What’s with the SHAME?!?!

The Ecstatic Birth Body Series was absolutely stunning. Sheri Winston blew the socks off the participants with her tour of a Woman’s anatomy and all the connections she drew between the sexual and birthing processes. I received so many acknowledgments from participants like this FB post: “First class of the Body Series and I’m already a whole new woman. The bliss door is open!!” I am so proud of this baby being born, of myself for the part I play in its creation and nurture and growth. And yet, when the first session ended, I was trembling head to toe. Trembling with an overwhelming feeling of SHAME.

Shame. Can you believe it? There I was on the cusp of an incredible personal and professional moment and I had shame running through my veins. What was that? And I remembered my second birth, my daughter’s ecstatic delivery that taught me that all of this is even possible. I had joy and sunshine beaming from my cells for weeks after that birth! But in the hours directly after her birth, I was trembling with an intense anger. Anger. What was that about?

Oh my, ladies. Birth, it cracks you wide open. It has the potential to be the deepest most profound healing experience of your life. It is a rite of passage, no doubt, to support your growth into becoming the mother you need to be for your child. I now know that the anger, after my daughter’s birth, was the release of all the trauma I held in my tissues from my first birth. In opening wide, in being fully present in each moment, in allowing another baby to come through a place that had formerly been cut with a knife… yow…all of that suppressed rage had been released, unbottled, and ultimately cleared. It’s a wonderful thing that I don’t walk with that anger within me anymore.

And the shame? We live in a world that doesn’t understand sexuality as sacred. Instead, it is seen as dirty, often perverted and distorted in its expression. Think about the biggest insults in the English language, and you can see we’ve got big issues valuing our sexuality. So, for me to have created a course that asserts that sexuality and birthing are part of the same beautiful process?!? To discuss how bringing sexual energy into the birthing room is not only ok, but to have Sheri Winston, an award winning sexual educator and former midwife, come in and outline in detail all the ways that it is actually part of our physiological design? Woah. That shame was all of our cultural conditioning jumping out of my skin….

And right now, I have a choice, I can put my attention on the shame, and tell myself that I am not good enough, that I was practically hyperventilating during my talk, that I have embarrassed myself, and that I should slither back into my hole and allow centuries of cultural conditioning to keep me in check….

Or I can put my attention on the deep pleasure of knowing that I did an incredible job, that I am sharing something so fully aligned with my soul, that women all over the world are receiving this critical information, and are deeply grateful for it.

I am actively and consciously choosing pleasure and I invite you to join me. We have this choice in every moment, in every situation, with every birth. The pleasure is always right there if you look for it and choose to put your attention on it (and believe me, more often than not, it is going to kick up the dirt of your personal and cultural conditioning!)

Remember ladies, the way we birth is the way we live. And Ecstatic Birth is teaching you a whole new and ecstatic way of doing both. Come connect with women from all over the globe. We’re flipping the culture’s conception of birth!