Savoring Athens, Listening for the Mountains

A sacred pause between city light and ancient trail: on presence, pleasure, and following the call of myth

Athens is humming in high spring light, and I find myself slowing down to savor it all. 

The city is waking up from the sleepy reverent Easter weekend. And my time here is shifting. 

The cracked marble steps warmed by the sun, the wild fig trees spilling their scent into alleyways, Lilly’s steady breath beside me as we wind through Kolonaki at dawn. 

I’m not leaving just yet. But I can feel the mountains calling, softly, like a myth remembered in a dream. 

And so I walk a little slower. 

Sip my coffee with both hands. 

Let my eyes linger longer on the Acropolis as I pass. 

This city has held me, healed me, tested me, and now, it invites me to love it even more deeply, precisely because our time together is shifting. 

There’s something tantric about this kind of presence. Not grasping, not rushing. Just letting the moment unfurl, breath by breath, petal by petal. 

I’m drinking in Athens with my whole body lately. The glint of humidity and sea salt in the air. The quiet elegance of older women in silk skirts walking home from the market. The rhythm of Pilates, the clang of kettlebells, the welcome of a returning client. They’ve come for a remembering. A reconnection. A soft exhale back into themselves. 

Lately, everything feels   heightened. Not dramatic, just lit from within. 

The way the light lands on the marbled ruins, the way my dog looks at me when the sun catches her eyes, the way my body knows how many weeks of walks we have left here. 

Presence, it seems, is not passive. It’s a wild, erotic devotion to what is. To what pulses beneath the surface. To what rises when we stop running and start feeling. 

My time here has been healing and soothing to my nervous system. Parts of my body and my spirit remember this place, remember the sanctuaries in the hills of the Acropolis, climbing the hills and rocks in the city there are corners I seem to know. Not from anything in this waking life 

I walk the same route through Kolonaki every morning. Past the bakery where I don’t eat anything but still inhale the cinnamon yeast and sugar scent deeply. 

Past the hidden church whose doors are always open. Past the man at the kiosk who nods, silently, like we’re part of each other’s rituals. 

Some days I stop and sit. I let the marble warm my thighs. I let myself feel the thrum of the city’s sensual pulse. Athens doesn’t need to seduce me. She already has. 

Sometimes, I pause to look at the women of Athens. The ones who walk slowly, who take time with their appearance, who seem to carry centuries of story in the curve of their spine. 

I wonder who their grandmothers were. I wonder what Aphrodite or Demeter might look like, walking in modern clothes, buying flowers or cucumbers from the street vendors. 

This city is drenched in goddess energy, even when she's loud, impatient, chaotic. Even with the taxis screeching brakes though each stoplight. Even then. Maybe especially then. 

And still, I feel the pulse of what’s next. 

Soon, I’ll be answering the call of stone and silence. Not just any mountain, but one laced with ancient myth. The mountain where Chiron, the Wounded Healer, once lived and taught. 

His cave still rests just beyond the village—a real place, not just a symbol. 

It is said he trained heroes there, guided them not only with skill but with deep wisdom drawn from his own pain. 

The mountain doesn’t feel like a place I chose. It feels like a place that remembers me. 

And I go not for quiet alone, but for healing. For initiation. For the kind of remembering that happens when the earth meets your bare feet and says, "You’re ready now." It’s as if my time in Athens has prepared me. 

My days will stretch wide. Full of hikes to sacred sites, mornings writing beneath trees, and nights thick with stars and stillness. 

The breath of Artemis. The hum of the land beneath my feet. 

The solitude that deepens me. This isn’t an escape. It’s an honoring. A shift from city magic to mythic remembering. 

There are places in Greece where the veil is thin, where the stones still whisper, where the feminine speaks through caves and wind and the curve of pine-covered hills. This is one of them. 

I think of Hecate here—goddess of the crossroads, keeper of keys, the one who walks you into the underworld with firelight and fierce love. I’ve felt her presence in dreams, in those threshold moments between waking and sleep. 

She doesn’t speak in words. She moves through sensation, intuition, symbols. I have been dreaming of keys, of alligators and of caves. The mountains feel like her domain. Wild. Initiatory. Unapologetically sacred. 

I go to listen. To write. To remember. To rest. 

I named this company Mountain Tantra from my time in the Rocky Mountains. Long hikes at sunrise, the haunting of elk during the mating season. Long summer nights and short winter days. And now, we are ready for the mountains of Greece. 

I think often of the women who came before me. The priestesses. The wanderers. The wise women who left the safety of the city to follow the call of the wild feminine. I feel them walking with me sometimes. Not in ghostly form, but as a vibration. As a knowing. As a drumbeat that rises from the earth and meets the rhythm of my steps. I go where they went. Not to be them, but to become more of myself. 

And yet, I’m still here. Still grounded. Still offering what I offer best. 

A space to return to your body, to your breath, to your pleasure, to your power. 

If you’ve been feeling the pull to work with me, this is a potent moment. There’s something rare and electric in the in-between. 

My hands feel even more attuned lately. My sessions deeper, slower, truer. 

The path I’m walking now isn’t linear. It’s spiral-shaped—full of returns and reckonings. 

Of deep knowing and raw tenderness. I’m not only meeting Hecate at the crossroads. I’m also meeting Chiron—the Wounded Healer, the teacher who taught others to heal while carrying his own ache. 

There’s a wound I’ve carried that doesn’t cry out for fixing, but for reverence. It lives in my body, in the spaces between sessions, in the ache of longing and the fire of presence. 

And I’m beginning to understand that part of my power comes not in spite of that wound—but because of it. 

Chiron reminds me that teaching, touch, and transformation can come from wholeness and from pain. The mountain doesn’t ask me to be perfect. It asks me to be real. To bring my ache and my ecstasy. 

To let the land meet all of me. Maybe that’s what makes this work sacred. 

Not that we’re always healed. But that we show up willing to walk with our wounds, as medicine women, as priestesses, as lovers of truth. 

I believe in the sacredness of this work. I believe in the transmission that happens when we meet in presence, when one human says to another: you are safe to feel again. You are worthy of slowness. Of sensation. Of pleasure that does not need to be earned. Whether you are new to this path or seasoned in your bodywork journey, there is something for you here. 

Whether you’re visiting Athens, living here, or passing through, this is a beautiful time to book. I have openings before I leave for my next chapter in Mid May 

For tantra massage, private mentorship, or simply to reconnect with your own sacred rhythm, you can reach me at megan@mountain-tantra.com. 

Sometimes, when I sit in stillness after a session, I feel the pulse of this city through my palms. I feel her stories. Her longing. Her fierce softness. I wonder if cities remember us the way we remember them. I wonder if Athens, in her own way, is also savoring me. 

So for now, I savor. I walk this city like a lover tracing the outline of a body they know they’ll miss. I let the light soak into my skin. I breathe it all in. The chaos, the beauty, the strange tenderness of a place that never stops moving.

 And I listen. Not for the ending. But for the invitation within the in-between. 

To pause. To feel. 

To remember that every chapter, every city, every step on the path is sacred. 

And to say yes to it all.