedicated breath work and movement practice, the pathway opened. Now she has these experiences regularly, and they range from subtle waves of bliss to full-body shaking, laughter, and what she describes as a state of complete surrender.
“You never get bored. It’s always different.”
“When people complain that sex has become boring, it’s because we haven’t been taught how to explore this art form properly, how to be fully present with the energy in every single moment. Because it will always take you somewhere new. That’s the beauty of it.”
Her approach to teaching this is not abstract. She teaches breath, sound, movement, and a practice she developed called the Tantric Movement Method, a combination of meditation, breath work, voice, and sensation-led movement. “Dedicate time to be present. It can sound like homework. But it can also be the most nourishing self-care act.”
The War Between Genders Serves Nobody
Cleo calls herself a feminist. She is also one of the most articulate critics of the way gender politics are often practiced right now. The combination is not a contradiction for her; it is the whole point.
“Patriarchy has hurt both men and women,” she says. “When you remove women from their power, who suffers? Not only women. Men need women in their power just as much. When you push women away from their bodies, their eros, and you push men into industry and war and force them to block their connection to their heart so they can kill each other and work for bigger structures, what do you create? A disconnection in everyone from their own inner essence.”
She points to the cultural myth she sees most clearly in her clients: the Madonna-whore split.
The idea that women must choose: either be the wife, the good woman who deserves a husband and security, or be the whore, the woman who owns her erotic power but loses her social standing. That split, she argues, damages everyone. Both men and women subconsciously buy into it and pepetrate the disconnect.
“It disconnected women from their erotic power and made them think they have to choose. And that split is also present in men, because men internalize it too. They marry one woman and desire another. They separate love from sex. And both of them follow these rules that damage the whole family.”
Cleo says:
“I don’t resonate with the war between genders. There is so much anger, and that anger deserves to be there. But we need to sit with it and ask: is it really targeting all men? Are we putting everyone in one category because of what a few have done with their thirst for power? That is so painful for me to hear. Because I know what men are capable of. I see it every day.”
Three Generations of Women Against the Grain
Cleo’s grandmother was forced into marriage in Morocco. A man wanted her, and he threatened that if she refused, he would hand over her brothers to the French authorities during the resistance war in Algeria. She had no choice.
Once in Morocco, Cleo’s grandma did something remarkable: she opened a center for women. Women who had been raped, who had had sexual encounters outside of marriage, who had no way to survive, who were outcast from their communities. She taught them weaving and tapestry, skills they could use to provide for themselves.
“For a woman in conservative Morocco at that time to welcome outcast women. There was already a seed planted there in my lineage,” Cleo says quietly.
Her mother was also a rebel, also went against the grain in her own way.
And then came Cleo, who strips now on Cabaret stages, who works with men’s sexuality, who leads erotic rituals in Berlin, who is now preparing for the build of a global movement.
When she first told her mother she was working as a stripper, something broke open. Her mother didn’t take it well. They didn’t speak for a month.
“I felt so in myself. So fulfilled and embodied in what I was meant to do. And I risked not being loved by my parent because of it.”
This is how far the split and the stigma goes.
She carries that experience carefully. For most of her family, she describes herself as an “intimacy and relationship coach”. The fuller picture lives in Berlin, in the rooms where she works, and now, increasingly, in the world.
A House of Erotic Wisdom
Cleo is building something. She doesn’t call it a business. It is a vision, a movement.
“I call it a house of erotic wisdom and beauty, and I see a lot of Art in it. I see retreats, group work, education, well-being and fashion. And I see initiations for men; because we are missing initiation rites. What does it mean to be really in power? What does it mean when your sex, your solar plexus, and your heart are integrated? I have this vision of a secret society, where people are initiated into a deeper version of themselves. Where men too remember their healing gifts, and can then be part of our Salon des Plaisirs.”
The physical form is still taking shape.
She envisions global pop-ups in different cities rather than one fixed space. Online courses alongside live initiations. And one project that she is particularly excited about for Berlin: the Erotic Art Salon.
“We are connected to so many artists here, and I am an artist. I love seeing erotic art and creating erotic art in many forms: performance, photography, videography, fashion, food. And there isn’t a lot of physical spaces where we can meet around that. An erotic art salon could be that space; a place where bodies, art, desire, and intelligence share a room.”
Alongside the events, she has begun running regular Tantric Movement Ceremonies:
a more accessible, community-oriented format where people can come back to their bodies on a bi-weekly basis, not just for special occasions.
“The only way is to be in practice,” she says. “And it’s easier to be in practice in a group.”
Eros Is Not a Niche. Eros Is a Life Force.
What drives all of this – the sessions, the group events, the initiations, the art salons, the whole vision – is a conviction that goes deeper than tantra as a practice.
Cleo: “We live in a society that is disconnected from eros. Sexuality has become this taboo thing, or just something you do quietly with your partner. But eros is the base of life. It’s what moves through the plants, what makes the leaf turn toward the sun, what brings the bee to the flower. It’s the force that creates life itself. And we need to normalize it again. Not make it just sexual. Expose it. Talk about it. See it. That is how we re-empower people: by returning them to the most powerful force they carry inside themselves.”
Cleo is clear that this is not a call for everyone to be polyamorous or to dissolve all boundaries. She considers herself quite monogamous. She goes to play parties and rarely plays. None of that is the point.
“It doesn’t mean we all have to have sex with everyone. There needs to be containment; but there also needs to be more visibility of what eros is, what art is, what the human body is. The body itself is art: energy moving through it. We somehow came to believe sexuality only exists in interaction with another. But our sexuality gets to be experienced with ourselves first: it’s an embodiment, a state of being, a connection to life itself.”
When she was in that apartment in Leipzig, years ago, with mirrors covering an entire wall, she used to create little shows for herself. Try on outfits from second-hand shops. Undress slowly, feeling the sensuality move through her body. She never wore the outfits outside.
She remembers a ceremony she did alone in that room.
And seeing, in her mind, a circle of people doing the same thing around her. Being guided back into their bodies. She didn’t know what to call it then.
Now she does. And she’s building it.
This portrait is part of an editorial collaboration with Sensuali.
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