The View from the Other Side

I’ve been telling you all about the Ecstatic Birth Practitioner Training and the benefits of supporting women in birth with PLEASURE.

I’ve shared how the program ELEVATES you in so many different realms simultaneously the personal, the professional, the cultural and the global.

I talked yesterday in this livestream about the curriculum and the various streams of content and practices you receive throughout the course of the year.

And still you may be wondering if it is worth the commitment-  the time, the money- Is it worth it?

So I thought you might enjoy a sneak peek at the other side and hear directly from a graduate what you will really get out of it!

I’d like to introduce you to Ekaterina Baranova, a doula and childbirth educator, who just completed her first round of the Ecstatic Birth Practitioner Training Program (graduates are able to repeat the training as often as they are inspired).

Ekaterina has spent the last year immersed in the content, practice and community of PLEASURE, actively contemplating and practicing bringing it into the world of birth.

You will see, from the blog she has written here, so many of the different pieces I’ve highlighted at play:

• The tools and practices you can bring into birth to have more fun, and support the flow of labor and delivery
• The invaluable nature of being immersed in a like-minded community
• The elevation of consciousness about the body and the interconnected nature of life, birth and sex
• Opening to the flow of pleasure within via the body practices
• The shift from thinking states to FEELING states to tap into our intuitive and primal nature
• The power of being present in the body
• The transformation in supporting others from being draining to nourishing
• Bringing everything you learn in this training into the world with your unique flavor
• Elevating the birthing culture through your pleasure

And so much more..  I’ll let her tell you herself!  Enjoy her and when she inspires you, you can click here to register and join us for the next round of the Ecstatic Birth Practitioner Training!!!

Hello! My name is Ekaterina Baranova. I am a Russian birth doula and birth educator living and working in Guatemala. I have 2 kids who were born peacefully and with pleasure at my home in Guatemala. I started learning about the possibility of pleasure in birth 7 years ago, before I even conceived my first child. Talking about Orgasmic birth has been my passion ever since. I resisted working as a childbirth educator until people started referring their pregnant friends to me and even started offering me money for consultations with me. Only then I decided to become a birth doula and educator.

I took the Ecstatic Birth Practitioner Training as I was looking for new tools to include in my practice so more people could integrate pleasure in their birth experiences, something that to this day very few people on our planet teach about. I believe I am the only one who teaches about pleasurable birth in Guatemala.

One of the things that I really love about what Sheila Kamara Hay does with her training is creating an international network of birth workers that support the idea of shifting our birth culture from being fear and pain oriented to pleasure and empowerment oriented. Being able to communicate to others that are on the same professional journey and discussing the common challenges we face was a blessing to me.

What I liked about this training is that I could listen to many experts talking about possibility for pleasure, sexuality and birth from different perspectives. This improved my understanding of our physiology that supports the idea of having a pleasurable birth, strengthening my believe that I’m on the right track in my digging for information and practices. I especially enjoyed being able to discuss this content with other practitioners in this course, experiencing a sort of sisterhood through our shared learning experience.

Personally, I started being more connected with the sensations in my body, checking in with her more regularly.  I realized that being in touch with our bodies is probably the key for being in touch with our needs and being in emotional balance through the days and life challenges.

In my practice, I used to talk a lot during my prenatal visits with clients. Being very passionate about the subject I would spend hours explaining how things work in theory that seemed a bit exhausting to my clients and me. Altering my regular practice by incorporating body exercises that I learnt in Sheila’s training into my routine with my clients  helped me to see how being in the body is an important component of ecstatic birth preparations. I started to feel a sparkle in my eyes and feeling more joyful, by making sessions shorter and giving my clients multiple points of reference for pleasure they could experience here and now and bring into the birth room.

One of the amazing things that I learnt was an aha moment when I realized that to experience sexual pleasure one doesn’t need to be explicitly sexual. There are several techniques that allow shy people (that is probably majority) to experience sexual pleasure while being unnoticed by anyone that maybe present in the birth room.

Practicing and playing with different body practices that I learned in the training, I was able to my surprise to become very creative and make combos of my own, that were enjoyed by my pregnant friend whom I used as my experimental rabbit! I also created my own version of the body practices at a recent online conference for doulas in Russia “Emotional Support and Emotional Intellect” and had great feedback from the conference participants. Even the moderator of the conference Liubov Shraibman commented that she thought my meditations were the best part of the program. Now as I am working to create a birth preparation course for women in Guatemala, I definitely plan to include these body practices in my course.

So, if you are birth practitioner that is intrigued by the idea of helping women in creating their Ecstatic Birth experience, I highly recommend you to start your journey by taking this training.  It will transform your perspective, your connection to your body, bring you into a sisterhood with other practitioners and give you a lot of pleasure!

Ekaterina Baranova is a psychologist, a birth doula and a childbirth educator working in Guatemala and offers virtual Ecstatic Birth consultations in English, Spanish and Russia. To learn more about her work visit: birthwithpleasure.com